LAWRENCE VENUTI
I write here as a literary translator, prefacing my own work, but I do not intend to offer yet another belletristic commentary on translation. My aim is also to challenge the prevailing tendency among contemporary translators to make fairly impressionistic remarks on their practice, on its literary and cultural values, on the equivalence they believe to have established between their translations and the foreign texts. In adopting this approach, translators actually avoid addressing the conceptual problems posed by translation and so inadvertently raise the question of whether any translation practice can ever take into account these problems without a sustained theoretical reflection. Such a reflection, I believe, can enrich practice in ways that have yet to be fully explored.
My starting point is a skepticism as to whether cross-cultural understanding is possible in literary translation, particularly when the foreign text to be translated was produced in a remote historical period. Maintaining a strict semantic correspondence to the foreign text, a correspondence based on dictionary definitions, cannot obviate the irreparable loss of the foreign context. Translation radically decontextualizes a foreign text by uprooting it from the literary traditions and practices that not only give rise to it, but make it meaningful to foreign readers who have read widely in the foreign language and literature. This context of production and reception can never be restored so as to provide the reader of the translation with a response that is equivalent to the informed foreign-language reader’s response to the foreign text (I dissent from the widely held notion of “equivalent effect,” particularly as formulated by Nida1). For foreign traditions and practices, their cultural meanings and historical weight, can rarely (if ever) be signified in the translation itself, at any textual level, whether linguistic or stylistic, discursive or thematic, prosodic or generic.
Of course, a scholarly apparatus might help immensely in compensating for the loss of context. But any such compensation, however much learning it incorporates, can never enable the translation to elicit an equivalent response: the very term “scholarly” means, not only that the audience of the translation has been narrowed to readers seeking specialized knowledge in the form of historical scholarship, but that the foreign audiences for which the foreign text was originally written have been displaced. These audiences were never limited to scholars or other professional readers. And historical scholarship, notwithstanding its enormous value in understanding past moments, always asks questions of those moments that they did not ask of themselves, questions that issue from the moment of historical research and the historian’s particular methods. This fundamental anachronism in historical scholarship is exacerbated in the translation of archaic literatures. Because translation is decontextualizing, it inevitably opens up a historical difference from the foreign text through the very linguistic choices that the translator makes to overcome that difference. For these choices expose the translator’s address to audiences in another culture at a later moment.
Archaic poetries bring the added difficulty of generic and prosodic features that, even when they have been revived by modern poets, continue to signify a historical remoteness to modern readers. During the twentieth century, the practice that came to dominate English-language poetry translation was to avoid developing comparable prosodic features, especially rhyme schemes and stanzaic structures, and rather assimilate the foreign text to the forms that dominated English-language poetry: varieties of unrhymed metrical verse and free verse. Indeed, the dominance of these forms has been so decisive that many modern readers take them as the distinguishing feature of “modern” vs. “archaic” poetry. In the case of translation, this dominance has created a set of reader expectations that have undoubtedly limited the translator’s choices, but that can be strategically frustrated to produce a range of effects in the translating language and culture. These effects might be designed to evoke the form of an archaic foreign poetry. But insofar as they violate a modern poetic norm, they might also defamiliarize prevailing translation practices.
Archaic poetic forms cannot be easily imitated in English. Prosody, in particular, is a repository of literary traditions and practices, so that the translator’s effort to imitate somehow the meter or rhythm of an archaic foreign poem cannot simply restore past sounds and listening experiences for readers who do not have sufficient access to the foreign context. On the contrary, such efforts risk the infiltration of later sounds and listening experiences—which is to say the inevitable problem of anachronism in translation.
The translator, however, might admit this inevitability and turn it to advantage. Ezra Pound’s translations and his commentary on them can prove exemplary here. Pound showed how an archaic foreign poem might be rendered through the imitation of an analogous poetry in the translating language or, in other words, through a calculated recontextualization. Nonetheless, he was acutely aware that the analogy was never a perfect stylistic or temporal fit and could not control every reader’s response. In “Guido’s Relations” (1929), for instance, Pound describes his effort to translate Cavalcanti’s poetry by drawing on “pre-Elizabethan English,” the language used by poets such as Wyatt and Surrey. And he anticipates two
objections to such a method: the doubt as to whether one has the right to take a serious poem and turn it into a mere exercise in quaintness; the “misrepresentation” not of the poem’s antiquity, but of the proportionate feel of that antiquity, by which I mean that Guido’s thirteenth-century language is to twentieth-century Italian sense much less archaic than any fourteenth-, fifteenth-, or early sixteenth-century English is for us.2
By “quaintness,” the first objection, Pound seems to be referring to a superficial appearance of historical difference, a pastiche, say, whereby the translation does not offer readers a compelling depth of engagement as a historically situated foreign poem might do. Avoiding this appearance depends much on the translator’s skills, not only as a writer of the translating language, but as a literary imitator with a wide stylistic repertoire. Two kinds of imitation are at stake. In addition to maintaining a semantic correspondence, the translator mimics distinctive features of the foreign poem by mimicking an analogous style drawn from the poetic traditions in the translating language. The stylistic analogue does not supply the loss of the foreign context, nor does it enable an equivalent effect; it rather provides another context in the receiving culture, a context of production and reception in which the translator inscribes the foreign poem with an interpretation that is both illuminating and convincing, that does not seem merely a literary prank.
The second objection to Pound’s method is perhaps more consequential: creating an analogue from literary traditions and practices in the translating language can distort the historical difference that an archaic foreign poetry signifies in its own language. Here Pound has run up against the inevitable anachronism in translation, which occurs whether the translator relies on current usage or resorts to the imitation of an archaic poetry. To object that Pound’s poetic analogue is historically distorting assumes that a literary translation can establish a relation of historical adequacy to the foreign text, regardless of the fact that languages and literatures develop disjunctively, at different speeds, establishing different relations to other languages and literatures. The objection, then, does not recognize the radical decontextualization at work in every literary translation.
Yet Pound’s response also remains questionable. He does not insist on the inevitable anachronism that accompanies the loss of context in translating, but rather assumes that a degree of historical adequacy is possible between the foreign and translated texts. Thus he suggests that his pre-Elizabethan English versions of Cavalcanti “can show where the treasure lies” to the modern reader who cannot read the Italian.3 Yet he describes that “treasure” with such terms as “clarity and explicitness,” as opposed to “magniloquence and the thundering phrase,” and thereby reveals his preference for poetries that reflect his modernist concern for linguistic precision, excluding the work of Marlowe and Milton, among other poets.4 Pound assumes that his reading of archaic foreign poetries is true to the texts themselves, to their essential values, not one possible interpretation determined by his own modernist poetics and underwritten by a modernist canon of English-language poets.5 And he does not admit that he is translating for like-minded readers, modernists, or at least for readers whom the very power of his translating might persuade to accept a modernist aesthetic in a translation.
Despite these problems, Pound’s translation method remains an advance over widely adopted approaches (namely, maintaining a semantic correspondence in current usage), and it should not be rejected by modern translators of archaic foreign poetries. Yet it does require greater self-consciousness on the translator’s part, greater attention, on the one hand, to the relation between the translation and the foreign text and, on the other, to the relation between the translation and the literary traditions and practices from which an analogue is fashioned in the translating language. These two relations are both interpretations, enacted in the translation process, and so they are provisional, directed to specific audiences, engaged in the reproduction of forms and meanings in a particular cultural situation at a particular historical moment. And because both interpretive relations are culturally and historically variable, neither leaves its object—the foreign text and the literature in the translating language—entirely unaffected or intact. To a certain extent, both objects are transformed, at once imitated and inscribed with an interpretive difference, trusted as meaningful yet submitted to a revisionary manipulation. As a result, the translator’s creation of a stylistic analogue signals the linguistic and literary features of the foreign text in a disjunctive and indirect manner, through the interpretive differences that transform the foreign forms and themes as well as the receiving literature.
Yet the problem of modern audiences still looms in the background. For which readers will both the foreign text and the receiving literature be transformed? Can a translation of an archaic foreign poem be appreciated by readerships who do not necessarily share the interpretation that the translator has inscribed in the text through a stylistic analogue? Is the translation necessarily directed to a readership that possesses specialized knowledge of literature in the translating language or can it cross the boundaries between readerships, appealing to readers who have limited or no access to that knowledge?
These reflections have increasingly shaped my approach to translating poetry, including a recent project in which I attempted versions of the medieval Italian poet Jacopone da Todi. What follows is a set of introductory comments on the poet and his work, on some previous translations, and on my own versions, two of which are reproduced here. None of this commentary constitutes the contextualization that the materials deserve. I rather present them with two aims: to stimulate further consideration of the problems posed by translating archaic poetries and to encourage experimentation with the methods used in translating them.
Compared to other European poetries, poetry in Italian languages developed late, not emerging till the twelfth century. At first it was dominated by the chivalric romances of northern France and the love lyrics of the Provençal troubadours, but the Bible was also a strong influence. The Ritmo Laurenziano (“Laurentian Verse,” named after the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence where it was discovered) is the oldest surviving poetic composition in an Italian language. Written between 1150 and 1170 in the Tuscan dialect, it is the work of a troubadour who requests the gift of a horse from a bishop. Between 1224 and 1226, St. Francis of Assisi wrote his hymn, Laudes creaturarum, “Canticle of the Creatures,” in the Umbrian dialect, modeling it on the Psalms and the Book of Daniel.
During the thirteenth century, Italian poetry was a mixture of secular and religious genres in various dialects, northern and southern. Among the most striking of the early poets is Jacopone da Todi, who wrote in Umbrian. Jacopone produced more than a hundred poems in a genre called the lauda, a religious song or hymn, designed for a soloist with a chorus and framed in different meters and verse structures.
Although Jacopone’s themes were fundamentally religious, his poetry was unique in giving them a distinctly personal cast. He used the lauda not only to explore theological concepts, but to express his psychological state during mystical experiences. He also used the form to petition a pope for pardon and even to satirize him and his supporters. Appreciating Jacopone’s poetry, then, requires some knowledge of pertinent events in his life, even if the power and popularity of his work soon inspired biographical legends that overlay the incomplete historical record and complicate any attempts to separate fact from fiction.
Jacopone was born Jacopo dei Benedetti in Todi around 1230, a member of a noble family. He was trained as a notaio, an office that combined the functions of a notary and an attorney, and he argued cases in Bologna, amassing great wealth. In 1267, he married a pious noblewoman named Vanna di Bernardino di Guidone, in whose judgment he dwelt too much on earthly things. In 1268, at her husband’s insistence, she attended a ball and met her death when the platform on which she stood suddenly collapsed and crushed her. Stricken with guilt as well as grief, Jacopone noticed that she was wearing a hair shirt. Thus he became painfully aware that she had led a penitent life on his behalf.
This sequence of events motivated his abrupt conversion to a rigorous asceticism. He abandoned the legal profession, distributed his wealth and possessions among the poor, and pursued a penitential course of self-denial in poverty. He became a humble Franciscan tertiary. His piety sometimes took the form of mysticism, bouts of ecstatic madness that cast doubt on his mental stability. His poetry suggests that he was familiar with the mystical works of such authors as Hugh of St. Victor and St. Bonaventure.
In 1278, Jacopone attempted to become a Franciscan brother, but was rejected because of rumors concerning his sanity. That same year, however, he was admitted to the Order of Friars Minor on the strength of a poem he had written: it deplored the vanity of worldly values. He gravitated toward a faction known as the Spirituali, the Spirituals, who wished to return the order to the extreme poverty espoused by St. Francis.
By the end of the thirteenth century, Jacopone assumed a position of leadership in the Spiritual faction, which mired him in the political struggles surrounding the newly elected pope, Boniface VIII. The Spirituals’ bid for clerical autonomy had been denied by Boniface, whom Jacopone opposed in 1297 by signing a manifesto that declared the pope’s election invalid. In 1298, Boniface retaliated by excommunicating Jacopone and sentencing him to life imprisonment. The pope’s death in 1303 brought Jacopone’s release, whereupon he retired to the monastery in the Umbrian town of Collazzone and died three years later.
The first printed edition of Jacopone’s poetry appeared in 1490. Yet by that time it had already enjoyed wide circulation. Many manuscript copies were made, stretching into the seventeenth century. Individual texts were enthusiastically sung by confraternities or guilds who performed laude in processions and dramatic recitations. The intensity of Jacopone’s poems also appealed to heretical sects such as the wandering flagellants who sang them as devotional hymns. These diverse performances show that his writing, although influenced by both religious and secular literature, made an important contribution to popular piety in Umbrian towns.
The poems I have chosen to translate are representative of Jacopone’s forms and themes. In “O papa Bonifazio,” an epistolary poem evidently written during his imprisonment, he addresses the papal retaliation against the Spirituals by questioning it even as he appeals for Boniface’s mercy. The Umbrian text is written in couplets that vary from seven to eight syllables, and the meter is fairly singsong, despite the variations. As scholars have shown,6 the language is extremely heterogeneous: although generally simple, it employs the extended metaphor of the shield for theological concepts and mixes doctrinal and liturgical terms (“scommunicazione,” “assoluzione”) with a Latin phrase and a vernacular Latinism (“per secula infinita” and “Absolveto,” which was a popular form for absolvetur).
In “O iubelo del core,” Jacopone addresses a recurrent theme in mystical literature, the inexpressibility of the ecstatic experience. Here too the meter is irregular, with lines varying from seven to eight syllables, but the verse structure is much more intricate: the opening couplet (xx) is followed by five six-line strophes with an alternating rhyme scheme (ababbx) and an incremental repetition of the key word “iubelo.” The language is also marked by heterogeneity: the simple lexicon contains dialectal forms (the repeated assimilation of -nd- to -nn- in “quanno” for “quando,” “granne” for “grande,” “pensanno” for “pensando”) and vernacular forms of Latin words and phrases (“iubelo” from “iubilo,” “’n deriso” from “in derisum”). A couple of words that have since become archaic in Italian point to a French or even Provençal influence (“dolzore” for “dolcezza,” “convenente” for “conveniente”).
The formal features of the Umbrian texts, notably their prosody and language, clearly pose difficulties to the modern English-language translator who wishes not only to establish a semantic correspondence, but to compensate somehow for the loss of the medieval context. Because of this loss, the form cannot be reproduced so as to enable a response that is equivalent to the responses of Jacopone’s contemporaries. Consequently, modern translators have been forced to develop strategies that answer primarily to the function which the translations were designed to serve. Two translations produced during the twentieth century are particularly worth examining because they exemplify very different approaches.
The first consists of a selection of Jacopone’s poetry included in Evelyn Underhill’s 1919 biography. The translator is identified on the title page as Mrs. Theodore Beck. The function of the translations, as Underhill stated in her preface, was “to illustrate the most important points of his mystical growth and outward career.”7 She viewed the literary dimension of Jacopone’s “career” as combining two contemporary influences: “secular poetry” represented by the philosophical love lyrics of the dolcestilnovisti and “that popular demand for vernacular moral and devotional songs which the penitential movements of the thirteenth century—especially the Franciscan revival—had created and developed.”8
Interestingly, Underhill’s interpretation of Jacopone’s poetry can be glimpsed in Beck’s translations, although only very indirectly, through the translator’s decision to develop a resonant stylistic analogue. Here are the opening lines from her version of “O iubelo del core”:
Thou, Jubilus, the heart dost move;
And makst us sing for very love.
The Jubilus in fire awakes,
And straight the man must sing and pray,
His tongue in childish stammering shakes,
Nor knows he what his lips may say;
He cannot quench nor hide away
That Sweetness pure and infinite.9
Beck obviously tried to evoke the meter and rhyme scheme of Jacopone’s six-line strophes. Yet the fluent regularity of her tetrameter lines, combined with her reliance on standard usage mixed with poetical archaisms, suggests that her model was the eighteenth-century hymn. A similar six-line stanza frequently recurs in John Wesley’s collection of Methodist hymns (this analogy was proposed by an anonymous reader who evaluated my essay for the journal, Translation and Literature, but who cannot be held responsible for what I made of it). The following example is typical:
Come, Holy Ghost, all-quick’ning fire,
My consecrated heart inspire,
Sprinkled with the atoning blood;
Still to my soul thyself reveal,
Thy mighty working may I feel,
And know that I am one with God!10
In translating Jacopone’s poem “O papa Bonifazio,” Beck likewise imitated his couplets. Here too the analogue with the hymn can be perceived, along with her use of poetical archaisms. Her version breaks the Umbrian text into four-line stanzas, another form that appears in Wesley’s collection. I print one of Beck’s stanzas followed by a stanza from another hymn:
Though fierce and sharp be thine attack,
By Love I’ll beat thine onslaught back;
I’ll speak to thee with right good will,
And gladly shalt thou listen still.11
When rising floods my soul o’erflow,
When sinks my heart in waves of woe,
Jesu, thy timely air impart,
And raise my head, and cheer my heart.12
If Beck’s translations are compared only to the Umbrian texts, her work can easily provoke criticisms. It might be objected, not just that she translates too expansively, adding words to fill out her lines, but that her meters are too regular, her diction too smoothly poetical, to mimick Jacopone’s irregular rhythms and heterogeneous language. And indeed a contemporary reviewer complained that Beck’s translations are “stilted, artificial, unpleasantly anthropomorphic, and appallingly flat.”13 Such criticisms, however, ignore the irreparable loss of the medieval context at the level of the poetic line and the interpretive relation that the translator created with English-language poetry to compensate for that loss. At her later moment, Beck does create a convincing stylistic analogue that gives a glimpse of the formal features of the Umbrian texts, and the various archaisms do signal the historical remoteness of the poems. This historicizing effect is produced by the archaic lexical and syntactical items in her English (other examples include “fray,” “foeman,” and “If thou canst pink me openly”), as well as the use of a medieval Latin word, “Jubilus,” signifying an exultant shout.
The analogy with the eighteenth-century hymn, once perceived by the reader, results in a translation that possesses greater historical depth than a quaint pastiche. In effect, Beck’s stylistic analogue invests Jacopone’s poetry with considerable cultural value in English: it positions him in a popular poetic tradition that has long supported religious worship. At the same time, however, the formal and thematic differences between Jacopone’s laude and the hymns remain sufficiently clear in the translations to invite the reader to think differently, more searchingly, of both poetries. Because Wesley’s hymns contain so many phrases taken from canonical poets such as Milton, Dryden, and Pope, because he expressed his own literary aspirations in claiming that his hymns reveal “the true spirit of poetry,”14 the stylistic analogue can point to the secular influence on Jacopone’s poems, the dolcestilnovisti, leading the informed reader to ask whether those poems seemed more literary to the uneducated segment of his contemporary readership than they do today. A reader sensitive to the stylistic analogue might also wonder about the extent to which the extreme states depicted in Jacopone’s poetry, whether the physical coarseness of his asceticism or the psychological imbalance of his mysticism, overshadow the devotional advance offered by the plain, direct language of Wesley’s hymns while calling attention to the fact that their theological content did not deviate from Anglican doctrine. The interpretation enacted by Beck’s translations can be doubly interrogative, posing questions about Jacopone’s poems and about the English-language poetry on which she draws to fashion an analogue.
Her work differs markedly from the first complete version of Jacopone’s laude published in 1982 by Serge and Elizabeth Hughes. Able to benefit from a century of historical scholarship, these translators are more aware of the sheer hybridity of the poetry: in his introduction, Serge Hughes calls it “a rough-textured coat of many colors, with nothing in it of the ideal of seamless beauty.”15 Hughes’s interpretation, however, foregrounds the religious themes, which he describes as “the mottled word of Jacopone, his multifaceted meanings, the twists and turns of his descent into the self, his wrestling with God,” arguing that “the place of music in the Lauds as a whole is that of a humble handmaiden.”16 In accordance with this theme-oriented interpretation, the translation makes no attempt to re-create the formal features of the poems. Hughes in fact feels that Jacopone’s prosody is not consistently effective:
The Lauds are not well served by making rhyme and meter the primary considerations. Indeed, all too often in the original those considerations become the tail that wags the dog. A translation that concentrates on the strength of Jacopone, by contrast, the mottled word, can bring out the muscular texture of that utterance.17
The result of this approach is generally a prosaic rendering in current standard usage. Here are the Hughes versions of the opening lines from the two poems we have examined:
O heart’s jubilation, love and song
Joy and joy unceasing,
The stuttering of the unutterable—
How can the heart but sing?
O Pope Boniface, I bear the marks of your preface—
Anathema, and excommunication.18
These extracts show that the stress on theme doesn’t entirely rule out sound effects, but it does lead the translators to depart from the lineation of the Umbrian texts. It is also clear that they have avoided the creation of a stylistic analogue or any comparable English-language poetry and have chosen an English that is not marked in any distinctive way.
It might be objected, then, that the translation does not reproduce the “muscular texture” of Jacopone’s Umbrian texts, that the English versions lack the linguistic heterogeneity characteristic of his work. In the second extract, moreover, the weakness of the translation is evident in the misleading literalism “preface” to render “prefazio,” an Italian calque for Praefatio, a part of the Mass where the celebrant makes a solemn invocation to introduce the Eucharistic prayer. Jacopone’s use of the liturgical term initiates the satire of his poem: it ironically refers to Boniface’s harsh sentence. The English rendering is obscure and actually exposes rather than compensates for the loss of the medieval context.
Nonetheless, the translators have succeeded in realizing their main intention: to communicate to the late twentieth-century reader the main themes of all the poems attributed with certainty to Jacopone. Their imagined reader does not possess any specialized knowledge of Italian medieval literature and culture, nor does he or she wish more than the basic information about Jacopone’s life and work. As Serge Hughes states, “since this translation is principally an introduction to the Lauds, it has not been weighed down with a detailed commentary.”19 The translation presents Jacopone’s poetry, not as a body of literature that reflects Italian literary traditions and practices at a particular historical moment, but as a document in the history of Christianity which reveals the author’s personal experiences. This presentation was also determined by the conditions under which the translation was published: it was issued by the Paulist Press, an American Catholic publisher operated by an order of missionary priests, and was included in their series, the Classics of Western Spirituality, which contains more than 130 works from various religious traditions. In this context, religious theme is assigned much greater value than literary form.
Today the Beck and Hughes translations, even if effective in their own terms, have come to seem limited, and their very existence has led me to experiment in retranslating Jacopone’s poetry for a different audience at a later moment. Like Beck, I tried to cultivate a stylistic analogue, but mine aimed to suggest precisely the heterogeneity of his language while re-creating his loose, jogtrot meters and his rhyme schemes. This sort of analogue, attuned to formal features but avoiding the plainness and metrical regularity of the eighteenth-century hymn, was designed to inscribe my interpretation of the Umbrian texts as at once literary and popular.
English-language poetic traditions contain useful models in which Jacopone’s work can be recast. I have imagined him partly along the lines of the early Tudor poet John Skelton, who, following medieval literary genres, wrote satires and ballads in language that mixes learned and oral forms. I was particularly attracted to Skelton’s remarkable prosody, in which short, irregularly metered lines are joined to rhyme schemes that vary from stanzaic structures to unpatterned repetitions of sounds. Skelton’s poetry, like Jacopone’s, sometimes adopts a typically medieval attitude of contemptus mundi, pointing to the transitory nature of human life. Here is an extract from a poem “uppon a deedmans head” (c. 1498):
It is generall
To be mortall:
I have well espyde
No man may hym hyde
From deth holow-eyed
With synnews wyderyd [withered]
With bonys shyderyd [shattered]
With hys worme-eatyn maw
And hys gastly jaw
Gapyng asyde
Nakyd of hyde,
Neyther flesh nor fell [skin].20
Skelton’s satires on Tudor courtiers and statesmen were immediately suggestive of Jacopone’s wry epistles to Boniface VIII. Here is a extract from Skelton’s attack on Cardinal Wolsey, “Collyn Clout” (1519):
And yf ye stande in doute
Who brought this ryme aboute,
My name is Collyn Cloute.
I purpose to shake oute
All my connynge bagge,
Lyke a clerkely hagge.
For though my ryme be ragged,
Tattered and jagged,
Rudely rayn-beaten,
Rusty and mothe-eaten,
Yf ye take well therwith,
It hath in it some pyth.21
Skelton’s writing is so strongly marked that a limited imitation might go a long way in a modern translation, might be easily noticeable for readers who have read widely in English poetic traditions. With other, less informed readers, his early modern English and “ragged” prosody, although useful in creating a stylistic analogue for Jacopone’s poems, could not be followed closely without risking unintelligibility. The effect I wanted, moreover, was not merely an archaism that signaled the historical difference of the Umbrian texts, but a heterogeneity through which their various influences and audiences might be perceived. Hence, I also incorporated current usage, both standard and colloquial forms, including clichés.
Translating an archaic poetry, however, is always more complicated than inventing a stylistic analogue because of the inevitable anachronism entailed by the address to a later audience. The task for the translator is perhaps how to control this inevitability, how to turn it to effect in supporting and developing the analogue. Because I am translating Jacopone’s poems at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the infiltration of popular music seems pertinent and unavoidable. Indeed, when I read the Umbrian texts, I often hear not only Skelton, but a rap artist like Eminem, with echoes of his endlessly played hit, “The Real Slim Shady” (2000). Here is an extract:
We ain’t nothing but mammals; well, some of us cannibals
who cut other people open like cantaloupes.
But if we can hump dead camels and antelopes
then there’s no reason that a man and another man can’t elope.
But if you feel like I feel I got the antidote.
Women wave your panty hose, sing the chorus and it goes …
I’m Slim Shady
Yes I’m the real Slim Shady22
In combining colloquial language with varying rhythms and rhymes, rap music offered me another poetic form that can prove helpful in signifying the popular dimension of Jacopone’s poetry.
Still, nothing remains unchanged in fashioning a stylistic analogue. The hybrid I sought also redounds upon the various forms that compose it, exposing and interrogating the differences among them and the cultural situations in which they emerged. The extreme individualism of much rap music, the focus on the typically male singer who is given to chest-thumping machismo, can only be questioned by Jacopone’s mystical asceticism which extols the virtues of penance and self-denial. Similarly, Jacopone’s rejection of the world, his fearless criticisms of a pope, his harsh imprisonment reveal the considerable extent to which Skelton’s privileged position allowed him to mount satiric attacks on government officials. Although at Wolsey’s order Skelton was once imprisoned for a short time, the poet enjoyed a number of distinguished offices and appointments: after serving as rector of a Norfolk parish church, he became tutor to Henry VIII, Poet Laureate, and King’s Orator. Yet Skelton can also come back to worry Jacopone by pointing to his aristocratic status, especially the education and wealth that enabled the Italian poet to write with a knowledge of both secular and religious literary traditions. And when juxtaposed to Jacopone’s poetry, rap, performed by so many artists who began in working-class situations, might pose the question of how many medieval poets were lost to poverty and the absence of patronage.
Of course, these implications can be pursued only by an informed reader who also brings an understanding of the translation method that I have sketched here. This reader was not in the audience for which I first translated Jacopone’s poems: a group of American students who were spending a junior year at the Rome campus of Temple University. This campus attracts a student body from as many as fifty American schools, ranging from elite private institutions to small liberal arts colleges to large public universities. Each semester begins with an outing to Umbria that includes a stop at Todi, where students can visit the church of San Fortunato, the site of Jacopone’s grave. On one such outing I read my translations, along with a brief sketch of Jacopone’s life and my translation method. Very few members of this audience were students of Italian or English literature; none, as I recall, had heard of Jacopone or his poetry. Yet they were all able to grasp the affiliations that the translations tried to construct with rap music.
Will the translations work for an audience of literary scholars and translators who not only have some familiarity with the traditional materials I have used, but can understand (if not accept) the theoretical rationale for my method? This is precisely the question I wish to pose to you, my informed reader, who alone are in a position to answer it.
TWO LAUDE BY JACOPONE DA TODI
TRANSLATED FROM THE UMBRIAN BY LAWRENCE VENUTI
LVI
O papa Bonifazio,
eo porto el tuo prefazio
e la maledezzone
e scommmunicazione.
Co le lengua forcuta
M’hai fatta esta feruta;
che co la lengua ligne
e la plaga ne stigne;
ca questa mia ferita
non pò esser guarita
per altra condezione
senza assoluzïone.
Per grazia te peto
che mi dichi: “Absolveto,”
l’altre pene me lassi
finch’io del mondo passi.
Puoi, se te vol’ provare
e meco essercetare,
non de questa materia,
ma d’altro modo prelia.
Si tu sai sì schirmire
che me sacci ferire,
tengote ben esparto,
sì me fieri a scoperto:
e s’io no i me ne tollo,
per secula infinita
mai non temo ferita.
El primo scudo, sinistro,
l’altro sede al deritto.
Lo sinistro scudato,
un diamante aprovato:
nullo ferro ci aponta,
tanto c’è dura pronta:
e quest’è l’odïo mio,
ionto a l’onor de Dio.
Lo deritto scudone,
d’una preta en carbone,
ignita como foco
d’un amoroso ioco:
lo prossimo en amore
d’uno enfocato ardore.
Si te vòi fare ennante,
puo’lo provar ‘n estante;
e quanto vol’ t’abrenca,
ch’e’ co l’amar non venca.
Volentier te parlara:
credo che te iovara.
Vale, vale, vale,
Deo te tolla onne male
e dielome per grazia,
ch’io el porto en leta fazia.
Finisco la trattato
En questo loco lassato.23
LXXVI
O iubelo de core,
che fai cantar d’amore!
Quanno iubel se scalda,
sì fa l’omo cantare,
e la lengua barbaglia
dentro non pò celare,
tant’è granne ‘l dolzore.
Quanno iubel è acceso,
sì fa l’omo clamare;
lo cor d’amor è appreso,
che nol pò comportare:
stridenno el fa gridare,
e non virgogna allore.
Quanno iubelo ha preso
lo core ennamorato,
la gente l’ha ‘n deriso,
pensanno el suo parlato,
parlanno esmesurato
de che sente calore.
O iubel, dolce gaudio
che dentri ne la mente,
lo cor deventa savior
celar suo convenente:
non pò esser soffrente
che non faccia clamore.
Chi non ha costumanza
te repute ‘mpazzito,
vedenno esvalïanza
com’om ch’è desvanito;
dentr’ha lo cor ferito,
O PAPA BONIFAZIO
My dear Pope Boniface,
I suffer your disgrace,
the dreaded malediction
of excommunication.
You spoke with forkéd tongue
and deeply I was stung:
it has to lick my sore
to show the plague the door;
because I’m sure my grief
can’t find the least relief
without the execution
of your absolution.
Out of grace I beg you,
say, “Ego te absolvo,”
leaving my other fears
till past this vale of tears.
You can test your might
and meet me for a fight—
without the self-same arm
that did me all this harm.
Should you draw the blade
that drove me to this shade,
able I can deem you
but then you must strike true:
the two shields that I bear
will banish every care
if I make them mine
until the end of time.
The shield that’s on the left
never will be cleft:
a diamond truly tested,
it never will be bested:
thus is my self-hate,
to God’s glory conjugate.
The shield that’s on the right,
made of carbuncle bright,
is burning like a flame
of an amorous game:
the same is love thy neighbor
filled with a kindled ardor.
If you wish t’advance,
you’re free to take a chance;
but try howe’er you might,
love won’t lose the fight.
I’d talk when you have leisure:
I think you’ll get some pleasure.
So, fare thee well, fare well,
may God take all your evil
and grant it me for grace,
in pain with a smiling face.
This rhyme I’ve shaken out
and now I’m heading out.
O IUBELO DEL CORE
Heartstruck jubilation,
erotic incantation!
Whenever joy enkindles,
the soul begins to sing,
the tongue is tied in mumbles,
speech doesn’t know a thing:
you can’t keep on hiding
such immense delectation.
Whenever joy is burning,
the soul begins to shout;
with love your heart is yearning
much more it can’t stick out:
you scream, you shriek without
the slightest humiliation.
Whenever joy takes hold
of the heart enamored,
people turn so bold,
mocking how it stammered,
they utter things unmeasured
when it feels the calefaction.
Joy, sweet blissfulness,
the mind is penetrate,
the heart would be sagacious
to conceal its estate:
you can’t hardly obviate
such clamorous exclamation.
Lacking this experience,
people judge you insane,
seeing your divergence
like a man grown vain;
but within your heart is pain,
undetected by observation.
Notes
1. Eugene A. Nida, Toward a Science of Translating, With Special Reference to Principles and Procedures Involved in Bible Translating (Leiden: Brill, 1964), 158.
2. David Anderson, Pound’s Cavalcanti: An Edition of the Translations, Notes, and Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 250.
3. Anderson, Pound’s Cavalcanti, 251.
4. Anderson, Pound’s Cavalcanti, 250.
5. See Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 165–78.
6. Rosanna Bettarini, “Jacopone da Todi e le laude,” in Cesare Segre and Carlo Ossola, eds., Antologia dela poesia italiana: Duecento (Torino: Einaudi, 1997), 284–90.
7. Evelyn Underhill, Jacopone da Todi, Poet and Mystic—1228–1306: A Spiritual Biography (London: J. M. Dent, 1919), vi.
8. Underhill, Jacopone da Todi, 212, 217.
9. Underhill, Jacopone da Todi, 279.
10. John Wesley, A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists, ed. Franz Hildebrandt, Oliver A. Beckerlegge, and James Dale, vol. 7 in The Works of John Wesley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 503.
11. Underhill, Jacopone da Todi, 441.
12. Wesley, A Collection of Hymns, 487.
13. L. C. Willcox, “A Famous Mystic of the 13th Century,” New York Times (April 11, 1920), BR166.
14. Wesley, A Collection of Hymns, 74.
15. Serge Hughes and Elizabeth Hughes, eds. and trans., Jacopone da Todi: The Lauds (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), 3.
16. Hughes, Jacopone da Todi, 4, 3.
17. Hughes, Jacopone da Todi, 64.
18. Hughes, Jacopone da Todi, 227, 177.
19. Hughes, Jacopone da Todi, 65.
20. John Skelton, The Complete English Poems, ed. V. J. Scattergood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 39.
21. Skelton, The Complete English Poems, 248.
22. Eminem, The Marshall Mathers LP (Interscope Records, 2000).
23. Gianfranco Contini, ed., Poeti del Duecento, vol. 2 (Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi, 1960), 69–70.
24. Contini, Poeti del Duecento, 105–107.
