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Journal of Italian Translation
another instance, she indicates Cecchetti’s use of Greek and Latin
in “particular individual vocabulary words” (xviii), but the example
she cites is: “Navigan piano / grandi carene in fila
all’orizzonte.” Perhaps this is a perpetuation of the Virgilian synecdoche,
whereby the keel stood for the ship, but it was already a
commonplace even in Italian neo-classical poetry. So, how Latin
or Greek this phrasing may be is debatable, or maybe even incidental.
In yet another section, she remarks: “This is a highly refined
poetry, of the kind that is not easy to penetrate fully without
considerable concentration” (xx). I agree that the poetry provokes
the imagination and offers much food for thought, in an existential
way, but the poetry speaks, as most poetry does, in an indirect
way that hints or intuits meaning rather than prosaically defining
it. Having said this, however, I believe Cecchetti has found a way
of making the unsayable phenomena sayable, and, in that way,
quite accessible.
Payne’s translations of Cecchetti stand up rather well. As with
any translation, where her transposition deviates from Cecchetti’s
original, it would be impossible to determine her motives, for all
we read is the finished product, never aware of the decisions and
issues with which she may have wrestled before making her final
choices. In fact, because she worked with Cecchetti, it is possible
that – as often occurs – the poet himself misled the translator as he
interpreted his original intent. For the most part, Payne chooses to
stay with the general rhythms and tabulations of the verses, for to
approximate certain consonances and assonances would have been
a Herculean task that, in the end, might have yielded a less
cecchettian version of Cecchetti. With only limited exceptions, she
renders Cecchetti adeptly in English. One could take exception to
her rendering of “valle,” “vallata,” and “vallone,” with the allencompassing
“valley,” but English cannot, as in many cases, accommodate
this sort of subtlety, and that is not the fault of the
translator. More glaring are the following examples: “glowing
keels” for “grandi carene” (17); “butterflies” for “libellule” (65);
the redundant “over-swelling” for “tumefatti” (79); “brisk and
nimble” for “leggeri” (91); and “lulling sea” for the rather contrary
meaning of “la mareggiata” (115). Perhaps these wrinkles
can be ironed out in a future edition, which might also correct the
many errors in the printing of the Italian.
The most curious translation is the title of the poem “Isole
ubriache alla deriva” (“Islands Drunken at the Leeway”) from the