Letters.

Umberto Saba

To the Editors:

In the often thankless work of translating poetry, the translator is usually content with any attention that might be paid to his labors. Thus I suppose I should, and do, prefer Eric Ormsby's lengthy, mixed review of my translations of Umberto Saba's Songbook: Selected Poems and History and Chronicle of the Songbook (December 2000), with its partial praise, to the general indifference with which the work has been received. All the same, because Professor Ormsby's quibbles with my renditions seem to me informed by little more than a captious pedantry and because he goes to such length to make points that, when not simply wrong, are merely differences of opinion and taste, I feel compelled to defend my decisions and point out some of the flaws in his reasoning.

Professor Ormsby appears to belong to that school of armchair translators who too often succumb to the illusion that not only are their sight translations of the original preferable to the painstakingly gestated solutions presented on the page, but that such immediate and literal renderings never occurred to the translator. Thus we are told, at the start of the review, that the following tercet:

 
   Esistere da tanti anni mi sembra, 
   che ]brse can Abramo ho trasmurato. 
   Forse fui Faust, e Margherita ho amato. 

would somehow be better, and truer to the original and all its effects, in the reviewer's following version (the last two lines are his):

 
   I feel I've been alive so many years, 
   Maybe with Abraham I migrated, 
   Maybe I was Faust and loved Margarete.