Gabriele Costarella

on translating Alda Merini

During Prof. 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 her life story, and it struck me as something 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 enjambement in /The courage of our fathers / lies within. / 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 the author is trying to say we should read often and carefully(like a nun's habit). But if we read the next lines, we understand it is necessary to read "religiously" because our father's courage is present in the 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 father's 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 to be quite awkward: they miss the sense of openness and liberty the author is trying to leave us with. /Think you may walk upon us/ or /Know you may walk upon us/ or /Imagine you can walk upon us/ leave out a crucial subtext from the original: we, the readers and receivers of the poet's work, have been allowed to soar beyond this reality using their work. If we use the word "think," then we lose poetic charge; if we use "know," then we are transmitting security, reassurance, which is not what I believe the author wishes to leave us with. Finally, if we use "imagine," we are deviating from the original meaning by suggesting the reader should create a mental image instead of actually carrying out what the poet wants us to accomplish by reading their poetry.

The last word of the poem, "quotidiana"(/ˈkwɔ.ti.ˈdja.na/), means "daily"; I think it is represented faithfully by the idea of an "everyday reality". Of course, with this translation we are shifting the focus from the word "everyday" to the word "reality"; it is possible that this change could leave the reader with a juxtaposition of the real versus the unreal instead of the original image of escaping from the "everyday". Yet I feel the compound "everyday reality" will more than likely transfer the same meaning to most readers, and few will focus on reality, just a hunch.