Aleksandr Blok, La Violetta notturna e altre poesie, prefazione e traduzione di Nilo Pucci, Giuliano Ladolfi Editore, Borgomanero (Novara), 2016, euro 10.
A small book about a great and highly beloved Russian poet: Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921), one of the most painful voices of his time, exacerbated irreparably from the outcomes of the October Revolution.
If every poetry anthology speaks first of all to the predilection of those who set it up, the private portrait of the poet chosen by it delineates reverberates in the common cultural space, adding new dots to its perception.
The blockbuster syllabus Nilo Pucci presents for Ladolfi publisher picks up on that crunchy crest in which, around 1906, almost unwittingly, the poet leans out of his symbolic past to lose himself in a space of his own, marked by abject afflictions. From his poetic legacy, with enigmatic and apocalyptic signs, are transposed - along an arch that embraces the first fifteen years of the last century - some of the most breathtaking passages, where the ambush of restlessness floats in certain confidences, or rages in unresolved exaltations.
A passage exemplified by the poem The Night Violence, from which the whole volume takes the title, borrowing a choice that had already been of Renato Poggioli for his blockbuster anthology of 1933. Pucci returns today on the steps of those who preceded him, along the path that was inaugurated by Poggioli was beaten by Angelo Maria Ripellino and Eridano Bazzarelli, with the idea of offering the Italian reader yet another key to access to the dense world of suggestions of this poet.
Not dusty florilegio of forgotten verses, emblem of tempered temples, is this new translation, but live poetry that reaches us and touches us, especially in the happiest moments of translating, when the original man can reproduce the nervous sign enclosed in voluntary hypnotic, changing it into precious Italian styles, shaken by expressionist tremors. As in the rendering of a lyric of July 1902, of which the first quartine reads: “È orrendo il freddo delle sere,/ battono inquieti i loro venti,/ per strada, trepide chimere,/ fruscii di passi inesistenti”. Versi che si rivelano come lampi di intertraduttività pura, in cui la grana ripelliniana viene affinata ancora, inglobata nelle proprie trovate.
Or as in the verse that opens the poem of 1914-1915 entitled The garden of the nightdresses, in which the fine poet pretends to be a stone scavenger: “Spezzo lo schisto sul fondale/ melmoso, all'ora del riflusso/ ed il mio asino fiaccato/ trascina i pezzi sopra il dorso”.
The metric virtuosity of the translator leads the scanning of the original to his own home, without ever being constrained by the letter of the block syntactic dictum, yet very careful to return the torpid, enchanted solo stralunato.
The most umbratile, sublunare Blok of the first collections that comes from these pages inhabits spaces close to those crossed by poets edited earlier by the same translator for the types of the same publisher. It brings us back to the twilight aura that lies in the verses gathered in Innokentij Annenskij's Insomnia Book (2011), unmatched master of Anna Achmatova. And in Vladislav Chodasevič's cauldron's infamy, perpetually immobilized in desperate compositions, in which he is crowned in the Quarantuno poems (2014), the twenty years from 1907 to 1928 and stops at the thresholds of the European Night given in translation by Caterina Graziadei in 1995. Thus a first triptych is presented, pending further enlargements.
Paola Ferretti