Quinn Gruber

on translating Alda Merini

Even after I finished this translation, I struggled to find words to describe what is so captivating about Merini’s poetry. Calling its language simple feels like an injustice to its intense emotional power, and yet the poem’s simplicity is its driving force. Balancing these traits proved itself the most difficult aspect of translating. For example, sentire possesses many meanings: “to hear, smell, taste, and feel”; multiple forms of sensory perception are implicitly tied to emotional feeling. Thus, sentire nemico not only implies the feeling that someone is your enemy, but also the inability to perceive them as anything else. I translated this phrase as “see as an enemy” to preserve the sense-emotion link as naturally as possible in English.

Far sortir was another difficult phrase; the use of fare (“to do, to make”) before an infinitive is a common construction in Italian but can sound jarring in English, so I only translated sortir. Sortir(e) means “to pull from, draw out,” but I chose to translate it as “spin,” in the sense of spinning yarn or thread, to evoke a physical connection, the weaving together of two people’s lives.

Overall, I wanted to capture the conversational sound of the poem — not in the sense of small talk, but of openness. The speaker recognizes the pain of the past that lies between them and the man, and yet they forgive him. They do not dismiss that pain, but reach out despite it, because we rely on our relationships with others to know who we are. Though this generosità/generosity is “false” in that we write and speak in order to reassure ourselves, Merini asks us: Is there any other way to survive, to connect with each other, than through language and poetry?