And Suddenly It’s Evening

A snook at Vulcan
Jonathan Keates
Guardian,10 December 2004


THE FABER BOOK OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALIAN POEMS. By Jamie McKendrick, editor. 167pp. Faber. £12.99. 0 571 19700 0
Being a poet in Italy represents an enormous responsibility. Ever since the Risorgimento, whose bards assumed a status almost like that of Shelley's "unacknowledged legislators", writers of serious verse have all too often been overburdened with a sense of their historic duty and position. The resultant significance is equally enjoyable and dangerous for its possessor. Too often, what is more, individuality is stifled by too many respectful nods in the direction of literary forerunners. Leopardi's melancholy, for example, whatever superb artefacts he himself may have fashioned from it, has had a dire influence on successive generations. A whole poetic tradition of plangent solitude, stretching all the way back to Foscolo's "I sepolcri", has with the passing of time become little better than a viral cliche infecting style and expression.
Jamie McKendrick, in a trenchant introduction to The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poems, highlights a distinctive cultural context created in part by the fact that Italian poets, more often than their British counterparts, tend to write for, or at, each other, in an ongoing conversation.
French influence on the nation's literary life has encouraged a fondness for identifiable schools and factions, while politics, particularly during the impegnati 1970s, has drawn further demarcation lines. Italy's essential regionalism, with its abundance of dialects, has meanwhile offered a robust counterbalance to those metropolitan voices resonant from publishing centres like Milan, Turin and Florence.
A few of the names here, Giorgio Bassani, Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, will be familiar to British readers under other guises, but this does not claim to be a representative anthology. If it were, we should have more D'Annunzio, a better selection of Guido Gozzano (in Michael Palma's versions, what's more, rather than those of J. G. Nichols printed here) a properly focused choice of Sandro Penna's lyrics and something at least from Nanni Balestrini and Antonio Porta. As McKendrick admits, personal taste, availability of translations and the perceived standing of individual poets have all shaped the making of his collection, but its overall conspectus, within 160-odd pages, is surprisingly rich and comprehensive.
The most obvious challenge posed by various poems here to the translators is their classic status. A schoolroom favourite for several generations, D'Annunzio's "The Shepherds" uses the idea of transhumance, of the flocks driven down from the Abruzzi pastures to the maritime plains, as an image of the poet's eternal restlessness. Salvatore Quasimodo's "And Suddenly It's Evening" embodies his quest for the essential in poetry, for a lyric distillation which, by saying no more than it absolutely needs, will become a species of vatic utterance. In "Levant", meanwhile, Giuseppe Ungaretti perfectly reenacts, through the structural design, a voyage from his native Alexandria to a Europe in which, for all his family's Tuscan origins, he never felt perfectly assimilated.
Nuance in these texts is sometimes treacherous. Alistair Elliot's translation of "The Shepherds" cleverly sustains a certain authentically D'Annunzian quality of jostling impatience, but his rendering of "imbionda" - literally "turn blond" as "fade" undermines the whole idea of the sun gilding the flock as it crosses the beach. Jack Bevan's "each of us" may perhaps be a little too comfortable for Quasimodo's less personal "ognuno', and Patrick Creagh mysteriously changes Ungaretti's "mare cenerino" into "ashen sky", making nonsense of the subsequent lines.
We can turn, if we prefer, to more unbuttoned poetic moods. Cesare Pavese makes something almost paradisal out of the Genoese slum where a grubby urchin eyes up a bottle-blonde spitting in a fountain, Maria Luisa Spaziani luxuriates in a Parisian cosmopolis of "dried cod, arquebuses, incunabula, seal's lard, damasks, cymbals", and Bartolo Cattafi receives his comeuppance from a whore in a Tunisian brothel. Alongside the sardonic laughter and self-mockery echoing among these pages runs a more sombre sense of Italy's burden of modern historical experience.
It seems the shortest of steps from Marinetti's Futurist aviator, cocking a snook at Vulcan ("sputtering old ventriloquist") in Etna's bubbling crater, to the Partisan Franco Fortini glumly considering the uselessness of his poetical calling in "Translating Brecht" or to Primo Levi adjuring us not to forget the Holocaust. Now, amid the false glitter of Berlusconian bread and circuses, let us hope the fine old traditions of Italian poetic satire are not altogether dead. Another Parini or Giusti among the nation's poets is sorely needed.

Letters to the editor, 24 December 2004

Brief and beautiful

Sir – In his review of Jamie McKendrick’s Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poems (December 10), Jonathan Keates says that Jack Bevan’s “each of us” seems “too comfortable for Salvatore Quasimodo's less personal ‘ognuno’” in the poem “And Suddenly It’s Evening”. In fact, Bevan translated “ognuno”as “everyone”-- “Everyone is alone on the heart of the earth” -- in his first version, made for the Penguin Modern European Poets series in 1965.
I have a letter from him dated April 1984 in which he regrets the change. He says he “havered over it a good deal” and thought “each of us” “more specific, more multitudinous” than “everyone”, but came to think the change “hard on the tongue” and to “[lose] more than it gained”. It’s not a trivial point, really, since the poem is so brief and so beautiful, and since Bevan’s translations of Quasimodo usually work so well in English.

Neil Corcoran
Department of English Literature, University of Liverpool.



The texts:



Ed è subito sera
[da Acque e terre (1930)]

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera.

Salvatore Quasimodo

[1] And Suddenly It’s Evening

Each of us is alone on the heart of the earth
pierced by a ray of sun:
and suddenly it’s evening.

Jack Bevan

[2] And Suddenly It Is Evening

Everyone stands alone at the heart of this earth
Stunned by a ray of sunlight
and suddenly it is evening.

J Ruth Gendler

[3] And suddenly it is evening

Everyone stands alone at the heart of the world
pierced by a ray of sunlight,
and suddenly it is evening.

[4] And it's suddenly evening
Everyone stays alone, on the heart of the Earth,
wounded by a ray of sun.
And it's suddenly evening

[5] AND THEN SUDDENLY IT'S EVENING
Alone at the earth's core stands each man,
Pierced by a ray of light; and then
Suddenly it's evening.

[6] Each one stands on the heart of the earth,
impaled by a ray of sunlight.
And suddenly, it's evening

[7] A’s siúd go tobann an tráthnóna.

Seasann gach n-aon ina aonar ar chroí an talaimh
gath gréine ina shaighid tríd:
a’s siúd go tobann an tráthnóna.

Máirín agus Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh