Giovanni Pascoli Myricae Translations in English
I attended college at The Ohio State University, where I graduated with Bachelors degrees in English and Italian. My senior year I worked on a self-study course where the sole purpose was to translate 20 of Giovanni Pascoli’s poems. It has been 7 years since I translated these poems, but felt it was time to make them publicly available so that others could explore the works of Pascoli.
Giovanni Pascoli was a 19th century poet who lived in Tuscany, Italy for a good portion of his life. I chose to translate Pascoli because I felt he wrote beautiful, approachable and sometimes adolescent poems that captured the peasant life of rural Italy. It often juxtaposed the excitement and fear of the effects of the industrial revolution on his homeland. I focused my endeavors on translating selected poems from Myricae; in particular the chapters Le pene del poeta and L’ultima passeggiata, as well as the poems Novembre and Orfano.
Translating poetry is terribly challenging. A successful translator will do his or her best to translate each word, while at the same time mimicking syllable counts (e.g. rewriting endecasyllibo lines into iambic pentameter), alliteration and rhyme in order to capture the various minutiae that makes each poem sing. But as I am sure you are well aware, Italian and English are quite dissimilar; Italian floats off the tongue like a song dancing from cloud to cloud, while English can often sound like you’re banging rocks together. It is no easy feat for a translator to mimic a poem in another language, and at times he or she will make certain sacrifices in the translation in order to carry out the poem’s meaning.
In these translations, I focused primarily on attaining the proper translation of each poem, with a slightly lesser focus on matching each poem’s sound. I strove to write in blank verse, and believing that end rhymes are too constraining, I used internal rhyme when possible, but not if it adversely affected the poem’s meaning. In these translations, I do my best to honor Pascoli’s voice, and hope my efforts come across as such:
Giovanni Pascoli: Myricae Translations in English
I am especially grateful for the mentoring of Dr. Charles Klopp throughout this process.
