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Vivian Lamarque’s “This Quiet Dust” Translated by N.S. Thompson N S Thompson has contributed translations to many poetry journals as well as The Penguin Montale and The Faber Book of 20 th Century Italian Poems. He has taught translation seminars at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and venues elsewhere. In 2008 he was an official translator for the 39 th Poetry International, Rotterdam. He was a contributor to the new modern edition of Sources and Analogues to ‘The Canterbury Tales’ (2005) and his most recent poetry collection Letter to Auden (Smokestack Books) was published in 2010. Vivian Lamarque was born in 1946 in Tesero (Trento), then moved to Milan where she has lived and worked as a schoolteacher. Her first collection of poetry, Teresino, won the Viareggio Award for a First Publication in 1981. She has since published Il Signore d’oro (1986), Poesie dando del Lei (1989), Il Signore degli spaventati (1992) and in 1996, Una quieta polvere, a poetry born directly from her own personal experience, especially of psychoanalysis. She is also a translator, a journalist and a very successful children’s writer. Fifteen collections of her short stories for children have been published, and she has won the Rodari Award (1997) and the Andersen Award (2000). Her collected poems, Poesie 1972-2002 was published by Mondadori.
78 Journal of Italian Translation N.S. Thompson / Vivian Lamarque 79 TRANSLATING ‘THIS QUIET DUST’ At first glance Vivian Lamarque’s fascinating sequence can be seen in the context of one of the longest traditions in genre poetry, namely that of writing in or about a cemetery, addressing a particular tomb or sepulchre (cf Pasolini’s Le ceneri di Gramsci) and more generally exploring the life-death divide in a meditation on the implications of mortality and loss. While setting the sequence in a cemetery (Tesero is her birthplace), the poet however avoids the funerary aspect and instead of reflecting on the transience of life, her meditation in a cemetery expresses a highly personal sense of loss, namely the thoughts and feelings of a woman abandoned by the man she loves. In making this departure, the poet does two surprising things: she references the work of others in quotation and also engages in a kind of self-interrogation. Although the relationship of one to the other is not clear here, it can be seen that interrogation throws up quotation during the process of (self-) analysis. If not this, then at the very least both can be seen as emerging from the matrix of a memory stirred. If there is no real-life reference to the cemetery, the poem itself approximates a garden of remembrance in its recollection of the lover and key passages remembered from past reading. In pursuing her meditation the poet allows an almost overwhelming amount of literary references to surface in a fragmentary way, abandoned – one could almost say “orphaned” – in the body of the sequence, exactly as they might surface randomly in the consciousness. The quotations are marked in the text by italics and number a total of fifty three. The sources range from the poems of Emily Dickinson (whose poem 813 gives the sequence its title) through other named writers such Marina Tsvetaeva and Lewis Carroll to the folk and fairy tales written and collected by the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and anonymous sources. All the references are acknowledged in a note that briefly lists the author or source title in order from one to fifty three: …le cinquantatré citazioni che qui nel testo figurano in corsivo sono state tratte, nell’ordine, da: J. e W. Grimm, Fiabe Piedmonesi, A. N. Afanasjev… and so on, with naturally some repetitions. The translator’s first task, therefore, is to find the source of these quotations. This is not out of scholarly interest alone, nor to see if the poet got them right, as it were, but in turning the poem from Italian into English then, where a well known source is used, it would be breaking an unwritten but fundamental rule then to translate Lewis Carroll back into English from his Italian translator, rather than going back to Carroll’s own words. Fortunately, the largest number of citations come from the work of Dickinson and with the use of concordances and even the Internet, the search was not that difficult. Thus part of this first task with this particular poem was the detective work of tracking down the sources. There is a second part, however, and that is how to fit the source back, as it were, into the new English version, which could possibly lead to a skewed result. This problem stems from the fact that translators tend to translate into their own contemporary idiom and to shy away from any form of archaising. Thus where a modern translation is used, the language obviously has a contemporary feel, whereas the original may be distinctly old. Lines 381-382 are taken from Ecclesiastes I:15 which would be more instantly recognisable as Biblical if given in the King James version, but this looked too didactic and I decided to modernize it by using the New International Version. Another problem in this regard is where the original is in a highly idiosyncratic style that the translator has again rendered more assimilable by a kind of paraphrase that enables the language to be more easily understood. In linguistic terms, the translator shifts a foregrounded or defamiliarised language into an automatized or normalized one. For the translator into Italian a good example of the task would be that of translating T S Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, another sequence presenting a dense weave of quotations from a variety of sources. Eliot left many, of course, in the original, but what does the Italian translator do with a line such as 431, taken from Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedie (c. 1582-92): “Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe”? In Roberto Sanesi’s version (Bompiani, 1961) this becomes: “Bene/allora v’accomodo io. Hieronimo è pazzo di nuovo” , where the language is automatized. Conversely in Four Quartets, “East Coker” part I, line 30 from Eliot’s ancestor Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour (1530): “In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie – “ Sanesi (loc. cit) has rendered the line in an archaic form by Latinizing it: “in danza, quale di matrimonio est significatione…” thus keeping it as defamiliar in the translation as it is in the original. Essentially, then, the problem is one of paying attention to
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