The Selected Poetry and Prose

by Andrea Zanzotto, Patrick Baron (Translation), Ruth Feldman (Translation)

Andrea Zanzotto is widely considered Italy’s most influential living poet. The first comprehensive collection in thirty years to translate this master European poet for an English-speaking audience, The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto includes the very best poems from fourteen of his major books of verse and a selection of thirteen essays that helps illuminate themes in his poetry as well as elucidate key theoretical underpinnings of his thought. Assembled with the collaboration of Zanzotto himself and featuring a critical introduction, thorough annotations, and a generous selection of photographs and art, this volume brings an Italian master to vivid life for American readers. “Now, in [this book], American readers can get a just sense of  [Zanzotto’s] true range and extraordinary originality.”—Eric Ormsby, New York Sun “What I love here is the sense of a voice directly speaking. Throughout these translations, indeed from early to late, the great achievement seems to be the way they achieve a sense of urgent address.”—Eamon Grennan, American Poet

Genres: Poetry

450 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 2007

About the author

Andrea Zanzotto (born October 10, 1921) was an Italian poet.

Reviews

[Yalena · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Man after my own heart” is the briefest, most affectionate way I can express the complicity I felt reading these poems. There are no words I can use to convey the extent to which I admire him and find a great companionship in his art. For some time, I had felt incredibly alone both artistically and geographically and wanted to find images within which it was safe for me to live. I was in search of pastoral, familiar images because the cosmopolitan self-obsession of a lot of contemporary poetry is repellent and insincere to me. The English speaking publishing world has, for many decades, denigrated pastoral art since it does not appeal to the people who control traditional publication and distribution (i.e. market pressures encourage publishers to falsely deem pastoral art as “irrelevant”). At the same time the fetishisation and pseudoaestheticisation of rural life has become prominent in many areas of life as a form of escape from the pressures of technology, reducing rustic life to a "simplistic" aesthetic rather than a lived reality. This means that the rare glimmer of pastoral literature one sees to day is usually a form of kitsch which allows certain writers to create representations which appeal to a touristic or fetishistic idea of rurality. But the present-day rural voice, the rural relation to technology, to surveillance, to war, to isolation, to grief is not allowed to exist in print.

Now, Andrea Zanzotto is a magnificent poet and I feel so fortunate that the things of life made it possible that I could encounter his work. I feel an immense gratitude towards him, for bestowing upon me the confidence that our way of life, our way of existing in the world and in relation to it, is not obsolete. I want to live in his words for the longest time. He redefined the pastoral poem, disrupting the naive and often fetishistic view of rural life people often have and created images which are truly electric, vitalistic, and with a great attention to life. In brief, this is poetry that makes me want to live. I also appreciate the inclusion of his prose which allowed me to gain insight on how carefully and consciously he constructed his poetic style and approach to poetics.

However, this is a book for the American reader. I was a fool not to have read the back cover which actually states this. It came to my attention over the course of this book that at least four of the “translators” of these poems do not know Italian (at least sufficiently to have been tasked with translating Zanzotto). This is all the more perfidious when Zanzotto was preoccupied with defending the Italian language from its marginalisation and spoke against the imposition of Anglophone linguistic models: “For Italians there is the urgent need to have good translations from English to Italian and vice versa. Without them we would be left without a voice and echo because our language is unfortunately becoming more marginalised […] What a strange destiny Italian has: finally used by people after centuries of only written or elitist use […] a language reduced to miserable touristic bla-blas, or good for narrow layers of the culture for specialists in the arts or opera.”

I am reminded of Coleman Barks who did not even know Persian but wrote many “translations” of Persian poems and made millions from his appropriation of Persian poets. This is apparently what Americans do with “translations”—completely ruin an artist’s work to produce profit. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann are the worst culprits. The former is more treacherous because whilst Swann shamelessly acknowledges he does not know Italian, Feldman cites “living in Italy” (living in a five-star hotel in one of the most touristic areas of Rome and buying her way into connecting with the Italian intellectual elite), as knowledge of the language, which by the quality of her translations is doubtful. I mean, these translations are so horrendous that I inadvertently started learning Italian because I felt a great responsibility to protect all that is magnificent in Zanzotto’s poetics due to my aforementioned sense of gratitude and devotion.

Now, one can make all the usual arguments against me on the difficulties of poetic translation—save it. I learned German to read Rilke and Goethe’s Divan but the English translations of their poems were still sincere and honest. But anyone who reads any of these poems in Italian and then reads the English will find that this is a case of over-monied and mediocre poets of no consequence attaching their names to a marvellous artist. At best one can say the English "translations" are adaptations, and of a quality not unlike Emerald Fennell’s recent film “adaptation” of Wuthering Heights.

[Sam Lohmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hott