Poetry emerges from the whole body, not just the mind or the tongue. This is especially clear in the work of Italian poet Patrizia Vicinelli (Bologna 1943-1991). Vicinelli often said that her work and her life were one and the same, it’s a nice myth to build around the poet-self. Words emerge from every limb, seep out, spill to the pavement to listeners’ ears. Vicinelli worked in various forms but what has interested me most is her relationship to sound. When listening to tapes of her reciting her own work the power of poetry emanates; what is then found on the page is something resembling a score rather than the poem itself. It is only a trace, a record of the real event.
For this reason, I’ve made a translation on paper that attempts to perform its own recitation. There is the original poem in Italian as well as my English version, but there are lots of other handwritten notes to self and to potential reader. These range from definitions to theories to multiple versions to new poems inspired by Vicinelli. I wanted to make clear that translation is a series of choices of course, but there is also some spontaneity in the work, and that the results could have always been different. I was also inspired by Vicinelli’s own visual poetry in her book à,a.A,.
A while back I read David Rattray’s essay “Translating Artaud” which appears in his book Becoming One of the Invisible, (1992) and it’s stayed with me through every translation I work on. He says you have to identify with the author, he says it’s an occupational hazard. With Vicinelli it really is dangerous—she’d give anything for the sake of the poem. I can only try to live up to that in translating her.
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