In this issue we present reviews of Luca Manini’s newly published translation of The Faerie Queene into Italian. Here we offer a brief interview with the translator:
I first met The Faerie Queene when I was a sixteen-year-old student and, leafing through my English anthology (it was still a time when school anthologies presented Spenser …) I came across an excerpt from the poem—this was the episode of the Bower of Bliss, and my first encounter with Spenser was thus in the enchanted garden of Acrasia.
Some months later I bought my first Faerie Queene—it was the 1950 translation by Carlo Izzo in a glorious collection of classics; a book which has moved from shelf to shelf in my house library but which has always been well within my reach.
In 2005 I prepared the Italian version of Spenser’s Amoretti, thanks to the support of Gian Mario Anselmi, a professor of Italian at the university of Bologna. And during a coffee break at a conference on European Petrarchism he threw in a challenge: “Why don’t you start working on The Faerie Queene? I’ll find a publisher for it… .”
No more words were necessary. I started immediately; and a year later Professor Anselmi put me in touch with Nuccio Ordine, who was drawing up a first list of titles for a new series of classics. A remotely-rooted dream was becoming true … .
The first draft of my Italian rendering of The Faerie Queene I was in verse; but when the contract was signed, I was required a prose translation. That’s why what you are reading is Spenser in prose. Obviously, this is a wrong statement. It is not possible to read Spenser in a language that is not Elizabethan English; obviously, it something else.
At the end of my labor (which took me nearly six years) I can say that the choice (or the imposition) of prose was not a bad choice. This being the first complete Italian translation of The Faerie Queene, it was necessary to give an exact rendering of everything that Spenser wrote and wanted to convey, and this is much easier if done in prose. A big problem with a verse rendering is a basic difference between English and Italian. English having so many mono- and bi- syllabic words, an iambic pentameter can contain up to ten words, which is impossible in the Italian endecasillabo. My version of Amoretti was done in verse—but this entailed the sacrifice of many words, a forced choice between the ones to preserve and the ones to leave out; this was what I experienced in the first draft of The Faerie Queene I. Prose allowed me, instead, to be faithful to all words, concepts, images that Spenser wrote and used. My major aim was to create a text which could flow as the original one does and which could give an idea of the labyrinthine qualities of it, of its lexical richness and variety, and of the enchanting rythm that Spenser is able to create. There is no point in stressing that much (too much) was lost.
The language used by Spenser has an archaic flavour which comes from his love of majestic old- sounding words and his admiration of poets like Chaucer. An archaic-flavoured Italian would have sounded out of place at the beginning of the twenty-first century; as Friedmar Apel has acutely remarked, languages move on and develop; and every generation must re-translate classics to make them their own classics. However, Spenser’s language called for what I like to define (which is what I have tried to give to the Italian reader) a “patina d’antico,” that is the recovery and preservation of words used in 16th-century epic poems, so as to create a necessary link between the language of literary tradition and the langauge of today.
A great deal of work was necessary for footnotes, in order to signal (if not all, which would have been an impossible task) the major debts Spenser has to poets from the past (Homer, Virgil, Ovid) and from his present day (Ariosto, Tasso, Trissino). It is a remarkable fact that in Renaissance England classics were not only Greek and Latin writers but also contemporary writers, such as Baldassar Castiglione and Stefano Guazzo.
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