Translator’s Note

Reading the poetry of Luigi Fontanella, even in so small a selection as the present volume, one is struck by its great variety  in both form and subject. Here, amid much else, are affectionate  addresses to friends, concentrated philosophical speculations (thought  always rooted  in the phenomena of the natural world), and descriptions, whether sorrowful or satirical, of strangers glimpsed in laundromats, railroad cars, and the corridors of academic building. The short lines and brief sections of “Nedelia” a tender and elliptical evocation of the poet’s late mother, are just a few pages from the sprawl and flow of “Amerika America Amen,” a fast-shifting, multivoiced collage inspired by Robert Altman’s film Nashville. (Given Fontanella’s long recidence in this country, it his hardly surprising that his subjects are frequently drawn from American life and landscapes , but the observing and organizing sensibility  at work in these poems is distinctly, and ineradicably, Italian; as he himself has analogously remarked, “No one ever classified Pound as anything but an American.”)
    It is also very interesting to trace the development of his work, as I have had occasion to do in the ten years since I first encountered both the poet and his poetry. In the earlier lyrics, the speaker seem often to make upon the reader the demands that reality has made upon him; the phrasing is often dense, the images packed, the line breaks and the syntactic shifts abrupt; punctuation is used sparingly, when it is used at all; and themes tend often toward the epistemological . While there has been no loss of the stylistic inventiveness that is one of the more attractive features of  Fontanella’s poetry, abstract investigation and extravagant wordplay have largely become the province of longer texts, such as the full-length Round Trip (1991) and the series of  surreal sonnets written with Giose Rimanelli (Da G. a G., 1996); The shorter poems and sequences now more typically concern themselves with concretely detailed personal reminiscences, especially of loved ones, and express themselves in a more relaxed and open style, one that makes frequent use of traditional devices of sound and rhythm.
    “I am here…, “Fontanella says in “Paper Curtain, “not to understand/but seeking only to describe/and so live. “As true as this assertion my be in the moment of its utterance, its truth is repeatedly questioned and often undermined by the other texts in the volume, and never more so than in the “Suite for My Father,” which he has continually revised and enlarged over the last decade. In this poem, he returns to his youth and early manhood-the nature of time has been a constant preoccupation in Fontanella’s work- to examine the “admired and detested” figure who has thrown such a long shadow over his life. In trying to come to terms with his past, an effort informed by a hard-earned and often rueful awareness, he tacitly acknowledges that it is the attempt to make sense of our experiences that makes us most fully human. And it is at this level, a point toward which all his earlier work looks now to have been striving, that he most fully engages the humanity of his reader.
    In the formal variety of his work and its several, often intermingled modes, Luigi Fontanella brings to contemporary Italian poetry a note that is uniquely his own, one that I hope will ring clearly through the English versions of his poems.

                                    Acknowledgments

Most of the Italian poems in this volume were drawn from the following collections: La vita trasparente (Rebellato,1978); Simulazione di reato (Lacaita, 1979); Stella Saturnina (Ventaglio, 1979); and Ceres(Caramanica, 1996). Several of the uncollected poems have appeared in the following journals: Gradiva: “Foglio sipario” and “Ripeteremmo il viaggio a”; Yale Italian Poetry: the first section of  “Suite for My Father, ”Part Two, under the little ”Un sogno.”
    A number of the translations have previously appeared, sometimes in different versions, in the following journals: Brook Spring: “The image of the frozen lake” and “Paper Curtain”; Chelsea: “Nedelia” and four sections of “Suite for My Father, Part Two(“In the train on its way to…”; “My college graduation day”; “Your last acquisition was”; and “It was here”); Gradiva: “The image of the frozen lake”; “I’m on a straight path with a red sun beating down”; “Page and Awakening”; “Paper Curtain”; the first section of “Suite for My Father,” Part One (“I think of you this evening amid…,”); and “Words for Emma, “ I (“In the nighttime someone in my place”); Polytext: “Words for Emma, I; Stony Brook: “Mimikòs”; VIA: Voices in Italian Americana: “Page and Awakening” and “Paper Curtain.”
    The following translations  also appeared, at times in different form, in the antology New Italian Poets, edited by Dana Gioia and Michael Palma (Story  Line, 1991): “The image of the frozen lake”; “Mimikòs”; “I’m on a straight path with a red sun beating down”; four sections of Part One of ”Suite for My Father” (You had a lot of friendly enemies”; “This morning I recognized you suddenly”; “I find myself thinking of you at the age I am now”; and “You went away from us too soon”); “Turning of the car”; and “Words for Emma,” I.
    I wish to thank Dana Gioia, for introducing me to Luigi Fontanella and to his poetry, and thus initiating a friendship and a collaboration of  which the present  volume is only one of many results; Laura Stortoni, for reading several of the translations from Ceres and offering a number of valuable suggestions for their improvement; my wife, Victoria, for providing, as always, sensitive readings of the text and crucial encouragement for the project; and especially Luigi Fontanella himself, for helping to make the final selection of poems, and for clarifying many passages in the originals, thus enabling me to make their English approximations clearer and stronger than they would otherwise have been.