Notes of Translating Yusef Komunyakaa's Poetry into Italian

Sometimes a translator finds it helpful to identify within his or her own literary tradition a poet whose diction might provide clues for the translation of a foreign author, suggesting solutions to the rendition of images, tone, and style. When this happens, we have a unique, supplementary dictionary at our disposal that is somehow consonant with the language of the poet being translated, whether because of kindred sensibilities, themes, or techniques, or similar sources and/or inspirations. The inexhaustible "dictionaries" of Dante, Eugenio Montale, and Mario Luzi, for instance, in certain circumstances offer a wealth of words more helpful than those found in Webster's and Ragazzini to render in Italian certain images by, let us say, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, or Charles Wright.

However, this is not the case with the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa. In translating this poet, I had no point of reference within the Italian poetical tradition and I had to work from a tabula rasa. To put it briefly, it is Komunyakaa's luxuriant contemporary speech modulated by blues and jazz, his imaginative movements grafted onto recognizable historical and political issues, and his direct unfolding of emotions that make him different from any Italian poet. It is his finely textured weave of physical, metaphysical, mythological, and literary planes, sublimated into music, that makes his poetry sound original to Italian ears, accustomed as we are to a poetical language still heavily embedded in tradition, to the lyrical mode that from the Middle Ages has reached the post-Montalian generations.

Jazz, on the other hand, seems to have fared poorly in Italian poetry. In Italy, jazz was introduced by the avant-garde movement of futurism between 1913 and 1919, and gained ground in the 1920s. In their obsession with modernity, for the fast rhythms of the metropolis with its noises, crowds, machines, and café-chantant, the futurists regarded black music from Harlem as another synonym for rebellion against the past. Blackness became an exotic fashion epitomized in the figure of Joséphine Baker. Black silhouettes playing drums or sax, and jazz bands, helped re-create in poetry urban nightscapes with men and women dancing to the frenzied rhythm of the new music. In an effort to mimic blues and jazz, words were often used merely to correspond to sound patterns and assembled in nonsensical or light texts to the detriment of a serious thematic development. The system of aesthetic truths that Komunyakaa achieves by bringing music and language together is rare in Italian jazz-inspired poetry; it is as if our tongue, so barnacled with literary associations, were incapable of reconciling itself to different moods and modulations. Even a connoisseur and appreciator of modern American culture like Cesare Pavese, to whom writing was essentially a matter of rhythm, reverted to English in one of his blues pieces (Pavese 143)¹

'Twas only a flirt
you sure did know—
someone was hurt
long time ago.

All is the same
time has gone by—
some day you came
some day you'll die.

Some one has died
long time ago—
some one who tried
but didn't know.

The challenge for an Italian translator of Komunyakaa's poetry is therefore to imagine and construct an appropriate language for transmitting to Italian readers the rhythm of the many emotions his poetry conveys to the English ear. Perhaps even to imagine a place for his work within the Italian poetical tradition. In translating Komunyakaa's poetry, my primary challenge was thus to find a register for his extraordinary balance between technique and improvisation, erudition and chant, and to achieve the verbal fluidity that makes the meaning of his words dissolve into music. It was a matter of keeping intact, also visually, the symmetry of his jagged lines, his fluid patterns of images centered around an emotion or a specific mood. And it was also a matter of language economy—trying to avoid losing the pregnancy of his diction.

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