Olivia E. Sears is founder of the Center for the Art of Translation and the journal Two Lines, which she edited for more than a decade. Poems from her translation of Ardengo Soffici’s entire 1919 collection appear or are forthcoming in the Literary Review, Poetry International, and Jubilat. Her translation of Ardengo Soffici’s poem “Lights of Rome” can be found here. It appears along with another poem in the Mar/Apr 2019 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for translating “Lights of Rome”?
Some years ago, in a tattered old anthology of Italian poetry held together with rubber bands, I stumbled across a 1915 poem by Ardengo Soffici entitled “Rainbow” (Arcobaleno). The poem was a surreal, painterly, stream-of-consciousness declamation. I was immediately hooked. I poked around a bit, found that the poem had not been translated into English, and commenced a deeper investigation into both the poem and the poet.
I soon discovered that Soffici had been first and foremost a painter. He’d lived in Paris as an artist and art critic at the turn of the century and counted among his friends some of the most significant artists of the time—Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Rousseau, Degas, Cézanne. He was deeply inspired by the poetry of Rimbaud and fruitfully exchanged ideas with Apollinaire, but the other major influence on both his art and his poetry was clearly Cubism.
And yet, despite all this apparent (and ongoing) affinity with French visual art and poetry, Soffici has always been considered a Futurist—not least of all in his own estimation. Following his time in Paris, Soffici sought a major renewal in Italian art and literature, and at first Futurist theory was just what he was looking for. For a few years, he became one of the chief theoreticians for the Italian Futurists, led by F.T. Marinetti in Milan, but he never managed wholly to embrace their artistic practice. Soffici tried to establish a competing definition of Futurism that would better describe his own aesthetics, arguing that Futurism was the dynamic synthesis that reconciled Impressionism (concerned with light and color, in movement) and Cubism (with its focus on the solid, static form). But Marinetti wrote the manifestos, so he had the last (or loudest) word in defining Futurist art. Ultimately, Soffici’s poetry of this period, while adhering to his own definition, frequently defies the most basic Futurist principles (as dictated by Marinetti) and lacks the requisite polemics.
When I tracked down Soffici’s 1915 poetry volume with the unpronounceable title BÏF§ZF+18, full of poems he called “Simultaneities” and “Lyric Chemisms,” I found it pretty surprising. The work recalled not only Apollinaire and Rimbaud, but Baudelaire and Tristan Tzara. Soffici combined visual and auditory impressions of experience and memory and created a propulsive poetry. Soffici described the “Simultaneities” (among them, “Lights of Rome”) as a kind of “simultaneous amalgam … [of] everything the poetic self has experienced.” The “Lyric Chemisms,” by contrast, made use of typographical elements, advertisements, and sounds to make meaning. The work was experimental, vibrant, and colorful, but also full of subjectivity and humanity, unlike what I’d read of Italian Futurist poetry, and I felt it deserved to be read in English. The most surprising aspect of this book of Futurist poetry was the subject matter: Soffici didn’t adopt the themes that characterized most Italian Futurist writing, like war, machines, and speed. He does have one airplane poem, but he otherwise applied his techniques to daily (not glorious) human experience: rainbows, poetry, boredom, light refracted in a glass of water, a stroll through Florence, lovers running away together, a still life painting, and numerous scenes in cafés.
I ended up translating the whole book (coming out this fall from World Poetry Books)—a book of Italian Futurist poetry, of all things. How could I find this book so compelling when I often found the most renowned and exalted Italian Futurist poetry bombastic and dull (if not abhorrent)?
This volume was published towards the end of Soffici’s tentative alignment with Marinetti’s Futurists, and “Lights of Rome” appears to be one of the last that Soffici composed for the book. This is the poem in which Soffici plainly rebels against the rigidity of Futurist poetics. Among the tenets that Soffici defies here is Marinetti’s dictate “to destroy the cult of the past, the obsession with antiquity.” The past was obviously not a fitting subject for a Futurist poem. Yet Soffici blithely wallows in antiquity, describing Rome as the “crucible of eternity of histories of destinies” and evoking “distant days of knowledge… of heroism … memories of power.” The poem even invites cameo appearances by some of the most recognizable monuments of antiquity (the Colosseum, the Forum, and the Arch of Titus) as the speaker strolls through the city. Soffici also ignores one of Marinetti’s fundamental mandates: “to destroy the ‘I’ in literature: that is, all psychology. The sort of man who has been damaged by libraries and museums.” Instead, Soffici embraces the writing subject’s centrality, in the footsteps of Rimbaud and Apollinaire, allowing the speaker to reflect on history and memory and the human heart while meandering among marble fountains and all the architectural marvels that make of Rome a kind of living museum. Apparently, Soffici was a “damaged” man!
By the time Soffici was composing “Lights of Rome,” he had also begun to rethink the role of avant-garde poetry. While Marinetti and the Futurists insisted that art should join forces with the political movements of its day, Soffici argued that the work of art should remain autonomous and pure. The volume BÏF§ZF+18: Simultaneità e Chimismi lirici is in part so fascinating because all of these tensions—between the orphic voice and the voice of political propaganda, between Italy’s stiflingly rich cultural history and the promise of modernity, between Cubism and Futurism—were loudly roiling beneath the surface.
The opening sentence of this piece is grand, bright, and studded with descriptors. How do you feel it establishes the tone or mood for the piece’s progression?
The opening phrase of the poem actually paints a fairly bleak scene: “under a narrow stingy sky in this fleeting sphere of domestic disgust and despair. . . .” We feel the existential weight of mortality and the claustrophobia of mundane lives. As in many of his poems, however, after Soffici establishes this desolate landscape, the “spirit“ appears and immediately rebels against all this gravity and mediocrity. The lid of the poem seems to fly off and Rome is suddenly awash in colors and textures and layers of history and memory. The poem picks up speed, running through the centuries and the cobblestone streets of Rome, through wafting perfumes and dreams and distant lands. The world seems full of possibility. Bursting with hyperbole and nostalgia, the poem paints Rome as both “the crucible of eternity of histories” and the locus of hope for the future (albeit drunken hope).
Incidentally, in this first sentence, Soffici once again defies a Futurist commandment, “to abolish all adjectives and adverbs.” Those descriptors in the first sentence are all adjectives and adverbs in the original (translated here as narrow, stingy, fleeting, domestic, brighter). Clearly a damaged man!
What is the relationship between the original and your translation? What were you eager to emphasize? Was there anything you feel is more or less palpable in your translation than in the work you translated from?
As a translator, I always know it will be difficult to reproduce the music of the original Italian, but I can try to achieve different sonic effects in close to the same quantity and location; it is all a matter of choices and compensations. Soffici uses sound very expressively, but his poems are not aiming to be beautiful and lyrical; more often they have a visceral quality that can range from thorny to industrial to propagandistic to ugly to foul. This is a tremendous advantage for the translator because English is rich in variety of vocabulary and tone, if sometimes lacking in the lyrical qualities of Italian.
As I’ve said, the opening stanza of this poem establishes a mood of hopelessness, mundanity, repulsion: in questa sfera breve di disgusti casalinghi (“in this fleeting sphere of domestic disgust”). Soffici repeats an “eh” sound (questa with a closed e, sfera breve with an open e) followed by the guttural sonic combination of “dizgu” and “zalingh.” For the first phrase, I chose a different repeated vowel sound—“this fleeting sphere” (“ee”)—and as a bonus was able to include an “s-f” repetition that mimics the awkward pronunciation of the s+consonant sounds of sfera and disgusti. For the phrase disgusti casalinghi I knew it would be difficult to reproduce the hard “g” in both words, so I went with “domestic disgust”: this retains the internal “s” sounds (and now they are all followed by consonants: st / sg / st) and I was pleased to end up with the sound of “ick disgust.”
Soffici creates a certain level of disorientation for the reader by placing phrases in apposition, or simple juxtaposition, without conjunctions or punctuation to demarcate them. I wanted to preserve Soffici’s ambiguity without introducing any new ambiguity, to maintain that careening sensation yet make it as legible as (though no more legible than) the original. It was a challenge, but supremely engaging.
Could you talk a bit about the role of limited punctuation in this piece? There seem to be a lack of commas and periods, is this the case with the original work as well? How do you think it affects a contemporary English-speaking reader’s experience of movement in the text?
Once again, I’ll invoke the Futurist precepts, among which is “to abolish all punctuation.” On this issue, Soffici was an enthusiastic adherent. Here’s Marinetti’s instruction: “With adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions having been suppressed, naturally punctuation is also annihilated within the variable continuity of a living style that creates itself, without the absurd pauses of commas and periods.”
Right: avoid those absurd pauses that make comprehension possible! Elsewhere Marinetti allows that question marks, exclamation points, and hyphens were acceptable, and Soffici makes ample use of these throughout the book. The full stops were often indicated by a capitalized word and/or a blank space, but the lack of commas requires a lot of interpretation and caused me a lot of headaches. Again, Soffici wants to create a propulsive poem, like a runaway train; he doesn’t describe experience but drags you along with him. The reader is meant to feel disoriented, almost under assault from the cascade of images and sensations. More than anything, I think Soffici wants the poem to be an experience that leaves a lasting impression.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I usually translate contemporary women poets, so I’m working on several wonderful Italian writers at the moment: Mariangela Gualtieri, a dramaturg who writes beautiful poems about existential issues; Maria Grazia Calandrone, who writes poetry on a diverse array of subjects, from historical events, to modern crime, to our relationship with animals and trees; and Eva Taylor, a childhood émigré from the former East Germany who adopted the Italian language for her poems and recently published a novel about her family’s escape from the former GDR just before the Berlin Wall was built.