Gabriele Costarella

on translating Alda Merini

During Professor Tajie Silverman's seminar on translation at the University of La Sapienza in Rome, we were asked to translate a poem from our native language into English. My girlfriend suggested Alda Merini's A tutti i giovani raccomando, and I thought it was perfect: elegant, simple and with a strong meaning behind it. Later, I read about Merini's life story, and it struck me as incredible, worthy of praise and deep analysis.

The translation was quite simple, but simplicity does not always equal a straightforward process. Translation from Italian into English always requires considerable changes in prosody and lexical content in order to keep the fundamentals of the piece intact. Even free verse must be adapted to better suit the particular English prosody and the semantic charge of poems. That is why I added the enjambment in "The courage of our fathers / lies within"--which is not present in the original.

The simplicity of the verses and word choices gave me some peculiar problems to resolve. For example, the verse aprite i libri con religione literally means "open your books religiously," which would imply that we should read often and carefully (like a nun's habit). But in the next lines, we understand it is necessary to read "religiously" because our fathers' courage is present in books. So the meaning shifts from a temporal command to a moral, temperamental command: we should open our books ceremonially and respectfully because inside we will find our fathers' courage. I think the word "devotion" perfectly encapsulates both the feeling and the command being transmitted.

I omitted the word “pensate" (which means “to think”) from my translation because I found the other possibilities quite awkward: they miss the sense of openness and liberty the author evokes: "Think" and "know" and "imagine" as imperatives all leave out a crucial subtext from the original: we, the readers of the poet's words have been allowed to soar beyond this reality, because of her words. With the word "think," we lose poetic charge; if we use "know," then we are transmitting security, reassurance, which is not what I believe the author wishes to sugest. Finally, with "imagine," we deviate from the original meaning by suggesting the reader should create their own mental image instead of carrying out what the poet wants the reader to accomplish by reading her poetry.

The last word of the poem, "quotidiana," means "daily"; I think it is represented faithfully by the idea of an "everyday reality," which shifts the focus from the word "everyday" to the word "reality." This change could leave the reader with a sense of juxtaposition between the real and the unreal instead of emphasizing the original image of escaping from the "everyday". Yet I feel the compound "everyday reality" will more likely transfer the same meaning to most readers.