{"id":1844,"date":"2016-08-07T15:23:47","date_gmt":"2016-08-07T14:23:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nanopausa.com\/?p=1844"},"modified":"2016-08-07T15:23:47","modified_gmt":"2016-08-07T14:23:47","slug":"on-writing-and-translating-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nanopausa.com\/it\/on-writing-and-translating-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"On writing and translating poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Translating poetry is, by definition, the hardest\u00a0of all.\u00a0In the same way as you need a writer to translate fiction, so you need a poet to translate poetry.<\/p>\n

Over the years I’ve\u00a0had times\u00a0when I mostly wrote poems –\u00a0on top of\u00a0non fiction. Strangely enough, these were not my teenage years. I hated poems then. And I hated poems by teenagers. I thought they were full of clich\u00e9s. I promised myself I’d never write a teenage poem.<\/p>\n

It was later,\u00a0especially as I discovered contemporary narrative poetry<\/a>, as in the case of\u00a0Raymond Carver<\/strong>, Charles Bukowski<\/strong> and my beloved Wislawa Szymborska<\/strong>, that I realised poetry could be a genre I could really fall in love with. At last, I was reading poems that\u00a0touched my heart. Perhaps this was also due to the fact I read these poets by choice. Nothing to do with high school obligations and the older versions of narrative poetry, such as epics and ballads.<\/p>\n

I wrote my first poem at 27, I believe. It was an ode to three full stops, written in Italian.<\/p>\n

I’ve mostly written poems in Italian. Rarely in English. I’ve tried to translate my poems myself, but found it hard. And this even though I do translate, that’s what pays a most\u00a0of my bills in fact. Plus I was the author and translator of the same piece, which meant I could bend the text as much as I wanted with no risk of offending the author.\u00a0That’s heaven, when it comes to translating\u00a0poetry.<\/p>\n

However, the results were never satisfying, both as an author and as a translator. Recently, though, I found a call for poems by a new literary magazine. They were looking for bilingual authors, bilingual works. I have no idea whether my poem will be published in the end but I know this time, instead of writing the poem in Italian, I decided to write it in English first. The Italian translation followed, and this time, for some reason, it was easier. I guess this\u00a0is due to the very fact I’ve mostly written poems in Italian, so far, so\u00a0it seems natural that I feel more at ease, and hence bending the language so as to get a similar musicality is simpler.\u00a0This doesn’t happen when I write\u00a0fiction. Even less so when I write non fiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Translating poetry is, by definition, the hardest\u00a0of all.\u00a0In the same way as you need a writer to translate fiction, so you need a poet to translate poetry. Over the years…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1847,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[412,409,411,410],"yoast_head":"\nOn writing and translating poetry — Slawka G. Scarso<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Some thoughts on writing and translating poetry, especially when you're both the author and translator. 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