Roberto Sanesi : an Italian among Welshmern

One of the foremost poets of his generation in Italy, Roberto Sanesi was born in 1930 in Milan. His work is thoroughly Italian in spirit, as can be seen, for example, in his love of painting and music and in his concern with philosophical and aesthetic theory - constant preoccupations never far from the surface in any of his poems, all of which are evident as undercurrents in the Elegia a Vernon Watkins, in the poem's precise visual and aural imagery, and in the lines I have rendered as: ‘In your bones you knew abstract conjecture / could never yield a true equation’. Yet although Sanesi’s native literary roots stretch back through Dante and Cavalcanti, masters of the Duecento, to Latin poets like Lucretius, he is untypical and perhaps even unique among his Italian contemporaries in that, as far as the moderns are concerned, his own writing has been influenced less by recent models in his own language than by writers in English. The long and impressive list of his translations is clearest evidence of this: it includes Marlowe, the Metaphysicals, the only version of Paradise Lost in Italian for the last hundred years (a current work-in-progress), Blake, Shelley, Byron, Poe, Whitman, Yeats, Hart Crane, Conrad Aiken, T. S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, Nathaniel Tarn and, last but not least, Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins.

This list, which is indicative of Sanesi’s own preference for writers who are prepared to tackle cosmic and visionary themes, is inevitably a clue to his own poetry; and of all the writers mentioned here, those with whom Sanesi has the closest affinity, and for whom he has the deepest personal affection, are the two Anglo-Welsh poets. It would probably be no exaggeration to say that since his early twenties, when he first discovered Dylan Thomas, Sanesi has done more than any other writer outside Britain and America to draw attention to modern Anglo-Welsh poetry and art - through his translation of poems by Thomas and Watkins, his editions of graphics by Ceri Richards, and in a stream of critical books and articles on all three of them, as well as the only essay to have been written in Italian on David Jones. As an ‘outsider’ to this tradition, his recognition of it and, even more, his clarity and assuredness in interpreting it, may be seen as independent confirmations both of its inner vitality and of its importance in the European mainstream; while, on the other hand, it also suggests that an exploration of Welsh and Anglo-Welsh influences on Sanesi’s own work is called for. Among his numerous poems drawing on Welsh themes, none is more illuminating in this respect than the ‘Elegy for Vernon Watkins’, with its embedded quotations from Watkins himself, and its strong evocations of Thomas, Henry Vaughan and Taliesin, and of Welsh landscape.

But why, one might ask, should a modern Italian poet feel drawn to Wales in the first place? Superficially, the attraction seems almost odd. The prevailing versions of Christianity, for example, could not be more distinct: Catholicism on the one hand, nonconformism on the other. Contrast between opposites is perhaps itself a stimulus to attraction, but Sanesi offers a different clue in his introduction to The Graphic Works of Ceri Richards, in speaking of the Celts as ‘this basically emotional and outgoing people, who are in some ways so close to the Latins. (Italics mine, R.B.)¹ His assessment of the distinctive Celtic contribution to British art and literature, a few lines later, is equally interesting: ‘Wherever one finds the artist’s perception and treatment of natural data reflected and transcended in sudden strange outburst of spiritual or religious meditation, wherever an awareness of the mysteries of natural metamorphosis is seen to give rise to a constantly drawn out mystical tension and express itself in terms of a restless lyricism, there is bound to have been some degree of Celtic infiltration or influence.’ ² No doubt this argument is familiar enough, but the passage makes the reasons for Sanesi’s involvement in Anglo-Welsh art and literature quite clear: he is drawn by its exuberance, its lyricism, its concern with metaphysical themes and, one might add, its technical inventiveness and experimentation,³ operating within the constraints of a well-formulated tradition – all qualities which we also find in the ‘Elegy’.

Sanesi published his first article on Dylan Thomas in 1953,⁴ before the poet's death, and his selected translations of Thomas's poems in 1954, shortly after it.⁵ This was also his first full-length book. Sanesi never met Thomas: the letter he wrote him in summer 1953 was not answered until months later, by someone else, with formal notification of the poet’s death. But with his enthusiasm for Thomas's work unabated, Sanesi proceeded to translate more poems ⁶ and write more essays and articles,⁷ which eventually culminated in two critical books on Thomas,⁸ and began a series of pilgrimages to Wales. In the course of one of these visits, he met Vernon Watkins and, through him, Ceri Richards, and became close friends with both men, and with their families. Sanesi's account of his first meeting with Richards is full of warmth:

Ceri Richard's many illustrations to poems by Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins, and paintings inspired by his readings, have been well documented,¹⁰ as have his fine late series of lithographs for Sanesi's poems, most of which were composed in 1971, the last year of the painter's life.¹¹ Among these, is Richards's colour lithograph for the ‘Elegy to Vernon Watkins’,¹² with its falling blossoms and butterflies which not only echo Sanesi’s lines but also Watkins’s poems, ‘Music of Colours - White Blossom...’ and ‘Music of Colours: The Blossom Scattered’, as well as Richard's 1968 painting, named after the first of these poems, with the subtitle ‘Requiem for a Poet’.¹³ The last section of Sanesi’s poem, ‘Harrington Gardens Suite’,¹⁴ which was composed in London just after the painter's death, is dedicated ‘To C.R.’, and since then Frances Richards, Ceri’s widow and a fine artist in her own right, has also illustrated two of Sanesi's poems,¹⁵ while Sanesi has published a second book on Richards.¹⁶ As for Vernon Watkins, three of Sanesi’s shorter poems were translated by him,¹⁷ and he also dedicated to Sanesi his late poem ‘Stone Circle’, with the subtitle La Bocca della Verità (‘The Mouth of Truth').¹⁸ Sanesi's first translation of Watkins's poems appeared in an anthology in 1958,¹⁹ followed by a separate fuller selection with a critical introduction in 1968,²⁰ as well as several other essays and articles in between,21 culminating in a book-length exploration of Watkins's poetry in 1978.²²

As this summary shows, Sanesi’s relationships with both Watkins and Richards were not merely a case of the much younger Italian poet deriving strength and inspiration from the work of his two older Welsh friends, but of them too being influenced by him. All this suggests a web of correspondence and interdependences, mediated through their mutual love of Dylan Thomas's work and reinforced by his separate influence on each of them, which is so strong and complex that its ramifications can only be hinted at here. At any rate, it does pinpoint the fact that Sanesi cannot be described either fully or fairly as a mere ‘outsider’ to modern Anglo-Welsh poetry. He occupies at least an honorary place within the tradition itself, regardless of the fact that he writes in Italian.

This, then, is the matrix the ‘Elegy for Vernon Watkins’ grew out of and the context in which the poem needs to be approached. My belief that in many ways it deserves to be read as an Anglo-Welsh poem ‘in its own right’ is, I hope, reflected in my translation: this has certainly been a key factor in shaping my own response to the poem, and involved me in some quasi-Borgesian discoveries in the process of translating it. In making this version, I have benefited from two previous ones, by Henry Martin and William Alexander,²³ both of which I have referred to in my attempts at a third. But while acknowledging these, I must state that my desire to translate the poem myself (the first of Sanesi’s I ever came across,²⁴ before I had met him personally), arose not just out of admiration for the Italian original and curiosity about the relationships behind it, but, once I had read the existing English versions too, my dissatisfaction with both of these as adequate renderings of the author's intention. By ‘author's intention’ I do not mean quibbles on grounds of correctness at a simple literal level – both are more than adequate from that point of view – but in their failures to read between the lines, to uncover (or rather, rediscover) Sanesi's feelings for Watkins’s poems, his friendship for him as a man, and his love of ‘a country, a culture and a climate of art’. Plenty of clues to all of these are available.

For this reason, I saw my job as being not so much to reproduce Sanesi’s Italian rhythms line by line, but to ‘restore’ them as closely as I could to rhythms approximating to Watkins’s own, and this meant taking deliberate liberties with line-divisions. As for the many references to images and lines from Watkins flecked through the poem, which Sanesi had recently absorbed into his own consciousness, since he had been translating Watkins's poems in the preceding few years, my own aim was also to ‘restore’ these as fully as possible in English.

A few detailed examples should make the point. The first three lines of the Italian read: Avresti detto che le colline di Galles / erano verdi e viola al vento secco / delle felci e del mare. Henry Martin's translation of this is perfectly literal: ‘You would have said that the hills of Wales / were green and purple in the dry wind / of the ferns and the sea.’ William Alexander’s is only marginally less so: ‘You would have said that the hills of Wales / were lilac and green in the arid wind / of the ferns and the sea.’ I believe Martin is right in his literal translation of viola as ‘purple’ rather than ‘violet’. My version, however, which reads ‘You would have said the hills of Wales / were green and violet in the parched / and ferny sea wind’, attempts to reproduce the characteristically Watkinsian rhythm, enjambement and piling of adjectives and, more specifically, refers directly to the stupendous beginning of ‘Taliesin in Gower’, with its chime between ‘violet’ and ‘violent’ and its clear pun on the colour and flower-name: ‘Late I return, O violent, colossal, reverberant, eavesdropping sea. / My country is here. I am foal and violet. Hawthorn breaks from my hands.’ (Italics mine, R.B.)²⁵ Furthermore, I have deliberately allowed the vocabulary of these lines, which Sanesi certainly had in mind, to permeate through the rest of the poem. For example, viola appears later, in the line, la grande notte viola che esplode dal tramonto. Here Martin has ‘the great / purple night that explodes from the sunset’, and Alexander ‘the great violet night / bursting from the sunset’, while I have ‘this immense violet / night blooming out of the sunset’. Aside from the fact that Martin sticks to his ‘purple’ while Alexander has abandoned ‘lilac’ for ‘violet'’ my version is less accurate literally than either of the others but, I would argue, works better in English, because the enjambement after ‘violet’ creates textual density by setting up the possibility of a syntactic ambiguity (‘violet’ could be either an adjective or a noun) which is not clarified until the next line, where ‘blooming’ recalls the secondary reading which the syntax has just required the reader to dismiss, thus partially restoring its validity and also hearkening back to Watkins’s pun, even though this has not fully surfaced in the Italian. All of which is to say that I believe that translation should involve a rewriting based not just on a reading, but on a re-reading.

Similarly, another word from the opening of ‘Taliesin in Gower’ underlies a separate image in Sanesi’s poem: gigantesco il mare, which Martin translates (this time inaccurately) as ‘breadth in the sea’ and Alexander simply as ‘gigantic sea’. My preference for ‘colossal the sea’ was determined wholly by the Watkinsian reference. If I have occasionally embroidered on the original Italian, it has been for the same reasons. For example, lines 5 and 6 of the poem read: a precipizio nell'aria come i petali / dei fiori bianchi. For this, Alexander has ‘pellmell in the air like white petals’, and Martin ‘plummeting through the air like petals / of white flowers’. These are both perfectly acceptable and more accurate literally than my ‘hurtled on air / like whitest petals of white flowers’. Still, I believe my expansion of the Italian is both permissible and more accurate contextually, simply because Watkins's two ‘Music of Colours’ poems (which I believe Sanesi also had in mind here) are both explorations of the mystical symbol of ‘whiteness within whiteness’, in his lines: ‘white petal, of whitest darkness made ... / Dazzling the eyes with music, light's unspoken sound’.²⁶ And here, the proximity of the words ‘darkness’ and ‘dazzling’ clearly calls to mind Henry Vaughan's visionary lines, also well known to Sanesi, from ‘The Night’: ‘There is in God (some say) / A deep, but dazzling darkness.’ ²⁷ In the ‘Elegy’, the line nello stupefecante bianco delle tenebre is not only repeated twice, but also brings the poem to a close, both of which facts suggest that it is intended to bear a considerable weight of meaning. It is unfortunately impossible to render it adequately in English, with anything like the full force of associations echoing from that last Latin (Virgilian) word, tenebre, across two millennia of history. For this, Martin has ‘into the stupefying white of blackness’, and Alexander, ‘into the astounding white of the darkness’. Here, their literal approaches break down: stupefecante is by no means as ‘spoilt’ a word as ‘astounding’ or ‘stupefying’. My solution has simply been to restore the line to Vaughan and to our own seventeenth century Metaphysical tradition, via Watkins, Vaughan’s visionary heir in the twentieth century, with: ‘into the deep but dazzling darkness’.

To conclude, there is one prose passage in which Sanesi speaks personally of Watkins the man, and this too is revealing for the light it throws on their friendship, on the influence of Welsh landscape and tradition on Sanesi, on his dense style and descriptive prose, which owes much to that of Thomas, and on several lines and images in the ‘Elegy’:

NOTES

¹ Roberto Sanesi, The Graphic Works of Ceri Richards, tr. Richard Burns, Cerastico Editore, Milan, 1972, p. 5; henceforward referred to as GWCR.

² Ibid, p. 5.

³ In this connection, Nathaniel Tarn, a poet translated by Sanesi, has written: ‘Local post-Georgian poetry of validity is not English but Celtic: Yeats, Joyce, MacDiarmid, Dylan Thomas. A post-English reaction fades out after a praiseworthy but inconsequential brush with politics: Auden et al. Thomas, in whom Surrealism has its British day, provokes a new wave of little-Englandism. Rescue work on the English tradition: Hughes, Middleton, Silkin, Tomlinson, Redgrove, Macbeth, Wevill, however talented, or not, in its own terms, has not produced a new Poetics. The rest is beer and marital squabbles: politics at the level of the Profumo Case.’ Quoted (gleefully) by Hugh MacDiarmid in his preface to James Burns Singer, Collected Poems, ed. W. A. S. Keir, Secker & Warburg, London, 1970, p. xiii.

⁴ Sesso, nascita e morte in Dylan Thomas, in Aut Aut, no. 18, Milan, 1953.

⁵ Dylan Thomas, Poesie, tr. Roberto Sanesi, Guanda, Parma, 1954.

⁶ Dylan Thomas, Poesie giovanili, tr. Roberto Sanesi, Edizioni del Triangolo, Milan, 1958.

⁷ Nella coscia del gigante bianco, in Aut Aut, no. 20, Milan 1955; Nell'intricata immagine di Dylan Thomas, in Inventario, Vol. VIII, nos. 1-6, Milan, January-December 1956; In cerca del poeta che fu Dylan Thomas in Corriere d'informazione, Milan, 7-8 November 1963; Tre poesie giovanile e una lettera inedita in the Dylan Thomas special issue of Poesia e critica, no. 5, ed. Roberto Sanesi, Maestri, Milan, December 1963; Dati e supposizioni per una indagine tematica di `In the White Giant's Thigh', in Altri termini, no. 7, Naples, 1975; etc. Roberto Sanesi, Dylan Thomas, Lerici, Milan, 1960; and Nella coscia del gigante bianco, La Nuova Foglio, Macerata, 1976.

⁹ GWCR, p. 131.

¹⁰ See, for example, GWCR; Mel Gooding, Ceri Richards, Graphics, National Museum of Wales, 1979; Ceri Richards, Drawings to Poems by Dylan Thomas, with introduction by Richard Burns, Enitharmon Press, London, 1980; Catalogue for the Tate Gallery exhibition, London, 1981; and Richard Burns, Ceri Richards and Dylan Thomas: Keys to Transformation, Enitharmon Press, London, 1981.

¹¹ See GWCR, pp. 132-143; Roberto Sanesi, Journey Toward the North, tr. William Alexander, with lithographs by Ceri Richards, Cerastico Editore, Milan, 1973; Ceri Richards, Journey Toward the North, Collana 'Gli Smeraldi', no. 9, Cerastico, 1973; and also the three drawings in Roberto Sanesi, Elegia a Vernon Watkins, with tr. by Henry Martin, Guanda, Parma, 1968.

¹² See GWCR, p. 141.

¹³ See Ceri Richards, Tate Gallery Catalogue, London, 1981, p. 34.

¹⁴ Roberto Sanesi, `Harrington Gardens Suite', with tr. by William Alexander, in Roberto Sanesi: A Selection, ed. Tim Longville, Grosseteste, Lincoln, 1975, pp. 16-17.

¹⁵ Frances Richards, two postcards ‘On a poem of Roberto Sanesi’: ‘To Frances Richards, Painter’, Milan, 1979, and ‘The Blackbird’, Milan, 1981; both tr. Richard Burns.

¹⁶ Roberto Sanesi, Ceri Richards: Rilievi, disegni e dipinti, 1931-1940, with tr. by Rodney Stringer, La Nuova Foglio, Macerata, 1976.

¹⁷ Roberto Sanesi, ‘Capricorn’, in Vernon Watkins, Selected Verse Translations, Enitharmon Press, London, 1977, p. 78; reprinted in Roberto Sanesi, In Visible Ink, Selected Shorter Poems, ed. Richard Burns, Aquila, Isle of Skye, 1982, with two other unpublished trs. of Sanesi by Vernon Watkins: ‘Two Figures at the Door’ and ‘With the Selfsame Silence of Objects’.

¹⁸ See Vernon Watkins, Fidelities, Faber & Faber, London, 1968, p. 67.

¹⁹ Roberto Sanesi, Poesia inglese contemporanea, Schwarz, Milan, 1958.

²⁰ Vernon Watkins, Poesie, tr. Roberto Sanesi, Guanda, Parma, 1968.

²¹ Vernon Watkins, o delle mutazioni naturali in L'osservatore politico e letterario, vol. IV, no. 11, Milan, November 1960: two articles in Il Gazzettino, Venice, 3rd December 1961 and 7th February 1963; and article in Poesia e Critica, Vol, II, no. 4, Maestri, Milan, 1963; and article in Le Arti, Milan, April, 1967; etc.

²² Roberto Sanesi, Taliesin a Gower, Sandro Maria Rosso Editore, Biella, 1978.

²³ Roberto Sanesi, ‘Elegy for Vernon Watkins’, tr. Henry Martin, Guanda, Parma, 1968; and tr. William Alexander, Antaeus, Spring 1973, and New Directions, no. 28, New York, 1974.

²⁴ In Vernon Watkins, 1906-1967, ed. L. Norris, Faber & Faber, London, 1970. This is the easiest available publication of the poem in Italian for readers in Britain.

²⁵ See Vernon Watkins, Selected Poems 1930-1960, Faber & Faber, London. 1967, p. 50.

²⁶ Ibid, p. 46.

²⁷ Henry Vaughan, Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. L. C. Martin, Oxford University Press, 1963, p. 359.

²⁸ Roberto Sanesi, Taliesin a Gower, op. cit., p. 14; this tr. by Richard Burns.
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