In the United States Robinson Jeffers is often seen (and sometimes dismissed) as a regional poet. Your decision to translate his poetry into Italian suggests the appeal and significance of his poems is more than regional. What is it about Jeffers’ work that might make it relevant to Italian readers?
I believe that to get to what is considered the universal one must concentrate on the particular: James Joyce’s Ulysses is based on the erratic wandering of an unexceptional contemporary man in the busy streets of an ordinary city: Joyce’s knowledge of the geography and spirit of Dublin at the beginning of the 20th century was as complete and obsessive as Jeffers’ recreation of Central California from the early Twenties onwards. Both artists were able to unveil and communicate the essence of those particular places, and this achievement allowed them to expand the regional boundaries that define the space of their stories (together with the consequent reactions of their characters) to the measure of world geography and world experience. Their creations put under the eyes of any readers in any country actions and feelings which are human, all too human: from marital fidelity or infidelity, to the play of tolerance and intolerance; from the passionate desire to understand life to the animal torpor of its opposite; even to the ultimate and desperate fight of a determined hero against Death (I am thinking of Jeffers’ Hungerfield). So the label of “regional poet,” which is too often repeated as a mantra when considering Jeffers’ work, seems to me pointless. Artists are “regional” only in so far as they cannot raise their eyes above their restricted horizon, which definitely does not happen in the case of Robinson Jeffers.
My appreciation of Jeffers, until then unknown to me, was born as soon as I concentrated upon the opening lines of Hurt Hawks:
The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,
No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.
They made manifest to me that language could grasp what I thought was a contradiction in terms: the possibility to embrace, through signs and symbols, what is beyond the sphere of signs and symbols. Not even Ted Hughes’ Hawk Roosting seemed to me to have achieved such powerful result: in fact, Hughes entered the hawk’s mind and made it articulate inhuman thoughts; Jeffers left the human condition behind, and gave us a hurt hawk in its absolute otherness. It was a lesson that was both linguistic and moral. I read that poem in a review of Tim Hunt’s edition of Jeffers’ Collected Poetry, written by Charles Simic for The New York Review of Books (vol. XLIX, No. 6, April 11, 2002). Perhaps Simic’ response to the poem was not too different from mine, because he added the following words of comment: “I’ve only looked into the eyes of a hawk sitting on my windowsill in Santa Rosa, California, and the no-nonsense, matter-of-fact astuteness of that gaze is not something I’m likely to forget.”
Why did you choose to translate Roan Stallion rather than, say, a selection of the shorter poems?
Years ago I put together an 800-page anthology of Jeffers’ poems in the form of an illustrated manuscript. I talked about it when I first took part in an RJA Annual Conference, in 2012: I can still feel the excitement of that day. Along with shorter poems I managed to include some longer ones, from Tamar and Home, to Margrave, Mara, At the Fall of an Age, Solstice, Hungerfield. I have always experienced an irresistible fascination with long narrative poems, so I was in the company of that book for many a month. Roan Stallion was not in the list of content of that manuscript, because I had tried to give it an Italian form before working on that project. When I read that first attempt at the beginning of last year, I found it disappointing, so I decided to give it a second try. I finished the first draft in February, then I let it alone until I picked it up again in November. Two reasons for this choice: 1. the tragic beauty of the poem took possession of me as with a giant’s hand, and my first hope was to produce something worthy of the original; 2. My second hope was to have it published on the occasion of its centenary.
What were a few of the stylistic challenges that you encountered in translating Jeffers into Italian?
As I once pointed out to an interested listener, while translating Jeffers I fully and painfully understood what the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti wrote in the Preface to his selection of William Blake’s poems: no poet is ever simple.
In the first lines of the poem Jeffers gives a description of California, that unforgettable heroine of his:
A nobly formed woman; erect and strong as a new tower;
The meaning is transparent, but I was aware that a word-for-word version was not enough. I wanted the Italian lines to suggest the youth and pleasant novelty of that apparition, so I was not content with the obvious choice of “Una donna nobilmente formata; eretta e forte come una torre nuova” and at last I came up with the following:
Una donna dalle nobili forme, eretta e forte come torre novella;
The adjective “novella” seemed to me to produce the effect that I was looking for: not only does it suggest the springtime of life and the elusive quality of refinement, it is also linked to the best tradition of Italian poetry, as can be seen in the following example from Dante’s Purgatory, XXV, 99, which makes clear how the soul of a dead person acquires the form of its buried body. In the manner of a little flame which follows the fire wherever it shifts, the new bodily form follows the separate soul:
segue lo spirto sua forma novella.
I also chose to respect Jeffers’ repetitions, which have an important musical role in his lines, as is shown by the three occurrences of the adjective “pleasant” in the following example, recreating California’s actions in the rainy early hours of Christmas Eve:
the big black drops were cold through the thin shift, but the wet earth
Pleasant under her naked feet. There was a pleasant smell in the stable; and moving softly,
Touching things gently with the supple bend of the unclothed body, was pleasant.
le grosse gocce nere penetravano fredde la camicia leggera, ma la terra bagnata
Era piacevole sotto i piedi nudi. C’era un odore piacevole nella stalla; e muoversi con leggerezza,
Sfiorando le cose con l’agile flessuosità del corpo svestito, era piacevole.
When the stallion yawns obscene disgust over Johnny’s mauled body in the new corral, Jeffers uses a striking compound (“moon-lake”) that I hoped would also work in Italian, despite its appositional, rather than adjectival, function in Italian:
Yet California
Stood carefully watching, till the beast having fed all his fury stretched neck to utmost, head high,
And wrinkled back the upper lip from the teeth, yawning obscene disgust over — not a man —
A smear on the moon-lake earth:
Ma California
Rimase a guardare ogni dettaglio, finché la bestia avendo sfogato tutta la sua furia, allungò il collo, la testa alta,
E ritrasse il labbro superiore dai denti, spalancando osceno disgusto al di sopra di — non un uomo —
Una lordura sulla terra lago-di-luna:
Are there specific insights into Jeffers’ craft and vision that the translation process offered that you might share with those of us who read him in English?
Jeffers’ syntax is often complex, he stretches the possibilities of communication to a point that defies a reader’s expectations. But ambiguity is one of the fundamental characteristics of poetry, and it is actually wrong to try and simplify a poetic passage.
In Roan Stallion the philosophical stanzas are the toughest nut to crack: my approach was to let them resonate, as far as I was able, with the full force of their audacious syntactical knots, — after numerous private attempts at a plainer form. In adopting such an approach, it seemed to me I was following in Jeffers’ footsteps, trying to catch the echo of a voice coming from far away, from a sphere that had little to do with the human condition, which is only a secondary part of universal life. In fact, one of my ambitions was to write a translation that, with some luck, could communicate independently of the original text.
Here is one of Jeffers’ most memorable meditations in verse:
Humanity is the start of the race; I say
Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire,
The atom to be split.
Tragedy that breaks man’s face and a white fire flies out of it; vision that fools him
Out of his limits, desire that fools him out of his limits, unnatural crime, inhuman science,
Slit eyes in the mask; wild loves that leap over the walls of nature, the wild fence-vaulter science,
Useless intelligence of far stars, dim knowledge of the spinning demons that make an atom,
These break, these pierce, these deify, praising their God shrilly with fierce voices: not in a man’s shape
He approves the praise, he that walks lightning-naked on the Pacific, that laces the suns with planets,
The heart of the atom with electrons: what is humanity in this cosmos? For him the last
Least taint of a trace in the dregs of the solution; for itself, the mould to break away from, the coal
To break into fire, the atom to be split.
Rendering it into Italian brought me “a tremar per ogni vena,” [to tremble in each vein] to borrow some other words from Dante. The demonstrative pronoun in line 14, for example, might refer to wild loves, or to far stars, or to spinning demons — or to all of them together in a phantasmagorical vortex. I chose to leave my version as open to ambiguity as possible, but to invite the reader to see that certain syntactical solutions were more convincing than others. At the same time, I tried not to neglect some of the musical features of the English text, like the play of consonants in the repeated verb “break” (“The mould to break away from … the coal to break into fire”) , which I rendered with “frangere”, instead of the more usual “rompere” [/brk/ in English, /frg/ in Italian].
And at last I had my passage, and had no more possibilities of changing or improving it, although my mind was still yearning for more light:
L’umanità è l’inizio della corsa; io dico che
L’umanità è la matrice da cui bisogna evadere, la crosta da cui strapparsi, il carbone da sgretolare nel fuoco,
L’atomo da scindere.
Tragedia che frange il volto dell’uomo e un fuoco bianco ne erompe; visione che lo irretisce
Oltre i suoi limiti, brama che lo irretisce oltre i suoi limiti, crimine innaturale, scienza inumana,
Occhi intagliati nella maschera; amori sfrenati che si lanciano oltre i muri della natura, la scienza folle valicatrice del segno,
Intelligenza inutile di stelle lontane, vaga conoscenza dei demoni vorticanti che compongono l’atomo,
Questi frangono, e trapassano, e cantano osanna, striduli lodando il loro Dio con voci sfrenate: non in figura umana
Egli accetta la lode, lui che cammina in corrusca nudità sul Pacifico, che lega i soli ai pianeti,
Il cuore dell’atomo agli elettroni: cosa è l’umanità in questo cosmo? Per lui, l’ultima
Infima ombra di una traccia nella feccia della soluzione; per se stessa, la matrice da cui bisogna evadere, il carbone
Da sgretolare nel fuoco, l’atomo da scindere.
***
A 15-page “Afterword” accompanies my translation, summarizing Jeffers’ life, presenting two complete poems in both languages (“The Bed by the Window” and “Credo”), offering some comments upon Roan Stallion.
Finally, my imagination gave form to a dream of mine that is very likely destined to remain unsatisfied: spending one full day at Tor House. So I visualized myself walking by day along the coast in silent company with the poet, sitting at night in front of him, in the dimly lighted room downstairs, reading to him some parts of my translation, studying its effect on his face, until the darkness enveloping the house invited us to sleep:
At the end of the day, the present writer retired to his rest in the room of the bed by the window, because the kind host, whose “fingers had the art / To make stone love stone,” had given him permission to spend his nights there.
The splashes of the billows incessantly pounding the cliffs evoked in his mind, in the fragile moments between sleeping and waking, the thundering energy of the stallion.