"Pomes Penyeach": Pomi un Penny L'uno/Poesie una Pena L'una ed. by Francesca Romana Paci (review)

Several Italian translations of Pomes Penyeach—among which one can list those of Alberto Rossi, Aldo Camerino, Roberto Sanesi, and, more recently, Ilaria Natali—have appeared so far,¹ and yet we still feel that the collection of thirteen poems first published by Shakespeare and Company in 1927 remains a work largely neglected by translators and critics alike. Issued for the first time when the author's creative efforts were almost totally directed towards the composition of Work in Progress, these spare verses, generally considered a minor exercise, were overshadowed by other poems and, most of all, by Joyce's narrative production.

Such a panorama has been recently enriched by a new Italian version of Pomes Penyeach, edited and translated by Francesca Romana Paci and accompanied by a vast apparatus of postface and notes, where she explains the poems one by one and illustrates her translation choices. These appear as particularly original starting with the title itself, "Pomes Penyeach": Pomi un penny l'uno/Poesie una pena l'una. By providing a dual rendition of the original title, Paci's intent was precisely to reveal Joyce's explicit request to the publisher for a less expensive selling price in the first part ("poems/pomes a penny each"), and her own personal interpretation of the entire collection, according to which every poem expresses a different kind of pain—though all are connected with the relational and physical sphere—in the second part ("poems a pain each"). The editor-translator particularly associates this pervading sense of anguish with the gradual worsening of Lucia's mental illness and the preoccupation that her condition generated in Joyce, who was then spending most of his time, money, and energy seeking to solve his daughter's problems and even trying to involve her in the making of the book with her famous "lettrines," illustrations that embellished a 1932 deluxe edition limited to twenty-five copies. Paci's stress on the feeling of suffering that permeates the entire collection, however, not only highlights the impact of Lucia's mental state but also refers to other sorrows, such as those connected with Joyce and Nora's own past (especially in "She Weeps Over Rahoon"/"Lei piange su Rahoon"), the concern for his aging condition and the deterioration of his health (in "Bahanhofstrasse"/"Bahanhofstrasse"), or the pain generated by the breakup of a relationship or even, possibly, by death (as with "Tilly"/"Aggiunta," perhaps the most ingenious translation choice, based on the etymology of the word in Hiberno-English).

It is important to remember that, though composed intermittently over a long period of time (1904-1924), Pomes Penyeach represents a unitary, almost organic work whose linearity and circularity, along with the presence of echoes and internal references, recall the peculiar structure of Dubliners. As Paci points out, the movement from "Tilly" to "A Prayer" is a progression, following the leitmotif of pain, from youth to maturity and death analogous to the path that, in Dubliners, leads from "The Sisters" to "The Dead." The connection is not only structural, however: the diffuse sense of melancholy pervading Pomes Penyeach, which Paci masterly recreates also in the Italian language, evokes in her view the sorrowful tone of many of Joyce's short stories, especially the one that closes the collection. The editor-translator's stylistic choices are particularly effective in reproducing such cohesiveness, which she evidently considers as a peculiar aspect of the original text also to be preserved in the translation, and they represent a major element of novelty distinguishing her work from previous Italian editions.

All of this is accurately explained not only in the postface, containing three short yet insightful critical essays on the subject, but also in the detailed notes, which almost give the reader the impression of accompanying the translator-editor in the translation process. Paci's interpretive principles manifest her awareness of Joyce's...