Journal of Italian Translation
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Journal of Italian Translation frontmatter.indd 1 1/24/2016 7:14:49 PM Journal of Italian Translation is an interna- Editor tional journal devoted to the translation of liter- Luigi Bonaffini ary works from and into Italian-English-Italian dialects. All translations are published with the original text. It also publishes essays and reviews Associate Editors Gaetano Cipolla dealing with Italian translation. It is published Michael Palma twice a year. Joseph Perricone Submissions should be in electronic form. Translations must be accompanied by the original texts, a brief profile of the translator, and a brief Assistant Editor profile of the author. Original texts and transla- Paul D’Agostino tions should be on separate files. All submissions and inquiries should be addressed to Journal of Italian Translation, Dept. of Modern Languages Editorial Board Adria Bernardi and Literatures, 2900 Bedford Ave. Brooklyn, NY Geoffrey Brock 11210 or [email protected] Franco Buffoni Barbara Carle Book reviews should be sent to Joseph Per- Peter Carravetta ricone, Dept. of Modern Language and Literature, John Du Val Fordham University, Columbus Ave & 60th Street, Anna Maria New York, NY 10023 or [email protected]. Farabbi Website: www.jitonline.org Rina Ferrarelli Luigi Fontanella Irene Subscription rates: Marchegiani U.S. and Canada. Individuals $30.00 a year, Francesco Marroni $50 for 2 years. Sebastiano Institutions $35.00 a year. Martelli Single copies $18.00. Stephen Sartarelli For all mailing abroad please add $15 per Achille Serrao issue. Payments in U.S. dollars. Cosma Siani Make checks payable to Journal of Italian Marco Sonzogni Translation Joseph Tusiani Lawrence Venuti Journal of Italian Translation is grateful to the Pasquale Verdicchio Sonia Raiziss Giop Charitable Foundation for its Paolo Valesio generous support. Journal of Italian Translation is published under the aegis of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures of Brooklyn College of the City University of New York Design and camera-ready text by Legas, PO Box 149, Mineola, NY 11501 ISSN: 1559-8470 © Copyright 2016 by Journal of Italian Translation frontmatter.indd 2 1/24/2016 7:14:49 PM Journal of Italian Translation Editor Luigi Bonaffini Volume X Number 2 Fall 2015 frontmatter.indd 3 1/24/2016 7:14:49 PM In each issue of Journal of Italian Translation we will feature a noteworthy Italian or Italian American artist. In this issue we present the work of Simona Stivaletta. Simona Stivaletta was born in Vasto (Italy) in 1970. Trained as an artist in her youth, she later moved to Florence, where she stud- ied and worked in fields as diverse as puppetry and the restoration of antiques. Over the past decade she has focused exclusively on painting, with shows hosted throughout Italy and Germany. Her production has been described as “deceptively naïf,” as the appar- ently naïf quality of her painting reveals an intriguing capacity to blend disparate pictorial traditions, from across times and spaces. Artists as diverse as Klee, Van Eyck, Mondrian and Alfred Wallis all inform Stivaletta’s work, making her a medium of sorts for a myriad of influences internalized and metabolized over the course of decades. But such ownership of the past — in accord with the possibility of its dispossession — is what allows her, paradoxically, to invent a new language, a new vision: one both poetic and har- monious, where forms and colors mingle in startlingly original, indeed “musical” compositions. This, while the apparently naïf quality of her painting ultimately betrays a pervasive element of a kind of “familiar disquiet,” an intriguing capacity to yield a most contemporary expression of what psychoanalyst Christopher Bol- las calls the unthought known. Indeed Stivaletta, I’d dare say, is an expression of our unthought known: a slow bubbling of elements of a near-timeless iconographic unconscious in which we all share, whose outcome – precisely in its dimension of a familiar disquiet – makes for the discreet but unmistakable signature of a distinctly contemporary creative force. Still, one might ask: where is the originality of Stivaletta? In his book The Mystery of Things Bollas writes: “When the painter paints, or the musician composes, or the writer writes, they transfer psychic reality to another realm. They transubstantiate that reality, the object no longer simply expressing itself, but re-forming it… The term ‘transubstantial object object’ allows me to think of the intrinsic integrity of the form into which one moves one’s sensibility in order to create: into musical thinking, prose thinking, painting thinking.” Stivaletta’s “painting thinking”, the process whereby frontmatter.indd 4 1/24/2016 7:14:50 PM her peculiar sensibility is transposed into distinctly idiomatic and integral forms, reminds me of a comment by Igor Stravinsky (quoted by Bollas), who writes of how a “foretaste of the creative act accompanies the intuitive grasp of an unknown entity already possessed but not yet intelligible, an entity that will not take definite shape except by the action of a constantly vigilant technique.” For all of the grand “presences” one might see or imagine inhabiting Stivaletta’s work, her paintings — or intelligible entities — are unshakably and unequivocally hers, borne of the very possession, and specific technical vigilance, of which Stravinsky speaks. In my opinion, Simona Stivaletta can own traditions past in the very process of honoring them, unconsciously. But to clarify what I suggested earlier, it is her very relationship with the past that al- lows her — again, via its essential dispossession —tes, and indeed remakes that future, as every true artist does, trekking territory that is by necessity familiar but gets always trodden again. Consider, for instance, some of her landscapes, where a degree of mecha- nized alienation takes center stage (albeit not without a quirky transcendent urge), that renews and updates the distinctly Italian Futurist tradition while calling, perhaps ironically, or nostalgically, on Chaplin and his “Modern Times”. It is in works like these that familiar territory gets re-envisioned. Recast. Or, as Bollas would have it, forever, yet originally, transubstantiated. Anthony Molino frontmatter.indd 5 1/24/2016 7:14:50 PM frontmatter.indd 6 1/24/2016 7:14:50 PM Journal of Italian Translation Volume 10, Number 2, Fall 2015 Table of Contents ESSAYS Peter D’Epiro A Taste of Montale’s Amleto ..........................................................12 Alessandra Calvani Politics In Translation: The “Original” Translation of Dux ......20 Giulia Guarnieri Between Tradition and Creativity: William Weaver and the Translation of On the Carpet of Leaves Illuminated by the Moon by Italo Calvino ..................................................................... 28 TRANSLATIONS Louise Rozier English translation of “Quarto comandamento” by Paola Masino.. ............................................................................................52 Anthony Molino and Gray Sutherland English translation of Luigia Sorrentino’s “Il sonno”................75 Anthony Molino Italian translation of poems by Robert Zaller .............................80 Jacob Blakesley English translation of poems by Ernesto Livorni .......................90 Andrea Sirotti English translation of The Pain Tapestry by Baret Magarian ....96 frontmatter.indd 7 1/24/2016 7:14:50 PM Stephen Campiglio English translation of poems by Giuseppe Bonaviri ...............126 Jonathan Hiller English translation of a selection from Paolina by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti ..........................................................................................137 Special features Scritture sperimentali / Experimental writing Edited by Gianluca Rizzo Gianluca Rizzo Italian translation of poems by Jackson MacLow ....................159 Voices in English from Europe to New Zealand Edited by Marco Sonzogni Marco Sonzogni and Ross Woods English translation of poems by Fabiano Alborghetti .............181 Francesca Benocci Italian translation of poems by Lynn Jenner .............................194 Theater Sesso Facile (Tragedia e Ironia), Due Atti Unici di Mario Fratti Translated into English by the author........................................204 Those Who from Afar Look Like Flies. An Anthology of Italian Poetry from Officina to the Present Edited by Luigi Ballerini and Beppe Cavatorta Andrew Hiltzik and Sarah Cantor English translation of poems by Edoardo Cacciatore and Gianni D’Elia..................................................................................243 New Translators Edited by John Duval Matteo Pasquarelli Gascon English Translation of Qualcosa non va by Matteo Favaretto ..282 frontmatter.indd 8 1/24/2016 7:14:50 PM Dueling Translators Edited by Gaetano Cipolla Two versions of a poem by Antonio De Curtis (Totò), translated into English by Onat Claypole and by Florence Russo ...........303 frontmatter.indd 9 1/24/2016 7:14:50 PM Simona Stivaletta, Borghi frontmatter.indd 10 1/24/2016 7:14:51 PM Essays frontmatter.indd 11 1/24/2016 7:14:51 PM A Taste of Montale’s Amleto by Peter D’Epiro Peter D’Epiro received a PhD in English from Yale University and is the author or coauthor of five books, including Sprezzatura: 50 Ways Italian Genius Shaped the World. His doctoral dissertation on Ezra Pound’s “Malatesta Cantos” (Cantos 8-11) was later published as a book, and he has also written several articles on the Pisan Can- tos for Paideuma, the Pound journal. His verse translations, mainly