Hi Anny
I'm glad you liked it, I don't have a fluency or even ability in spoken
Italian but I have a certain reading knowledge of it, I'm so lazy I've never
mastered, as it were, another language, but I know dribs and drabs of them.
Yes, I'm aware that I altered the closing lines, this was to do with
'Englishing' the poem, that is to say to translate something of its wondrous
verbal texture into another language, that's why I introduced the unusual
word 'geminous'. From which the closing lines of my attempt are triggered.
I am in complete awe that you knew the great Eugenio, it would have been
close to meeting God for me. Bless his Memory.
I'm very interested in questions of translation - I think that it is only
possible to 'rewrite' a poem into another language, never to duplicate it.
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
Home Page
A Chide's Alphabet
Painting Without Numbers
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "Anny Ballardini" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2003 10:53 PM
Subject: The Eel
Dear David,
thank you for your incredible effort, which surprised me. Mine is a long
story with Montale, I literally spent a year with him, first preparing
colored papers and then hand-writing his poems on them - one by one, the
entire amount he produced, a work of art, not of poetry. A privileged
dialogue I had with him. I reached a point in which I just drew or colored,
then opened the book and he gave me the right poem for the painting.
I was also taken by the choice of your words, very English of England, I
would say, and by your vivid images. It is interesting to compare the poet's
old voice in this Italy with its disasters but little neurosis, open
fields - long days, day and night, one after the other in all their length,
with your hand - a many-sided one of contemporary England. I anyhow rewrote
the last lines, which maybe you did not understand properly, in a literal
translation, so that you can get to them:
the brief iris, twin
of the one which your eyelashes mount
& which you let intact shine amid the children
of man, sunk in your mud,
can you
not believe her your sister?
Great work, take care, anny
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