Volume 22, Number 6 · April 17, 1975
Between Thunder and Lightning
By Robert Mazzocco
In the Dark Body of Metamorphosis and Other Poems
by Mario Luzi, translated by I.L. Salomon
Norton, 110 pp., $6.95
Tolstoy says that art commences with 'that certain little something' and then grows larger and deeper, never losing its initial vibration. In a translation, I suppose, the most one can hope for is but an echo of that certain little something, but I'm afraid that's not always what one gets in the votive offerings that I. L. Salomon drops at the feet of the brilliant and forbidding Italian poet Mario Luzi. Some of the translations, or individual passages from them, are often quite fine, but many more tend to have a lurching or flustered diction. And I say that even though I've read only a few of Luzi's poems in various Italian journals or anthologies. But surely it makes no matter: one's sixth sense can always tell whether things are really right or not. Norton of course has compounded the difficulty by committing the blunder of presenting Luzi's poems on these shores without the original texts to accompany them. And that is inane—Italian is not Chinese.
Review, 2416 words
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