The River Which Sleep Has Told Me, Ivano Fermini trans. Ian Seed, Odd Volumes of The Fortnightly Review, ISBN: 978-0999705827, £15.95
The Dice Cup, Max Jacob (Translated, with an introduction, by Ian Seed) Wakefield Press, 2022, ISBN 978-1-939663-83-6, $19.95
The Central Laboratory, Max Jacob, Translated, with an introduction, by Alexander Dickow, ISBN 978-1-939663-80-1, $22.95
The joys of reviewing translations from languages one less-than-half knows are boundless. This is especially the case when the originals are by a poet I’d never heard of before; but in the case of Ivano Fermini I expect I won’t be alone in that ignorance. In fact, so little is known about Fermini that I had a moment wondering if he might be an obscure member of Robert Sheppard’s European Union of Imagined Authors, but no, he’s real enough.
On the plus side, my sketchy Italian and the lack of biographical information meant that I approached The River Which Sleep Has Told Me with an open mind. Ian Seed includes a helpful interview with Milo de Angelis, Fermini’s one-time friend and editor as a kind of preface. I was taken particularly by the statement that for Fermini, poetry was ‘a question of naming things and each time finding the right word, which is to treat each individual thing with its own unique name, that which entreats us and lies beneath dozens of other banal words, and which demands to be said with millimetric precision.’
This drive away from treating things as members of classes and towards avoiding the predictable goes some way towards making sense of the formidable disjunction that typifies Fermini’s use of language. This is easier to trace thanks to the facing-page Italian/English text, which Seed consistently mirrors in his translations. This formal procedure allows for disjunction within and across lines, with each line a gnomic utterance within a set of similar riddles. Take, for instance, this full poem:
and away towards a climbing into the air
having let your hand slip into the flood
leaves therefore bear a title
boats of tools and lamps to love as they are
I know how to describe you infinitely in the garden
with the thief of peace who hangs around the profitable side
on this table the buzz of pebbles
he trumpets of murderous places
There is a consistent thread here of air, water and earth that carries the reader across the syntactical jumps in the text. The opening ‘and away’ is a typical Fermini in media res start to a narrative that isn’t while the ‘therefore’ signals a non-existent logical connection that turns out on consideration to actually make sense; that things and their names exist in and follow from a world of randomly associated other things and events. Fermi’s world of careful naming is a world populated by living things, as evoked by that ‘buzz of pebbles’.
This is perhaps more explicit in a later poem, ‘the statue’ (some but not many of the poems collected here have titles), with the stone finding its way into life via a series of attempted namings that are and not similes:
it’s like snow
the leaves
like zen on the rug
the fingers sounded wheat ears
the thrusts in each water from sudden sweetness
which words brush
they’re false false
it’s true
I started out reading this book not at all sure that I shared Seed’s enthusiasm for Fermini’s work, but as I went on, I found myself becoming engaged more and more with this odd, distinctive voice.
The prose poems of Max Jacob seem a more likely body of work for Seed to translate, being, as he is, an accomplished writer in that form. This handsome paperback from Wakefield Press contains his translations of the entire Dice Cup, Jacob’s seminal volume of prose poetry, published in 1917 but mostly written between 1903 and 1910, along with a highly useful introduction by the translator. Running at about 240 pages, there is, unfortunately but understandable, no space for the French originals. However, the translations stand as works of the highest interest in their on right.
It is easier to say what Jacob’s prose poems are not that to express what they are. They are not narratives; quite the opposite. Where Fermini disrupts the syntax of logic, Jacob sets out to disrupt the logic of narrative structure. Neither are they polished gems of poetic language; these texts are often like dreams, but never dreamlike. In his own preface, Jacob rejects self-expression as the root of style, preferring another approach: “Style is the will to exteriorize oneself by one’s chosen means.”
Part of this will to exteriorize is a recognition, again in contrast with Fermini, that the relationship between language and the world, the quest for naming, is a slippery one:
My horse has stopped. Stop yours too, friend—I’m afraid. Between us and the slopes of the hill, the grassy slopes of the hill, there’s a woman, unless it’s a great cloud. Stop! She’s calling me and I see her beating heart. Her arm makes a sign for me to follow, her arm…unless her arm’s a cloud.
[from ‘Translated from German or Bosnian’]
Which is not to say that concrete themes and concerns don’t emerge: the mythical and the mundane; Jacob’s childhood in Quimper, literature and literary politics, the French Revolution and Jacob’s experiences of Anti-Semitism, which would in its most virulent form ultimately cause his death, are all woven through the texts. The poems often feature personal experiences and emotions at a slant, but in the end, it is not what’s said but the manner of its saying that makes this a key book for readers of the prose poem. This short poem serves as an almost perfect instance:
Just to Say Nothing
The barrow of thunder ends up in Spain via a ball of rainbow. In a country where the churches are surrounded by geraniums of all colors, I saw it on a horse’s tail.
Many of these same concerns colour the verse poems of The Central Laboratory as translated by Alexander Dickow in an equally handsome Wakefield volume, this time with facing page originals. In his introduction, Dickow discusses Jacob’s use of the art of deception, translated as disappointment: “this art of ‘disappointment’ is precisely the art of sabotaging readers’ expectations, of producing doubt and disorientation, perhaps even sadness or a slight sense of being jilted’.
Like Fermini, Jacob’s use of the line as the basic unit of composition helps create this disruption of our expectations, but it’s not easy for Dickow to emulate because of the need to replicate the incessant rhyming of the original. Again in the introduction, he warns us that Jacob’s verse can seem to tend toward doggerel because of this tendency, and it’s perhaps amplified in translations because the English rhymes can come across as more heavy-handed in English. Nevertheless, Dickow’s versions capture the fairground stylings of the originals, and he is not afraid to translate across time as well as language to prod the reader, as when, for example, he renders espadrilles as sneakers, a move that brings a potentially over-obscure line into focus.
It’s also a move that avoids the need to add another endnote to the 238 that Dickow uses to explain some of the more obscure references in the poems. Note 155 reveals good deal about The Central Laboratory. The note refers to this line from ‘Reflections of an Unpublished Author’:
Qui peignais comme on pein en Chine.
I painted as they paint in Spain.
The footnote reads: ‘Jacob refers to how they paint in China; I have altered this for the sake of the rhyme.’ And therein lies my issue with these poems. All too often they seem to consist of strings of lines linked only by this incessant need to rhyme, regardless. The defence may be that Jacob is playing with the conventions of nonsense verse, but even Edward Lear becomes tiresome in medium-sized doses.
Nevertheless, I’m pleased that Wakefield Press has published these companion volumes; what I learned from them is that the poems in verse are of their time, while The Dice Cup transcends time.
Elliptical Movements 
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