Posts featuring Eugenio Montale

The Sea Will Dream In My Ears: Megumi Moriyama on Recasting Virginia Woolf into Japanese and Spiral Translation

September 18, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Translation can never be just a flat movement between two points, merely returning to its origins.

Japanese poet, critic, and translator Megumi Moriyama has so far worked on metamorphosing Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) into the Japanese and on a ‘back translation’ of Arthur Waley’s poetic rendition of the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, in collaboration with her sister, haiku poet and critic Marie Mariya, published by Sayusha. As a poet, Megumi confesses that even her original poems in Japanese are layered with translation across varying texts within and outside her native language. Of her forthcoming poetry collection, she told me, “Perhaps you might say that through translation, I have made a journey into the depths of Japanese language.”

In this interview, I spoke with Megumi, currently in Tokyo, on rendering Virginia Woolf and Waley’s The Tale of Genji into the Japanese; how spiral translation goes beyond back-translations; and the new-age scene of literary translation in Japan.

Author headshot courtesy of Benjamin Parks.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): You translated Virginia Woolf’s experimental classic The Waves into the Japanese as Nami (2021), published by Hayakawa. Could you speak about your process in rendering a 1931 polyphonic novel set in England by a prose writer known for her stream of consciousness narrative mode with the modern-day Japanophone readership in mind? I heard there was so much hype about it, especially on Japanese book Twitter, as it was the first translation of this novel in almost 50 years.

Megumi Moriyama (MM): The new translation of The Waves was welcomed much more enthusiastically than I had expected. When I posted the announcement on social media, it went viral. And after the publication, the book was immediately put into reprint.

I studied Virginia Woolf as a student, and The Waves was one of my favorites of hers, but I never thought I would have the opportunity to translate it. It was thanks to social media that I got the chance. I tweeted very casually that I was interested in translating The Waves, an editor took notice of it, and the project became a reality.

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The Story as Experience: Oonagh Stransky and Marla Moffa on Eugenio Montale’s Butterfly of Dinard

June 20, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

[A]s ephemeral, beautiful, and delicate as these stories are, they are firmly grounded in history. . .

In Butterfly of Dinard, the great poet Eugenio Montale leads the reader up to numinous looking points along the towers of everyday experience, pointing us towards an innate sublimity and magic—how individual vision and experience can strike pedestrian sceneries with an extraordinary intensity of meaning. Originally published as columns in the Corriere della Sera, fifty of these stories have been translated with extraordinary care and finesse by Marla Moffa and Oonagh Stransky, and in this interview, they speak to us about the affinity between Montale’s prose and poetry, the revelations of translation, and how such stories travel from the page into personal realities, deepening and celebrating the spaces, people, and objects that—if looked at closely—“reveal a great truth.”

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): I wanted to start with asking you both about the crossings between Montale’s poems and his prose works. What do both of you consider Butterfly of Dinard to be saying to us on its own? Is there an independent author to be found, or should we read his prose as dialogic with his poetry?

Marla Moffa (MM): I would say that there are various symbols in the poems that we can also find in the stories. Considering that he wrote Butterfly of Dinard when he was in his fifties—after the two main volumes of poetry, Cuttlefish Bones and The Occasions, and concurrently with The Storm and Other Things—it’s as if he’s regrouping in these stories everything that we find in the poems as well.

For example, as Jonathan Galassi points out in the introduction, Montale speaks about the eels in the story “The Best Is Yet to Come,” and just at the mention of the word eel on the menu for the protagonist, the narrator has this flashback, because the eels represented something special in his youth. There’s also the poem “L’anguilla / The Eel” in Montale’s poetry, which is one of his most important poems. It’s interesting to be able to read the two pieces in parallel, but at the same time, I feel like the stories are independent. If you don’t know his poetry, and you just read Butterfly of Dinard, you can still enter into Montale’s world. He even says himself that if one wants to know his story, that this is the book to read, because it is quite autobiographical.

Oonagh Stransky (OS): I agree with what Marla said, and the only thing I would add is that one of the things that appeals to me most about these stories is really the element of humour—the self-deprecating humour and irony. As in his poetry, there are moments of existential crisis, of gaps and sudden shocks, but there is also a delight in life, and a delightfulness that he attributes to so many different things. The nostalgia towards his past is one aspect of it, but I also like how he talks about himself—how he describes this figure, who may represent himself, as bumbling and Chaplin-esque, as Galassi calls it. It opens up new windows onto Montale the man, and who this very mysterious and obscure Nobel-winning poet was. Here we see him as a man in slippers, with a turban on his head, holding a rug up to scare away a bat—all those things are elements that allow the reader to feel more familiar with him. READ MORE…

Announcing Our May Book Club Selection: Butterfly of Dinard by Eugenio Montale

May 30, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

These stories are a spatial message; they tell of living amongst, and in this way, they belong to everyone.

In the fifty short stories that make up Butterfly of Dinard, the great lyric poet Eugenio Montale turns to prose to inscribe the world that moves the psyche to its most extraordinary heights. As one of the most inviting additions to a remarkable oeuvre, the collection moves from mystery to comedy, from reminiscence to fantasy, taking the reader on excursions and immersions, introducing an Italy grasped in historical and personal material alike. The Montale admirer will find motifs that correspond with his most famed poems, and anyone new to the writer will find an assured, perceptive voice, dedicated to documenting the most curious and complex intersections of our social reality. Reissued now by New York Review Books in an updated translation from Oonagh Stransky and Marla Moffa, and with an illuminating introduction by Jonathan Galassi, we are delighted to introduce Butterfly of Dinard as our Book Club selection for the month.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Butterfly of Dinard by Eugenio Montale, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky and Marla Moffa, New York Review Books, 2024

After the walkman came into common use, a reporter in the Nouvel Observateur did a self-directed study on its effects, going around and asking its users if they considered themselves psychotic or schizophrenic. Clearly, the world of music had grown a new frontier. There would be communal listening, through the radio or some other form of public broadcasting, and solo listening; one could have a personal sonic timeline, running separately—though parallel—with the rest of the world’s sounds. Since then, we’ve only found new and improved ways to insulate ourselves from the social environment, so when a friend and I took a rental car around Los Angeles a month ago, I hadn’t heard the radio in probably a decade. When we turned it on, running through station after station, I catalogued the brief soundbites of the local airwaves—jockey banter, garbled trap, Christian rock, upbeat grupera. That frenetic soundscape accordioned over the brushed hills and highway traffic, and we synced to it, suddenly adopted into the city’s musical timestream as insiders. After a little while, we stopped at a light, and I looked to the car beside me. I couldn’t hear what the driver was listening to, but the taps of his fingers hit the exact same beats as those from our radio.

Music, and its innate potential for disrupting separation, was on my mind while reading Eugenio Monatle’s Butterfly of Dinard, a collection of prose pieces first published in the daily Corriere della Sera. The newspaper, similar to the radio, is a halfway-abandoned arena of public consciousness—a gathering place where people can experience the same thing at relatively the same time, and be joined, if not in opinion, then in engagement. But the days in which radically dissonant lives and perspectives could be unified via song or text are largely gone; though the cultural artifacts themselves are more proliferate than ever, we meet them on terms that are ever more individualised, ever more catered to the psychic patterns that we build, alone. Passing through Montale’s slice-of-life writings, some tell stories of the past, some follow the mania of dreams, but running through all of them is a sense that they are being told in the textual version of the town square—meant for all to hear, no matter if you are sat in the audience or just passing through. These stories are a spatial message; they tell of living amongst, and in this way, they belong to everyone. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2024

May 13, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Danielle Pieratti and Sarah Gear

New titles from Italy and Colombia!

In a fecund month of new translations, our editors select two phenomenal titles: a collection of the later poems by the acclaimed Eugenio Montale, and an intimate epistolary fiction leading readers to a seldom-seen region of Colombia. 

Late Montale – New York Review Books

Late Montale by Eugenio Montale, translated from the Italian by George Bradley, New York Review Books, 2024

Review by Danielle Pieratti, Poetry Editor

“The world exists,” declared Eugenio Montale in the poem “Wind and Flags” from his first book, Cuttlefish Bones, published in 1925 (translated by Jonathan Galassi). Given the frank, existential agnosticism that governs the poet’s later work, it feels a little like whiplash to return to this otherwise characteristically subtle poem after reading Late Montale. Translated from the Italian by George Bradley, this collection comprises Montale’s published and unpublished poems from the second half of his life, offering glimpses of the poet first in the period of his Nobel win and later, as an increasingly reflective and skeptical widower. Yet ultimately, Montale seems to arrive where he began. “Unarguably / something must exist,” he writes in an unpublished poem at the end of his life,

But with [regard to] this,
science, philosophy, theology (red or black)
have all misfired.

If this isn’t faith,
O men of the altar or the microscope,
then go f. yourselves.

Given that these works range from the 1960s to his death in 1981, the fact that Montale circles back to this revelation bears noting. While his underlying ironies and symbolism persist, there’s a definitive “shift from formality to intimacy and self-revelation,” Bradley writes in his introduction, which “parallels the course of twentieth century poetry as a whole”. In poems taken from Satura, first published eight years after the 1963 death of his wife Drusilla Tanzi, Montale retains his characteristic imagery and density, but his focus has drifted from the tangible nature symbolism of his earlier works to more abstract questions of grief befitting an older poet experiencing loss. Many of the poems speak to memory and to individuals from Montale’s past, including several from two long sequences addressed to Tanzi. Others allude frequently to Montale’s former life as an opera singer. Indeed, the tension between then and now pervades Late Montale, and the poet’s apparent scorn for the passing of time lends a hint of tragedy to poems increasingly pensive and raw. “We were two lives too young to be old but too old to feel we were young,” he writes to Tanzi in “Lake Sorapis, 40 Years Ago”, which ends:

That’s when we learned what aging is.
Nothing to do with time, it’s something that tells us,
that makes us tell ourselves: “Here we are,
it’s a miracle and won’t come again.” By comparison
youth is the most contemptible of illusions.

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Asymptote Podcast: Blackness Revisited

October 12, 2018  |  in Multimedia, Podcast  |  by Layla Benitez-James

2018 MacArthur Genius John Keene on how translation underlies all artistic pursuit

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“All art, all artistic production, entails the base of this word translation, a carrying over…”

In this latest edition of the Asymptote Podcast, we sit down with translator and writer John Keene on the heels of the tremendous news of his MacArthur Genius Award. Author of Annotations and Counternarratives, Keene was longlisted for the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for his translation from the Portuguese of Hilda Hilst’s Letters from a Seducer. But it was his essay Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness which inspired a panel at the most recent AWP Conference as well as our June podcast, so we wanted to get insight straight from the source. Join us as we talk about how translation carries over into a writer’s creative life, how English still holds powerful sway over writers working in other languages, and much much more! Listen to our latest podcast now!

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In Conversation: Christopher Merrill, Director of The International Writing Program

November 29, 2017  |  in Interviews  |  by Claire Jacobson

What persists through every job I have held...is my love of reading and writing, which at every turn has helped me to navigate my time here below

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are
     with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I
     translate into a new tongue.

—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

This is perhaps the most appropriate introduction to Christopher Merrill, the award-winning poet and translator from Slovenian and Korean who directs the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa. Gifted with a style that frequently combines, as Kirkus Reviews called it, “Merrill-the-poet’s gorgeous writing, and Merrill-the-reporter’s sharp eye,” he has risen to greater international prominence in part through his involvement with the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO and extensive cultural diplomacy engagement all over the world.

In his recent memoir Self-Portrait with Dogwood, Merrill writes: “The invention of language made possible what we imagine to comprise human experience, for good or ill—agriculture, warfare, religion, government, poetry, philosophy, art, and science, not to mention the emotions that drive individuals, societies, and civilizations. Long ago, under a tree, we learned to express ourselves in a new key, building structures of meaning word by word, phrase by phrase, alert to the necessities of living, to the varieties of love and grief, to the mysteries of faith, quirks of nature, and consolations of storytelling… The musical possibilities encoded in language expanded our understanding of the worlds without and within, giving birth to poetry—and so much more.”

Claire Jacobson: Can you tell me how you got started writing poetry, and translating, and being involved in the international writing community? Basically, what is the origin story of Christopher Merrill?

Christopher Merrill: A writer’s origin story may change over time, especially if the writer’s life takes many forms, as mine has. Thus at different points along the way I have dated the beginning of my literary vocation to a love affair; a serious illness at the age of twenty-four; working as a war correspondent in the Balkans; making pilgrimages on the Holy Mountain of Athos; and so on. But the most enduring story is that as a teenager in New Jersey I wanted to be a soccer player and a poet: two career paths that did not sit well with my parents—which only enhanced their appeal. When I matriculated at Middlebury College, where I was recruited to play soccer and intended to be a French major, I had the good luck to take a poetry workshop with the novelist Thomas Gavin, who became a lifelong friend; his encouragement inspired me to serve what turned into an unusual literary apprenticeship, which included stints as a graduate student, nurseryman, college soccer coach, caretaker, bookstore clerk, director of writers’ conferences, and freelance journalist. What persists through every job I have held, each of which I viewed as a gift regardless of the pay or working conditions, is my love of reading and writing, which at every turn has helped me to navigate my time here below.

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Translator Profile: Jennifer Scappettone

November 13, 2017  |  in Interviews, Translator's Profile  |  by Allegra Rosenbaum and Jennifer Scappettone

The notion of a unitary, homogenous, and monolingual “America” is as much an alternative fact as Spicer’s attendance numbers at the inauguration.

Former Asymptote blog editor Allegra Rosenbaum interviews translator and scholar Jennifer Scappettone, whose profile appeared in our Winter 2016 issue. Her translation of Italian poet Milli Graffi was featured on the Asymptote blog last week and her translation of F. T. Marinetti’s futurist poetry appeared in our Spring 2016 issue. 

Who are you? What do you translate? (This is just a preliminary question! To be taken with an existential grain of salt.)

I am a poet and scholar of American and Italian nationalities who grew up in New York, across the street from a highly toxic landfill redolent of the family’s ancestral zone outside of Naples (laced with illegal poisonous dumps). I translate Fascists and anti-Fascists; Italian feminists and a single notorious misogynist; inheritors of Futurism and the historical avant-garde; and contemporary poets who are attempting to grapple with the millennial burden of the “Italian” language by channeling or annulling voices from Saint Francis through autonomia.

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