What Brings Us to a Halt: An Ongoing Dialogue about (and because of) Translation
by Franca Mancinelli and John Taylor
Poetry is made of words but it takes us beyond them; every poetic word is a threshold.
What makes Franca Mancinelli and John Taylor’s author-translator relationship unusually rich is the intricate dialogue they carry on by e-mail during the translation process, not only about word choices and syntactic difficulties, but also about the very themes of the poems and prose texts. The literary and intellectual affinities that they share often prompt them to discuss the psychological, philosophical, and spiritual questions raised by Mancinelli’s resonant writing. Their dialogue “Distance is a Root,” published in Hopscotch Translation on July 13, 2021, offers one example among several others. Recently, Mancinelli’s essay “Flowers and Hell: On Poetry and Authenticity,” which appeared online in Italian only on the literary website Le parole e le cose, spawned a new form of exchange. At the center of Mancinelli’s essay is a haiku by Issa which immediately caught Taylor’s attention. The same haiku was evoked by Philippe Jaccottet in an important prose text, “Apparition of Flowers,” which Taylor had translated many years before and of which he still often thinks because of his love for botany. As he was translating Mancinelli’s essay, he therefore began writing a parallel text, a personal essay also in the form of a letter to his dear friend, detailing the coincidence and the importance that these two translations represent for him.
Below, we present Franca Mancinelli’s essay in John Taylor’s English translation. Stay tuned for Taylor’s response, forthcoming in Hopscotch…
Flowers and Hell: On Poetry and Authenticity
by Franca Mancinelli
Authenticity in literature is an issue that must be addressed by beginning with language. When we enter the creative dimension, that is, when language exists in its original potentiality, the theme—the object of writing—is in fact nothing more than a filter, a sieve, through which life passes. No theme is worthier or more entitled, than another one, to be expressed. The destruction of an anthill rather than the bombing of a city. A sparrow killed by a hunter, a woman victim of femicide. An ongoing war, a kitchen in which meat stew is being prepared. We often unconsciously find ourselves within an ideological horizon that establishes hierarchies of spaces and contexts, and that claims to determine the direction in which literature should look. But writing is still today, as myth tells us, a kind of weaving, not so much for what it does, but for what is brought to the surface. Such is a literary work when it enables us to perceive the subtle warp and woof in which every element of reality is woven; when it shows us the same thread, the same material, that passes through multiple states and forms of being. The identity in which we find ourselves living is loosened, opened up, when we enter into certain experiences such as art and writing. In fact, when we are in contact with the authentic nature of language, we are fully within this woven fabric of reality, so that, in every figure which we draw, the Other also reverberates as the whole to which it belongs. Similarly, no experience that we have undergone, however dramatic or exceptional, can ensure us that we are an author or a person worthy of being listened to. We can be one to the extent that life’s tapestry shines through our words, as if the very letters of the alphabet faded to allow the original weave to emerge. The blank page faces us as a space of vision, a place where the veil of reality is torn and we finally, if only for a few moments, lean out.
Everyone is consigned to his or her own blood, like a page to ink. Authenticity in writing has to do with a form of measure, with a subtle and mandatory balance. It is intrinsically linked to an ecology of language, to the awareness that silence is our most precious resource, our primary source of energy, our connection to the deepest layer of reality, from which we receive the nourishment to create. The more we linger in this space, the more our language is regenerated, brought back to the life that belongs to it, within the same millenary ribbon that wraps and unwinds.
We write by starting from what precedes language, from the experience of the unspeakable. It is from there, from that darkness, that we come back up every time, bringing the signs of our failure. In fact, by returning to language, we lose the totality in which we were immersed, but we preserve the memory of what happened.
Poetry is made of words but it takes us beyond them; every poetic word is a threshold. When, instead, one writes by taking off from mere words, a claustrophobic feeling is sensed. Such is the surface symptom: no previous descent has taken place. We are simply brought back to what appears before our eyes.
I believe, as Andrea Zanzotto states, that language is still the depository of the authentic. It perhaps resembles a refuge, a tunnel leading beyond otherwise barred borders, or a hidden place where resistance is being organized and where is carried out what the poet from Pieve di Soligo calls “the eternal rehabilitation of a trauma whose nature is unknown”; a space where the catastrophe—first and foremost, our coming into the world—is re-elaborated.
“In this world we walk / on hell’s roof, / gazing at the flowers” (Kobayashi Issa). Do those flowers belong to reality or to a figment of the imagination that helps us to endure horror? The distinction doesn’t matter. Drawing boundaries between our interiority and the world is like separating clouds from the sky, waves from the sea. The flowers that Issa mentions represent one of those details unnoticed by the inattentive eye closed during everyday routines. Those whose lives are determined by work and action ignore those flowers, whose place is taken up by objectives and tasks that help them not to be swallowed up by the void, and conceal it for a while. Actually, however, those flowers cover nothing; they grow right next to the abyss. They shine like a candle in the darkness. They wait for each of us there, disarmed, for the possibility that we have of returning to childhood, acknowledging beauty, and continuing to marvel. Because those flowers, even along the edges of our path, are capable of orienting it, of giving us the strength to take the footsteps we are taking above hell.
Both hell and flowers are in Issa’s gaze, in his awareness. If he hadn’t mentioned hell, those flowers could merely have been fake, rhetorical, decorative ones. Instead, they stand out as a signal, a direction towards salvation, enabling us not to fall. If he hadn’t mentioned the flowers, the scene would have been completely somber; the footsteps would have resulted from human qualities like resistance and courage. This is not the case, for the direction taken by those footsteps is determined by the flowers, by their simultaneously humble and miraculous presence. Those flowers are neither more nor less real than hell. Poetic language brings both into existence. There is, however, a dimension in which what is apparently more labile, closer to imagination and dream, includes per se a reality that goes beyond the surface, beyond givenness, without denying it, and that opens it to a condition whereby what appears negative is recharged positively, brought back into the generating vastness of the cosmos. It is neither a lie nor fiction, but a transformation making reality “truer,” nearing it to the origin, reconnecting it to the infinite weave of the universe. What we ultimately still expect from poetry (and which probably constitutes its essence) is this radical change of direction. Whatever contents are presented to us by existence, however tragic and alienating they are, we recognize the authenticity of poetic language precisely from its ability to guide us through them, without inventing or concealing, through the strength of a metamorphosing movement.
When I think of the greatest authors, I see an empty frame, a window sash, more than their faces. The force that brings them to us over distances of space and time, of languages and cultures, is proportionate to the extent to which they have created, through themselves and their work, a space for life to speak. In fact, their books are above all anonymous, the product of all the existences that have converged at that point; only later do they take on, for the world, author’s names such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Fernando Pessoa, T. S. Eliot, Giacomo Leopardi. . . As Paul Eluard says in two lines that I have carried with me ever since adolescence: “One face indeed had to respond / To all the names in the world.” The lines are taken from one of his poems that I read in Franco Fortini’s translation. In these lines, I still sense a love expanding and overflowing until it is embodied in one person, like water finding a shore in order to exist, to be recognized. Moreover, Adriatic and Ionian are names referring to the same body of water on the planet. Something similar happens in that face that suddenly seems to illuminate our existence. The face responds to a name, but all the names in the world continue to resonate within its contours; all the names in the world in fact precede the existence of that beloved space with its human features. Love is authentic when it possesses this tension, this movement which, from the infinity of life, leads to an individuality, without closing itself up and dying in it, but, instead, continuing to vibrate with the boundless vastness belonging to it. Poetry follows this same movement. Likewise, poetry is inconceivable beyond a collective horizon: plurality is inherent in the very matter of language, which is kept alive through meaning transmitted beyond the confines of the self towards others in the present as well as in the past and future.
Poetry is a form of rebirth. The beginning of another life in words. In fact, through language all of us are given the opportunity to break through the surface of the world and get closer to our own essence, to what germinates in us. This creative principle manifests itself in the empty spaces, the interstices of our ego, with the same obtuse tenacity of plants that grow up from cracks in cement. As authors, we strive to build—a plot, a form, a structure—yet the creative process demands that we come to a halt in places where our techniques and strategies, refined over the years, prove useless. We are called upon to relinquish time spent exerting our will on writing projects and reconcile ourselves with the cyclical movement at work in us, as in every other element of the universe. This circular motion smooths out our mind, making it increasingly humble, ever closer to the matter of which it is composed. We still have much to learn from stones. For example, both sea and freshwater stones lose their shine when they dry in the sun. The same is true of us when we leave the circle. Our beauty, our authenticity as human beings, lies in being fully immersed in the dimension that belongs to us.
In the composition of a text, the work consists in giving ourselves over to the flow of images, in making ourselves as empty as possible and therefore capacious towards the widest scope of vision. We must make ourselves able to contain, to be receptive, and at the same time to comprehend, as the Latin verb cápere suggests. More than rational understanding, this in fact involves a disposition towards openness. After the text has found an initial form on the page, the work involves removing everything which weighs down on the language, which hinders the flow of images: poetic expressions, abstract terms, residues of tradition, just as we would clean the products of our existence from a stream. One’s entire attention is concentrated and calibrated on the balance between abandonment and carefulness, between obedience and control. Some elements indispensable to the vitality of the text remain hidden, immersed in the matter of the language. If I remove them during my labor limae, the work of filing down, an impression results of images remaining suspended, uprooted from the experience that has given birth to them. This affects the text in that it records our labor, effort, fatigue. Something similar happens when our breathing is broken off too soon. There is, however, a secret adherence to the life of language and it is at work within language’s very nature, within its authenticity: this adherence knows which words remove energy from the text, and which deletions increase its strength.
Translated from the Italian by John Taylor
Note: Franca Mancinelli’s essay was published in Italian on the literary website Le parole e le cose, as a part of the series “Autenticità e poesia contemporanea,” edited by Maria Borio and Laura Di Corcia, on 11 March 2025.
Franca Mancinelli (b. 1981), one of the most important poetic voices in Italian poetry, has won several national prizes for her books. Her entire published oeuvre is also available in English. Excerpts from her dialogues with John Taylor have appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Hopscotch Translation, Hammerklavier, and Eurolitkrant. A bilingual dialogue in verse has also appeared in two successive issues of the journal Traduzionetradizione (Nos. 20 and 21, 2022-2023). Mancinelli lives in Fano, Italy.
John Taylor (b. 1952) is an American writer, poet, critic, and translator who has long lived in France. As a translator from French, Italian, and Modern Greek, he has brought the work of several European poets into English for the first time. His most recent translations include books by Pascal Quignard, Philippe Jaccottet, Béatrice Douvre, Charline Lambert, Veroniki Dalakoura, and Elias Petropoulos. His own volumes of poetry and poetic prose include Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees, A Notebook of Clouds & A Notebook of Ridges, which is a “double book” co-authored with the Swiss poet Pierre Chappuis, and What Comes from the Night.
Originally published on Hopscotch Translation
Tuesday, May 27, 2025
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