Reviving Maria
d’Arezzo, Presidentessa Dada
Stet? • Olivia E. Sears • April 23, 2015
Translation may be the invisible art, but the
translator's mission is precisely to bring visibility to a work of literature,
and at times to rescue an author from obscurity. This is especially true when
translating Italian women writers of the past who struggled for visibility even
within their own culture.
In a recent interview,
Elena Ferrante, the renowned (though anonymous) contemporary author of a series
of novels about Naples, has said that she writes under a pseudonym so that the
focus of attention will remain on her books—in which she writes intimately
about women's lives—and not on "some writer-hero.” While she has attained
remarkable prominence in a short time, her work revolves around women who
struggle to find their place in society. And yet in the Italian press there has
been a persistent rumor that Elena Ferrante is in fact the pseudonym of a
successful male novelist, perpetuating the search for the writer-hero, presumed
to be male.
Maria d'Arezzo, an Italian woman writer who lived and wrote in Naples a hundred
years ago, also chose to write under a pseudonym (though her motivations for
doing so are lost to history). In 1917, Dada founder and poet Tristan Tzara
traveled to Naples to recruit this poet, little known outside Italy, to his
movement. Despite d'Arezzo's assertions of creative independence, Tzara
conferred on her the title of Presidentessa Dada in Paris and presented her
poem “Volata” ("Flight") at his Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The Dada
movement included numerous women (and présidentes), but when d'Arezzo
made her international debut in the pages of the legendary Dada Almanach
(Berlin, 1920)—the volume that collected the works of Tzara and his circle—her
poem ultimately proved to be the only work by a woman to appear in the
anthology.
Tonight I am everything and I
am made of nothing—
I have even forgotten my name—
Born Maria Cardini in 1890, she published her debut volume of poetry in 1913
(under her given name) but soon thereafter confessed that she no longer
recognized herself in its fairly conventional style. Adopting her nom de plume
(Arezzo being the city of her birth), she began to ally herself with the
avant-garde journals of the time, serving as editor of Le pagine, and in
1918 published Scia [Wake], a book closer in spirit to the Dada
avant-garde, with flashes of near-Futurist dynamism, unusual metaphors,
synesthesia, and occasional syntactical experimentation.
And yet, within the span of a few short years, by the age of thirty, she had
completely abandoned creative writing and dedicated herself to translation. Her
entire poetic career had flown by in a kind of fevered sprint—what in Italian
is referred to as a volata, the kind of thing that leaves a wake (scia).
As it happens, movement (or stagnation) and escape (or confinement) were
d'Arezzo's major poetic concerns, and her work is imbued with a spirit of
restlessness. The titles of the two poems from Scia translated in APS
22—"Andante" (1916) and "Volata" (1917)—are words of
movement also used in music. Andante—from the verb andare, to go
or walk—is used as an adjective in Italian to mean affable (for people), cheap
(for quality), or simple (for style)—all with a generally easygoing
connotation. But outside of Italy, andante had long ago been adopted in
music as a tempo marking—defined as a walking pace—so a listener seeing a
musical movement labeled andante would expect to hear music that is
neither too fast nor too slow. Instead, d'Arezzo immediately follows her title
with the startling opening statement: "I would not be surprised to find I
am dead." She continues:
I feel so distant so dead so
at peace
while the hours slide by, silent...
She interprets this steady sliding pace as a "ritmo d'immobilita,"
a rhythm of stillness or immobility. By contrast, the title of the second poem,
"Volata" (from volare, to fly), conveys speed. In its original
meaning, volata refers to a flock of birds in flight, but it is commonly
used to describe a sprint or a rush. Volata is also a term used in
music—a fast run of notes—but not widely, and generally not outside of Italy.
Hence, in the translation, "andante" had to stay and "volata"
had to go. The poem "Flight" incorporates a number of phrases from
languages other than Italian, and in the translation I largely preserved the
kaleidoscope, as it is native to much avant-garde poetry of the time. Most of
the phrases from French and German—which serve mostly for style and sound, as
part of the whirlwind of the poem—would be familiar enough to readers.
The only non-Italian phrase I translated was "bleu cendre"
because the ashen blue is an important detail in itself, contrasting the
narrator with the statue of the Madonna. The narrator's blue tunic is ample
like the open sky in contrast to the small, rigid image of the Madonna—who
always appears dressed in blue in Italian iconography, and is inextricably
associated with the color—stuck in the hard vault of her "heaven." In
"Flight," d'Arezzo sets up the opposition of free flight versus a
fixed ideal, a ceramic beauty, embedded in the "duro cielo"
(hard sky) of the ceiling. She imagines herself rising out of a preordained
destiny to soar up, alive and growing, like a rose. And yet the rose is fragile
("sottile"); the statue is secure in its place, while the rose
must try to find its bearings. D'Arezzo is explicitly writing about the
conflict faced by a woman, but by invoking flight—a particular obsession among
Italian Futurist poets of the time, who idolized machines and symbols of
freedom—she engages in the larger poetic conversation. A well-known 1915 poem
by Ardengo Soffici, a panegyric to the airplane and the rapture of flight
("Aeroplano"), names dozens of colors of blue in its ecstatic
description of the "firmament" and describes the largest stars as
roses. D'Arezzo's poem might well have been a response to this and the many
other contemporary paeans to flight, with her own unique twist.
Rather than the prevalent yearning to fly, D'Arezzo articulates a more specific
desire: to flee. In “Flight,” she grapples with the longstanding dichotomy
endemic to the Italian view of women: one is either "Madonna"
(virgin, mother—or, better yet, virgin mother) or "whore." However,
here the confinement of the little ceramic statue of the Madonna (a "madonnina,"
the diminutive) is contrasted not with the fate of a fallen and failed woman
but rather with one who will fly free:
I
have wings—
but I could also set myself like a little white
madonna in that hard
sky of blue tile shining above—
The ceiling is a hard sky where the statue perches even higher than a pedestal,
and where it is mounted, immobile. (A side note here about the verb "incastonare":
normally used for tile and gems that are mounted, set, or encrusted, d'Arezzo
makes the verb reflexive, which limits one's choices in English. I had to
reject "I could mount myself there.")
Numerous poems throughout Scia revolve around the theme of escape. In
“Certain Domestic Evenings,” the narrator depicts herself “with the soul of a
predator in a sparrow's nest ... coming home to the order of life with a soul
in rebellion—and sitting down calmly when we really want to dance strangle
smash.” (The shift to the first person plural might be read as a statement
about how common this feeling is among bourgeois women of the time.) In
"Unmoorings," the first line consists of a single word standing
alone: "Fuggire." ("Escape.")
D'Arezzo's work is characterized by the intense ambivalence and ambiguity of
the boundaries between soul and body, freedom and constraint, love and
violence. For the translator, the challenge is to maintain the youthful voice
of a poet focused on the urgency of music and expression as well as that ineluctable
tension—the recurring "si e no" ("yes and no") of
the indecisive trees that paralyze her, the sense of being at once
"everything and made of nothing" ("tutto e fatta di nulla").
Whether or not d'Arezzo's poems reveal anything about the poet's own experience,
they often describe someone (the poetic "I") caught between the
expectations of bourgeois Catholic women (even those who are privileged and
well-educated) in early twentieth-century Naples and what lies
elsewhere—perhaps the dynamic world of avant-garde literature, with Tzara and
his Dada compatriots, or perhaps along another path.
As with Dadaism, d'Arezzo flirted with Futurist poetics, but never embraced the
movement, likely in part due to one of the central precepts laid out in the
Futurist manifesto: the destruction of the poetic "I." As critic
Cecilia Bello Minciacchi has noted (in her invaluable collection of Futurist
women writers that has served to revive so many voices), d'Arezzo's
self-perception at the emotional and psychological level seems to proceed from
the physical, sensory level; the inner conflict that infuses her work plays out
in the physical world. And while many of the best-known Futurist poems focused
on machines, and particularly the revolutionary airplane, d'Arezzo's "Flight"
is organic—the wings are her own, a part of herself, allowing the poetic
"I" to soar.
D’Arezzo: Two
Poems
Poetry • Maria d’Arezzo
Translated from the Italian by Olivia E. Sears
ANDANTE
It would not surprise me to find I am dead—
as my soul is full of sweet things
I never found in life.
The trees down there say yes and no, yes and no—
and the sky is like a distant kiss—
I must remain silent to understand, and make myself understood—
I will not break the rhythm of this stillness with a gesture, no—
tonight I am everything and I am made of nothing—
I have even forgotten my name—
and I cross my white hands, in themselves a prayer—
maybe I imagine a kiss that is meant for me—
and I too say yes and no yes and no like the trees
yes and no, yes and no my whole life without moving from here—
I feel like some old portrait of an unknown Florentine—
I have those white hands and that faded smile—
and I feel so distant so dead so at peace
while the hours slide by, silent in silk slippers on the carpet of time.
FLIGHT
in
the sun
(the
first sun after days and days of unending rain)
I
as
one alive and drunk on the fresh air burrowing indiscreetly into
my collar and my cuffs—
have
an uncommonly vigilant sense of this subtle body
bundle
of nerves vibrating elastically à son aise in this ample tunic
of ashen blue—
the
sun fans out a golden halo on my head, as in the holy pictures
of saints—
I
have wings—
but
I could also set myself like a little white madonna in that hard
sky of blue tile shining above—
by
now far beyond all my troubles: today I am truly me—
my
face with its red mouth on the top of this agile body soars up
and leans towards possibility, just as a rose soars up and finds its bearings on
the top of its stalk—
my
friend, seize the moment, put out your hands and catch me—
I
have slain all my troubles because I am me—
to
hell with the selbstbespiegelung and all other sophistry—
je
veux vivre, j’ai seulement une envie folle de vivre—
—voilà
tout—
Olivia E. Sears is founder of the Center for the Art of Translation and the
journal Two Lines, which she edited for more than a decade.
She has published translations of both modern and Renaissance Italian poetry.
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