Translating Eugenio Montale: or who really ought to try it

Eugenio Montale

Art can only live within a process of liberation. Art is, so to speak, always democratic - its productive mechanism is democratic, in the sense that it produces language, words, colours and sounds which pull together into communities, new communities. In order to escape the aesthetic illusion, we have to flee solitude; in order to construct art, we have to construct liberation in its collective figure (Antonio Negri)

Don Share's recent post on his own tribute (at times maudlin) to the distinguished Montale translator William Arrowsmith had me reaching for my Eugenio Montale: Collected Poems 1920-1954 (trans. by Jonathan Galassi). As I'm generally inclined to lay the blame for both the theory and transmission of disastrous poetry at the academic's doorstep anyways, the thought did occur to me that perhaps Share's encomiums on Arrowsmith's Montale translations are a tad exaggerated. I maintain the best translators (like the best poets) must have an exquisitely rhythmical ear for the original inaccessible to everyone except well, those with an exquisitely rhythmical ear. Perhaps only poets can do the job. I doubt the academic-translator ever can. Ever.

I have to admit Share's comments annoyed me a little, too: both the fawning tribute, self-serving affiliations to the best ever teacher that ever taught comparative literature in the whole wide world. But I don't have a bone to pick with Arrowsmith's competent translations (of which I've read a few). I'd rather like to save the integrity of the great Italian Nobel laureate from translation controversy altogether. And to do that I'm going to post a poem and--you guessed it!--offer a translation of my own. I'm not presuming to do one better than Arrowsmith, however. That's not the point. It's rather my way of wresting the pristine mystery of poetry out of the academic's tight grip: my way of giving back to the 'commons' what's been filched by the professionals.

Montale was not an academic: he lived life beyond the graduate seminar room, risking life and career for political beliefs he never hesitated to put into his own writings. It follows for me that the academic-translator oughtn't really to try it since it's always resulted in straitjacketed versions that conform to personal temperament and pet literary theory. There are the academic-translators who also happen to be poets, exceptionally good ones, like Robert Bly and Clayton Eshleman, but they are few in number. The aim here is to offer a translation in esteem and gratitude only to the great Modernist bard. I'd like to make translation (in all its forms: from the strictly literal to 'homophonic') a publicly accessible and deeply appreciative event.

And so alllow me to begin now with "Portami il girasole", "Give me sunflowers!" Wildly differing (or asphyxiating 'word for word') versions are welcome here.

Portami il girasole

Portami il girasole ch'io lo trapianti
nel mio terreno bruciato dal salino,
e mostri tutto il giorno agli azzurri specchianti
del cielo l'ansietà del suo volto giallino.

Tendono alla chiarità le cose oscure,
si esauriscono i corpi in un fluire
di tinte: queste in musiche. Svanire
è dunque la ventura delle venture.

Portami tu la pianta che conduce
dove sorgono bionde trasparenze
e vapora la vita quale essenza;
portami il girasole impazzito di luce.
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Give me sunflowers!     (trans. C.DiDiodato)

Give me sunflowers to take to
my patch of salt-burnt ground,
its wizened yellow turned
   daily to a mirroring sky!

Dark things clamor for clarity,
bodies run dry in flowing hues:
as in music. A show of shows
    is this fading!

Give me the plant whence this
clamoring of yellow, and this
fading of essential life come--
   oh! light-crazed plant.
_________________________________________
Bring me the sunflower    (trans. Joseph Hutchison)

Bring me the sunflower, and I’ll make it    
take root in my garden seared by salt wind,
and all day long the sky’s blue will reflect
upon the excitation of its yellow face.

All dark things lean toward clarity,
bodies exhaust themselves into a flow
of colors: into these airs. To fade away,
then, is the most adventurous venture.

Bring me the plant that leads us up
to where blonde transparencies arise
and the essence of life mists away;
bring me the sunflower crazed by light
______________________________________
Bring me the Sunflower    (trans. A. Wyndham)

Bring me the sunflower to take root
in my blistered, earth-bound pod,
to show, every day, to the mirrored blue
sky its anguished, xanthous-hued face.

Compelled to clarify the darkness,
our bodies exhaust themselves in dissipating strains:
like faded melodies. We vanish -
the inevitable fortune of such venture.

Point me to where I can find
transparence emerge
and send forth life's essence, so fleeting.
Bring me one sunflower suffused with such light!

"Rapture" by Dorothea Tanning