The Mockingbird's Chops: Charles Wright in Italian

Those of us who translate poetry may be tempted to think of ourselves as heroic (if not simply bemused) in our dedication to a calling whose difficulty approaches impossible. The difficulty fascinates, drawing us to task like mariners to Sirens, and fascination only increases in proportion to difficulty. Walter Benjamin may intend to give us hope when he asserts that the higher level of a work, more does it remain translatable even if its meaning is touched upon only fleetingly, but chime of his last word-fleetingly-is a reminder of how hard it is to transport sense and attributes of poetry to a foreign shore. This essay is one of a series exploring issues in translation of poetry, taking its examples from American poets translated into Italian. (A complementary series discusses Italian poets rendered in English.) While choice of language reflects my work as a translator and my interests in Italian literature and art, these issues arise when poetry from any language. More broadly still, they are attendant to what Tim Parks calls translating Poetry in translation is like wine in pre-sulfate days, when certain bottles traveled and others did not: Some aspects of poetry survive trip, some arrive in bad shape, some are lost entirely. One of first casualties of translation voyage is style, and one of most fragile elements of style is tone. Tone is essence of Charles Wright's work, because his poetry is so musical, and because its effect is so dependent on voice (making it distinguishable, up to a point, from poetry more reliant on other elements, such as traditional form, meter and rhyme, narration or psychology, experimental language, or particular subject matter). Composed of subtly modulated registers of speech and shaped by a resonantly American cultural setting, Wright's distinctive voice can be elusive a translator. It is not news to say that important subtleties are lost in translation, and it is not worthwhile to critique a translator, since exercise often degenerates into carping and second-guessing. But it can be instructive to look at translation's losses with an eye to how and why they occur. The translation process (the philosophy and method, choices available, decisions made) can become a lens; if we use this lens to look back at poem and refocus our attention, we can study relationship between elements that are difficult to transpose and qualities that are central to poetry's effect. Approached in this spirit, comparing an original poem with a translation has a larger and more useful aim than finding fault with a translator; it has potential to shed light on art of translation itself, on differences between two languages-and most importantly, on nature of style. When a poetic style relies on voice, as in case of Wright, translator faces a difficult task. Admittedly this is only one type of difficulty. Formal poets, like Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, or young Robert Lowell, confront us with problems of their own, beginning with fateful choice of whether or not to rhyme-a classic translator's dilemma. (Eschewing rhyme may seem like taking down net before playing tennis, but it is often done; Richard Howard, one of translation's maestros, while acknowledging that Baudelaire always rhymes, foregoes rhyme in his version of Les Fleurs du Mal for sake of cumulative effects.) The difficulty posed by Wright's poetry, with its stress on nuances and variations of voice, is only one of several types-but it poses a considerable challenge. What is nature of Wright's voice? The dominant mode of his poetry is lyrical, but it is never just that, and task might be easier if it were. A translator of Derek Walcott, by contrast, can rely on his tendency to gravitate, or rise, toward a single rhetorical level, like a cathedral organ recital whose sound carries you along as it swells and fills up space. …