Journal of Italian Translation - Brooklyn College - Academic Home ...

Rusnak/Piersanti 71
wrote of Piersanti’s land, “E’ uno spazio preciso e specifico, amato
dagli urbinati, da tutti loro, sia dagli intellettuali che parlano di
“luoghi dell’anima” come dagli artigiani o muratori che ti raccontano
dell’aria, unica e inconfondibile, l’aria delle Cesane fresca anche in
agosto.” Piersanti has best articulated the profound roots of his
verse: “Scavare dentro il luogo significa toccare radici, non solo di
una specifica identità, ma dell’umanità in genere. Se rimaniamo
nel secondo Novecento, non si dà Bertolucci senza Parma e la
campagna, Zanzotto senza Pieve di Soligo e le colline trevigiane,
Luzi senza gli sfondi fiorentini e senesi. La problematica è
ineliminabile: fare di un proprio luogo uno spazio totale come ha
fatto Leopardi con la pure odiata Recanati.”
Piersanti’s engagement with the world of nature, filtered
though a literary imagination trained in the classical tradition and
brought up on Pascoli, presents some interesting challenges to the
translator. Anyone who has walked into the woods with Piersanti
has suffered his question, “How many plants to you know by name?”
Piersanti knows a flower or tree not just by its name, but by the
moment when it blossoms, the date when it begins to decay. He
knows and anticipates the colors green leaves of oak trees will turn
by autumn.
Linguistically, Piersanti does not present the difficulties with verbal
pyrotechnics or dialect (though the occasional local idiom appears).
The problem is rendering in English the tonal qualities of the original,
without any flourishes, retaining some of the classical grace, gravity
and, at times, even solemnity. Perusing the translations together over
lunch at the Alce Nero, Umberto invariably chose, when given two
alternative translations, the simpler one, avoiding even a syllable that
might call attention to itself, and away from the poem.
In Piersanti, shifts and disruptions between past and present
are frequent, and the various Italian past tenses are difficult to replicate
in English. The past tenses, as we all know, are extremely
complex and psychological in Italian. Even the classical word “nostalgia,”
the final one in “L’antica casa,” has acquired a bad connotation
in American English. “Una volta passati sogni e ricordi sono la
stessa cosa,” Piersanti writes. We—Umberto and I—have attempted
to produce a translation that calls readers back to the original Italian
and that, furthermore, calls them to the Cesane, to the mythic
past, and into the “Arcadia d’ombra” of memory.