FROM WOUNDS TO EYES TO BUDS: Giorgia Meriggi reviews Franca Mancinelli’s All the Eyes that I Have Opened
All the Eyes that I Have Opened
Franca Mancinelli (translated by John Taylor)
Black Square Editions
ISBN: 978-0-9997028-9-5
246pp
Since November 2017, John Taylor and Franca Macinelli have carried on a dialogue that has enabled the American poet, critic, and translator to follow the development, from its inception, of Tutti gli occhi che ho aperto (Marcos y Marcos 2020), the fourth and most recent book written by the Fano-based Italian author. A selection of texts translated by Taylor appeared in the Journal of Italian Translation (vol. XIII, No. 1, Spring 2018, pp. 47-51) as early as two years before the original Italian book was finalized, and nearly all the poems and poetic prose texts were published in English-language journals and web-magazines before the bilingual edition, All the Eyes that I Have Opened, was issued by Black Square Editions in 2023. Taylor had previously translated Mancinelli’s three earlier books for The Bitter Oleander Press: The Little Book of Passage (2018), At an Hour’s Sleep from Here (2019), The Butterfly Cemetery: Selected Prose 2008-2021 (2022).
If every translation implies a dialogue, often indirect, between the writer and the translator, in the case of All the Eyes that I Have Opened, this interaction is in fact documented by an e-mail exchange which took place between July and August 2020 and March and April 2021 (published online, with the title Distance is a Root, on the web-magazine Hopscotch Translation). From their correspondence emerges not only a discussion of the structural and compositional themes and problems of the translation, but also a human and intellectual conversation about philosophical and literary topics.
The openness to plurality offered by the dialogue appears in All the Eyes that I Have Opened as a meditation, an existential, ontological and spiritual journey traversed by recurrent keywords: ‘light’, ‘white’, ‘darkness’, ‘branches’, ‘gleams’ (or ‘glimmerings’), and still others. The image that remains impressed on the mind after reading the book is a winter landscape. The bright snow crossed by lines of dark branches brings back memories of ancient Japanese waka poetry. This is also a book with a fascinatingly intricate architecture, in which the rhythmic sequences of verse and prose are ‘like a flock travelling onwards’ that ‘cannot scatter itself’ yet ‘puts itself back together at every turn’, as Mancinelli puts it in the epigraph, and therefore that transmigrates into the subsequent sequences.
In this opening epigraph, the grammatical subject is ‘tellingly left unspecified’, as Taylor points out in his introductory essay ‘From Pain to Possibilities of Vision’. In contrast, in the sections that make up the book, the subjects become multiple and well-defined. A more traditionally conceived poetic self is flanked by the dispersed voices of migrant men and women (in the Jungle section) or by that of the author herself, not to mention the presence of other subjects such as ‘master trees’, ancient bronze figurines from Mount Titano, and Saint Lucy. This ‘plural dimension’ derives, in Mancinelli’s own words, ‘perhaps from the desire to take a breath, to have other eyes, other possibilities of looking, not to remain stuck in the fixedness to which trauma consigns us’.
It is precisely the transition from trauma, whether historical or personal, to new possibilities of existence and vision, that is the most enduring constant. In the title image, taken up in the final couplet of a poem in the Master Trees section, ‘eyes’ are ‘opened’ by the cutting or falling off of branches, making pain and the possibility of the new coincide in a single point. On a grapevine, the buds from which the pruned shoot will bear fruit in the spring are called ‘occhi’ in Italian, as they are similarly termed ‘eyes’ in English.
from here ways parted
breathing I was growing
in the collapse, something sweet
a hollow of time
all the eyes that I have opened
are the branches that I have lost
da qui partivano vie
respirando crescevo
nel crollo, qualcosa di dolce
un incavo del tempo
tutti gli occhi che ho aperto
sono i rami che ho perso.
(pp.72-73)
Out of wounds, out of loss and abandonment, even out of ruins and destruction, something good can be drawn. ‘When I read Franca Mancinelli’s poetry’, writes Taylor in the very first sentence of his introduction, ‘when I translate it, I am brought face to face with this question’. This theme of discovering or recovering what is positive from a negative experience appears, to cite only one of many examples, in this fragment:
the wounds on the walls
have surfaced inside a frame
as a work of life.
sulle pareti le ferite
sono affiorate dentro una cornice
come un’opera della vita.
(pp. 194-195)
The power of the gaze as a tool and cognitive attitude is revived in the symbolic figure of Mancinelli’s poetic meditation on Saint Lucy. The patron saint of sight, but also of blindness, is celebrated on December 13th, the darkest day of the year, but from which light returns. The relationship between darkness and light, a key theme in literature and in life itself, is at the heart of Mancinelli’s poetics. And if the passage from darkness to light takes place through the eyes, it is from writing that the bud sprouts: ‘clutch the pen it writes / nothing like a cut-off branch / nothing but the shining air’ / stringi la penna / non scrive come un ramo tagliato / altro che l’aria splendente (pp.154-155).
Seeing and writing are one, a single point from which Mancinelli’s poetic gesture moves towards knowledge and beauty. It is an instrument of illumination. Reinforcing this thought is the vocabulary that she borrows from photography, such as the notion of the ‘camera obscura’ (darkroom). According to Taylor, ‘the act of writing, as Mancinelli conceives of it, takes her into her darkroom, a place of the unknown, where [her] demons nestle [and her] most tenacious and impenetrable shadows [can be found]’. This is explicitly stated in the poem ‘Silver Halides’ / ‘Alogenuri d’argento’:
the eyes don’t close.
I see from inside—the darkness
from the seed to this recess:
writing, my darkroom.
non si chiudono gli occhi.
Vedo da dentro—il buio
dal germe a questo incavo:
scrittura, mia camera oscura.
(pp. 158-159)
The occasion of translation transforms the linguistic solutions adopted by Mancinelli, and in the necessity of comparison, illuminates them with new meanings. ‘When we debate a difficult choice between two English synonyms for a given Italian word’, Taylor reminds Mancinelli in the Hopscotch Translation dialogue, ‘you often suggest to me that I choose the simplest, most common term […] and you especially tend to prefer the alternative that is more “aperto”—“open”.’ This observation pertains as much to stylistic usage (craftmanship) as to poetics, and it directly reveals the philosophical foundations of Mancinelli’s writing as well as motivates Taylor’s decisions when translating it.
Mancinelli is distinguished by her quest for simplicity. ‘I am reminded of an Italian expression’, she points out in the dialogue, ‘that is used when someone is digressing […]: say it in poor words’. But she manages to give this quest the depth of a poetics. Indeed, she adds: ‘I believe that poetry takes place within this “poverty”, this essentiality, on the path that leads directly into the heart of things. This poverty is not scarcity, not lack; on the contrary, it is a possibility of fully possessing what we have by recognizing it in all its value and meaning. It is a poverty that comes from humility, from being close to the earth, and for this reason it has everything that is necessary in it; it does not tolerate decorations and frills. The words I bring onto the page are the same ones that live daily between our lips. The difference lies only in a sort of dilation of time that the poem operates, asking us to intensify our attention as much as possible, pausing on the threshold of another dimension.’
In All the Eyes that I Have Opened, Mancinelli encapsulates this notion of ‘poor words’ in a fragment that evokes ‘the power of nothing’. Her forthright lines indeed express this central aspect of her poetics:
with the power of nothing
of never having had
anything to barter,
gestures re-create a language
fastening armor to my body.
con la forza del niente
del non avuto mai
niente da barattare,
i gesti ricompongono una lingua
si allaccia al mio corpo un’armatura.
(pp. 106-107)
The discussion of how to translate seemingly simple Italian words, such as ‘chiaro’, which is not always the exact equivalent of ‘clear’, induces Taylor to focus on the sometimes fundamentally different usage, between the two languages, of similar terms and cognates: ‘It is here that the realist or empirical propensities of English must accommodate, and sometimes yield to, the semantic richness and resonance of Italian. English likes to focus on a single fact, a particular, whereas [Franca Mancinelli’s] Italian likes to employ a term that can have simultaneous meanings.’
The Italian expression ‘alberi maestri’, which is a key notion and section in this book, offers a prime example of these multiple meanings. Here is the poem that gives the title to the section:
I branch out according to the light
master trees
to open my chest wide
with the strength that comes from a seed.
ramifico secondo la luce
alberi maestri
a spalancarmi il petto
con la forza che viene da un seme.
(pp. 62-63)
The Italian expression means not only ‘master trees’, but also the ‘mainmast’ of a ship. In English, one can also think of a related, though different, nautical term that has a figurative meaning: ‘mainstay’. The semantic resonances of ‘master’, ‘tree’, and ‘mast’ are therefore set to work in Italian, and they work together. In English, Taylor has to choose, whence the more open title of Master Trees for the section instead of some concoction that would also somehow bring ‘masts’ or ‘mainstays’ into the affair. It is only in suspension that the meaning of a word can open up. Indeed, ‘like the crown of a tree’ which, as Mancinelli observes in her dialogue with Taylor, ‘finally finds its space of light’. ‘For this John, as you recall’, she goes on to tell her translator, ‘there is nothing else to do but to exist in an open presence, as mediums of this primal vibration that passes through us, and to let it resonate in us.’ This beautiful bilingual book shows how fruitful—like buds becoming sprouts and in turn fruit—a dialogue between a poet and a translator can be.
Acknowledgement: This review was first published in Italian in the Journal of Italian Translation, vol. XVIII, No. 2, Fall 2023, pp. 311-314, and is republished here with permission in a revised and augmented English version
Aug 20 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Franca Mancinelli
FROM WOUNDS TO EYES TO BUDS: Giorgia Meriggi reviews Franca Mancinelli’s All the Eyes that I Have Opened
Since November 2017, John Taylor and Franca Macinelli have carried on a dialogue that has enabled the American poet, critic, and translator to follow the development, from its inception, of Tutti gli occhi che ho aperto (Marcos y Marcos 2020), the fourth and most recent book written by the Fano-based Italian author. A selection of texts translated by Taylor appeared in the Journal of Italian Translation (vol. XIII, No. 1, Spring 2018, pp. 47-51) as early as two years before the original Italian book was finalized, and nearly all the poems and poetic prose texts were published in English-language journals and web-magazines before the bilingual edition, All the Eyes that I Have Opened, was issued by Black Square Editions in 2023. Taylor had previously translated Mancinelli’s three earlier books for The Bitter Oleander Press: The Little Book of Passage (2018), At an Hour’s Sleep from Here (2019), The Butterfly Cemetery: Selected Prose 2008-2021 (2022).
If every translation implies a dialogue, often indirect, between the writer and the translator, in the case of All the Eyes that I Have Opened, this interaction is in fact documented by an e-mail exchange which took place between July and August 2020 and March and April 2021 (published online, with the title Distance is a Root, on the web-magazine Hopscotch Translation). From their correspondence emerges not only a discussion of the structural and compositional themes and problems of the translation, but also a human and intellectual conversation about philosophical and literary topics.
The openness to plurality offered by the dialogue appears in All the Eyes that I Have Opened as a meditation, an existential, ontological and spiritual journey traversed by recurrent keywords: ‘light’, ‘white’, ‘darkness’, ‘branches’, ‘gleams’ (or ‘glimmerings’), and still others. The image that remains impressed on the mind after reading the book is a winter landscape. The bright snow crossed by lines of dark branches brings back memories of ancient Japanese waka poetry. This is also a book with a fascinatingly intricate architecture, in which the rhythmic sequences of verse and prose are ‘like a flock travelling onwards’ that ‘cannot scatter itself’ yet ‘puts itself back together at every turn’, as Mancinelli puts it in the epigraph, and therefore that transmigrates into the subsequent sequences.
In this opening epigraph, the grammatical subject is ‘tellingly left unspecified’, as Taylor points out in his introductory essay ‘From Pain to Possibilities of Vision’. In contrast, in the sections that make up the book, the subjects become multiple and well-defined. A more traditionally conceived poetic self is flanked by the dispersed voices of migrant men and women (in the Jungle section) or by that of the author herself, not to mention the presence of other subjects such as ‘master trees’, ancient bronze figurines from Mount Titano, and Saint Lucy. This ‘plural dimension’ derives, in Mancinelli’s own words, ‘perhaps from the desire to take a breath, to have other eyes, other possibilities of looking, not to remain stuck in the fixedness to which trauma consigns us’.
It is precisely the transition from trauma, whether historical or personal, to new possibilities of existence and vision, that is the most enduring constant. In the title image, taken up in the final couplet of a poem in the Master Trees section, ‘eyes’ are ‘opened’ by the cutting or falling off of branches, making pain and the possibility of the new coincide in a single point. On a grapevine, the buds from which the pruned shoot will bear fruit in the spring are called ‘occhi’ in Italian, as they are similarly termed ‘eyes’ in English.
from here ways parted breathing I was growing in the collapse, something sweet a hollow of time all the eyes that I have opened are the branches that I have lost da qui partivano vie respirando crescevo nel crollo, qualcosa di dolce un incavo del tempo tutti gli occhi che ho aperto sono i rami che ho perso. (pp.72-73)Out of wounds, out of loss and abandonment, even out of ruins and destruction, something good can be drawn. ‘When I read Franca Mancinelli’s poetry’, writes Taylor in the very first sentence of his introduction, ‘when I translate it, I am brought face to face with this question’. This theme of discovering or recovering what is positive from a negative experience appears, to cite only one of many examples, in this fragment:
the wounds on the walls have surfaced inside a frame as a work of life. sulle pareti le ferite sono affiorate dentro una cornice come un’opera della vita. (pp. 194-195)The power of the gaze as a tool and cognitive attitude is revived in the symbolic figure of Mancinelli’s poetic meditation on Saint Lucy. The patron saint of sight, but also of blindness, is celebrated on December 13th, the darkest day of the year, but from which light returns. The relationship between darkness and light, a key theme in literature and in life itself, is at the heart of Mancinelli’s poetics. And if the passage from darkness to light takes place through the eyes, it is from writing that the bud sprouts: ‘clutch the pen it writes / nothing like a cut-off branch / nothing but the shining air’ / stringi la penna / non scrive come un ramo tagliato / altro che l’aria splendente (pp.154-155).
Seeing and writing are one, a single point from which Mancinelli’s poetic gesture moves towards knowledge and beauty. It is an instrument of illumination. Reinforcing this thought is the vocabulary that she borrows from photography, such as the notion of the ‘camera obscura’ (darkroom). According to Taylor, ‘the act of writing, as Mancinelli conceives of it, takes her into her darkroom, a place of the unknown, where [her] demons nestle [and her] most tenacious and impenetrable shadows [can be found]’. This is explicitly stated in the poem ‘Silver Halides’ / ‘Alogenuri d’argento’:
the eyes don’t close. I see from inside—the darkness from the seed to this recess: writing, my darkroom. non si chiudono gli occhi. Vedo da dentro—il buio dal germe a questo incavo: scrittura, mia camera oscura. (pp. 158-159)The occasion of translation transforms the linguistic solutions adopted by Mancinelli, and in the necessity of comparison, illuminates them with new meanings. ‘When we debate a difficult choice between two English synonyms for a given Italian word’, Taylor reminds Mancinelli in the Hopscotch Translation dialogue, ‘you often suggest to me that I choose the simplest, most common term […] and you especially tend to prefer the alternative that is more “aperto”—“open”.’ This observation pertains as much to stylistic usage (craftmanship) as to poetics, and it directly reveals the philosophical foundations of Mancinelli’s writing as well as motivates Taylor’s decisions when translating it.
Mancinelli is distinguished by her quest for simplicity. ‘I am reminded of an Italian expression’, she points out in the dialogue, ‘that is used when someone is digressing […]: say it in poor words’. But she manages to give this quest the depth of a poetics. Indeed, she adds: ‘I believe that poetry takes place within this “poverty”, this essentiality, on the path that leads directly into the heart of things. This poverty is not scarcity, not lack; on the contrary, it is a possibility of fully possessing what we have by recognizing it in all its value and meaning. It is a poverty that comes from humility, from being close to the earth, and for this reason it has everything that is necessary in it; it does not tolerate decorations and frills. The words I bring onto the page are the same ones that live daily between our lips. The difference lies only in a sort of dilation of time that the poem operates, asking us to intensify our attention as much as possible, pausing on the threshold of another dimension.’
In All the Eyes that I Have Opened, Mancinelli encapsulates this notion of ‘poor words’ in a fragment that evokes ‘the power of nothing’. Her forthright lines indeed express this central aspect of her poetics:
with the power of nothing of never having had anything to barter, gestures re-create a language fastening armor to my body. con la forza del niente del non avuto mai niente da barattare, i gesti ricompongono una lingua si allaccia al mio corpo un’armatura. (pp. 106-107)The discussion of how to translate seemingly simple Italian words, such as ‘chiaro’, which is not always the exact equivalent of ‘clear’, induces Taylor to focus on the sometimes fundamentally different usage, between the two languages, of similar terms and cognates: ‘It is here that the realist or empirical propensities of English must accommodate, and sometimes yield to, the semantic richness and resonance of Italian. English likes to focus on a single fact, a particular, whereas [Franca Mancinelli’s] Italian likes to employ a term that can have simultaneous meanings.’
The Italian expression ‘alberi maestri’, which is a key notion and section in this book, offers a prime example of these multiple meanings. Here is the poem that gives the title to the section:
I branch out according to the light master trees to open my chest wide with the strength that comes from a seed. ramifico secondo la luce alberi maestri a spalancarmi il petto con la forza che viene da un seme. (pp. 62-63)The Italian expression means not only ‘master trees’, but also the ‘mainmast’ of a ship. In English, one can also think of a related, though different, nautical term that has a figurative meaning: ‘mainstay’. The semantic resonances of ‘master’, ‘tree’, and ‘mast’ are therefore set to work in Italian, and they work together. In English, Taylor has to choose, whence the more open title of Master Trees for the section instead of some concoction that would also somehow bring ‘masts’ or ‘mainstays’ into the affair. It is only in suspension that the meaning of a word can open up. Indeed, ‘like the crown of a tree’ which, as Mancinelli observes in her dialogue with Taylor, ‘finally finds its space of light’. ‘For this John, as you recall’, she goes on to tell her translator, ‘there is nothing else to do but to exist in an open presence, as mediums of this primal vibration that passes through us, and to let it resonate in us.’ This beautiful bilingual book shows how fruitful—like buds becoming sprouts and in turn fruit—a dialogue between a poet and a translator can be.
Acknowledgement: This review was first published in Italian in the Journal of Italian Translation, vol. XVIII, No. 2, Fall 2023, pp. 311-314, and is republished here with permission in a revised and augmented English version
By Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, poetry reviews, year 2024 0 • Tags: books, Giorgia Meriggi, poetry