Online: Dialect to dialect translation: Belli, Burgess, Garioch

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Online: Dialect to dialect translation: Belli, Burgess, Garioch

by Jim Clarke

Language, like people, evolves in response to geographic location. In nations like Ireland, Britain and Italy, dialectal language forms have thrived and continue to survive, despite the homogenising influence of mass media. And just as poetry is, as Edgar Allan Poe held, “the rhythmical creation of beauty in words”, so those words may evade the tyranny of formal established language forms and adopt the dialectal variants of demotic speech.

Giuseppe Gioachino Belli was a Nineteenth century poet who composed nearly 2,300 sonnets entirely in his native Romanesco dialect, the language of the streets of Trastevere in Rome where he resided. Inspired by the Milanese sonneteering of Carlo Porta and others, he dedicated his literary life to capturing the essence of Roman life in his poems. While some were avowedly anti-clerical, and aimed at the Vatican and its inhabitants, many more depicted street life and the condition of the poor, of whom he was intermittently one. He often adapted Biblical themes to his Romanesco tongue, demonstrating the counter-intuitive universality of the local. Belli’s sonnets almost invariably follow a rigid, but simple rhyme scheme. They tend to feature two quatrains and two tercets, in which the rhyme scheme follows ABBA ABBA CDC DCD, with occasional variation in the quatrains to ABAB ABAB.

Belli explained his work by stating that he wished to leave a monument to the Roman plebe, the poor demotic underclass oppressed by church and state. In turn, Rome has dedicated a monument to him, which can be found, top-hatted and thoughtful, looking down upon the eponymous Piazza G.G. Belli at the Trastevere end of the Ponte Garibaldi. Constrained by the conditions of his employment, only one of his scurrilous and witty sonnets was published during his lifetime, and like Kafka he asked that his papers be destroyed after his death. Fortunately, they were preserved and the first collection was published some two decades after he died, with a full collection only emerging in 1952.

Belli’s work has inspired and delighted generations of readers. Gogol laughed aloud at them, D.H Lawrence wanted to translate them, and William Carlos Williams adored them. For Pier Paolo Pasolini, Belli was the greatest of Italian poets. There have been many attempts to render them into English, including admirable selections by Eleanor Clark, Harold Norse, Miller Williams, Peter Nicholas Dale (who has supposedly translated all of Belli’s sonnets into ‘Strine’, the dialect of 1960s Australia) and Mike Stocks. Most interesting, however, are the attempts to transpose the pungent and authentic sense of place in Belli’s work to other geographical locales and locutions. Writing on behalf of the eternal city, Belli sought to render its people universal, and I suspect he may have

most appreciated those poets who have attempted to place his words in the mouths and accents of other demotic, dialectal peoples.

What follows below are some examples of Belli’s sonnets, accompanied by such dialectal translations, including my own attempts to capture something of the vibrancy of his Nineteenth century Rome in the unique form of Hiberno-English found in Belfast.

La bona famija

Mi’ nonna, a un’or de notte che viè ttata Se leva da filà, povera vecchia, Attizza un carboncello, ciapparecchia, E maggnamo du’ fronne d’inzalata.

Quarche vorta se famo una frittata, Che ssi la metti ar lume ce se specchia Come fussi a ttraverzo d’un’orecchia: Quattro noce, e la cena è terminata.

Poi ner mentre ch’io, tata e Crementina Seguitamo un par d’ora de sgoccetto, Lei sparecchia e arissetta la cucina.

E appena visto er fonno ar bucaletto, ‘Na pisciatina, ‘na sarvereggina, E, in zanta pace, ce n’annamo a letto.

Written on 28th November 1831, this poem is typical of Belli’s exquisite ability to generate miniature pen pictures of the poverty of the Roman underclass. He does not shy away from depicting the deprivation, yet humour and warmth pervade. It transposes well to the Scots setting created by Robert Garioch:

The Guid Family (Robert Garioch)

Faither wins hame, my grannie leaves her wheel, puir sowl, gies owre her spinning for the nicht; she lays the buird, blaws her wee coal alicht

and we sit-in to sup our puckle kail.

We mak oursels an omelet, aince in a while, gey thin, sae’s ye can fairly see the licht throu it, jist like it wes a lug; aa richt, we chaw a puckle nuts, and that’s our meal.

While Faither and mysel and Clementine bide on, she clears the buird, gaes aff and redds the kitchie, and we drink a drappie wine.

The wee carafe timmit doun til the dregs, a wee strone, a hailmary said, and syne, lither and loan, we sclimm intill our beds.

Garioch was strongly influenced by the great Scots poet Hugh Mac Diarmuid, and was a close associate of Sorley Maclean. His Scots poetry is, for the non-native, occasionally intimidating, replete as it is with dialectal terms and constructions which can sometimes be difficult to penetrate. However in this instance, as with many of his Belli translations (his Roman Sonnets frae Giuseppe Belli contains about 120) the Scots formulation adds wonderful colour and identity and is easily comprehended.

A common misunderstanding, arising from the lengthy and close shared history between Scotland and the North of Ireland, is that the Northern Irish dialect contains a substantial, even dominant, Scots lexis. This has even been enshrined in legislation, with the formal adoption and recognition of Lallans, under the name “Ulster-Scots”, as a legal indigenous tongue. However, the vast majority, estimated at up to 97%, of Northern Ireland’s inhabitants speak a form of Hiberno- rather than Scots-English, the dialect known as Mid-Ulster Hiberno-English, whose cultural richness generally goes tragically unloved and unfunded. This dialect, colloquially known as ‘Norn Iron’, has sadly received more attention from comic writers like John Pepper than it has from linguists or poets. By way of highlighting the significant distinction between Scots and this genuinely indigenous Ulster dialect, I offer my own translation of this sonnet below:

The Good Fambly

When the oul lad comes home late, my wee nan drops the clothes she’s stitchin, poor oul sinner, pokes a drap o’ coal to fire it up And makes us a wee salad for the dinner.

Sometimes she fries an omelette in the pan an if ye held it up until the light it shines right through just like it would yer ear. Supper’s over in a few wee bites.

Then me, the oul lad and my big sister sup cans a’ stout or half-uns for an hour While nanny’s in the kitchen, cleanin up. Until ye reach the bottom of yer jar

then a quick pish, or say yer prayers instead And peacefully head up thon stairs til bed.

Unlike Garioch, I was not able to reproduce Belli’s famous ABBA ABBA rhyme sequence, which gave Anthony Burgess the title for his novella about a putative encounter between Belli and John Keats in Rome during Keats’s dying months. In a deviation from Belli, I also thought it more apt to have my Belfast good family drink indigenous stout and whiskey rather than the somewhat displaced carafe of wine which Garioch faithfully transposed from Belli’s original sonnet. Equally, where Garioch fails to translate the age component of Belli’s “povera vecchia”, I followed the lead of Paul Howard, who translated this sonnet into his native Yorkshire dialect as The Good Life. Howard glosses “Mi gram” as “poor owd pet”, which seems better to capture the warm familial intent of Belli’s phrase than Garioch’s slightly condescending “puir sowl”. Similarly, where Garioch’s fidelity to Belli’s Crementina seems somewhat exotic in a Scots setting, Howard renames her as “mi sister Grace” which seems more fitting even though it moves further away from the original.

Many of Belli’s poems render scenes from the Bible into his contemporary Roman dialect in a manner that likely would have found even greater disfavour with the Vatican than his excoriating sonnets about popes and cardinals. One of his most popular, and one

that has been translated persistently, is his depiction of the day of judgement:

Er giorno der giudizzio

Quattro angioloni co le tromme in bocca Se metteranno uno pe cantone A ssonà: poi co ttanto de vocione Cominceranno a dì: “Fora a chi ttocca”

Allora vierà su una filastrocca De schertri da la terra a ppecorone, Pe ripijà ffigura de perzone Come purcini attorno de la biocca.

E sta biocca sarà Dio benedetto, Che ne farà du’ parte, bianca, e nera: Una pe annà in cantina, una sur tetto.

All’urtimo uscirà ‘na sonajera D’angioli, e, come si ss’annassi a letto, Smorzeranno li lumi, e bona sera.

This sonnet aptly closes Anthony Burgess’s novella ABBA ABBA, a clever and entertaining evocation of Belli’s Trastevere in which the poet encounters the dying John Keats. The novella arose out of Burgess’s own obsession with translating Belli’s poetry in the mid-1970s, when he was a resident of Trastevere himself. In his previous novel, Beard’s Roman Women, Burgess’s pseudo-autobiographical protagonist considers dedicating his life to translating Belli’s works, but is relieved by a busker who is similarly obsessed with the task. With dozens of sonnets translated, Burgess, who never let good work go to waste, repurposed them as an appendix to a novella in which he “presented John Keats dying in Rome after the realisation that there was a new style to develop, closer to the scabrous realism of the Roman dialect poet Belli than to a romanticism he had already outgrown.” The culture clash, as much poetic as national, between Belli and Keats is fascinating, though tragically fictional (Joseph Severn, who accompanied Keats in Rome, makes no mention of Belli whatsoever). Similarly, the poetic and nationallinguistic encounter between Belli and Burgess has proved extremely fruitful:

The Last Judgment (Anthony Burgess)

At the round earth’s imagined corners let Angels regale us with a brass quartet, Capping that concord with a fourfold shout: “Out, everybody, everybody out!” Then skeletons will rattle all about Forming in file, on all fours, tail to snout, Putting on flesh and face until they get, Upright, to where the Judgment seat is set.

There the All High, maternal, systematic Will separate the black souls from the white: That lot there for the cellar, this the attic. The wing’d musicians now will chime or blare a Brief final tune, then they’ll put out the light: Er-phwoo. And so to bed. Owwwwwww. Bona Sera.

Michael Lister considered this version to be “most clever”, but at the same time “in no way faithful to the original.” I would counter by suggesting that Burgess may be too faithful in this instance, concluding the poem somewhat confusingly with Belli’s Romanesco. However, this sonnet also concluded the novella ABBA ABBA, and in that context it is entirely legitimate. Though Burgess’s original intent was to translate Belli’s sonnets into his native Mancunian dialect, generally they are more idiolectal than dialectal. The effervescent and muscular language packed tightly into a rigid rhyme scheme is typical of much of Burgess’s poetry, which is generally unfairly overshadowed by his fiction. By contrast, Robert Garioch did seek to evoke the same sense of a local depiction of the universal:

Judgement Day (Robert Garioch)

Fowre muckle angels wi their trumpets, stalkin til the fowre airts, sall aipen the inspection;

they’ll gie a blaw, and bawl, ilk to his section, in their huge voices: ‘Come, aa yese, be wauken.’

Syne sall crawl furth a ragment, a haill cleckin of skeletons yerkt out fir resurrection to tak again their ain human complexion, like choukies gaitheran roun a hen that’s clockan.

An thon hen sall be Gode the blissit Faither; he’ll pairt the indwellars of mirk and licht, tane doun the cellar, to the ruiff the tither.

Last sall come angels, swarms of them, in flicht, and, like us gaen to bed without a swither, they will blaw out the caunnles, and guid-nicht.

Garioch’s version is notably more apocalyptic than Burgess’s, and manages to retain Belli’s marvellous image of skeletons gathering like chicks around a mother hen, though Burgess does evoke something of the farmyard tone. The Scots farewell also seems somehow more definitively final than Burgess’s slightly whimsical nod to Belli. Yet even that is surely preferable to Mike Stocks’s standard English version, which closes with a mild “nighty-night.” To replicate that kind of finality, I was forced to draw upon the fondness for casual profanity found in Belfast speech:

On Judgemint Day

Four angels with their trumpets to their bakes at all four corners of the universe give out a little sumthin o’ their spake: “Git yersels up for better or worse.”

So skeletons will get intill a line, throwing flesh an skin on like a coat, down on their hunkers, then stood nice an fine, but heart-ascared of judgemint, poor wee dotes.

Then Holy God will split them inty two an send one lot till heaven, one till hell, dependin’ on who was decent or shite.

Angels sing their final hymns unto the Good Lord, an they kill the lights as well. That’s all there is, mucker. Good fuckin night.

In this final sonnet, both of these Belli traditions come together, the Biblical content and the demotic Roman setting. His depiction of Christ’s encounter with Martha of Bethany derives from the Gospels of John (11:17-29) and Luke (10:38-42). What Belli adds to the Biblical accounts goes far beyond a mere transposition of location. He adds a wonderful sense of humour to the scene, rendering Martha’s encounter with Christ akin to that of a nagging wife pestering her husband:

Marta e Madalena

“Ma Gesucristo mio”, diceva Marta “Chi ce pò arrege ppiù co Madalena? Lei rosario, lei messa, lei novena, Lei viacrùce ... Eppoi dice una ce scarta!

Io nott’e giorno sto qui a la catena A ffà la serva e annàmmece a ffà squarta, E sta santa dipinta su la carta Nun z’aritrova mai c’a ppranzo e a cena.”

“Senti, Marta”, arispose er Zarvatore, “Tu nun zei deggna de capì, nun zei Che Maria tiè la strada ppiù mijore.”

E Marta: “Io nun ne resto perzuasa; E ssi ffacess’io puro com’e lei Vorìa vedé come finissi casa.”

Burgess’s translation of this sonnet is a truly magnificent evocation of his native Mancunian dialect. He manages to retain perfectly Belli’s balance of tone and sense of humour, while relocating the entire encounter to the North-West of England. As with Howard’s Yorkshire translations of Belli, there is a wonderful sense of place about this version:

Martha & Mary (Anthony Burgess)

Martha said: “Christ, I’m full up reet to’ t’ scupper Wi’ Mary there.” She belted out her stricture: “Rosaries, masses – it fair makes you sick t’your Stomach. Stations o’ t’ Cross. I’m real fed up. A Carthorse I am, harnessed neck and crupper While she does nowt. About time this horse kicked you Right in the middle of your holy picture, Mary. Go on, now. Say it: What’s for supper?”

“Martha, O Martha,” sighed the blessed Saviour, “You’ve no call to get mad at her behaviour. She’s on the right road, and you’re out of luck.” “The right road, aye,” said Martha. “Why, if I Went on like her, this house would be a sty, And she’d not see the right road for the muck.”

This poem was surprisingly not one of those translated by Robert Garioch, though an excellent rendering into Scots was written by the poet and teacher William Neill in his Twa Score Romanesco Sonnets. Neill dedicated his selection to “Rab Garie”, or Robert Garioch, “whase skeilie owersettin o Belli’s sonnetti first gied me a lift ti ettil a hantle mair.” In Neill’s version, Martha complains of “daein the scodgies” and “sairvin up denners”, which like Burgess evokes an exquisite sense of localisation. Where it jars somewhat, and this perhaps cannot be helped, is in the depiction of Mary “tellin her beads” in a Calvinistic-sounding “kirk”. My own version was perhaps overly influenced by that of Burgess, even to the point of stealing his rhyme of “Saviour” and “behaviour”. But I tried to depict a more robust, bellicose Christ than Burgess’s reasonable and sighing messiah:

Martha an Mary

“Here, Jesus,” Martha said, “see our Mary has my heart scalded with her mass an prayer. She does nathin but count her beads at church and doesn’t lift a finger here or there. What’d her last slave die of? I’m in chains liftin an layin, cleanin up her mess, makin dinner. She’s no holy picture. Guess who’s cookin’ nigh? Gwon nigh, guess.”

“Houl on there, Martha,” said the Lord our Saviour, “you don’t understaun the sityeeashun. She does better than you. Her prayers are great.” “But if I tried to copy her behaviour,” said Martha, “we’d both be above our station an you’d soon find this house was in some state.”

It would be unfair to suggest that translation from or into dialect is any more difficult than any other form of translation. The same problems of transposition of tone and imagery remain. Yet in seeking to evoke a localised sense of place through the medium of dialect, there is an additional transposition required, where the translator is driven to find the points of universally shared experience between discrete cultures. It may be that Giuseppe Belli’s sonnets are particularly amenable to such translation because of his ability to render the universal local, and indeed the versions written by poets like Anthony Burgess and Robert Garioch among others suggest this may be the case. In such a context, the universality of content and theme assists translators who seek to relocate the work in a different culture and locale.

Bibliography

Sonetti, Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, Rizzoli, Milano, 1997.

ABBA ABBA, Anthony Burgess, Faber and Faber, London, 1976.

“G.G. Belli: Roman Poet”, Eleanor Clark, The Kenyon Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, Winter, 1952.

Roman Sonnets frae Giuseppe Belli, included in Complete Poetical Works, Robert

Garioch, ed. Robin Fulton, Macdonald, Loanhead, 1983, pp. 215-280.

Twa Score Romanesco Sonnets bi Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, William Neill, Burnside

Press, Castle Douglas, 1996.

Seventeen Sonnets by G.G. Belli, William Neill, Akros, Kircaldy, 1998.

The Roman Sonnets of Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, Harold Norse, Jargon Books,

Highlands NC, 1960.

Sonnets – Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, Mike Stocks, Oneworld Classics, London, 2007.

Sonnets of Giuseppe Belli, Miller Williams, Louisiana State University Press, Baton

Rouge, 1981.

Readers may also wish to consult this webpage, which contains a Belli sonnet and five different translations, including versions by Robert Garioch into Scots, Paul Howard into Yorkshire and Peter Nicholas Dale into ‘Strine’, the dialect of Australia: http://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.ie/2012/11/the-life-of-man.html

Copyright for the sonnets by Anthony Burgess is held by the Estate of Anthony Burgess/ International Anthony Burgess Foundation. Copyright for the sonnets by Robert Garioch is held by the Estate of Robert Garioch.