PEASANTS WAKE REVISITED

 

 

The much abused epithet traduttore/traditore (translator/traitor) does not apply to the translations of Andrea Zanzotto’s Italian dialect poems into the American idiom carried out by Professor John P. Welle, of Notre Dame University, and Ruth Feldman, ar­guably the best existing translator of Italian poetry.[1] For a variety of stylistic, textual, and structural reasons, probably no other Ital­ian poet is as difficult to bring across into another language as is the work of Andrea Zanzotto. Hence these two translators’ success should be diligently studied by any serious practitioner of this subtle art of “transvasing” from one linguistic/cultural matrix into another. I use the image of travasare, of pouring out the essence contained in one “vase” (language, culture, tradition, etc.) into an­other receptacle that ought to contain all the properties of the original, to illustrate the translation process when properly done.

As it is possible, albeit difficult, to “transvase” nearly all the bouquet, the aroma, the “spirit” from a large vessel of wine (barrel, keg, a “damigiana,” etc.) into a smaller container, a simi­larly successful operation ideally can be carried out by the trans­lator. Thus the good wine will be transferred from one bottle (original language) into another bottle (language of translator) without causing a major “fiasco,” without turning the wine into vinegar. Yes, the isomorphism between these two processes might seem superficial and simplistic. Yet it is not only what is lost in translation, as Robert Frost maintained, that does get rebottled in a new context by the expert translator. Call it “transvasing,” trans­formation, transubstantiation, transliterization, the artistic process of “bringing across” from one language into another is as subtle and precise as choosing the right metaphor to illumine the original poem. It is as simple and as difficult as that. Both Feldman and Welle are accomplished practitioners of this extremely demanding art.

Before touching on specific examples of the translators’ virtu­osity, a brief overview of Zanzotto’s spinta, the force that pro­pelled him to compose these poems in dialect should be clarified. Federico Fellini, the well-known Italian film director, asked An­drea Zanzotto to help him out of an impasse: “And now I have to dub it, this film [Casanova] which I have shot recklessly in English, and among the many problems there is also that of the Veneto dialect.” In the “Introduction” to Peasants Wake for Fellini’s Casa­nova and Other Poems, Professor Welle continues,

 

the challenge of inventing poetic texts in Venetian dialect to accompany Fellini’s visual evocations of two female fig­ures—the woman’s head rising from the lagoon in the first scene of the film, and, in a later scene, the giantess from the Veneto who sings a plaintive lullaby—stimulated Zanzotto to enter into a whole new phase of poetic experimentation of his own. . . . Peasants Wake constitutes the first in a series of explorations by Zanzotto in the vanishing mother tongue(s) of his native region. (vii)

 

It remains a mystery how artists collaborate to produce syner­gistic artifacts whose whole is greater than the sum of the parts; also mysterious how this collaboration stimulates each partici­pant’s subconscious so that new vistas, farther horizons open up. It is possible that Fellini’s “two female figures” might have trig­gered something in Zanzotto’s miasmic subconscious so as to ne­cessitate a return, a rediscovery and, simultaneously, a re-invent­ing of that maternal Veneto dialect the poet had absorbed by listening to his mother, his aunts, and other female presences while growing up. Zanzotto himself has referred to his dialect po­etry as the “mother tongue,” as a probably unconscious regression in utero.[2] This feminine presence combines with the oral attributes of all dialect languages to create a poetry of vivid emotions, feel­ings, a poetry that draws deeply its metaphors from the topogra­phy of the senses, rather than from the labyrinths of the mind. It is a memorial celebration far more than an intellectual “cerebration.” This is one of the major distinctions that separates Zanzotto’s creations in the “maternal” Veneto vernacular from the poetry where he uses the official Italian “father” tongue. Oral culture ver­sus literary canon. This becomes the poet’s principal innovation and contribution as he readapts a primarily spoken language and sets it in his own idiosyncratic and very original written forms.

The tough challenges faced by these two translators of Zan­zotto’s poetry are compounded not only by the linguistically complex experimentations the poet deploys and always pushes toward new limits, but also by the varieties of dialects he uses. In the first two sections comprising the “Filò” (“Peasants Wake”) part and translated as “Venetian Recitative” and “London Lullaby,” Zanzotto virtually recreates a pseudo-Venetian dialect as it was supposedly spoken in that city in the eighteenth century. Using the image of “transvasing,” here the poet first invents the “wine,” then pours it into the dialect container and, finally, rebottles that vintage into the standard Italian receptacle. How do the transla­tors faithfully carry across another successful rebottling? They do so not by employing an American “dialect,” a patois that reflects no valid correlative isomorphism to the original creation. “Comforted by the presence of the originals in this multilingual volume,” they utilize a contemporary American English

 

that is simple and colloquial, yet dignified. Although it isn’t possible to reproduce exactly the tone of the dialect, [they] have tried to capture some of the singsong cadences and lilt. [They] have also used rhyme and alliteration to echo the music of the dialect. (xvi)

 

In this they succeed admirably. For the reader who can under­stand the poems in all three languages, a careful analysis of any of these poems and the respective transations will make this imme­diately palpable and obvious. And the book’s original format, which presents the dialect, the Italian and the English texts side by side, is an admirable editorial innovation that makes both the reading and the linguistic comparisons extremely rewarding. The readers who only comprehend the English translations have to trust the translators’ virtuosity and fidelity to the originals. Read aloud, the English renditions reverberate with the charm, musi­cality and unique qualities embodied in Zanzotto’s original diction.

While in “Venetian Recitative” the poet virtually creates a new language (see 36–39), in “London Lullaby” he taps deeply into the well of youthful memories, where maternal singsongs, nursery rhymes, terms of endearment are fused with nonsense words (like those spoken by a pre-verbal child) to inform an original “nenia”/lullaby. In the translators’ own words, this poem “truly challenges the limits of translation.” But their results are superb. In the final segment of his dialect poems, Zanzotto brings into written life the oral dialect of Pieve di Soligo, the town nestled in the Prealps of the Treviso province, where the poet has spent most of his life. Prof. Welle and Ruth Feldman comment:

 

all the dialect poems that follow are written in a rural dialect which Zanzotto employs, in part to create a deliberately ar­chaic tone. For this reason, we have opted at times for a slightly archaic diction. (xvi)

 

Often, for many valid motives, readers fluent in both the origi­nal and the translated languages are skeptical when confronted with yet another bilingual (and, in this case, trilingual) volume of poems. Poetry is arguably the most difficult art form to bring across. So let us examine some examples of these two translators’ skills. Let us visualize how the poetic “spirits” concretely flow, unaltered, from one language (from the vas efferens) into the other language (the vas inferens):

 

I. from “Venetian Recitative” (first section of Filò)

 

(dialect)  Vieni amica mea, columba mea

               vieni sponsa, vieni—

               Osculabor labia tua, ubera tua,

               ubera tua dolciora vino—

 

 (Italian) Vieni amica mia, colomba mia,

               vieni sposa, vieni—

               Bacerò le tue labbra, i tuoi seni,

               i tuoi seni più dolci del vino—

 

(English)  Come my friend, my dove,

               come my bride, come—

               I will kiss your lips, your breasts,

               your breasts sweeter than wine— (12–13)

 

This scene recreates the traditional marriage between Venice and its (maternal) sea, the Adriatic, the ceremony being perfomed by the Doge, the Venetian chief of state. Zanzotto creates a proto-Ve­netian language that mixes a Latinized vocabulary together with the rhythms and images present in the biblical Song of Songs. The seriousness of the ritual is conveyed however with sensuous im­agery whereby the sacred and the profane are admirably con­joined in a dialect invented by the poet for this occasion. Zan­zotto’s Italian rendition is faithful to the original, and the translators’ English version is a mirror image whereby all the in­herent flavors are “transvased” in a new linguistic receptacle. Theirs are not smoke-and-mirrors illusions but genuine transfu­sions.

 

II. from “London Lullaby”

 

(dialect)  i xe zoghessi de la piavoleta

               le xe le nosse i caprissi de chèa

               de chèa

               che jeri la jera putèa.

 

(Italian)  sono i giocuzzi della bambolina

               sono le nozze i capricci di quella

               di quella

               che ieri era bambina.

 

(English)  this is the make-believe of the little doll,

               the wedding and the whims of the girl,

               of the girl

               who yesterday was a child at play. (48–49)

The interweaving of reality with fantasy embodied in a child’s daily routine is rendered by the poet with a tender dialect termi­nology remembered and, maybe, “stolen” from his own child­hood, then resurrected to create this lovely fictive creature. Listen carefully to the singsong lilt recreated by Feldman and Welle as they rebottle the original into a new flask. Hear how the English end rhymes (“doll”/“girl”/“girl”) reflect those of the dialect original (“chèa”/“chèa”/“putèa”) as well as of the Italian (“bambolina”/“quella”/“quella”/“bambina”).

 

III. from “Peasants Wake” (the latter section of Filò)

 

(dialect) parlar porèt, da poreti, ma s’cèt

              ma fis, ma tòch cofà na branca

              de fien ‘pena segà dal faldin (parchè no bastetu?) —

              noni e pupà i è ‘ndati, quei che te cognossèa,

              none e mame le è ‘ndade, quele che te inventèa,

              novo petèl par ogni fiòl in fasse,

 

(Italian) parlare povero, da poveri, ma schietto

              ma fitto, ma denso come una manciata

              di fieno appena tagliato dalla falce (perchè non basti?)—

              nonni e babbi sono andati, loro che ti conoscevano,

              nonne e mamme sono andate, loro che ti inven­tavano

              nuovo petèl per ogni figlio in fasce

 

(English)  poor speech, of poor folks, but you’re pure,

               thick and dense as a handful

               of hay freshly cut with the scythe (why aren’t you enough?)—

               granpas and dads have died, they’re the ones who used to know you,

               grandmas and mamas have died, they who made up for you

               new baby-talk for every baby in diapers, . . . (78–79)

 

Toward the end of the “Peasants Wake” section, the poet vo­calizes again the paradox he must face constantly: how to utilize, how to justify usage of the entire linguistic spectrum faithfully, without betraying the essence of the meanings as carried across by oral, visual, auditory and graphic signs and symbols. Well aware that the ancient dialect’s “flavor still has/a drop of Eve’s milk,” still contains some remembrance of Eden, nevertheless he pain­fully knows it to be an “ancient dialect that I’ve forgotten, / you’ve worn yourself out / day by day in my mouth (and you’re not enough for me)”; this introspection is immediately meta­phorized via the appearance of the haymaker cutting the grass with his/her scythe—a memorable scene that embodies the es­sence of what has been lost as the world moves from an agrarian to an urbanized/industrialized reality.

Even from this limited and arbitrary selection one will readily ascertain Ruth Feldman’s and John Welle’s multivalent synergy as they “transvase” Zanzotto’s Veneto pluridialects into American English. Superlative praise in this case is almost an insult. It is far better to read these translations over again and again, to fully ap­preciate the range and uniqueness of their accomplishments. As much as humanly possible, these renditions approach true iso­morphism.

 

Adeodato Piazza Nicolai

 

 

 

 

 


[1]Andrea Zanzotto, Peasants Wake for Fellini’s Casanova and Other Poems, trans. John P. Welle and Ruth Feldman, drawings Federico Fellini and Augusto Murer (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997).

[2]Andrea Zanzotto, Fantasie di avvicinamento (Approaching Fantasies) (Mondadori, 1991): Speaking of the poetics of Fernando Pessoa, self-referentially Zanzotto states: “One can be driven to find a language which cannot and should not, ever, be written (ranging from pure dialect to the petèl baby-talk to true so­matic magma) because it points directly to a possible eternal orality, that is, among other things, an immediate physical contact with the mother; it implicitly negates every form of protowritings (protoscritture)—from a caress to a scratch—which auto-tattoo themselves on the body or, at least, leave a visible scar” (289–90). Thus dialects draw their images on, as well as from, the topogra­phy of the body (English “transvasing” by the present writer).