About

This project is not only opinionated, but also based on the opinions of someone who hasn’t studied poetry formally since high school (i.e. since about thirty years ago).

It is meant neither as an authoritative nor a representative view of Italian poetry: you’ll only find poems that I like, presented emphasizing what I like (and I know, or think I know).

I still hope it will be useful, but ymmv.

… but if it does turn out to be useful, feel free to

Sing to me of the man

Modern and contemporary poets seem, on average, to have distanced themselves dramatically from what had been an essential component of traditional poetry since its origin: the public performance, or at least the reading out loud.

To say nothing of music: be it from Sappho, Homer, Orpheus, or Apollo himself, poetry was sung (or at least accompanied by one or more instruments).

All of that not being in the picture anymore, it is a short distance to foregoing meter, rhyme, and those pesky structures/strictures we learn at school: modern poetry (with some exceptions) is more at home in the private silence of one’s head, rather than around the fire, or in public festivals.
It is meant to be intellectually satisfying, refined (perhaps a bit elitist), and to convey the inner feelings of the poet lyrically — not some grand narrative, or a wide ranging foundational myth, etc.

I, myself, miss meter and all the trappings, and enjoy having poems read aloud to me. I think that’s how most poetry before the 19th century was intended to be read. And besides, it sounds better.

So, do expect this selection of Italian poetry to be skewed towards stuff that isn’t too free with its verses.

Tradurre è tradire

In Italian we have a saying: tradurre è tradire, or “translating is betraying”.

It is a feeling that goes back all the way to Dante:

E però sappia ciascuno che nulla cosa per legame musaico armonizzata si può de la sua loquela in altra transmutare sanza rompere tutta sua dolcezza e armonia

Dante, Convivio, chapter vii

Which means: “let it be known to everybody that nothing that has been harmonized through a link to the Muses can be translated from its language to another without breaking all its sweetness and harmony.”

Translating prose is difficult. Whenever I tried it on a non-trivial amount of text, I was confronted with hard vocabulary choices, expressions that don’t map well from one language to the other, contextual assumptions that would need to be explained, and so on.

Real literature, even prose literature, works precisely on the untranslatable edge of every language.

Italo Calvino, Tradurre è il vero modo di leggere un testo, in Mondo scritto e mondo non scritto

How hard, then, must it be to translate poetry? Well, according to Calvino:

We all know that translating poetry in verse is by definition impossible.

Indeed, one has all the problems that present themselves in translating prose, only compounded by the much stronger emphasis on what Jakobson appropriately called the poetic function of language: an attention on the message itself, especially in terms of its utterance for its own sake, on its meter, rhyme, its sounds and their relationship.

Or, as Calvino says elsewhere:

in poetry it is the expression that dictates laws to the content. The content must, so to speak, adapt itself to this expressive obstacle. The principle of prose is rem tene, verba sequentur, the principle of poetry is verba tene, res sequentur.

Further, poetry being highly technical, steeped in tradition and in oblique or outright references to its history, one would need to somehow reproduce this web of relationships in the translation too.

Simply there aren’t enough degrees of freedom, by a wide margin.

Thanks

For syncing the text to the recording, which otherwise would be a huge pain, we use the awesome service provided by the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals.

The website is unapologetically retro-looking. The font (Alegreya) is with serifs and ligatures because the poems are mostly old (fashioned).

The logo is a particular from this painting:

It shows Dante, the grandfather of Italian poetry, going through hell with his hero/teacher/guide, Virgil, seen here pointing back to the left: an old poet being instructed by an even older poet to look even further in the past.

The logo for the podcast, reproduced below, was created courtesy of Midjourney.