Read This: Tonino Guerra’s Abandoned Places

Just want to recommend an extraordinary poet, Tonino Guerra—his book Abandoned Places (Guernica, 1999), translated by the American fiction writer Adria Bernardi. Guerra was born in 1920; he’s probably best known as a screenwriter who has collaborated Antonioni, Fellini, Tarkovsky and others. He writes poems in the montanari dialect of the region of his birth, Santarcangelo di Romagna, in the Apennine mountains of Italy. Abandoned Places is a kind of narrative in short lyrics of a place and time that’s gone. Instead of being all nostalgia and sentimentality, which you might expect, these poems are full of humor, harshness, loveliness, startling imagery, political consciousness and humanity.
Reginald was blogging a few weeks ago about what’s lost in translation; perhaps poetry with narrative and strong imagery translates best, though any sonic sense has to be pretty much gone. There’s double trouble with Guerra.

As Bernardi writes in her Translator’s Note, “there is loss going from the dialect into standard Italian, let alone into English. Words and jokes…sounds of the words…”
Thankfully, Bernardi hasn’t tried to substitute some American or English dialect for Guerra’s dialect, which is how, in the past, some translators have tried to deal with dialect, or even, simply, slang. Dialect and slang don’t translate because they carry with them a load of cultural givens and assumptions exclusive to the dialect. Well, I suppose any language does that. But Guerra’s imagery, narrative and sense of timing—and Bernardi’s, in translation—produce stunning poems in English. Below is a sample, from the sequence “The Honey.” Bernardi comments on one thing lost from this poem: When Guerra writes of the pages fluttering, she says, this is captured in the original with the repeated sound of ‘z’—al zuclé lizìri ma la brezza de vent—which isn’t available in Italian (“a frusciare leggere nella brezza del vento”) or in English (“the pages started to rustle slightly in the breeze.”) But note that Bernardi brilliantly says “slightly” instead of “lightly” for “lizìri/leggere.” “Slightly” is, appropriately, a touch harsher and less standard-lyrical than “lightly,” and gets in an extra ‘s’ sound, even if the ‘z’ sound can’t be managed. In any case, the poem (and the whole sequence, and book) is striking:
Canto Nine
It must have been raining a hundred days,
and the water that saturated*
the roots of all the plants
Reached the library and soaked all the holy words
which were closed up in the convent.
When the good weather came,
Sajat-Novà, who was the youngest monk,
got a ladder and took all the books up to the roof,
out in the sun. Then he waited for the warm air
to dry the wet paper.
There was a month of good weather
and the monk kneeled down in the courtyard
waiting for the books to give some sign of life.
And finally one morning the pages started
to rustle slightly in the breeze.
It sounded like a swarm of bees had arrived on the roof
and he started to cry because the books were talking.
*This line should have a hanging indent but I haven't been able to make it stick; my incompetence with html....