oh no David, I spent a year with his "entire collected works" book, not with
him, sorry if I gave you the wrong idea...
:-) anny
From: "david.bircumshaw" <[log in to unmask]>
> 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
|