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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Summer’s Last Cicada

July 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

David Herkt
Campana To Montale: Versions From the Italian, by Kendrick Smithyman, edited by Jack Ross and Marco Sonzogni (Edizione Joker – Transference series, 2010) 244 pp., $35.00.

Translation is a loaded literary subject. The transmutation of a poem, from one language to another, is a fraught act, and the status of a translated poem seems, if possible, even more problematic. It is also clear from the outset that Kendrick Smithyman’s translations from Italian, by a New Zealand poet who did not speak Italian, are a very special case.
Campana To Montale: Versions From the Italian contains 211 poems by fourteen Italian modernist poets, ranging from the troubled isolate Dino Campana to Nobel laureate Salvatore Quasimodo, rendered into English by Smithyman. These ‘versions’, as he preferred to call them, were mainly the products of his late career, and many were completed after his retirement from the University of Auckland in 1987.

            The initial impulse seems to have been Smithyman’s dissatisfaction with some literal translations by Mary and Walter de Rachewiltz in a 1968 dual Italian/English issue of Poetry Australia (22/23), which he read in the early 1980s. However, his first ‘I could do better’ response to the clumsiness he perceived went far beyond a case of simple dismissal. It would play a role in more than a decade of his life.

            No other New Zealand poet has had such a substantial involvement with European poetry or with poets writing in another language. While the first step might have been the product of a momentary reaction, it is evident that the following engagement was anything but haphazard. As observed by Jack Ross in his introduction to Campana to Montale, the project became a ‘nightmare of industry’. For each of the chosen poems, Smithyman typed out the Italian text with a literal translation underneath and dictionary definitions down the side. This first page, in turn, was succeeded by a second with an initial English version, which was furthered worked to hone meaning, and produce line-breaks and scansion.
            Smithyman ended up translating nearly half of Salvadore Quasimondo’s complete output — 132 out of 195 poems — as well as large chunks of Eugenio Montale and Sandro Penna. They were accompanied by smaller selections from the works of other poets which, in sum, constitute a complete overview of the modernist poetic movement in Italy.
            Campana To Montale is a substantial and noteworthy addition to the corpus of Italian poetry in English. It is focused, yet comprehensive within those bounds. It gives a clear insight into more than half a century of writing. It is not the work of a dilettante. But Smithyman’s texts also produce far more questions than have been answered, even in the excellent essays by Ross and Marco Sonzogni that introduce and accompany the Edizione Joker edition. 
            Was such a labour really the product of a casually caused reaction? Was Smithyman’s involvement with Italian modernist poetry and poetics merely a matter of chance? Was it sustained purely by a hunt-and-peck exercise in dictionary translation much like doing a cryptic crossword in two languages? No matter how beguiling these questions might be, currently we have no real answers beyond the body of work. And such questions also avoid an obvious observation: these poems are some of Smithyman’s finest work.
            Evaluation of a poet’s oeuvre is not something that comes immediately. Things need time to settle. In Smithyman’s case this is further compounded by sheer volume. His self-selected Collected Poems (now easily accessible in toto, via: http://www.smithymanonline.auckland.ac.nz/) number some 1500 poems, even with the exclusion of ‘several hundreds’, some previously published.
            The place of the translations of Campana To Montale in this extensive output would initially appear minor — but for their outstanding quality. They have now been published in two countries: from The Writer’s Group in Auckland, New Zealand in 2004 and, in 2011, from Edizione Joker in Novi Ligure, Italy. They cannot be easily shuttled to the secondary place we so frequently reserve for a poet’s translations.
            In contradistinction to Smithyman’s vastly referential middle and late works, these translations are rich with deceptively simple wonders, stripped down to the bare bones, often stark, but always vivid.  There is, to take the most obvious example, ‘The Eel’:

            The eel, siren
            of the chill seas, quits the Baltic
            making for our seas,
            our estuaries, our rivers,
            flogging through the deeps, below the unfriendly flood
            from branch to branch and then
            from creek to stream, now waterways spreading like hairs,
            always pushing on further, into the very heart
            of the rock, slimed fine and easing
            through muddy creases . . .
                                                              (Eugene Montale: ‘The Eel’/’L’anguilla’)

            It is one of any number of eye-blinkingly good versions in Campana to Montale:

            Green on an unmoving sea, 
            islands where I used to live.

            Dried weeds, marine fossils,
            the beach where in their mating season sped
            horses of volcanoes and the moon . . .
                                                         (Salvadore Quasimondo: ‘Moon Horses and Volcanos’/   
            ‘Cavalli di luna e di vulcani’)

These translations encompass a wide range of poets and their responses to a world. There are the melancholy gay observations of Sandro Penna:

            Shadow of a light-footed cloud
            led me to a boy
            who came up from the fast-running river
            to stretch out naked on the grass . . .
                                                      (Sandro Penna, Untitled, L’ombra di una nuvola… , p. 52)

And Guiseppe Ungaretti’s almost-imagist, broken syntaxed condensations:

            A whole night long
            cast down beside,
            to
                 a mate butchered
            there
                             with his insulted mouth
            turned to the full moon
                             with the congestion
            of his hands
            making their way
            into my silence,
                          I have written
            letters full of love.
                                                 (Guiseppe Ungaretti: ‘The Vigil of Ungaretti’/‘Veglia’)

             Smithyman’s Italy is a locale of sharp images, taut phrases, and hard-edged summer light. At times, these translations have an almost cinematic quality. Shores are moon-crazed. Horizons withdraw. Anguish bursts into flame. In tone, they are often compressed and dramatic action-epics. Strangely, too, these poems are often not so much translated into English as they are transferred into a very New Zealand vernacular.
            They are filled with words and locutions like: ‘shelter-belt’, ‘the wind bares the kids’ submissive heads’, ‘our gullies’, ‘a mate butchered’, ‘the sun now wallops them’ – and the redolent ‘We shall have to put away the beach gear’. The recognitions by a New Zealand reader are unending. At times, it is almost as if we are exploring a great body of previously undiscovered New Zealand verse. They show us ourselves in a strange but very beguiling mirror. They make us ache for more translations by other New Zealand poets, granting us something most other cultures have experienced in full, a poetry enriched by exterior views painstakingly framed in a local perspective.
            Again, the position of Campana To Montale in Smithyman’s poetic career comes to the foreground. They are anomalous in his works and they force us to examine his own decisions in his own poetry, multifaceted as it was. It is possible to see them as a bright lance into ‘what could have been’, if Smithyman had not been dominated by the consequences of the nationalist project that had governed a century of New Zealand poets and poems. Their condensation, set against the sprawl of Smithyman’s own productions, the intensity of their vision, the multiple viewpoints, their tautness, and the lick and the turn of their relished language, all take these poems a long way from the discursive baseline of a late modern and early postmodern antipodean tradition.
            They inevitably produce a readerly desire that Smithyman had proceeded their way, rather than to the dead-ended, sometimes bloated, frequently derivative, and ultimately provincial gaze that is so evident in the exactly contemporaneous Atua Wera and Imperial Vistas Family Fictions, immense enterprises though they are. It is even possible to suggest, paradoxically, that the traditionally regarded bonds of translation here represent freedom for Smithyman: freedom from a nation at the back end of nowhere, freedom from an insular subject and inwardly turned received poetics, and freedom, ultimately, from himself.
But finally, it is their quality and power that should be our focus. In a century of poet’s translations, from Pound to Lowell to Heaney, Smithyman more than holds his space. His recreation of the poetry of another nation is alluring. His ‘nightmare of industry’ is successful. The works remain vividly in mind. The relocation of the poems by the translator is exactly achieved.
            It is to our benefit that these versions exist, but it is also our loss that Smithyman could not finally transfer this marvellously attained achievement to benefit his own self-authored works. This world of ‘could-have-been’ – compact, compressed, vibrant, and profound – must stand as one of the great lessons of late twentieth-century New Zealand poetry.


DAVID HERKT is a television director and researcher. A collection of his poetry, The Body of Man, was published by Hazard Press.

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