Ottavio Fatica is a poet and translator. He has translated, among other things, the Diaries of Byron, the Notebooks of Henry James, the Limericks of Edward Lear, the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, and then De Quincey, Stevenson, Jack London, Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, and most lately Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. He has received major literary prizes for his translations (Mondello, Monselice, Procida, Isola d’Arturo – Elsa Morante), including the Italian National Prize for Translation.

 

We are at the [fourth] and last [volume of Belli], confirms the translator. For a total of 429 sonnets, a quantity quite unmatched in the field of Belli translation. And all or them mirroring the metrical and rhyme scheme, etc. of the original. Thirty of them discarded simply because he found the scheme irreproducible. Everything lay in finding the register in a phrase: one voice for each sonnet, each time different in terms of walk of life, environment, tone, spirit, a choice pursued consistently though diametrically opposed, in “harmony and contrast”, to that of the author. So we meet Irish and cockneys, Jewish EastEnders, thugs from Birmingham or Leeds, Scottish toughs, etc. One might say with some approximation that Sullivan follows the foundling Sloppy of ‘Our Mutual Friend’, he give(s) Mrs Hidgen the Police news in different voices, with the more or less Eliotique consequences of the case.

 

A master in the manipulation of lists, very difficult if not impossible sometimes to reproduce in another language, Belli has found a worthy rival in Sullivan, and this not in rare but in many cases; each volume presents a half-dozen or more lists reinvented out of whole cloth; among the most successful, or only favourites, worth mention are 102, 741 and 1931 respectively in the first, second and third volumes. And speaking of inventiveness one cannot pass over in silence some at least of the many verbal inventions, the outcome of the injudicious mating of small or unintentional misunderstanding of high-flown words and a stubborn will and pleasure in dragging them down, characteristic of underclasses. I limit myself to mentioning divulve(d) (for sficò) in ‘Pope Joan’ 279; mortitude (for mortissime, moltissime) in ‘Lot outdoors’ 349; ’ollowghost (for ojocaustico, olocausto) in ‘The Sacrifice of Abram’ 757, and I could go on: St Froid 673(made the patron of malign indifference)and lifesty 783 – but I must stop somewhere. And when Belli’s line was too short for the English scheme he had to invent and insert something fitting: albatrocities 133 and sillypollables 1294 are good examples of this risk-taking.

 

Who knows whether in the dying world whence Sullivan also comes quotation is still a vice, unchastened as the one which created it: reading, and the national vice. He practices it with discrimination, with largesse when required; I would say with taste in the usual sense, of course, but also in that intended by Hazlitt with gusto. A case in point occurs in the sonnet ‘Death an’ after’ 2170, where the penultimate line of the octave, the Fisc pursue takes up the audenary yet unbreakable tax chain of one of W.H.’s poems, ‘The Fall of Rome’. And what do we find, hidden in broad daylight in the first verse of ‘The girl’s dream 2’ if not the celebrated play that Sebastian Knight doses out with futile cruelty to his secretary in the Nabokov novel named after him?

 

Since this is not the place for an in-depth reading of individual texts, I shall only make a brief dip into a sonnet that, just going by the title, contains more than one secret: ‘On the sly’ 1828. In the second quatrain comes a quote from Shakespeare’s ‘The Winter’s Tale’ that paddling palms and pinching fingers that exasperates Leontes’ jealousy, and in the next line we have comin’ through the rye, a famous ballad attributed to Robert Burns, a seemingly simple text, and yet the subject of a thousand different interpretations, perhaps the most amusing that in ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, which makes Holden an interpreter sui generis. But treading on that comes an’ all the nosies knows is: does that not sound a bit like Moses supposes His toeses are roses but Moses supposes erroneously of film memory? And we get to the grand finale, to this jug-jugglery. How not to think of the jug jug to dirty ears of ‘The Waste Land’ (in the second section, ‘The Game of Chess’)? Jug, song of the nightingale rather than the lark for the Elizabethans, to a dirty cast of mind will suggest fiddling with big tits, jiggly jugs, like that passa e cammina of the original, explained by Belli in a note: a phrase used by conjurers in passing one or more balls from one cup to another, (http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/frith/paintings/7.jpg) in short, sleight of hand, a skin-game: jugglery, of course, and what a lark: but more than a lark, a true pleasure in the hands of the translator-juggler.

 

Between the fifth and the third century the Roman plebs, in an attempt to gain equal rights with the patricians, more than once closed up shop and workshop and abandoned the city en masse to retreat to the Aventine, thus preventing the convening of the military levy: this was the secessio plebis. Belli gave a voice to the Roman plebs: a secessio also, if you will – an undisguised claim to equal artistic rights with patrician literature? It is a possible, passable if unauthorised version of the indefatigable underground workings of a poet poised between Victor Hugo and Emily Dickinson, between the light and shade of an immense monumentality and the suffocating and stifled silence of a dungeon. Whereas the populace that ranges under the eye of Sullivan is everywhere: every London borough, every city and town of the realm, every race, class, club, diocese and decile falls under the heading pleb: princes and prelates, VIPs and spivs, politicians and publicans, nippies and celebrities, bankrupts and brokers, footballers and footmen, the living and dead, and all who dwells in betweens – all serfs. The world is mud, as we know, and vain the shovel’s work, unless by mud were meant clay...

 

Ottavio Fatica