Claudia Azzola (Italy)

Richard Berengarten

I knocked on Berengarten’s door in the early Nineties, as a travelling companion to Anita Sanesi. We were on our way to Swansea to attend a celebration for her late husband, the poet Roberto Sanesi. We paid a visit to Richard’s “castle” (every Englishman’s home…) in Cambridge. Later on, by a bay in South Wales, influenced perhaps by the dreamy and psychic quality of the clouds, but also by the evening in Cambridge and our talks and thoughts on that occasion, an idea struck me: to put together a small publication dedicated to literary translation, a “cornucopia of speech acts, dialects, conversation and languages” – following our host’s reflections on the translation of poetry.

Here, I start out from one of the key expressions of Richard Berengarten’s giant production: an extraordinary “poem of the soul”.  In March 2019, I presented this during a seminar led by Prof. Gabriella Valera Gruber at the University of Trieste. Translating this poem into Italian began as a test for me that turned into a treasure. Through the enchantment of this text, the ambiguity of dream – of the unconscious, freed by drowsiness, from the cause-effect relation – achieves intimate connection with the essence of poetry:

I dreamed I slept, and in that sleep I dreamed

and from that double dream interior woke

and walked in a closed courtyard. Someone spoke

behind me, and I turned. A dark girl beamed

a smile at me and said, ‘Just as you seemed

in dream to dream, so by the double stroke

of waking into waking, from this yoke

you’ve quietly shouldered, may you be redeemed.’

So when I enter my last mortal sleep

after dreams end, and I vacate this shell,

will I then wake and, doubly waking, keep

some mirror of that courtyard in my skull

and, back inside it, rising from the deep

notness of death, sleepwalk, or wake instead?

In Italian it sounds like this:

Ho sognato di dormire, e in quel sonno sognavo

e da quel doppio sogno l’interiore si destava

ad una chiusa corte per adire. Qualcuno parlò

dietro di me, e mi voltai. Una fanciulla scura mi sfavillò

un sorriso e disse, ‘Così come apparivi nel sogno

sognare, in doppio colpo svegliarti nella veglia da questo giogo

che hai quietamente sopportato

possa tu esser redento.’

Così quando entrerò nel mio ultimo sonno di mortale,

alla fine dei sogni, sgombrerò questo guscio,

mi desterò e doppiamente vegliante, avrò nel teschio

riflessi di quella chiusa corte come in specchio,

dal fondo, risalente dal non esserci della morte,

sonnambulo sarò, o sarò vegliante?

Here, I suggest the motif of an optical instrument, or a magnifying glass, to introduce the reader to Berengarten’s “diamond” activity as a poet and translator. Or, to change metaphor, his work (opera, oeuvre) comes across as a forest which grows from many different seeds and streams. This “cornucopian” activity includes the languages of Europe, by which I mean “all of Europe,” and all the peoples of Europe. Here he is in a Balkan context:

From what remains of the Kragujevac dead,

who have become mere mineral and memory,

massed flowers, in a triumph of living red,

breed in a soil where corpses calcify.

Di quel che resta dei morti di Kragujevac

divenuti puro minerale e memoria,

si nutrono, in un trionfo di vivo rosso,

fiori ammucchiati nel terreno dove i cadaveri calcificano.” (*)

Here again, the acting-out of unconscious processes pierces the magnifying glass of the poet’s multiform production.

(*) From “First Wreath”, published in Traduzione e tradizione (Quaderno internazionale di traduzione poetica), no. 2, Milan, March 2007. 

Back to introduction here.

Next contribution here.