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Book Reviews
259
translatorly work is her attention to Cattafi’s lexical and imagistic
economy. Cattafi’s existential preoccupations play themselves out
on clearly defined semantic fields (the earthy materiality of mud
and putty, darkness, violence, disillusionment, vast empty spaces
and gulfs) that are effectively evoked in Ferrarelli’s English, as well:
Cattafi’s “triste” and “mesto” are consistently rendered as “sad,”
for example, as are “rugginoso” and “ossidato” as “rusty.” Ferrarelli
further underscores this lexical coherence when, within individual
poetic components, she unites difference in the Italian text with often
inventive repetition in the English. Thus, in “Dal cuore della
nave,” “Puoi cogliere dal cuore della nave” (v. 4) becomes “From
the heart of the ship you could gather,” and “quasi due gigli estivi”
(v. 10) becomes “you could say two summer lilies.” The repetition of
“you could” in Ferrarelli’s English version of the poem recreates
Cattafi’s aggregate lexical economy within a single poetic text. In
her version of “Mio amore non credere,” Ferrarelli does the same in
translating “è lo stesso viaggio tra le vecchie/ stazioni scolorite (vv.
3-4) as “it’s the same journey between the same/ faded stations.”
In a more general context, Ferrarelli ably meets many of the
challenges presented by Italian (or Romance, for that matter) to
English translation; the stickiest of these, Ferrarelli says in her
translator’s note, can be attributed to essential incongruities in syntax,
sound (assonance and alliteration) and gender markings.
Ferrarelli usually opts to remain as close to Cattafi’s syntax as possible;
when this becomes cumbersome, she employs compensation
strategies that allow her to maintain source text positional emphases
and rhythmic properties. In the case of “Plaza de Toros,” “Resta
un traffico, una festa di formiche/ trafelate” is rendered as “A traffic,
a feast of breathless/ ants remains”: the contrasting terms “resta”/
“remains” and “trafelate”/ “breathless” thus continue to occupy
privileged verse or phrase positions, even though English syntax
demands that they shift within the larger segment. In most cases,
syntactical and rhythmic properties such as Cattafi’s characteristic
repetition of three terms without punctuation or conjunctions are
maintained in the English translation, and Ferrarelli recuperates
alliteration where she can, as in her translation of “i calcoli che
scattano scorrevoli/ come toppe addolcite” (“Partenza da Greenwich,”
vv. 7-8) as “the calculations that click/ like locks made
smooth.”
It is important to remember, in the end, that the editor and
translator of this volume is also a poet in her own right, and that