This dialogue originated from my reading in August 2024 of Franca Mancinelli’s The Butterfly Cemetery, translated by John Taylor. Every day I put Franca’s collection of essays and narratives in my backpack and set off on long hikes in the high mountains. Whenever I opened it, the larch forest, the stream, and the meadow withdrew. When I closed it, everything returned, but with more color, more fragrance, more sounds. I had roots, petals, I was a trickle of water. I wanted to know what this book’s secret was.
Giorgia Meriggi
Giorgia Meriggi: Let’s begin with a question about The Butterfly Cemetery. Franca and John, how did you come up with the idea to give birth to this book?
Franca Mancinelli: This book was born from the depths of the dialogue between me and John that has been going on almost continuously for about eight years, through the act of translation or, as we often call it, our work as “busy beavers,” to quote a common English expression that I learned from him and to which I have remained attached. Writing several e-mails a day, we pass a text back and forth to each other as if it were a branch until we have undone every tangle and feel that the dam is finished, that the passage from one bank to the other has been completed.
No one knows my writing like John. Not only because he has translated all of it, from my first book through this collection of prose still unpublished in Italy, but also because his ability to listen, as a translator and poet, has led him to the origins of my poetics, of my vision, of my being and non-being in the world. His gift of active attentiveness, aimed at a creative process, has opened my eyes to texts to which I had devoted my care, shaping them into a definitive form and finally publishing them. Illuminated by his gaze, my books have freed themselves from their author, bringing to the surface meanings that had remained imprisoned in the layers of the language. Only John’s conscious effort of taking those texts from one language to another has allowed some messages to reach me. It is a surprising experience, like finding ourselves brought into the world by another adoptive mother who welcomes us as her children.
The Butterfly Cemetery is a book that entirely owes its existence to his energy and attentiveness, which have accompanied me daily. In fact, the book took shape bilingually and found a home in the United States, while in Italy it still remains on the threshold of my uncertainties and indefinite postponements.
John Taylor: My first translations of Franca’s poetic oeuvre were the prose poems of The Little Book of Passage and, even before that project was published in late 2018, I had begun to translate the verse poems of Mala Kruna and Mother Dough. From the onset of my work with her I was curious about other aspects of her writing. After she had shown me some of her narratives and personal essays, which she had published in magazines and anthologies over the years, I immediately understood that these “occasional pieces” not only represented deep and compelling writing in themselves, but also cast light on her poetics.
G.M.: John, The Butterfly Cemetery was born bilingually as a “montage” of texts which were originally independent of each other, but which, when ordered in this particular sequence, form a book with a coherent progression and structure. Were they translated all together, once “assembled,” or at different times?
J.T.: By 2019, when At an Hour’s Sleep from Here (which groups together Mala Kruna and Mother Dough) was published, I had already begun to translate several of these prose writings. In fact, the first three examples, “A Line is a Lap and Other Notes on Poetry,” “A Bed of Stones,” and “Keeping Watch,” appeared in the Autumn 2019 issue of The Bitter Oleander. That issue comprised a special feature on Franca’s writing, including some unpublished texts as well as the first installment of our ongoing “dialogue”—and for this opportunity we remain grateful for the support and enthusiasm of our publisher, the poet Paul B. Roth. By the next year, I had translated many of her other prose pieces and published them in English-language journals. In our e-mail exchanges during the year 2020, Franca and I started discussing the possibility of gathering these texts into a single volume. She sent me some unpublished pieces, which I also translated, and then she carefully organized all the texts into three series separated by a blank page on which a symbolic butterfly could be found. Paul B. Roth gave a slant to the butterfly as if it were taking flight, which it was!
G.M.: Franca, your literary partnership with John began in 2017. Do you find that the dialogue between you two, which is mostly epistolary, and perhaps precisely because it is epistolary, has changed your writing?
F.M.: Although written, the dialogue between me and John takes place as if we were walking side by side, taking part in each other’s lives. Issues related to the translation process intertwine with other remarks that pass through the walls of his study: errands to run, work in the garden and the vegetable patch, time spent in Paris with his granddaughter Léa. I really love these outcrops of existence which emerge in his e-mails, which interrupt the work; often, in fact, they are only apparent interruptions, because a doubt or a choice that has remained pending in the translation, even after our countless exchanges, suddenly dissolves, beyond John’s desk, while he is repairing something in the house or is about to fall asleep. This daily proximity that we have established through poetic language moves me every time that I experience it again or even simply become aware of it.
I realize that John experiences translation in the same way that I experience the creation of a poem: the process that leads to the shaping of a poem and recognizing it as completed, through various attempts to adhere as closely as possible to the voice that has reached us, is the same. For me as well, most decisions do not occur when I am sitting in my study, but instead when I am outdoors and in movement. John’s translation practice, like my writing practice, is based on a rigor exercised by giving ourselves over to—and trusting in—forces that come forth in the interaction between our body and something supporting us; the beginning of each sentence, of each word, recalls that first moment when we could remain balanced on our own two feet.
Then, beginning with At an Hour’s Sleep from Here, something in our dialogue changed.
G.M.: How has this changed in relation to your creative process?
F.M.: From that book on, while writing, I can feel John’s eyes open in mine, like a second retina. If we think of our eyes as an opening to reality, the sensation is that of an inner blossoming, as in roses consisting of several rows of petals. I believe that something similar happens at the end of a therapeutic journey, when the patient can find his analyst’s gaze inside him or herself. And in an intimate relationship, when knowledge of the other person has built a space inside us to which we can return and continue the dialogue, even in the other person’s apparent absence.
I have always sought essentiality, naked and smooth forms, like things cradled by the sea and returned to the earth. These poetics have tended to condense meaning, especially in Mother Dough, to a few lines often stemming from an image with which I have lived for a long time before expressing it in words. Later, with the prose texts of The Little Book of Passage, I tried to open a space of distension that would continue beyond the poem. In fact, if something is narrated in that book, it is through the silence and images around which it took shape. And it is perhaps no coincidence that this little book, which was born as a rite of passage, was the one that inaugurated another home, another language, thanks to my encounter with John. The Little Book of Passage was published in the United States a few months after its release in Italy.
John and I began to get to know each other’s language and poetics better in the dialogue that arose about the very making of a translation.
G.M.: Is it possible to equate the practice of poetic translation with “making” poetry? Do you find that your poetics and your writing are conditioned by the possibility of translation?
F.M.: This experience, which I had never been through so deeply before meeting John, is fundamental in writing, as is, in our existence, the contact with death, that is, our possibility of sprouting every day. In fact, translation is a death and a rebirth; a passage through which the essence of the text lives again in another language. Faced with this threshold, my concern was to abandon my poems as would a mother with her children before an unavoidable journey. On the other shore, John would receive my messages, my solicitude, and, in the end, he would concentrate on carrying out the act of alchemy and metamorphosis that is the beginning of a new existence in another language. Now, whenever I write, I cannot ignore the fact that the destiny of a poem is its translation into another inner world and into another experience of life, as is also the case for every reader in the original language. It is therefore possible that being aware of this has guided me towards an even greater essentiality, in the sense of a greater adherence to the images, to what can actually face up to the passage and reach the other shore.
G.M.: John, how has working with Franca been constructive for your poetics?
J.T.: Working with Franca is marvelously stimulating. Beyond my translation work with her, our ongoing dialogue provides, with respect to my own writing, a constant encouragement to pursue the philosophical concerns that have long captivated me and that also often run parallel to themes in her own work. Her concise, fragmentary style in both verse and prose is also motivating. When I first noticed that she begins the first word of the first line of a poem or prose text with a small letter, not a capital letter, as if the line or sentence were emerging from the depths of silence and given to her (one thinks of Paul Valéry’s famous quip about how at times “the gods gracefully provide for nothing the first line of verse. . .”), I felt an immediate kinship with this technique. A similar approach had taken shape naturally two decades before while I was writing, in a notebook kept by my bed, one of my own books of short prose, If Night is Falling, also published by Paul B. Roth (and in Italian as Se cade la notte). In that book, the first sentence of every text, jotted down at dawn as I was coming out of a dream, begins with an ellipsis because it represents the second half of the sentence with which I had awakened but from which the first half remained unheard, unseen. Such intersections of our respective poetics are thus many and sometimes unexpected. I can give another example involving imagery: as I was translating the title story of The Butterfly Cemetery, in which Franca describes how she created a cemetery for the butterflies that she would capture when she was a girl, I suddenly recalled a short narrative also published in If Night is Falling. In that short text, which concludes the book, I describe how my son Justin, on vacation in the Alpine village of Bessans and walking with me through a forest, came across a butterfly alongside the trail. The butterfly’s wings were torn and it was dying. My son delicately placed it on a bed, which he had fashioned from leaves, so that it would be in peace.
G.M.: Franca, in a previous response, you compared John’s eyes to a “second retina” that “becomes active” when you are writing your texts, and perhaps also when you are observing. What you two respectively seek through writing is indeed very similar.
F.M.: To be sure, our poetics have many affinities, and our partnership, if we can call it that, is based precisely on this common ground. Our daily dialogue has subsequently strengthened this proximity, which includes not only our relationship with writing but also, more generally, our individual existential quests. In all aspects, this partnership resembles a shared space that nourishes and supports both of us. The more we compare ourselves, the more bonds and resonances emerge—and they are reflected in our writing. For example, John recently translated a text of mine resulting from Maria Borio and Laura di Corcia’s questionnaire about authenticity in contemporary poetry. It is entitled “Flowers and Hell” because in one passage I come to a halt and reflect on a famous haiku written by Kobayashi Issa:
In this world we walk
on hell’s roof,
gazing at the flowers
This triggered in John the memory of one of Philippe Jaccottet’s texts, which he had translated and in which the French poet quotes the same haiku. From this coincidence emerged John’s splendid essay “A Perennial Hereness,” in which he traces this initial spark which, from Issa, passes through Jaccottet’s gaze, mine, and his own hiking in the French Alps, with a wildflower manual and a notebook, listening to the flowers. Our “double essay,” which is thus also a dialogue, was published in Hopscotch Translation.
John’s eyes are often the first to look over what I have created. And when I am uncertain, they can indicate a direction. There is a moment in which, with respect to a text that has been written, revised, and pondered, we reach a kind of blindness, with our vision blurred. Then, as if we were walking on the same Alpine path, John tells me the flower’s name that I have forgotten, alongside my footsteps, which were about to trample its corollas.
G.M.: John, this chain of gazes on the “same flowers” which you created and which, from Issa through Jaccottet, also involves Franca, makes me think of the language’s ability to create community. In this regard, Japanese poetry is a community poetry from its origins, in its very presuppositions. Ancient renga, to give one quick example, is a composition of poems in a chain in which several poets participate. Almost a renunciation of individuality. In translation, a bridge—a relationship between linguistic communities—originates from an overlapping of glances.
J.T.: There are several ways of thinking of community and Franca, notably, has a very deep vision of community and the sources of poetic language as they relate to the individual poet’s voice, to master poets (like her “master trees” in All the Eyes that I have Opened), and indeed to all the preceding speakers of her language. Along with “Poetry, Mother Tongue,” “Yielding Words,” which is also comprised in The Butterfly Cemetery, is another of the several essays that she has devoted to this topic. Although a few years have gone by since I translated the text, I often think of it with emotion, especially a passage in which she recalls how, as a very young child, a sentence welled up inside her, seeking to be pronounced, and then another passage in which she explains how in her quest for a genuine poetic language she learned how to transcend biographical facts and to free herself from herself.
G.M.: To what extent is this community aspect of translation relevant for you as a translator and poet?
J.T.: Another sense of the term “community” pertains to how I envision my work, and responsibility, as a translator and critic. For decades I have endeavored to be a bridge between Europe and the English-speaking literary community. I like the French expression passeur, the ferryman who rows his boat from one shore to another, delivering precious goods or passengers. Throughout these past decades, beginning in 1979 (when my first essay was published), I have enjoyed (and insisted upon) a great amount of freedom. I see my role as that of an “explorer,” a “discoverer.” In the literary journals for which I was long a regular contributor as a critic (The Times Literary Supplement, The Antioch Review, The Arts Fuse, and several others), my editors often gave me a “carte blanche” enabling me to present the work of European poets and writers who were, up to then, little translated or not translated at all. Often these authors were esteemed by their peers in their homelands but not necessarily known to the general reading public. Beginning around 2015, I turned much more to translation as my main literary activity, but as a translator as well, nearly all my projects have resulted from personal choices, not from commissioned work. I gradually place excerpts in literary reviews and only then search for an English-language publisher for the entire project.
My translation of Franca’s writing is a prime example of this. We met in late November 2017 at a literary festival in Ljubljana. I had never read her poems. In our conversations at the festival, we quickly perceived that we had “the same reasons” (if I may recall the mysterious yet telling phrase that the poet André du Bouchet pronounced to Philippe Jaccottet upon their first meeting). At the time, Franca was putting the finishing touches on the manuscript of Libretto di transito. After reading only a few of the prose poems, I wanted to translate the entire book, which struck a deep chord in me. I realized that I had something unique in my hands and that the poet who had written it was also unique. By the next spring I had published excerpts from the translation in literary journals and not long afterwards Paul B. Roth accepted the project and published it at his press as The Little Book of Passage.
G.M.: Franca, poetry has a strong community value for you as well.
F.M.: I think that poetry survives today, in the inhospitable latitudes in which we find ourselves, precisely because of these small communities or tribes that are created around poetic language. Recently, much of my work has been aimed in this direction, in the workshops that I lead “on listening to and experiencing poetic language.” They provide opportunities to experience the creative energy of language in its transformative resonances that often become even stronger when shared with others. A circle of people united by attentiveness to poetry creates something similar to a bowl of silence that vibrates as soon as it receives a stimulus. The sounds that are generated, and the words that are born inside a workshop, have a deep meaning for all the participants; the words resonate from a common inner space. I like working at giving everyone the possibility of belonging to a larger body, something similar to what is created in dance by entering a “corps” of dancers, a “dance troupe” or, when keeping watch is involved, belonging to a “guard corps.” I really love these two expressions—respectively “corpo di ballo” and “corpo di guardia” in Italian—that lead us into the experience of poetic language as linked to a rhythm spreading throughout the body, creating a harmony through forms that keep watch over and defend beauty.
G.M.: For some time now, your poetry, and your role as a poet, has merged with your leading such workshops in Italy and even abroad.
F.M.: An experience that I had last October in Bucharest comes to mind. It was a writing workshop that I called “Like a Flock Flying Onwards” by borrowing the image of the epigraph to my most recent book, All the Eyes that I Have Opened. I had been invited by the Italian Cultural Institute and the Jazz Roots Poetry Series, an association which, beginning with dance, had recently opened itself to poetry thanks to an idea developed by Olmo Calzolari and Teodora Raicu. We walked silently, as a small group, through the streets of the city like a flock of walkers, gathering images that we jotted down in our notebooks. Each person responded freely to the call of beauty that reached him or her, or, as James Hillman would say, to the world’s soul showing itself by casting light on a detail, a fragment that suddenly beckoned to us for attention. At the same time, each person’s perceptions were multiplied in resonance with those of the other members of the group; each person was participating in the same listening “corps,” which was moving forward in accordance with the rhythm of the life now illumined in this city which, to our multiple eyes, appeared as it never had before.
Some of us had never seen Bucharest, others lived there, but for each of us the city was at the same time familiar and unknown. Like children going alone through the gates of their homes for the first time, we were taking part in an adventure and discovering the world; and this world was coming towards us and shining. Each of us had come from different backgrounds, some more connected to dance, others to poetry and translation, but at the end of this experience, after having reached the city limits of Bucharest by subway, and after having shared the intimacy of silence as well as the visions and messages that the city had delivered to us, we felt like our ancestors after a hunting and gathering expedition. Each of us had made provisions, for ourselves and for others, that would last.
G.M.: John, your knowledge of several European languages opens up various possibilities of encountering many poetic writings, therefore, different cultural attitudes, thoughts and views on reality. Have you ever written poetry in other languages? If so, how would you describe the experience of using grammar different from that of your mother tongue?
J.T.: Except for critical articles that I have written directly in French, I have never written poetic texts in other languages. I started to learn foreign languages only in early adulthood, much too late to sense that German, French, Italian, or Modern Greek could become a second literary language. Beyond this biographical fact, there are deeper reasons. I would say that they relate to how Franca writes as well. My mother tongue is intimately that of my childhood. Even after a half-century in Europe, when I write, I seek to re-settle into what might be called an “ontological childhood,” that is, to open myself up as much as I can to a vantage point enabling me to question the world once again with the wonder and bewilderment of a child discovering something for the first time. For me, those discoveries always take place in English, even if, only an hour before, I had been speaking French fluently.
And you rightly mention grammar. The syntax of one’s mother tongue is intricately related to how one perceives the world through language and therefore to how one aligns words to express that perception.
G.M.: I imagine that syntax and word order are topics of no little importance for you and Franca.
J.T.: Franca and I often discuss syntax because she is very attentive, when writing verse or prose, to the order of words and to the possibilities offered by, say, enjambments or intentional syntactic discontinuities (anacolutha). Moreover, Italian has more syntactic flexibility than English because of our lack of grammatical markers and therefore because of the necessity, in English, to place a qualifier nearly always next to the word qualified.
Another essential technical point can be evoked. English is a Germanic language, albeit also deeply influenced by the French (and thus implicitly the Latin) that arrived on English shores with William the Conqueror. As a general rule (with exceptions, of course), there is a natural syntactic tendency in English to place the most important element of the overall meaning towards the end of the sentence or line of verse. In Italian (and in Romance languages in general), this is not necessarily the case. When we gaze at the world with a certain openness and receptivity, the “logos” that emerges, that comes to us, sometimes almost as if emanating from the world itself, has a syntax, or can seem to have a syntax, even if only a few words are involved. Poetry (and thus translation) is about grasping that syntax and measuring the extent to which it can be mirrored or must be transformed.
The same double heritage of English with respect to vocabulary raises a similar issue (on which Franca and I also often reflect). Franca’s poems remain “open,” suggesting various interpretations, sometimes resembling “koans” on which each reader will meditate in his or her own way, perhaps applying them to aspects of his or her life. This is because her writing is semantically resonant; a given word or group of words in a poem can express a bouquet of simultaneous meanings and connotations. In such cases, when for a single Italian word there are at least two valid English words, one etymologically from a Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, or Nordic origin and probably more concrete, matter-of-fact, the other derived from French and probably more abstract (yet also perhaps more suggestive, more resonant), then it is always important to weigh the lexical pros and cons. When I was in school and learning how to write, we were taught to be as factual and thus as “Anglo-Saxon” as possible, to reject the abstract alternative especially when writing stories and poems: one recalls William Carlos Williams’s famous “no ideas but in things.” But translation demands a much more nuanced process of reflection.
G.M.: Franca, inside these “bouquets of meaning” there are some “flowers” that return. They are the key words of your texts (in John’s translations, for example: “care,” “to watch over,” “light”/ “darkness,” “branches,” “roots,” “gaze,” “eyes,” etc.). In such words, the possibility of a deep reflection on the meaning of being in the world is concentrated. Which ones do we find or rediscover in The Butterfly Cemetery?
F.M.: This is the first time I have thought about those words, and I’m not sure that I recognize them. John’s eyes have probably identified them before I have and could give me some support. In any event, if I try to make a retrospective synthesis, then in addition to the words which you have mentioned and which are central to my poetics, I also think of “childhood,” “metamorphosis,” “home,” “train,” “sea,” “hills,” “silence,” “mother tongue,” “invisible.” Such words, which possess a particularly dense meaning, actually often emerge with the passage of time, after a book has been published, through the gaze of readers. Another person’s attentiveness has given them back to us. Just like a house key that we had ourselves lost or dropped. An author who keeps all the keys has probably remained a prisoner of his or her own work. He or she loses the surprising gift of suddenly finding him- or herself at home as if it were an inn full of guests.
G.M.: John, apropos of keywords, can you give an example for which the discussion between you and Franca about choosing the “right” word became more complex?
J.T.: In your question to Franca, you mentioned the noun “care” and the verb “to watch over,” that is, two words that can be used to translate the Italian noun “custodia” and the verb “custodire.” The word “custodia” (or one of its derivatives) offers an excellent example of a resonant key word, not only for the difficulties that it raises for the translator (with its semantic scope ranging in English from “custodianship” and “guardianship” to “safekeeping,” “safeguarding,” “preserving,” “protection,” “watching over,” “looking after,” “taking care of,” and “caring for”), but also and especially because this notion is so deeply an element of Franca’s poetics, of her very way of writing (and, if I may add this, of her very way of being). The notion is so essential for her that after she separated a long response from her interview in the Una come lei series for the Biblioteca italiana delle donne in Bologna, and turned it into a short personal essay titled “Custodia,” which I translated, I wrote a long commentary on it for the website Hammerklavier by detailing the challenges of rendering the term into English and analyzing several of the many times it crops up in her books. In such cases, I examine etymologies (the Latin root “custos” has quite a story behind it), bend over English-language dictionaries to scrutinize usage and especially connotations (in which some semantic resonance in English can perhaps be recovered), and sometimes ask Franca about the resonance that the term has for her in the given text. This is how our “dams” (as we like to call them) come together branch by branch, twig by twig, leaf by leaf.
G.M.: These “dams” have indeed resulted in four books published in the United States. Franca, your books have been translated into other languages as well. What is the most recent translated book and into which language?
F.M.: Libretto di transito, my first book to be reborn in another language, was recently given a second life in Russia as Kniga perechoda. It was published in the summer of 2024 by Free Poetry, a publishing house located in Cheboksary, in a series devoted to contemporary Italian poetry. It was a tiny miracle in this harsh present. I met Vera Kazartseva, the translator, as a young Russian student and poet during a lecture by Professor Stefano Colangelo, to which I had been invited as an author. While speaking with Vera, I immediately sensed that we belonged to the same land beyond languages, a land that makes us emigrants, as Marina Tsvetaeva writes, even within the walls of our homes. This initial meeting is recorded in an interview by Vera titled “A Birch Tree as a Guide.” It opens by taking note of the birch tree, the representative symbolic tree in Russia, on the cover of my first book of poetry.
The image comes from a painting by Dunja Nedeljkovich, a Serbian artist who spent her summers in the hills near Fano. The meeting of blue and green creates something magical for me: the sea from the hills appears like this, in its splendor that reflects the sky. On Dunja’s canvas, a tree with a white trunk opens a dark gentle eye in this threshold space. It reminded me of some of Pushkin’s lines that I had loved when I was a teenager and transcribed in my notebook. Let me quote them as I remember them: “Between the forest and the sea there is a green oak and on the oak a golden chain.” That landscape is real and at the same time the beginning of a fairy tale or a dream.
Ten years later, the eyes of trees would speak to me again. From a forest in the Apennines their voices responded to a painful question, like an open wound, which I was carrying around inside me. They transformed it into a vision that would guide my fourth book of poetry, showing me the connection between loss and growth by opening other eyes for me.
G.M.: Being translated into another language is fundamentally another eye that opens. John, you have also been translated into several languages. Your Italian translator is Marco Morello. What is your relationship to this “reversal of roles”?
J.T.: Marco and I have established a dialogue and a hearty friendship ever since his first translation of one of my books, The Apocalypse Tapestries (published in Italian as Gli arazzi dell’Apocalisse). Because a few poems in that book included exact plant names, I discovered with joy, when Marco first contacted me, that he shared my love for botany. This is how our collaboration began.
G.M.: I share this love with you. Hunting for names of flowers and plants is a magnificent botanical stroll.
J.T.: Indeed, one of our most enjoyable conversations by e-mail, for my other books as well, is when Marco must translate botanical names, a chore which even between neighboring languages like French and Italian, let alone English, can be very delicate. This is especially true of my latest book, What Comes from the Night, the translation of which he has just finished. When I reread Marco’s translations, we sometimes discuss a word choice or I point out a half-hidden pun or allusion in English. Marco has been very generous in my regard. He has translated five of my books, as well as others for which we have not yet found an Italian publisher.
G.M.: Franca, to which translation experience with John are you most attached?
F.M.: It is not easy to answer because, although each experience has given birth to a different book or ongoing project, they all take place within the same open dialogue, even in its blank spaces. I am particularly attached to John’s intuitions which, like fireflies in the darkness, have illuminated my path, sometimes by staking it out, sometimes by encouraging my footsteps. For example, John helped me to choose the title, The Beginning of a Ford, of which I had been thinking for some time for my new book of poetry that is very slowly taking shape. With this title, some of my unpublished poems appeared in his translation in an Indian magazine, The Antonym, in February 2024. Compared to other possible titles that I had noted down, this one includes some of my central themes and images, such as water, the idea of life as a passage or crossing; a beginning and, implicitly, the end of something; also the energy of a movement, of going beyond an apparent obstacle. Speaking of passages and bridges, an image that is especially dear to me comes to mind. John brought it to me in an e-mail when he told me of the oneiric origin of one of his own fragments written in response to one of mine:
I am gazing across the water and notice too late what can unite me to (or enable me to join?) what I must reach. For a long time, I have been going across bridges, back and forth, without really knowing what I was looking for, and then I finally become aware of what I need to do in order to unite myself with the opposite shore; but it is the estuary and there are no bridges anymore.
As in a correspondence in verse, John and I were dialoguing by writing poetry and translating each other. Here is the poem that John wrote, based on his remarks above:
I keep crossing bridges in this town
until well beyond the last one,
when the river reaches the sea,
the waters merging,
I see what I needed to join
on the opposite bank.
G.M.: In these lines, regret, awareness, and peace merge in a great delta that reaches out to the open sea.
F.M.: What John writes to me here expresses a restrained anxiety and at the same time an image of freedom and openness that seems to refer to the profound meaning of translation and, at the same time, of existence. It resembles a nightmare mitigated by the perception of something greater that we cannot oppose, something that cancels out our energy, our patient efforts, at last confronting us with the apparent senselessness of all our actions: in reality, the overcoming of our human limits, in the embrace of the infinite. It is as if, in the continuous search for bridges, John had finally found himself facing the authentic image of his desire: the absence of bridges, the return to that to which we originally belong.
Our two sequences of fragments appeared between 2022 and 2023 in two successive issues of the magazine Traduzionetradizione, with the title “Like Hansel’s Breadcrumbs: A Path between Two Languages.” The poems were born in a rather dark period, marked by the pandemic. “As in the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale, the two friends have dropped breadcrumbs and picked them up, so as not to get lost in the dark.” Rereading this short note thought up by me and John, I have the impression that it contains everything that can be said about our journey together.
G.M.: John, with respect to this path along which you and Franca walk as you work together on your projects, another author comes to mind. You have also translated the great Calabrian poet, Lorenzo Calogero (1910-1961). I am thinking of the rocky syntax and whirlwinds of his language and of the semantic density and “hilly” rhythm of Franca’s writing. Deep immersion in a text opens up emotional tones and sense impressions. As a poet-translator, what inner “landscapes” do their respective writings open up to your imagination and sensibility?
J.T.: This is a pertinent question, all the more so in that Franca helped me with the difficult spots of many of the new translations that I added to the recent bilingual reedition, published by LYRIKS, of my original edition of Calogero’s poetry (An Orchid Shining in the Hand, Chelsea Editions, 2015). The poems that I added to the LYRIKS edition were often chosen from Calogero’s last writings, The Villa Nuccia Notebooks. In general, it seems to me that Calogero’s postwar poetry, beginning with But This (1950-1954) and As in Diptychs (1954-1956), and culminating in The Villa Nuccia Notebooks (1959-1960), is more original and more recognizably personal than his more classically structured poems from Little Sound (1933-1935) or Words of Time (1931-1938). The late fragmentary poems are often rather short (though longer than most of Franca’s poems), include syntactic ruptures, fragmentary qualities, and enjambments (as in some of Franca’s poems), but there remain deep and essential differences between the two poets. Franca is always rigorous lexically and syntactically. If one of her poems is difficult to translate, it is not because of some logical or grammatical ambiguity: everything, including the presence in two successive lines, for instance, of two different potential readings, is intentional. This is not always true of Calogero’s otherwise compelling late poems, which can comprise lines or images that are difficult to construe. It is true that much of his late work was found in notebooks and unpublished manuscripts after his death. He did not have the time or the energy to reread his verse and revise it for publication.
From a stylistic viewpoint, it is therefore not so much Franca’s poetry, but rather one of my most recent translations, the French poet Béatrice Douvre’s collected poems (a book that has just been issued by The Bitter Oleander Press under the title Inhabit the Brief Halt) that brings Calogero to mind. Douvre (1967-1994) passed like a comet through the sky of French literature. At the time of her death, she had published only a few poems in various literary reviews, but some three hundred poems were found among her papers. Like Calogero and his depressions, she suffered greatly during her short lifetime (in her case from mental anorexia), yet managed to produce a captivating oeuvre for which she was encouraged by Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Jaccottet, and other important French poets. Nonetheless, her poems, like Calogero’s, include textual ambiguities.
To return to Franca’s oeuvre and to the question of “inner landscapes,” as well as to the possible bridges between it and Calogero’s, I can say that in both cases, but especially in Franca’s, I am fascinated by their respective uses of what T. S. Eliot calls an “objective correlative.” Franca does not name emotions, for that would “close off” potential interpretations, but she instead (to paraphrase Eliot’s definition) begins with a concrete “set of objects, a situation, a chain of events” which will in turn become “the formula of a particular emotion”—emotions, in her case, having to do with the mystery of the “other,” with perceptions of metamorphosis, with a liberating movement towards an open identity. I can add that this “formula” or equation in her work is very open and, as a mathematician might say, has more than one “solution.”
G.M.: John, in discussions of translation, themes of the betrayal of the original, of the impossible fidelity to the text, and of opting, or not, for a more honest loyalty, often come up. In any case, implicit failure is willingly accepted. Let’s try to reverse the perspective. Through his or her own (linguistic, cultural, historical, biographical, etc.) tradition, the translator brings the translated text back into the world, giving it new life. This is not a matter of betraying it, but of opening it up to a further semantic horizon.
J.T.: On one level, I of course agree: a translation necessarily opens the foreign text to a new horizon and thus possibly introduces it into another ongoing tradition, by which I mean that the translated author sometimes comes to participate in that other tradition, influencing writers in various ways, and so on. Some classic authors are examples. To cite a famous case much-debated in French literature, Shakespeare has influenced poets, writers, and playwrights the world over, whatever the language and culture, whereas Racine has arguably exerted little influence abroad. I think that this difference in influence partly has to do with the enormous difficulties facing the translator who attempts to render Racine’s lexically simple, sonorous language, which is full of force and presence in the original. It is proverbially said that he used a total vocabulary of only 1000 words in his entire dramatic oeuvre with respect to the 25,000 words commonly employed by French people in his day. The statistical truth is somewhat higher (3719 words), but nonetheless telling.
Thinking once again of Franca’s fragments, often based on what she calls “parole povere,” literally “poor words,” I can add that it is often more difficult to translate a poem focused on the essential and employing few words, and simple everyday words, than a longer text with a lexically rich structure. The translator often enjoys more syntactic and lexical flexibility when rendering the latter kind of writing; for the former, he must make sure that he has opened up many of the little thresholds to the mysteries, the emotions, as well as the psychological and philosophical implications that are present in those resonant simple words. Of course, I am speaking here as an English-language translator.
What I am outlining, via the extreme example of Racine, also engages the particular “double heritage” of English vocabulary. As a theoretical example, I would be tempted to argue that a translator who, when facing a word in a poem in a language like Italian or French, systematically chooses a “matter-of-fact” word of Anglo-Saxon origin, as opposed to its Franco-Latinate synonym, stands a more likely chance of being read as the “author” of his translation. The translation will seem very “English.” At the same time, the translation might have moved rather far away, not only from the specifics of the poetic language of the original, but also and perhaps especially from the way the foreign poet conceives poetic language—its origins, its possibilities, its aims. To my mind, as an ideal, some of those deep ideas and intuitions must also be carried over into the target language. In any event, they must be taken seriously into account.
G.M.: Sometimes the translator puts himself forth, that is, his vision of the world and of poetry, before the text of the poet to be translated. On the contrary, your respect for the poetics of others prevails over an authorial will. It is no coincidence that reading The Butterfly Cemetery gives the impression of a close transparency to Franca’s prose in Italian. You have managed to “make Franca’s poems speak” in your language. I believe that there is no greater gift from a translator.
J.T.: This is why my ongoing dialogue with Franca about “la parola poetica,” and her enlightening texts in The Butterfly Cemetery, are so important to me in my everyday practice of translation and the word-after word decisions that must be made. There are no hard-and-fast rules. Two poems by the same poet might call for two different approaches. Nuanced reflection is primordial. So is respect in terms of the translator-author relationship in its many dimensions. It is essential to understand as much as possible how the “other”—the foreign poet—conceives being, the world, language, and “la parola poetica” in his or her terms, not the translator’s own terms. Sometimes a little “xenity” in the translation is appropriate in that the foreign word or concept, translated literally and thus remaining at an unusual and rather stubborn remove from the normal, “expected,” lexical transformations of the target language, jars the reader of the translation into seeing the world differently: the target language is “forced,” “dislocated if necessary” (to paraphrase Eliot once again) into a new meaning—and translation is also about conveying new meanings. By underscoring such aspects, I am also thinking of Franca’s ideas about writing, as expressed in “Yielding Words” and other essays in The Butterfly Cemetery, and how they also apply to translation. In other words, the necessity of putting one’s self to the side, of opening oneself up to the other, and of transcending one’s ego so that this very precious form of transfer, which is translation, can take place as authentically as possible. This is why I see myself as a translator, not an author, when I translate. Translation is an ancient and noble trade!
G.M.: Are you working together on some future project? If so, what is it?
J.T.: Ever since the publication of All the Eyes that I Have Opened, I have continued to translate (and publish in journals) Franca’s new poems as she writes them, as well as a few new “occasional pieces” such as those that filled The Butterfly Cemetery. We’ll see what happens next!
F.M.: For a few years now, I have been waiting for the chaos of life to settle. It is as when we let our clothes pile up at the foot of the bed or remain scattered around the room… When I tidy up and put everything back in its place, I think that a new book of poetry will be ready.
Then there is another book which is taking shape and has been with us for several years. Thanks to you, Giorgia, it is beckoning to us again. The dialogue with John has made me experience translation as a “molting” of the text. What happens to some animal species at the end and beginning of winter is similar to what happens to a poem in the process of translation: it sheds one skin to enter another one. We are thinking of a book that gathers aspects of this “molting” process. And we thank you for having called us back to this dam which, like good beavers, we abandon every now and then to let ourselves be carried by the current.
G.M.: Thank you, Franca and John, for this stroll “among the flowers.” May our world learn to molt, to have a second retina that recognizes in the other not hell but instead the common beauty restored by the bridge of translation.
This dialogue was translated from Italian into English by John Taylor.
Giorgia Meriggi is a poet and translator who regularly contributes to the Journal of Italian Translation. She has published two poetry collections with Marco Saya Edizioni, Riparare il Viola (Sottotraccia series, 2017) and La logica dei sommersi (2021). And for Biblion Editore, she has co-translated the Anglo-Caribbean poet Roger Robinson (A Portable Paradise, 2022). She is currently completing translations of Seamus Heaney (Stations) and Anne Carson (Men in the Off Hours).
John Taylor is an American writer, poet, critic, and translator who has long lived in France. As a translator from three languages (French, Italian, and Modern Greek), he has brought the work of several European poets into English for the first time. Besides his work with Franca Mancinelli, his recent translations include books by Pascal Quignard, Philippe Jaccottet, Charline Lambert, Veroniki Dalakoura, and Béatrice Douvre. In 2013, he won the Raiziss-de Palchi fellowship for his translation of Lorenzo Calogero’s poetry, An Orchid Shining in the Hand, a bilingual volume now republished in an expanded edition in Italy by LYRIKS. His own books of poetry and poetic prose include Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees, A Notebook of Clouds & A Notebook of Ridges, which is a “double book” co-authored with the Swiss poet Pierre Chappuis, and What Comes from the Night.
Franca Mancinelli is an Italian poet and writer. Her writing is available in English, translated by John Taylor, and published by The Bitter Oleander Press: The Little Book of Passage (2018), At An Hour’s Sleep from Here (2019) which gathers her first two books, Mala kruna (2007) and Mother Dough (2013), and The Butterfly Cemetery (2021) which gathers prose narratives and personal essays. Her most recent poetry book is All The Eyes That I Have Opened (Black Square Editions, 2023). Mancinelli has been selected for the ongoing European poetry project “Versopolis.” Her writing has been translated into more than fifteen languages. She leads poetry workshops (Teatro Valdoca, Feltrinelli Education, Scuola Holden) and collaborates with the Fondazione Pordenonelegge as a jury member for the “Umberto Saba”, “Esordi”, and “I poeti di vent anni” awards. With Rossana Abis, she is the co-editor of the poetry series “Cantus firmus” (AnimaMundi edizioni).