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Corno
inglese is
a lively, delightful, constantly surprising sounding of the breadth and
depth of English-language writers' engagement with Montale's work in
all its variety.
Jonathan Galassi
This
new anthology gathers a diverse band of translators who revel in the
company of Eugenio Montale and “to be in Eugenio
Montale’s company”, according to George Steiner,
“is to profit from one of the noblest, albeit most
disenchanted, of modern sensibilities”. Corno
inglese is intended to enhance that profit.
The
collection of the translations included in this volume began in 1996,
the centenary of Montale’s birth, and has continued to the
present. The number of translators has expanded from a small
constellation of stars (from Samuel Beckett to Paul Muldoon; from
Robert Lowell to John Updike) to a galaxy of interpreters and
interpretations from all over the world.
Susan
Sontag argues that translation is about
“differentness”. She maintains that to translate
“signifies a change of condition and site”, arguing
that the term ‘trans’ “is a physical
‘across’ or crossing and proposes a geography of
action, action in space”. Corno inglese is
an atlas of translations penned by an alphabet of translators
– established and emerging poets; academics and literary
translators; postgraduate and undergraduate students – who
have proven to be receptive readers of one of the finest poets of the
twentieth century. And the variety of their responses is a vivid
demonstration of the actions that translation, according to Sontag,
sets out to perform: explanation, adaptation,
improvement
and even obfuscation.
[...]
The
poems appear alphabetically by translator rather than in chronological
order; this challenge to convention is intended to engage the reader in
a freer and fresher reading of each translation independently of the
canon of the originals.
The
multiple versions of ‘Dora Markus’ and
‘L’anguilla’; the several new poems
inspired by Montale and the back-translation of Montale’s
translation of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet
XXXIIII’ demonstrate what William Weaver called the
“elusive art of translation” as well as the rich
and flexible response of the English language to Montale’s
Italian.
If
there is “a Montale for everybody”, as fellow poet
Giorgio Caproni has claimed, then Corno inglese confirms
this.
Marco Sonzogni
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