Translating D’Annunzio
Sometimes when we first meet a person who is to change the course of our lives, we don’t even realize it. And yet, this sort of phenomenon — more or less the opposite of love at first sight — though it is perfectly ordinary, in accord with the bulk of human experience, deeply offends our common sense.
When it comes to matters of destiny, we have a strong, irrational, and all-too-telling preference for the clarity of fate. We would like such momentous meetings to be neatly written in the stars: for such things to be as obvious as Orion in the night sky. After all, how could we fail to see the very light that’s to lead us?But long before things like common sense took hold there was a time when man looked up without recognizing the constellations or even the names of the stars. We looked up like a bunch of know-nothings, like children. To be blind one day to what we’ll never forget the next is human. Half of what we do with our eyes is close them. Thus in the wending course of our lives, we so find our bright stars and our spouses-to-be — as well as enemies, mentors, proteges, divorce lawyers, interns, real estate brokers, and even poets who seem worth translating.
I do not remember when I first came across the name, Gabriele D’Annunzio. It was probably sometime in college. Then and for years after what I knew of him is probably what most people with a casual interest in interwar Europe know of him:
He had been a journalist, poet, novelist, soldier, pilot, serial lover, and was known variously as Il Vate (“The Poet”), Il Profeta (“The Prophet”), and, for a period, Il Duce (which needs no translation) in connection with the Italian Regency of Carnaro, also known more poetically as the Impresa di Fiume (“Endeavor of Fiume”), which ordered the life of a little city in the Austrian Littoral in an area belonging to modern-day Croatia, which now goes by the unassuming name, “Rijeka.”
In 1919 the Paris Peace Conference (confirming the terms of the Treaty of London signed during World War I) left the city then known as “Fiume” out of the Kingdom of Italy’s control. So, D’Annunzio and some soldiers patriotically seized it and offered it back. However, the Kingdom of Italy, somewhat baffled, refused. Later, after some diplomatic back and forth, when it seemed Italy would agree to a modus vivendi
that would pave the way to annexation, D’Annunzio became wary, rejected the offer, declared the city’s independence, and coauthored a constitution with Alceste De Ambris (who would later become famous for coauthoring the Fascist Manifesto) reflecting a daring amalgamation of then popular syndicalist, corporativist, and democratic republican notions.Music was made the fundament of the whole State. Daily poetry readings were mandatory. There were fireworks virtually every night. The bold and brilliant poet-prophets in its borders were legally accounted supermen. Venereal diseases spread like wildfire. Enemies of the state were dosed with laxatives. But contrary to reason and right, this new state did not last long.
In November 1920, the Kingdom of Italy signed the Treaty of Rapallo with the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes granting Fiume its independence (from D’Annunzio). So, D’Annunzio declared war on Italy and the latter responded on the 24th of December with a full-scale attack wherein after several hours of war the two sides, practically composed of brothers, in the spirit of Christian fraternity, declared a truce for Christmas. Afterwards, a pair of Italian dreadnoughts firebombed the city for three days straight until D’Annunzio relented.
The once-Il Duce retired to his palatial estate overlooking Lake Garda and though considered a rival of sorts with the future Il Duce, Mussolini, he stayed on the sidelines. In August 1922, he fell from an open window. Some historians consider this incident an attempted assassination via defenestration, others think he was drunk. (It remains a matter of open and jovial debate.) In any case, Mussolini occasionally siphoned cash his way to make sure he was comfy. According to one oft-quoted source, on the topic of D’Annunzio, Mussolini once remarked, “When you have a rotten tooth you have two possibilities open to you: either you pull the tooth or you fill it with gold.”
In 1924, the gilded D’Annunzio was given the hereditary title of Prince of Montenevoso by King Victor Emmanuel III and after about a decade of luxuriating over Lake Garda, D’Annunzio looked down and noticed to his horror that Mussolini was about to make a terrible mistake in allying with Hitler. He tried to convince him not to get involved, going so far as to write a satirical pamphlet. Later in 1937, in an effort to convince Mussolini to leave the Axis, he met with him for a talk of sorts at Verona’s train station. A year afterward, he died of a stroke, was given a state funeral, and was buried in a grand tomb of white marble on his estate where he lies till this very day among the remains of those who fought with him at Fiume.
His son, Gabriellino D'Annunzio, became a film director and made Quo Vadis, the greatest flop in the history of Italian silent film.
Today, his fatherland honors his memory with two institutions bearing his name: a public research university in Chieti, ranking among U.S. News and World Report’s “Top 1,000 Universities” (at 935) and a small airport southeast of the city of Brescia in Montichiari, which has not scheduled any passenger flights since 2018, but has lately become a hub for e-commerce cargo.In September 2009, D’Annunzio’s grandniece wrote an article for the New York Times honoring the legacy of his love, titled, “The Randy Dandy.” In March 2015, as part of some sort of publicity lark, an Italian police department’s forensics lab extracted his DNA from fluids he had affectionally reserved in a handkerchief, which had been loaned to them by his estate’s historical foundation, the chief of which speculated to a Guardian reporter that in the future people might want to clone him. In a November 2016 essay in The American Interest, Tara Burton compares him to Donald Trump.
This is all to say, that based on what I knew of D’Annunzio, cribbed from Wikipedia pages and the sort of articles that appear in mainstream outlets, he seemed to have been one of many swashbuckling aesthetes-turned statesmen who lived and loved in the lurching throes of what’s now abridged in polite circles as ‘the modern turn.’ He had an endearingly incoherent-though-romantic political agenda, a titan’s share of trials and travails, wore a monocle, had a mustache, &c. He was yet another fancifully costumed little figure in the patchwork drama of the history of a country I had first been introduced to by way of iced desserts served with miniature tongue depressors prone to splintering. I had never read a single word he had written.
But then sometime in 2018 or ‘19, I was listening to Italian composers on YouTube. One clip would end and the algorithm would start another. I was lying on my bed, contemplating the lunar surface-like irregularities of my ceiling. A new piece started. Glancing across the room to my laptop on my desk, I saw the composer was Paolo Tosti. The algorithm was playing some of his canzoni, one after the other. Then “In van preghi” started playing:
In van preghi, in vano aneli,
in van mostri il cuore infranto.
Sono forse umidi i cieli
perché noi abbiamo pianto?At first, this seemed par for the course: the sort of usual late-romantic schlock I thoroughly enjoy (and on its own terms). But as it went on, it became apparent this piece was something else. It ended with the following quatrain:
In un Ade senza dio
dormi quanto puoi profondo.
Tutto è sogno, tutto è oblìo:
l'asfodèlo è il fior del Mondo.In The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading, Harold Bloom lays out an elaborate notion involving six “revisionary ratios” the last of which he calls “Apophrades,” appropriating the term Athenians used for those days on which their dearly departed would return to their old haunts. Poets operating at such a stage, he argues, having already achieved aesthetic maturity, open themselves up to the influence of their predecessors and create works eerily akin to theirs, though purer to such a degree that in comparison the latter appear like degenerations (e.g., there are pieces by Bruckner that seem more Wagnerian than Wagner).
As I heard that last quatrain of “In van preghi,” this haunting notion came to mind. The painted flower arrangements of kitsch yielded to the fragrance of something, a bloom
—the plant of a garden I’d heard of, but long since given up on. What’s more, while half-intoxicated by the fragrance of the verse, I felt a tug. There are times we are drawn out of ourselves, the age of our lives; we are tugged at and as we are that which we are tugged by and we ourselves jointly draw down a bell that rings out, and if we could translate this ringing from the most ancient of languages, it would say, “You are bound. Chance has knit you together, if only for its own amusement. It cannot be undone. Doubt this? But how? Though you are tugged from without, what it is that is tugged is in your heart of hearts.”I looked into Tosti’s piece and found that I was already familiar with the text’s author — that it was none other than the colorful fellow I had read about years earlier. Immediately, I read a good deal of his poetry and decided to start translating some of it.
On that note, I found the challenge of introducing D’Annunzio’s poetry to an anglophone audience to be something like trying to introduce a foreign friend, who strikes you as impressive and whom you would assume your friends would be more than pleased to know, at a dinner party. At first you talk him up. You tell people who you know will be present that you are bringing a guest. You tell them he is a great romantic with a storied career. Of course, they listen to you and are very polite.
At last, you arrive to the party with your friend in tow. As far as the other guests are concerned your foreign friend seems a bit strange: he is bald, is wearing a monocle, has an outré little mustache, &c. He does not look like the sort of person who votes Republican. Worse, you hear a whisper. Someone has googled him and is mentioning unsavory rumors about his love life, career failures, and dubious political associates. You are perspiring. You begin telling your friends of the marvelous things this man can say, going so far as to quote him verbatim. But his language is foreign. No matter, you figure: he’s a bright man, an occasional diplomat, he can make his own case. You tap your glass and tell everyone to listen up. You nudge your impressive foreign friend’s shoulder and make a gesture to indicate that he should start making himself clear. But it turns out your impressive friend is dead.
Yes, you realize that you have brought a corpse to a dinner party. You begin to worry you might not get invited back. In a last-ditch attempt to save your own social reputation, you set this corpse on your lap and using its oily little handlebar mustache like marionette strings, you begin an audacious ventriloquy act. It is ridiculous, you imagine: everyone will know it is you. After all, you are nothing like your friend. In a sense what you are doing is even obscene. And yet, the act comes off. Your fellow guests are clapping. They say, ‘another, another!’ And then once again, you skillfully articulate your friend’s mustache such that his lips move properly. The host raises his glass and toasts, ‘His Royal Highness the Prince of Montenevoso!’ Afterwards, your hostess is even so kind as to ask if you and your charming foreign friend are free Monday next.
That is to say, translating D’Annunzio is its own reward. Thus, I sent the fruits of my labor to the New English Review. Below is a copy of my original translation of “In van preghi”
: In vain you beg, in vain you ache,
in vain you’ve opened your wrecked heart wide.
Perhaps in heaven the rainclouds quake
because we both have cried?
This pain of ours is without a wing.
The fainthearted cry can never fly.
Weep and pray! What god is coming
by the path of the stars up high?
Abandon yourself to the dust
and upon it fall in surrender.
Our great mother is ever so just
to every sinner who kisses her.
Within a Hell of godless emptiness
submit yourself ever more to sleep’s spell.
All is a dream, all is nothingness:
the flower of the world is the asphodel.Since then, I’ve been translating D’Annunzio somewhat regularly. For your edification, I’ve collected some links to my translations of him below:
For the most part, these poems come from D’Annunzio’s earlier collections, which as a rule tend to be goopy and jammed with gratuitous classical references and clichés. (Though all of his poetry speaks to me, I admit it does not always speak in what Novalis calls the ‘True Sanskrit.’) Incidentally, in choosing what works to translate, I have in large part thus far chosen the easiest. Only recently with “Il cervo” have I dared a translation obliging competence.
Should you crave more translations, do not worry. I will continue my efforts in this vein, and perhaps even rouse myself to translate his longer works from later in his career. Perhaps, even, one day, if I can demonstrate to a publisher that there is a real market for translations of D’Annunzio’s poetry (or better yet my translations of D’Annunzio’s poetry) I’ll put together a neat little collection bookended by several purpled essays even more self-serving than this one.
And certainly, this would be worth my while. Beyond my circle of friends and readers who have made their affection for my translations of D’Annunzio known, I have found contrary to my expectations that the few translations I have churned out have already circulated widely
and more than that, deeply affected others.For instance, I have found that my rendering of that last, haunting quatrain of “In van preghi” — the original text of which had so enthralled me at first and precipitated all my efforts in translation — has itself proven equally stimulating:
TikTok superstar Sergio, who goes by the username “gentleman.gasmask,” used the quatrain to caption one of his highly regarded short films (in which he stars wearing his signature vintage gasmask); Chicago-based anarchist noise artist VEIDRIK was inspired by the quatrain to write two tracks, “All is a dream” and “All is nothingness,” in his album, Xejn; and last but not least, an author who goes by the nom de plume, “confused_moron,” used it as an epigraph to “Ruined Ashpodels,” a chapter in his erotic Harry Potter fanfic epic novel, Deceptions-(Drarry).
O beati quelli che più hanno, perché più potranno dare, più potranno ardere.
[Note: An abridged version of this post was republished at IM-1776 (The Art & Literature Foundation)]
Notes
If you should lack for a conspicuous instance of this in your own life to reflect upon, turn to Mishima, who excels at portraying this sort of thing, particularly in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and After the Banquet.
For those unfamiliar with diplomatic terminology, a modus vivendi, which literally translates to “mode” or “way of life,” is a sort of provisional agreement.
For better or worse, he retired from filmmaking afterwards.
For instance, Germanenzug (WAB 70) and Helgoland (WAB 71).
No pun intended.
This is not quite a decent translation.
In retrospect, I might have translated some parts of this differently.
If you happen to be a publisher interested in such a venture, please do get in touch!
Thanks to google, I have found boggling/delightful instances of my translations being shared without attribution, outright plagiarized, butchered into snippets and presented out of context, used to advertise mid-market gelato on Facebook, &c.
The opening line of the seventh section of D’Annunzio’s “Oration for the Festival of the Thousand.”