interviews
22 January 2025

Alias. Antologia translingue di poesia italo-spagnola contemporanea
(A Translinguistic Anthology of Contemporary Italian-Spanish Poetry)
An interview with Dalila Colucci and Leonarda Trapassi

Author: Paolo Grossi

<i>Alias. Antologia translingue di poesia italo-spagnola contemporanea</i>  <br>(A Translinguistic Anthology of Contemporary Italian-Spanish Poetry)</br>   <br>An interview with Dalila Colucci and Leonarda Trapassi</br>

Dalila Colucci, researcher at the University of Seville and holder of two doctorates (from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and Harvard University), has edited Alias. Alias. Antologia translingue di poesia italo-spagnola contemporanea with Leonarda Trapassi, Associate Professor of Italian Language and Literature at the University of Seville.

 

Alias. Antologia translingue di poesia italo-spagnola contemporanea has just been published by Ensemble de Rome, edited by Dalila Colucci and Leonarda Trapassi. How did this publishing project come about and what is its background?

 

Dalila Colucci.

Like the interweaving of languages, relationships and translations that feed its structure, Alias was born out of a happy emotional and intellectual correspondence, namely the encounter with Alibi. Prima antologia bilingue di poesia italiana nel Regno Unito (First bilingual anthology of Italian poetry in the United Kingdom), published in 2022 under the direction of Marta Arnaldi and Luca Paci for the ‘Erranze’ collection of Ensemble publishers. This initiative involved Beatrice Sica, a lifelong friend of mine, whom I discovered on that occasion to be a poet of dantesque and evocative verse. The volume immediately seemed to me and to Leonarda Trapassi – with whom I shared a course in Italian-Spanish translation at the University of Seville in the spring of 2022 – to be an ideal training ground for poetry, transposition and interpretation, inseparable in the fabric of the collection, made up of truly ‘migrant’ texts, suspended between different languages, cultures and translation practices. This was followed by a workshop on the translation into Spanish of a selection of verses – carried out by our students and subsequently made an integral part of Translating Illness, Marta Arnaldi’s interdisciplinary project at Oxford University, as research into the therapeutic value of poetry and translation (https://translatingillness.com/2022/10/26/translating-alibi/) – and the presentation of the anthology in Seville on 22nd May, in the presence of the publisher and Beatrice Sica, with remote contributions from Nicola Gardini and Jonathan Galassi. The director of Erranze, Gëzim Hajdari – a naturalised Italian-Albanian poet who has been working for years to reconstruct the polyform map of European translingualism – then invited us to create a sister anthology to Alibi, dedicated to Italian poetry in Spain. As we plunged into the project with enthusiasm, Leonarda and I soon realised that it would have been impossible to reproduce the English volume in the Spanish context. The Spanish context –- by its very nature and the languages involved – was not simply bilingual, but translingual. In other words, a group of Spanish and Italian poets, immersed in multiple writing and translating practices, ready to move from one language to another, without the predominance of their mother tongue (which is sometimes even rejected by those who, like Ángelo Néstore, only use the ‘second’ language, preferring to use a translator for the Italian version). The seventeen poets of Alias revive, in hyper-contemporary forms, the ancient Italian-Spanish translinguistic tradition of the 16th and 17th centuries, which developed thanks to the political, but above all literary, influences between the Iberian Peninsula and the Italian States (it should not be forgotten that authors of the calibre of Quevedo and Lope de Vega wrote in Tuscan). By this choice, they deliberately appropriate the other language (sometimes even integrating it with other codes: French, Portuguese, Catalan, English, Latin and ancient Greek are all present, for example) in order to create directly or to translate themselves, thus giving voice to a desire for physical and artistic omnipresence. This ‘disidentifying’ condition, multiplied in the dialogue dimension of the anthology, where poets often collaborate in translating each other’s verse, makes Alias a space of open and joyfully inhomogeneous translingualism: an approach that not only paves the way for the updating of important studies on this phenomenon (such as those by Profeti, Canonica, Ventura and its patron, Benedetto Croce)[1], but above all it restores a dual vision (that takes into account both sides), breaking down the boundaries of studies, either purely literary or purely translational, to which they have been limited over time. By eliminating the difference – and the priority – between the source language and the target language, the anthology is thus configured as a unicum in the contemporary poetic panorama: a collection of alternatives and variants (but also a mass of alia, if you like: of new, unexpected things) that reveal the extraordinary richness and vitality of the Italian-Spanish background, too often devalued because of the apparent proximity of the languages.

 

An anthology is, by definition, the result of a process of selection. What criteria did you use to choose the authors and texts?

 

Dalila Colucci.

The first criterion was, as you would expect, the translingualism of the authors: noticed in the first Italian poets selected for the anthology (such as Laura Pugno and Roberta Buffi), it immediately appeared as an obvious and fruitful perspective in a number of Spanish poets who are close to us for academic and, again, emotional reasons. We were aware, for example, of the long-standing translinguistic practice of Miguel Ángel Cuevas, professor of Italian literature at our university and a great translator (of Pasolini, Consolo and Attanasio, among others), who has been writing and publishing his poems in Spanish and Italian for many years, translating himself into both languages. His inclusion in the anthology soon seemed essential if we were to draw up an authentic profile of ‘Italian poetry in Spain’, as we had been asked to do. It was also thanks to him that we got in touch with Sebastiano Burgaretta (an Italian poet whose verses are linguistically stratified, where Spanish, Sicilian and ancient Greek meet) and José María Micó (a former translator of Dante and Ariosto, as well as an excellent poet and musician, also in Italian), thus beginning a practice that was essential for the construction of Alias, which was formed thanks to the recommendations of poets and scholars. Two colleagues from the Universities of Girona and Barcelona – Giovanni Albertocchi and Raffaele Pinto (himself a translinguistic poet who contributed his sonnets to Alias) – were responsible, for example, for meeting the poets Begonya Pozo and Gaia Danese (one from Valencia, the other a diplomat by profession), who were engaged in a constant process of transliterating linguistic universes. It was at this point that translation itself became a criterion, with Alias including all its forms: the aforementioned self-translation; allographic translation (practised as an echo of the human and cultural exchange within the volume, with the translators themselves being poets, almost always included in Alias); creative rewriting. This is why what Bernardo Santos wrote in Alias is so true: ‘Babel se reconoce y ama / como una torre posible, donde la traducción / es la empresa principal de las literaturas’ (Europe, Europe). This Sevillian poet, who has become a great friend, contributed to our anthology not only as an author, but also as a translator and promoter, weaving a dense network of relationships: it was he who put us in touch with Rocío Nogales Muriel and Ángelo Néstore. Translation, then, guided not only the choice of authors – all of whom are directly linked to one of the forms mentioned above and all of whom are aware of their translingualism – but also the choice of texts that we requested (from a minimum of 5 to a maximum of 10), based on the desire to translate them into another language and the contemporary nature of the operation, even in the case of verses written a long time ago (such as those by Alessandro Mistrorigo, written between 1999 and 2001, but translated or at least reworked specifically for the anthology). Indeed, the mark of the contemporary has proved indispensable in recovering the snapshot of a situation that is by nature in fieri, such as that of translingualism, itself a mobile and changing concept conditioned by time (of writing, of language, of translation). This does not mean, of course, that we compromised on the quality of the poetic selection: an apparently obvious criterion in itself, but one that was not self-evident in a foreign context, where the representation of a multiplicity of voices, as complete as possible, was essential. We wanted to maintain a high literary standard at all times. This is confirmed, moreover, by the names included in the volume (in addition to those already mentioned, there are Matteo Lefèvre, Francisco Deco, Marisa Martínez Pérsico and Ignacio Cartagena), all of them recognised poets, teachers and translators. They are joined by a single newcomer: myself. Of my four texts, one gives the anthology its name.

 

Alias takes the reader on a journey through contemporary Italian and Spanish poetry. Do you still see cultural and linguistic specificities in this itinerary, programmed under the signs of ubiquity, wandering and translingualism? 

 

Leonarda Trapassi.

There are undoubtedly specificities in the bilingual symbiosis practised by Italian poets writing in Spanish and Spanish poets writing in Italian. In the case of the latter – who adopt another language for reasons that are often literary or purely cultural – an intellectual character seems to prevail (somewhere between metapoetic and metalinguistic reflection, always on the cusp between seriousness and ludus), applied to two main thematic cores: love and satire (social and political), which sometimes seem to be a legacy of the translinguistic tradition of the 16th and 17th centuries. This is all the more evident in the verses of the translator-poets – especially Cuevas and Micó, but also Deco, where the influence of musical translation is strong – in which the conscious re-use of models (even from the Hispanic tradition) is perceptible, with particular attention to the choice of cultic or etymologically stratified words (see Cuevas’s Metatrópica or Deco’s rewriting of the myth of the Argonauts in Butes ). In Ignacio Cartagena’s Apocryphi, the use of Italian is also accompanied by that of Latin, which adds a note of disorientation to the translinguistic choice, ‘apocryphal’ in the sense of the appropriation of a certain poetic paradigm, only revealed here in the self-translation into Spanish (Tres apócrifos de Montale). Less filtered by intellectualism, on the other hand, is the poetry written in Spanish by Italians, with two notable exceptions: Matteo Lefèvre and Laura Pugno, who have already translated Spanish classics and whose verse also tends to reinforce the link between translation and tradition – for whom the Hispanic language is more a means of creation (and sometimes of genuine liberation, as in Néstore) than of literary recreation. Especially in the case of authors whose mother tongue is Italian, there is also lexical and syntactic contamination, sometimes condensed into deliberately unusual constructions borrowed from the acquired language, producing a cryptic translingualism, as in the case of Gaia Danese (think of the use of the gerund in v. 8 of A Raúl: ‘Mi viene in mente quella ninfea sbocciando in un polmone’ ‘I remember this water lily blooming in a lung’). In other cases, it is a third code that becomes a self-translating expedient: in Roberta Buffi’s texts, this is the case with the use of French for the titles (Main d’Amants, Le Baisier), a kind of hyphen between sister languages ‘in equilibrium’. In both cases, I think it reflects the atavistic habit of our poetry (since Dante) of accepting and inventing its own multiple variants (aliases), codifying their impurities.

[1] In his seminal article Italiani che scrissero in ispagnuolo tra Cinque e Seicento (Italians who wrote in Spanish between the 16th and 17th centuries), published in 1895, Benedetto Croce was the first to study Italian-Spanish translingualism.

<i>Alias. Antologia translingue di poesia italo-spagnola contemporanea</i>  <br>(A Translinguistic Anthology of Contemporary Italian-Spanish Poetry)</br>   <br>An interview with Dalila Colucci and Leonarda Trapassi</br>
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