UC Berkeley

Original Echoes: Poetic Subjectivity and Translation between Italy, France, and the United States argues for a reconfiguration of twentieth century poetics to include the crucial interventions of its translators of poetry. Triangulating between Italian, French, and English in the 1940s, the dissertation takes as case studies Fernanda Pivano’s 1943 Italian translation of Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, and Louise Varèse’s 1946 English translation of Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud. Through close readings of both source text and translation, Original Echoes reveals how these translations productively shift from their source texts, reconstructing how they made cultural, aesthetic, and political interventions in their receiving cultures—Italy under fascism, and the United States post-WWII. By drawing on Translation Studies, theories of comparative lyric, as well as feminist critiques that seek to redefine the hierarchical relation between source and translated texts, the dissertation theorizes the lasting intervention of these translators as proceeding from a paradoxical emphasis on fidelity, self-effacement and equivalence.

The four chapters of the dissertation alternate between chapters discussing a source text and chapters analyzing its translation. In Chapter One (“Spoon River Anthology: Lyric Address and Fatal Birth”) I examine the innovative form of the epitaph-monologues in Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, and how it critiques lyric address, while showing that the collection’s representation of crises of women’s health in particular exposes the limits to this critique. In Chapter Two (“Talento disobbediente: Fernanda Pivano’s Spoon River”) I argue that Pivano’s translation of Spoon River, in collaboration with poet-editor Cesare Pavese, redirects Spoon River’s poetic innovations by giving the collection a new life as an antifascist text in Italy. In Chapter Three (“Trouver une langue: English in Rimbaud’s Illuminations”) I turn to Illuminations, Arthur Rimbaud’s collection of prose poems from 1886, and read his use of English as it moves beyond a nationalist critique to reveal the otherness inherent in poetic language. And lastly, in Chapter Four (“Activating Translation: Louise Varèse’s Illuminations”) I reconsider Varèse’s much-lauded “accuracy” as a translator of Rimbaud as a form of close translation that renders the strangeness of Rimbaud’s language while retaining remnants of its own belatedness as a translation. The Conclusion briefly considers the legacy of these translations.