Translation as (Re)Performance (Part 1: Moonstriking)

In 2014, after fourteen years of reading, researching, and translating the poetry of the polyglot poet Amelia Rosselli, I found myself faced in terms more immediate than ever with the task of transmitting her voice to an English-speaking audience. Invited to present at a salon in Madison, I decided to read from my recently published book of translations, Locomotrix. But lacking access to a sound system, I was suddenly forced to confront the heresy of relaying the “voice” of the Italian text with my own: faced with the limits not only of the usual semantic equivalents, but of phonemes and beats detached from their sonorous manifestation via Rosselli’s person, tuned by political exile from Italian Fascism between four nations and three languages.

This poet’s readings highlight the fact that her lines ply their way between linguistic systems. A comment on the displacing effect of Rosselli’s language by one Italian critic is indicative of the way her voice testifies to a hovering between the imagined phonetic norms of nation-states: “non si capisce bene da dove venga” (one doesn’t understand where it comes from). Rosselli’s spoken accent, with its guttural r and other traces of alterity with respect to the faulty notion of a “standard” Italian, is the source of ample fascination, and some measure of condescension; I’ve heard it characterized as other to English, French, and Italian colleagues alike. These listeners would benefit from contending with the challenge posed by Adriana Cavarero’s A più voci: Per una filosofia dell’espressione vocale (“In Plural Voices: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression,” 2003) to the notion of a universal voice. Recuperating the channels of reciprocal communication between embodied voices as acoustic emissions, whether semantically laden or not, from Western philosophical abstractions of logos, Cavarero then moves discussions of voice from ontology into politics by tracing the resonance, music, and acoustic correspondence that can happen “in plural voices.”

Rather than measuring Rosselli’s divergence from the phonetic norms of standard Italian, we might apprehend her poetic and actual “voice,” artifact of a singular fusion of world-historical and personal circumstances, as itself plural: comprising separate cantons of expression.

“Chiesa,” from Rosselli’s Palermo ’63, suggests as much; it closes with a bid to Hell to synthesize the cantons of the speaker’s experience:

Infernoimmobilesintetizza
Cantonidisintegratidella
miavita.

The literally “Disintegratedcantons” of this poem, imprinted without spaces, mark as disintegral the cultural and linguistic subdivisions of nations in the speaker’s life—as well as the cantonate or corners that, once imposed on language and sound in what she called “spazi metrici” or “metrical spaces,” form cantos, or songs. While the etymological link between the two terms remains uncertain, cantoni harbors an echo of canzoni, one that Rosselli taps elsewhere in her first published collection, Variazioni Belliche (a title I translated as “Bellicose Variations” (1964)). “Cantons” in the modern and in the obsolete senses are linked; and Rosselli’s musicological studies were a result of the disintegrated tonal system, based on the perceived need to erect new musical systems to “save art from incommunicability due to the lack of a common and shareable language,” as Valentina Peleggi puts it. In the poem’s final movement, the speaker invokes the Inferno that synthesized an Italian vernacular to synthesize these cantons. But Rosselli’s own efforts of linguistic and architectonic synthesis rupture and recombine the Italian national language from within; they sing the violent and ecstatic disintegration of cantons.

A performer of organ, piano, violin, percussion, and voice in the heady postwar years of interarts experimentation, Rosselli evolved a powerful practice of reciting her own poems—noted for having struck the crowd at an epoch-defining poetry festival at Castelporziano dead silent. The performative aspect of her work is one with which strictly literary criticism and translation have proved unable to contend adequately, particularly insofar as it reaches into modes of recitation, or even canto. But performance was a central element of both poetic composition and presentation for her, pervading her own commentaries in terms of rhythm, vocal timbre, and breath.

Hoping to convey these crucial aesthetic, historical, and psychological contexts for a difficult body of verse in the bare intimacy of a living room in the American Midwest, I found myself feeling obliged to reperform as opposed to solely reading Rosselli’s original and translated texts. The work in question was Impromptu, composed in a single “bout of inspiration” in December 1979, published in 1981, and reissued in 1993 with a companion cassette. Rosselli’s recording of Impromptu forms a precious testament to the text’s musical aspirations. If reproducing the bass hoarseness of Rosselli’s reading voice, and her accent at sea, felt like mimicry to me, echoing the rhythm, the melody of the recorded performance seemed suddenly indispensable in translation. After all, Rosselli’s recitations of her English poems from Sleep emphasize extraordinary melodic and rhythmic correspondences between the English and Italian translations.

The act of conveying linguistic creations across a distance is rarely expected to reproduce the sonic qualities of the sources in any strict sense. Homophonic translations are finally being taken more seriously, but remain marginalized as experiments—regarded as limit cases apt for theorizing, with which standard literary translation need not contend. Useful exceptions arise in the context of theater and performance, where (re)vocalization and the rhythmic, physical and kinetic elements of language have to be foregrounded. But performance has generally been overlooked in discussions of poetic translation, as though verse were not conceived and continually reinterpreted as a conceptual and musical score. Possibilities for amending this tendency arise in the writings of Barbara Godard, whose term “transformance” conveyed without fully elaborating that translation, like performance, can act as an event, a process: an enunciation in the present toward a possible future.

Performance plunges us concretely into translation’s uncommon temporality as we strive to body forth the the cognitive and musical pulse of a text in multiple phases of reanimation. It gets to the heart of ensuring the continued life of a printed text once it has been “shelved.” Even while identifying translation as the expression of the innermost kinship of languages, Walter Benjamin admits that “all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages”—that “[a]n instant and final rather than a temporary and provisional solution of this foreignness remains out of the reach of mankind.” But this provisionality can lead to more generative sustained engagement.

Poetry such as Rosselli’s, which emerged in a context of dialogue with artists and theorists in time-based media, obliges us to regard performance as a vital aspect of both poetic composition and reanimation—which is after all the driving impulse of translation. It invites us to regard poetic translation as an event: interpretation of a score in which moment-by-moment decisions inflecting rhythm, pitch, timbre, and tempo trigger a perpetual rearticulation. Many Rosselli pieces, in their making-polyphonous of national languages, present problems large enough that their solutions exceed the framework of an individual poem or book. Solutions that couldn’t be undertaken in a university-press publication leaked into my own poems, and informed the divagations of my scholarly research. In establishing PennSound Italiana, a new sector of the University of Pennsylvania’s audiovisual poetry archive, I’ve worked to place singular voices like hers freely and directly into the public sphere; I am hoping to include more translations as the project evolves.

In light of having to perform the translations of Locomotrix in public once the book was published, I realized that if I were to be “faithful” to Rosselli as a multifaceted artist, my text would need to be altered for reading aloud. Reperforming Impromptu’s third section led me to change the translation considerably—though there was one thing I felt I’d gotten particularly right in the first published version, and it had to do with time.

To hear language pulled apart from itself in time, dazed, listen to section 3 of Rosselli’s Impromptu (scroll down, cue to 2:15-3:25), until the point when she articulates the phrase alla mia stralunante morte. If you understand any Italian at all, you can hear the way that Rosselli’s melodic lines estrange listeners from the messages they bear. They hover over the semantic field in a phenomenon that Gertrude Stein observes at play in the “emotional” paragraphs of Henry James: “his whole paragraph was detached what it said from what it did, what it was from what it held, and over it all something floated not floated away but just floated, floated up there.” Performance accentuates this drift. It’s as if the melody, the pulsation of the recitative exists on a plane above and beyond its semantic value, as an autonomous complex of assonant or dissonant phonemes. Rosselli’s reading, like her compositions, follows a musical and perceptual as opposed to narrative trajectory of association. It is inherently polyphonous.

There’s also something nearly liturgical in the way that she chants the poem, reminding us of an anecdote she tells about performing with David Tudor and Merce Cunningham at Rome’s Teatro Sistina, and breaking into a Gregorian chant. The rhythm of any translation seeking to reproduce the sound of Impromptu would need to unfold in that defamiliarizing march of hers, to echo that Gregorian uncanniness and hammering. Drifting away from the expected standards of spoken stress, Rosselli’s pitch and rhythm swerve from the action of mechanical rotation embedded in this poem on the narrative plane—from the scene’s whirling of catastrophic time, redolent of Yeats’s “turning and turning in the widening gyre.” Rosselli’s Mistinguette, a showgirl and singer, is being agitated by the axis of her underskirts, ground as if on a lathe—and these images are delivered in an Unheimlich, unhomely, antique music.

In performance, the translation would have to strive for the quality named in the poemetto’s title: a free-form musical composition with the character of an ex tempore improvisation—thus unfurling as if unscripted, spontaneous, resisting inscription. In this sense, Impromptu radicalizes the problem with all poetic translation; for doesn’t all poetry, especially lyric poetry, strive to resist the sense that it was composed? Doesn’t all lyric long to appear inspired rather than labored over? Rosselli recounted that some of the early poems of Bellicose Variations were composed immediately after having played preludes by Chopin or Bach: an anecdote that presents the poems as reinterpretations of the music, analogous to reanimation and riffing through performance. Even her more objective, post-Romantic, modernist work, wherein words fill a “cube-form,” was composed via an improvisation on the typewriter, where she could “for a moment, follow a thought that might be faster than light.”

Translating an improvisation and its reperformance ought to honor what Manfredo Tafuri named la dignità dell’attimo. And “the dignity of the instant” is what Amelia Rosselli lends to the condition of being dazed in Impromptu’s third section: the word she chooses for the speaker’s death is not “agitated,” “dazed,” “wild-eyed,” or as my more literal retention of the luna or moon would have it, “moonstruck”—a stralunata morte, or “moonstruck death.” This death is rendered the more durational through her otherworldly extension of the seemingly conclusive condition: a present as opposed to past participle makes the speaker’s death stralunante, actively dazing—not dazed in a finished sense. Editors of the valuable recent editions of this work from Mondadori and Guernica rightly note that in cleaned-up manuscripts of this text, the word stralunante is “corrected” in favor of the standard Italian term “stralunata.” It’s therefore the more compelling that when Rosselli performs this text for a recording that would accompany Impromptu’s reissue in the 1990s, she not only retains the original term, stralunante, but emphasizes it by drawing out the action of bedazzlement vocally. The death in question is not an object moonstruck, but an agent that keeps dazzling: it is aurally and visually moonstriking.