La poesia nel romanzo — The Poem in the Novel

Poetic Italian: recognizing an old register

Until well into the twentieth century, Italian poetry used a language of its own, inherited from Petrarch and refined by centuries of imitation: inverted word order, truncated forms (cuor, amor, mar), literary pronouns (egli, ella), and words found almost nowhere else (ove, sovente, giammai, un dì). Schoolchildren learned it by memorizing poems, and many ordinary people who wrote verse for themselves — like Nella's father, and Ada's grandfather — wrote in it, whatever they spoke at home. Twentieth-century poets broke with much of this tradition. Trieste's own Umberto Saba, one of the major Italian poets of the century, was famous for an honest, plain language, while still using rhyme and traditional forms. Readers today recognize the old poetic register instantly, which is what allows Ada to use it for characterization: a father who suffers sincerely but can only speak about it in the dusty words of school poetry. For translators, such passages raise the problem of period style. A fully modern version loses the character; a fully archaic one can tip into parody. Many translators look, as Ada suggests, for the target language's own equivalent register — in English, the vocabulary of old hymns, epitaphs and Victorian verse — and use it sparingly.