Translated from Italian by John Taylor
In his introduction to All the Eyes that I Have Opened (Black Square Editions), the American edition of Franca Mancinelli’s Tutti gli occhi che ho aperto (originally published in 2020 by Marcos y Marcos), the translator, John Taylor, reflects on a central point of the author’s poetics: “Mancinelli writes within an open, undivided conception of time wherein ends and beginnings blend, and the past, the future, and the present intermingle” (21).
Mancinelli’s writing in this book indeed seems to thematize a state of limits: a Heideggerian Dasein (“being-there”) that implies not only the other’s presence, but also the other’s time frame. As Taylor also underscores, the formal directive of this concept, within the scope of this collection, is borrowed from T.S. Eliot, to whom the poet herself refers by quoting from “East Coker,” the second of the Four Quartets. “In my beginning is my end,” writes Eliot, and then, at the end of the same poem, he inverts these opening lines: “In my end is my beginning.”
The translator’s acknowledgment of this point, as a junction that is fundamental to the construction of the collection, appears to be a revealing element for understanding the general structure of his work on this translation. It is an element which, moreover, already emerges from a conversation between Taylor and Mancinelli in Hopscotch Translation (13 July, 2021).[1] “The words I bring onto the page,” explains Mancinelli, “are the same ones that live daily between our lips. The difference lies only in a sort of dilation of time that the poem operates, [. . .], pausing on the threshold of another dimension.” With respect to this dilation of time, one thinks of a short poem from the sequence Gleams:
A notion of poetics, therefore, as a vector of dilation: a space in which referential potentialities—possibilities of meaning—are reoriented and, in fact, increased in number. Taylor’s translation approach thus aims at grasping, in a primary sense, these potentialities, and therefore at accounting for the plural otherness to which Mancinelli’s poetics not only refers, but which is itself embodied in it. An example is offered by the poem “from here ways parted” [“da qui partivano vie”]:
Taylor renders the first line as “from here ways parted.” This verbal option, which excludes the continuous form, doubles the interpretative possibilities through an implied pun on the verb “to part”: on the one hand, respecting the original induces the reader to interpret the verb figuratively as a forward movement of these “ways” that are beginning; on the other hand, the translator implies a possibility of fracture, of an internal separation between them. The paths of the Ego (which, as is shown shortly afterwards, is portrayed in the middle of a process: “breathing I was growing”) therefore encounter a pluralization that is not only hetero-directed, and therefore oriented towards the outside, but also ontologically determined, in the same space of the self.
In this sense, another emblematic case is that of the sequence “To the tiny bronze offering bearers found on mount Titano,” in which the second and third lines, “cotta al fuoco la parte / di me in dono, invisible,” are rendered with “baked in fire the part / of me I gift you, invisible.”
Once again, one observes the generation of a referential ambiguity in the English translation, in which the cumulative doubling of the first-person singular personal pronoun (initially in an objective, then in a subjective position) increases the number of interpretative possibilities. At the same time—and therefore, according to the author’s conception, at different times brought into coexistence by the poetic act—the Ego is given as a gift and also as gifts. In all this can be observed the formal and philosophical influence of the Four Quartets, in whose first movement the thematization of this coexistence is already carried out by Eliot in terms of an existential connotation: “There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.”
However, the point where these translation dynamics stand out most clearly occurs in the final section, Diary of Passage. Here, examples of the linguistic tension generated by Taylor run constantly through the text, revealing a particular coherence of discourse. Let me cite one short prose text in its entirety:
For example, in the sentence beginning “Il treno continua a scorrere [. . .]” / “The train keeps gliding [. . .],” Taylor renders the next part, “–ripeto una sola frase– fatta suono,” with “—I repeat a single sentence— become sound,” that is, the verb “to become” becomes the paradoxical vehicle of a “making” that is subjective and objective at the same time. In another poetic prose text in the same section, “Ora cerco la pace di un bicchiere d’acqua –di montagna” (232) is rendered as “Now I look for the peace of a glass of water—from the mountains.” (233) The Italian specification of the origin of the water is therefore doubled by an opening of subjective directions, which perhaps indicates the mountain as the very place where the water can be sought.
Taylor’s translation appears to be a systematic operation—in other words—oriented by his acknowledgment of a philosophically (as well as poetically) coherent nucleus in All the Eyes that I Have Opened, a collection that constitutes one of the most interesting releases of recent contemporary Italian poetry. The repeated adoption of a translation approach (which admits, in its very constructions, the disarticulation of referential uniqueness), is thus carried out in line with what the Italian poetic voice is itself asserting. To wit: the compromise of one’s own subjectivity as a unified space, as a function of an ontological process that coincides, as the days go by, with what has been lost. An indication in this regard is already present in the book’s epigraph: “cannot scatter itself / puts itself back together at every turn / like a flock flying onwards” (27). The recognition of the fragile, trembling condition of the poet’s self entails the admission of its continuous state of fragmentation and recomposition—each time traversed by a loss that is never definitive. Thus, a series of possible fragmentations unfolds in the experienced moment and is transferred into poetic verse permeated by the loss itself. In the conclusion of the poem “from here ways parted”, Franca Mancinelli indeed writes: “all the eyes that I have opened / are the branches that I have lost.”
Mancinelli, Franca. All The Eyes That I Have Opened. Translated by John Taylor. Black Square Editions, 2023.
Stefano Bottero is a doctoral candidate in Italian literature at the Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia. As a translator and critic, he contributes to several magazines, including Polisemie, Nuovi Argomenti, and Lingua italiana (Treccani). His latest collection of poems, Notturno formale, was published by Industria&Letteratura in 2023.
This review of All the Eyes that I Have Opened was first published, in Italian, in Gradiva (No. 65, Spring 2024), and is published here, in this revised and expanded English version, with permission.
[1] For the ongoing dialogue between Franca Mancinelli and John Taylor, see: Trafika Europe radio broadcast; Eurolitkrant, the transcript of the Trafika Europe radio broadcast: “A beauty not yet visible to our eyes”: A Dialogue with Franca Mancinelli; Hammerklavier: Watching Over a Hidden Treasure: Franca Mancinelli’s Poetic “Custodia”; Hopscotch Translation: “On Translating Franca Mancinelli” by John Taylor; and Asymptote: “An Interview with Franca Mancinelli” by Adele Bardazzi and Roberto Binetti.