1) "minimum fax", an Italian publishing house from Rome, was known to have a young target of readers, due to its editions of Carver and the Beat Generation writers. This is why "West of your cities", a recent anthology of twelve top-notch contemporary american poets, edited by Mark Strand and Damiano Abeni, appears a bit unusual. We asked Damiano Abeni about it.

I think I’m not the right person to answer this question: Marco Cassini (the general manager) and Daniele Di Gennaro could really give you the publisher’s perspective on West of Your Cities. However, I’ll give you my opinion. Well, I think a smart publisher, such as minimum fax, certainly thinks about a specific literary arena and a specific literary public. But I believe literary quality comes before that. So... I feel it came quite natural to minimum fax to publish some of the best poets born between 1934 and 1950 and some of the best poems written in the last 40 years or so in the United States.

2) How do you compare these authors with the Beat Generation ones? I mean: what’s your final opinion about "West of your Cities". And how did you get over the difficulties -if any- of translatingin Italian such a broad variety of styles?

West of Your Cities is, for me, the accomplishment of a long journey. I started translating American poetry back in 1974, in Tucson, Arizona, where I was spending a year as an American Field Service exchange student. I was translating the Beats for my good friends at home, who were eager to know what it was really like to be out there in the early ‘70s. I have never stopped since. I am very fond of Ginsberg, Corso, Snyder, and specially of Ferlinghetti (his father emigrated to the States from the same province in northern Italy, Brescia, where I was born and where I grew up): they are the authors who made me read poetry, who drew me in the magic environment of poetry – I’ll never stop reading and translating them with admiration and gratitude. However, things change, and growing up you realize that there is a whole world out there, with so very many different things and people, different voices, and different ways of approaching poetry. In the years I have become more and more attracted to "metaphoric" poets, those poets who create new worlds of their own where we can roam and see things with a completely different eye. I think this is the main difference between the Beats, who were portraying the world and their own experiences, and the poets in West of Your Cities: the difference between metonimy and metaphor.

As for the authors included in the anthology, I’ve been reading and translating them for a long long time. Some of them, like Strand, Simic and Bidart, I know well or I talk to – and I admire them a lot. Of the 12 poets included in the anthology Strand and I agreed on 11 names, then he wanted to include another woman, I pushed for Robert Hass – at the end Hass was included. My idea is that these authors really represent well their generation and the amazing level of American poetry in the 20^th century, and that they are the base for the new poets who will mainly be active in this century.

As for the different voices... I don’t see that as a problem. I try to be as faithful as possible to the written page, and to the effect I imagine the written page will have on the reader. In an interview, Charles Simic said something I really relate to. He was asked why he completely stopped writing in Serbian, after a few years spent in the States, and he answered (I quote from memory) "Because I didn’t know anymore what those words did to people". Here, that’s exactly the main goal of my work: to see what the poems do to me, to imagine what they do to people in their original language, and to try to interpret them in a way that makes it possible to reproduce their effect in an audience in a different language. So... I just work hard on what is on the page, I read it aloud to hear the sounds and the rhythm, I type it – yes – I often re-type the originals, to have a physical feeling, through my fingertips, of what letters are used, of what regularities and irregularities are in those letters and which combinations are essential to give us the final "effect". I also "paint" the poems: I get colored pencils, and I paint the different letters in different colors, I underline alliterations, rhymes, similar portions of words – so that at the end I also have a visual experience of the patterns that make up the texture of the poem. Then, after reading for months or even years, I just "dive" in the act of translating as if it were a river, and I let myself go, trying to reproduce the flow of signs, sounds, meanings, rhythms, colors and feelings that I perceived. Sometimes it works.

3) Robert Hass and John Koethe are amongst my favourites in the anthology. I made also a quick internet search for interviews: I liked Koethe’s philosophical background and I found Hass trustworthy and down-to-earth. Have you ever asked, say Mark Strand about being a US Laureate?

As far as I know, Koethe and Hass were totally un-translated in Italian. They are important poets, capable of saying such important things in such a poised and clear way. I never talked about being a Poet Laureate with Strand, he wouldn’t say much, I imagine, and doesn’t care much about official appointments. However, I know poets take very seriously that position: they have the duty to promote poetry in the Country, and actually that’s what they do anyhow in their normal life, teaching, reading, editing, writing critical essays, finding new talented young writers.

4) West of your Cities is having quite a positive response on the critical side. But, while admitting the need for such an anthology, the Italian critics keep considering Italian poetry as being superior. What do you say to them? And how do you think the US public would react to a similar anthology of contemporary Italian poetry?

Yes, on one side I would say the book was well accepted by the public. However it is true that some remarks were a bit... bitter. The way I see it... I think this book is somewhat embarrassing for the "official" Italian literary world: it was published by a young publishing house and it was edited and translated by a... full-fledged full-time epidemiologist who recently has been publishing at least 10 scientific peer-reviewed papers on international journals per year, and who happens to translate poetry just for fun in the little free time he has, and who is friends with Strand and some other great American poets. To be perfectly honest I think West of Your Cities pissed off quite a few professors and a few big publishers: I expect, now, an abundance of translations from the American, including other anthologies. That would be great! It was just about time. I often wonder: how many Institutes of American literature are there in the Italian universities? How many professors and students? What the heck do they do, if no anthology of the American poetry was published in the past 40 years, if poets like Ashbery, Merrill, Wilbur, Justice, Hecht, Ammons, Snodgrass, and so on and so on, are still largely if not totally unknown to the Italian public? So, it’s quite understandable that critics had to hint something was not perfectly right with this book.

As for the Italians, they certainly are translated and known in the States. At times I tried to see if I could translate with some American friends (including, of course, Strand) some Italian poets I like, for instance Luciano Erba, Franco Loi, Antonella Anedda.... but... they already had a good number of translations there! The fact is that in the American universities (not much elsewhere, but in the school certainly yes) people read a lot more than in Italy. Just one last anecdote: in the early ‘80s I worked with my friend Pietro Gibellini – an outstanding student of Belli, D’Annunzio, and others – on a project about the "foreign fortune" of G.G. Belli’s sonnets. We surveyed the main translations and essays in English, French, German, Russian, Dutch, and a few other languages, and publishes a nice volume, "Belli oltre frontiera" (Bonacci, Rome, 1983). With the single exception of my friend and "maestro" Riccardo Duranti, I don’t know any Italian (I’m excluding from this count the students of Belli) who knows about this book. Well, when I was doing postgraduate studies at Johns Hopkins I found the book in the Eisenhower Library of the University, and could see that many people had read it! I was flabbergasted, but I think that’s how things go as far as reading poetry is concerned in these two countries.

5) Last Question: what are you working on these days?

First of all I’m waiting for another big project to be published, the "almost" complete poems of Elizabeth Bishop. It’s been a real struggle, for a few years: I fought to have the project accepted (after a while Adelphi agreed), and then I worked with Riccardo Duranti and Ottavio Fatica: for me it has been a great experience to work with such nice and gifted professionals and students of the poetic translation. There have been hard times, when I really did not know what we would have accomplished, but now I feel [modestia a parte] we have completed one of the best books ever published in the last decades in Italy. Bishop is amazing, even after you’ve read some poems a hundred times... it still amazes you.

For the future: I have a contract with minimum fax for two other Bukowski books – as I said, although I feel a bit removed now from his poetic world, it makes me think of my poetic infancy, my initiation to the marvels of poetry, so I do it with a lot of affection, and I have a lot of fun doing it: I try to use slang phrases I was using with my friends as a teenager, but during the editing process these phrases always get crossed out!

Then, for the celebration of the 20 years of activity of the fine small press L’Obliquo I am preparing a new translation of To Build a Fire, by Jack London: a tale everybody should read, about the foolish confidence of man in defying nature (and the ensuing disaster). Then I’m preparing something for the journals of my friends: James Merrill for Nuovi Argomenti, and more recent poems by Simic, Bidart, CK Williams and Koethe for Lo Straniero.

But, really, what I would like to do is to be able to complete my "American Anthology" project: West of Your Cities is, ideally, the center-volume of a trilogy starting with a volume devoted to poets of the 1919-1933 generation (some of the names I’ve listed before), and ending with a volume of poets born 1951-1965. Among these latter ones, I would urge you to read Greg Williamson (The Silent Partner, and Errors in the Script) and Joseph Harrison (Someone Else’s Name).

Thanks a lot.

Thanks for listening,
damiano_