Jacob Blakesley

This project emerged from my PhD dissertation, which had focused on several modern Italian poets. One of my chapters dealt with the modern experimental poet Edoardo Sanguineti. I decided to see if I could send him questions by mail, and he graciously answered all my written questions. But I wanted to meet him in person, so we set up a date for the last days of April, 2010, when he would be speaking publicly in Bologna. I met him then, outside a café, and he told me all about his innumerable plans for the future. Less than two weeks later, I read in the newspaper that he had died.

It was only several years later that I turned my hand to translating his poetry, because I knew how difficult it would be, for numerous reasons. Sanguineti, a master stylist, was home in any of a number of different poetic idioms, with an erudition that stretched various disciplines, and a refreshing and vibrant political engagement. This latter element – the ideological stance of Sanguineti, a poet who defined himself as the ‘last Marxist’ – has proved very challenging indeed to introduce in the English context.

Although my first book was a translation of fiction, I have always been at home translating poetry, and only poetry. Receiving this fellowship has been enormously satisfying from this point of view, since this is the type of work that I prize most highly and that speaks to me most as a scholar and practitioner of literary translation. Moreover, this particular project – translating Sanguineti’s poetry – is all the more rewarding because I feel like I can actively perpetuate the luminous memory of him in another language and another context.