Minority not Minorities: A Window on Italian Cultures vol 1

Poets from Sardinia, Michael Pinna (ed.) Cinnamon Press

Reviewing an anthology differs from looking at a collection by a single author.  In the latter case there is usually some coherence of style, theme, linguistics, place or time in which to find a way in.  But the anthology offers to the reader differing poetic streams of consciousness. 

Anthologies present editors with many questions to be considered.  Where should the emphasis be?  On theme? Gender issues?  Chronology?  The logic of this Minorities collection has been to select works of two poets from each of several geographical areas of Sardinia, a country where there are many varieties of languages within the language itself; dialects, if you will.

The book is set out with each poem in the original Sardinian on the left-hand page while the right-hand contains the English translation, so those in the know can find the way-marks and pointers of the translations.  I know nothing of the Sardinian language except a very slim amount of information  (obtained from Wikipedia)  that it is called Sardo, apparently still widely spoken,  and is a mixture of the influences of  the Romance languages Spanish French and Italian. 

So does it matter?  Well, I suppose it does if you believe in context, influence and poetics. Because these poems were first translated from Sardinian to Italian and then into English, in a way the reader is at a remove from the original intentions of the author and from the complexities of meaning which derive from cultural identification, rather than pure linguistics.  The great Welsh poet RS Thomas  once said that reading translated poetry was like kissing through a veil.   

But that is an academic quibble.  Translations are an entry point in which to learn about the cultures, the lives of others. These poems reflect the human struggle for families, for land, for identity. They also show that language is not the barrier we sometimes think it to be, in the sense that the emotions represented here could have come from this source or another.  

For example:

One day  I shall seize

the mistral's cold flame

as anxiety's sharp blade

to free you ...

from the sorrow of footsteps leading nowhere

(Paola Alcioni / Cagliari)

 

The poems describe what it feels like laugh and die in a “farmyard of tears" (Franco Cocco / Moon Skybanner) and to yearn for something better, elsewhere.

 

I would like to lead

silent swallow

flights

towards

faraway springtimes,

where the years are green

and the stars young

and the blue

sustains the dream

that gives the heart

wings to fly far

from melancholy.

(Antoni Canu / A Dream)

 

One of the disappointments of the collection was that there were moments when the language seemed to lean toward the melodramatic: 'Oh War, how many sunsets / you tinge with innocent blood' ( Raffaele Piras / To a Female Kamikaze) and the 'Poetic' with a capital 'P",  but this is perhaps the effect of an eye overdosed on modernism. There is a sense of the restlessness of the land of the mistral  here, as well as  the deep connections between landscape and culture at the heart of these poems - and they are well worth reading. Frances Spurrier

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