Italian | Italy | Personal Essay
October, 2020Marosia Castaldi (1950-2019) was a Neapolitan writer who spent most of her life in Milan, and this duality animates much of her work. Naples is vast, beautiful, dramatic, hellenic, bright, manic; Milan is small, dull, obscured in fog, closed in on itself, neurotic. That her work draws on largely abandoned devices like pathetic fallacy or even concepts like environmental determinism makes her a certain kind of contemporary Romantic, a true heir to the sublime strain in Italian literature singularly evident in Giacomo Leopardi. Yet the essay featured here, “Milan, International City,” from the author’s miscellany In mare aperto (Portofranco, 2001), builds this intensity from the everyday. Disillusionment with gray, industrious Milan, a principal destination for internal migration for Italians compelled to relocate from more economically depressed hometowns, is something of a commonplace and a literary topos. Castaldi’s quick walking tour of Milan, by contrasting the present with the recent past, the north with the south, and pointing out a number of rather untouristy landmarks, condenses an entire reading of the city into an ontology of geography. While Milan’s cosmopolitan aspirations are painted as somewhat pathetic, Castaldi’s portrait is nonetheless generous, surprisingly sweeping in its brevity, and from the perspective of someone who lives there, dead on.
- Jamie Richards
As the U.S. once again confronts its inability to fulfill its legal and moral obligations to all its citizens, it is perhaps a good moment to revisit Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poem “Poet of the Ashes,” which Italy’s greatest 20th-century poet produced in the wake of his first visit to New York City in 1966, after being invited to appear at the New York Film Festival. He summed up his impressions of the city in an interview with the journalist Oriana Fallaci: “New York is not an evasion: it’s an engagement, a war. It gives you the urge to do, to confront, to change: it pleases you like the things that please you when you’re twenty.” Pasolini would later refine his thoughts in an essay published not long after his stay: “In America, even in my very brief stay, I spent many hours in a covert climate of struggle, of revolutionary urgency, of hope, reminiscent of the Europe of 1944 and 1945. In Europe everything is finished: in America you have the impression that everything is about to begin. I don’t mean to say there is no civil war in America, perhaps not even anything like it, nor do I mean to predict it: one lives there, however, as if on the eve of great things.” Excited by the Civil Rights Movement, Pasolini was pleased to discover that unlike in his native Italy, a desire for change still existed among the people. Pasolini’s entire life, after all, had been shaped by tyranny. He was born in 1922, when Mussolini's Fascists stormed to power, bringing three years of post-war revolutionary fervor to a complete halt and beginning a twenty-year-long campaign of tyrannical repression that drove the country’s poor and working classes into greater misery than ever before. “Poet of the Ashes” unpacks what Alberto Moravia meant when he called Pasolini a sentimental communist: in this poem we find the entirety of Pasolini’s life analyzed in what the poet himself called a “bio-bibliographical poem,” which discusses his childhood, his tortured relationship with his father, the death of his younger brother Guidalberto (1925-1945) during the Resistance in WWII, the roots of his political commitment, the failure of the post-WWII era to create real social change, his literary beginnings, and finally, his relocation to Rome, where he initially lived in the city’s poverty-stricken neighborhoods. The poem also discusses the trials and lawsuits that dogged Pasolini in his more successful years, as well as his artistic output. This complex narrative–or series of narratives–is interspersed with sharp commentary on his host country, the U.S., and his motherland, Italy. Readers will encounter references to Greek mythological heroes, the medieval Italian poet Tasso, the American anthropologist Oscar Lewis, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the Soviet dissidents Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, and even John Lennon.
- André Naffis-Sahely
Eritrea | Italian | Italy | Poetry
May, 2020Ribka Sibhatu, one of Eritrea’s most indefatigable writer-activists, was born in Asmara in 1962, the year Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia unilaterally annexed the former Italian colony of Eritrea, triggering a liberation war that would last for the next three decades. In 1979, at the age of seventeen, Sibhatu was sentenced to a year in prison for criticizing the government, on false charges trumped up by an Ethiopian politician whom Sibhatu had refused to marry. Adopting a false identity, Sibhatu fled to Addis Ababa upon her release from prison and finished her education in the Ethiopian capital, where she later married a Frenchman, relocating to the latter’s native country in the mid-1980s. Once that marriage ended, Sibhatu moved again, this time to Rome, where she published her first collection of poems, Aulò! Canto Poesia dall’Eritrea (Sinnos, 1993), a volume of confessional lyrics written in both Tigrinya and Italian. Despite falling into various different genres—poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—Sibhatu’s work essentially represents a reconstruction of Eritrea’s cultural heritage in exile. The poems featured here are drawn from a collection-in-progress.
- André Naffis-Sahely
In the essay below, originally published in the online journal archphoto.it, the psychologist Calogero Lo Piccolo presents some immediate but psychically sensitive reflections on the current Italian experience of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as its political implications, tentatively approaching intimate issues of subjectivity while nevertheless attempting to regain a vanishing objectivity. Lo Piccolo takes a step back, as it were, even while the world imposes the need to throw one metre’s distance between everyone. The act of urgent translation here takes on a strange role in the combined and uneven undevelopment of the crisis. In translation, the “ambassadors” from the future to whom the title refers become twofold: not only the young men in Japan to whom Lo Piccolo himself refers, but also we here in Italy, who have the uncanny role of bringing a message from an imminent future to the United States and elsewhere, exploiting the fortnightly gap in time that we have all now learned falls between exposure and symptom.
- Richard Braude
Fiction (excerpts) | Italian | Somalia/Italy
November, 2019Il comandante del fiume is the coming-of-age story of Yabar, an eighteen-year-old, second-generation immigrant dealing with the post-memory trauma of the Somali civil war; uncovering secrets about his absent father, destructive clan divisions, and Italy’s colonial past; and coming to terms with what it means to be black in Rome. This particular excerpt, which I've titled "Flunking Out and Overflowing," is sourced from a few different chapters, and centers on the theme of school and Yabar's relationship with his "sister."
- Hope Campbell Gustafson
Italian | Italy | Micro-Stories
December, 2017Superwoobinda is a collection of "micro-stories" (or "polaroids," as the author calls them) written by Aldo Nove. At the time of its publication in 1998, it was extremely popular--some call it a cult book--and played an important role in the Young Cannibals Italian literary movement. The Young Cannibals wrote about the reality of Italy during that period in an exasperated way (often with the inclusion of brand-name consumerism, hyper or surreal violence, and black humor). They were highly influenced by Quentin Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction (1994).
Superwoobinda depicts the Italy of the 1990s, an Italy that is marked by consumerism and an unnatural relationship with television. Silvio Berlusconi, a millionaire business and media mogul, has recently been elected prime minister. Italian television has been privatized, Berlusconi owning three out of the seven national TV channels, thus creating the Italian commercial TV empire. Nove chose to use the language of television in his writing—to highlight the absurdity, the horror, of a reality mediated by it. There are many different styles found here, often with repetition and syntactic disruption, and the fragmented stories mimic the rhythm of flipping through channels. There is a conglomeration of voices and perspectives, the sad and disturbed characters disconnected from one another, and from themselves, all brainwashed by the TV and its advertising.
Superwoobinda is an extreme and exaggerated social commentary. Its stories are both comic and tragic, scandalizing and iconoclastic, and they have an overload of lurid content (be forewarned). What follows is a selection of eight of these stories.
- Hope Campbell Gustafson
Italian | Italy | Poetry (excerpts)
September, 2017Andrea Raos was my Italian language teacher in Chicago. But he could have easily been my English, French, or Japanese instructor as well. His passion and talent for languages are prodigious. His poetry strikes me with its inexorable, almost tactile construction of everyday images that paint a sonorous but often painful picture of bodily or cerebral experiences. Andrea Raos’ poetry is indeed cerebral--both intellectual and visceral, it touches you emotionally and it makes your spine tingle, as Vladimir Nabokov would put it. At the same time it addresses questions that lie at the heart of our existence in a global society and the subjectivities this existence produces. Does language constitute identity, and, if so, how? What is the relationship between self, body, and language? Is speaking a new language reinventing your psychic and physical self? Where is language located as you pronounce foreign words? Do we perceive the world differently when reality is filtered through another language? Translating from Italian his poem “The Moment Just Before” was both challenging and exhilarating, as I too navigate between languages, feeling always at sea, my body adjusting to different vocal and corporeal demands, my mind juggling grammatical constructions and foreign lexicons. I am a native speaker of Bulgarian. My adopted languages are English, Russian, and Italian. And somewhere in the background lurk a handful of other modern and ancient languages. Thus when translating this poem, I could relate to the lyric speaker’s attitude, his attempt to articulate the embodied experience of language, and in doing so, to embrace his mother tongue and find a home inside it.
- Stiliana Milkova
Sardinia is the second largest island in the Mediterranean Sea and an autonomous region of Italy, perhaps best known in a literary sense for being the birthplace and home of Grazia Deledda, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926. But Sardinia was also home to a number of other intellectuals, writers, and artists, including Sebastiano Satta (1867-1914), a journalist and lawyer who is widely considered Sardinia’s greatest poet.
While working as colleagues in the now defunct but still singular international MFA program at the City University of Hong Kong, we visited the island in 2014 as part of a contingent from the university and as guests of Beyond Thirty-Nine, an independent arts and culture platform. Our trip took the form of an immersion in various aspects of Sardinian culture, such as the masked ritualistic dance of the Mamuthones and the canto a tenore or polyphonic singing of pastoral songs. We were also exposed to the work of the island’s great writers and artists, among them Sebastiano Satta.
A committed socialist in the vein of Pablo Neruda, Satta spent his life advocating for the island’s working class, while his poetry (such as Versi Ribelli and Canti Barbaricini) celebrated the island’s terrain, especially the mountainous wilderness of the Barbagia region. We were introduced to Satta’s work with the caveat that his particular music and use of local dialect made translating him very difficult. Taking that as a challenge, we set about trying to render his work in English while retaining some of the lyricism of the original. The following translations were composed in Sardinia and performed at the open air gallery of acclaimed sculptor Pinuccio Sciola.
- James Scudamore and Ravi Shankar
Italian | Italy | Poetry (excerpts)
December, 2016An iconoclastic portrayal of Italian domestic spaces (the kitchen, the body), The Guest (L’ospite) is an examination of the tangled network of family, and especially of the lineage of women that extends from Elisa Biagini’s great-grandmother to herself. It explores the intimate space that belonged to those women, and the ways in which that space made them both slaves and tyrants. The domestic interior and the female body often become one another in these poems in ways that are frightening and illuminating (in the first poem of this excerpt, for instance, skin that used to be butter has now become a paper bag for bread; in the last, dinner plates are white blood cells). In this way these poems exhibit the dangers and powers of the body’s ability to transform and morph into the spaces that it occupies.
One of the primary challenges of translating this startling and intensely physical poetry is how to render the sound and vivid imagery evoked by the Italian verse in English. We read these poems out loud to each other many times, both in Italian and English, as we worked on these translations, in an effort to reproduce that tactile and immediate quality of Biagini’s language in our work. Elisa Biagini is a translator of Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, and Lucille Clifton, and their directness of language has definitely influenced her Italian writing; another challenge was to allow those echoes to return in these English translations.
- Sarah Stickney and Diana Thow
Italian | Italy | Poetry (excerpts)
October, 2016Reading Dino Campana’s Orphic Songs for the first time is much like watching a David Lynch film. Thrilling and even a bit disturbing, it is guaranteed haunt you like only the most beautiful of nightmares can. For Campana’s poems function as unexpected and striking visions, loosely wrapped in classical Italian, but ready for modern consumption. Through the humble means of repetition and imagery, they tightly grip the ordinary and concrete, taking the overlooked or willfully ignored and turning it on its side until the sublimity of the grotesque leaks through. These poems are filled with equal parts danger and recklessness, as well as all that is human and bright. Once released from their Italian and slightly rusty cages, they crystallize a nascent urban vivacity which continues to ring through our lives today, connecting with us contemporary readers perhaps even better than when they were originally published. Because, as Campana demonstrates in Oh poem poem poem, even a woman screaming for her little dog can be a stunning instant of clarity.
A troubled and lonely soul who spent his youth in and out of asylums (his own unwell mother reportedly claimed he was the Antichrist) and wandering the cities of Europe on the brink of World War I, Campana infused his works with the electric energy that was pulsating through city streets at that time. The beauty he presents is one that must be snatched from the barbaric, for it is feverish, weak, and on the verge of certain death. And it is this urgency, that of a perceived madman searching for purity, of a soul on fire running for safety amidst the chaos of cruelty, that continues to make his poems unique and captivating to this day.
- Sonya Gray Redi
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).