Shailly Pandey
on translating Maria Luisa Spaziani
Translating “Testament” was a monumental task because of Spaziani’s musicality. Though I do not speak Italian, simply hearing the Italian and seeing it on the page was enough for me to know that I had to make sound a priority. At first, this awareness made my translation stray very far from the Italian. My work breached a line between translation and what Professor Suvir Kaul called transcreation, and I wasn’t comfortable with that breach. I wanted, rather, to honor Spaziani, whose reputation might be overshadowed by male Italian poets like Eugenio Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti, although she was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature three times. So I returned to the Italian (with the help of those who speak it and a number of Italian dictionaries) and rewrote many of the lines until I reached the translation you see. Still this translation does not parallel Spaziani’s poem in terms of lyricality, but I hope it is a testament (pun intended) to her brilliance.
about the author
Maria Luisa Spaziani was born in 1923 in Turin, Italy, and she died in 2014. At nineteen years old, she was the director of a small literary magazine, Il dado; her work there led to relationships with internationally renowned writers such as Virginia Woolf. A translator and scholar of French and German literature as well as a prolific poet, Spaziani incorporated motifs of the natural world into her sense of a long and thoughtfully inherited literary tradition. A longtime collaborator with the poet Eugenio Montale, Spaziani served as president of the Centro Internazionale Eugenio Montale. She published over seventeen acclaimed books of poetry and she translated writers such as Pierre de Ronsard, Marguerite Yourcenar, Jean Racine, André Gide, Francis Jammes, and Gustave Flaubert. Spaziani’s poetry has been translated into many different languages. Her Star of Free Will was translated into English by Irene Marchegiani Jones and Carol Lettieri.
about the translator
Shailly Pandey is a junior in the College at the University of Pennsylvania. She is studying Biological Basis of Behavior and is on the pre-med track. She is also the editor-in-chief of DoubleSpeak and is so grateful to be able to translate and publish this magazine.
