Manuel Rumiano
on translating Ada Negri
Translating this poem was challenging both stylistically and linguistically because of the elevated and old-fashioned tone of the original twentieth century Italian. In my translation, I aimed to reproduce as closely as possible the original solemn and old-sounding lexicon, for example by choosing “repose” instead of “rest,” “rejoice” instead of “enjoy,” and “limpid” instead of “clear,” given that all these pairs are semantically close but the former terms reflect more the spiritual and meditative tone of the original. Additionally, one particularly tricky sentence was rendine grazie al destino. While “be grateful for your fate” would have conveyed the message just as well, I decided to translate it with “give thanks to fate for it” to preserve its prayer-like quality.
Another challenge lay in retaining the dense network of metaphors that compare an elderly women to the autumnal landscape (through “repeat wheat,” “stripped cob,” and “fruitless earth,” for example). Throughout the text, natural and human cycles are constantly symbolically intertwined. Therefore, it was essential to preserve this correspondence without flattening its symbolic richness, so in these instances I took care to find exact equivalence between the Italian and the natural English terms (for example, with “purr,” “crowns,” and “thrush”). Sometimes, lexical ambiguity was also crucial to retain. A particularly complex example is the noun travaglio which can mean both “toil” but also “labour,” in the obstetric sense. In the final version of the translation, I chose “labour” to keep this double resonance: both the pain of physical work and the creational suffering of motherhood.
The most critical areas were syntax and rhythm, which are fundamental features of a poem and ones, I believe, that need to be preserved. Italian allows for implicit subjects, longer sentences and greater verb dislocation, whereas English is not as syntactically flexible. Adapting the intricate Italian phrasing into the more linear English structure was therefore one of the main difficulties, which I tried to carry out to the best of my abilities.
about the author
Ada Negri was an Italian poet who lived between 1870 and 1945. She was born in Lodi into a working class family and became the founder of the Female National Union. October Sun is taken from her poetry collection Il Dono (The Gift), one of her later works, published in 1936, in which she confronts death and reflects on her own life, defining it as a gift. This expression of gratitude is the final culmination of her gradual turn towards faith and her eventual attainment of profound serenity.
Today, she is recognised as a major literary figure who made art out of women’s everyday experiences in a society where their voices were still mostly unheard. However, back in the day, the reception of her poetry was mixed: Benedetto Croce, an important literary critic, criticised her for her melodiousness and readiness of emotions that, he misogynistically argued, constituted a “feminine flaw” that could only lead to imperfect art. Conversely, Vincenzo Schilirò, a lesser-known critic, thought of her work as incredibly successful in terms of capturing and artistically engaging with the toils of a generation.
about the translator
Manuel Rumiano is a master’s student in English and Anglo-American Studies at La Sapienza University in Rome. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Modern Languages in 2024 from the same institution and is fluent in Italian, English, French and Spanish. Rumiano currently works as an editor for Transitions, a postgraduate journal, and he contributes to Mapping Resistance, a translation project in collaboration with Northwestern University, which focuses on WWII memoirs. He is interested in translation studies and English linguistics.
