Introduction
Biagio Marin (1891-1985) is an Italian poet, who wrote almost all his poems in the dialect of Grado, a village along the coast from Trieste where he was born and spent much of his life. Grado is now a small resort. In his boyhood it was a quiet, isolated fishing and trading community, with a lagoon on one side and the gulf of Trieste on the other. Marin’s family were not well off, but he went to school outside Grado, eventually studying first in Florence and then at the University of Vienna. Like most other young intellectuals, he was committed to irredentismo, the struggle to take back the ‘unredeemed’ North-East of the country from Austrian rule and make it part of newly independent Italy. Marin joined the Italian army as a volunteer when Italy entered the war on the Allied side in 1915. After the war, he studied philosophy at Rome University, and then became a schoolteacher in Gorizia before becoming for a while the school-inspector for Gorizia province. He then came back to a Grado as director of the Terme (Baths) of Grado, moved back into teaching in Trieste and ended up as the librarian of the city’s main insurance company. He had married in 1915 and went on to have four children with his Tuscan wife. The family survived Fascism and the Second World War, but with one major tragedy which Marin returns to repeatedly in his poetry: this is the death of his only son, Falco, who was killed in 1943 while serving as a soldier in the Italian army in Albania. Marin retired to Grado in 1956 and spent the rest of his life there.
Marin published his first collection of poems in 1912 and his last one in 1985. In between came more than 30 other collections, plus various anthologies, as well as essays on Grado, Trieste, Gorizia and their literature and history. More anthologies of his poetry, some with previously unpublished work, have followed since his death. It was a first compendious selection, I canti de l’isola(The Songs of the Island, 1951), that brought him a relatively wide readership and critical acclaim. But it was his work from the late 1960s onwards, published at the rate of almost a volume a year, that cemented his reputation. ThoughMarin himself felt that he was never quite given the recognition he deserved, he was highly rated by fellow Northerners, such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Claudio Magris and Andrea Zanzotto. A selection of his poems is included in Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo’s immensely influential Poeti italiani del Novecento(1978) and a 500-page anthology of his work was published by Garzanti in their Elefanti paperback series in 1991.
Writing dialect poetry in Italy does not necessarily mean intellectual or emotional naiveté or a lack of literary awareness. The Veneto – that is the coastal region and the associated hinterland going north from Venice and round into what was Istria and is now part of Slovakia – has a particularly strong dialect tradition, and one which is still very much alive. No poet had written in the specific dialect of Grado before Marin, as he himself was proud to point out. His version of it, however, is never submerged by its local features, moving instead towards the general literary language of most dialect poetry of the region. There is also an unhesitating incorporation of items from the national culture and literature. Local vocabulary is most evident in a quite small number of recurrent features (words for seagulls, sandbanks, winds and so on come up in poem after poem) ,while folksy turns of phrase are almost entirely rejected. The result is a poetry which an Italian speaker certainly needs help with – all editions have footnotes glossing words not immediately guessable, or else giving complete paraphrases in Italian – but which, once over the initial difficulties, it is easy to follow, and to enjoy.
The readability comes also, perhaps principally, from the kind of poetry that Marin writes. Not for him the complex allusiveness and symbolism of famous contemporaries such as Eugenio Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti. Protected by dialect, he is abnormally direct in stating his feelings and has no hesitation in using generic images (flowers, spring, sunlight, sea, etc) that many European poets have felt need to be made much more specific if they are to be used at all. Since his poems are characteristically in rhyming quattrains, mostly with short lines, they can easily seem at first glance to be not far from the sort of verse that appears on Christmas cards or in funeral announcements, the more so in the ostensibly simple poems that Marin poured out at an almost daily rate in extreme old age. But the impression is deceitful. There is always much more going on, right to the end.
The narrow focus of Grado and its dialect proves to be the means to a poetry with vast horizons. As a young man Marin read Nietzsche, the German idealists and the Italian idealists too, such as Giovanni Gentile, whose lectures he attended in Rome and whose attualismobecame part of his own overall approach to life, supplemented by readings in Eastern philosophy and western mysticism, notably Meister Eckhardt. His poetry returns again and again to the idea of everchanging flux, and the inevitable transience of all human experience. That can lead him to proclaim at times a pantheistic oneness of all being, but he feels rarely able to lose himself in the oneness, and in many ways does not want to. There are too many pleasures and interesting things in life –in his own case collecting old books and seashells, for example, and then there is love, sexual attraction and friendship, as well as the beauties of daily life and the changing seasons. The inevitable insubstantiality of it all is not so much resisted as shared by poetry, though at their most positive the poems tend to a surprised celebration of the wonders of life and the universe and of the hidden creator who chooses never to show himself or make meaning explicit. There are also poems in which it seems there is nothing to be done with or about the emptiness of life, or which struggle to come to terms with personal loss and above all the tragedy of his son’s death. Taken overall, the poems voice a rich range of emotions and reflections, though they also invite the reader to enjoy them as distinct lyric moments.
I have begun with a poem in Italian (‘The Wish for Home’) from 1951 to give an idea of Marin’s earlier work. The rest of the fifty poems I have chosen come from the 1960s onwards, that is, in effect, they belong to Marin’s long and immensely fertile old age. What is perhaps his last major collection, La vose de la sera(The Voice of Evening, 1985) contains more than two hundred poems from the years 1980-3. In a way these poems form a poetic diary, with the dates of composition given after each one, and sometimes several being written on a single day. But they are much more than that. I include four poems dated 19 July 1982, that achieve a late throwaway lyricism that bears comparison with poems and paintings produced by other artists in their old age. Obviously my whole selection represents only a small part of Marin’s immense total production. It consists of poems I particularly like but I have also tried to give the English-speaking reader a sense of Marin’s variety and strength within the limits which he sets himself.
I have opted for standard English, on the grounds that no English dialect tradition comparable with that of the Veneto, other than perhaps Lowland Scots, which I am not competent in and which anyway represents a quite different world and culture. I have also opted mostly for a fairly simple idiom, partly out of convenience, but also in the hope of catching something of Marin’s tone, while holding at bay, as he does, the perils of faux-naif sentimentality, pretentiousness and banality. Marin’s quattrains all have strong regular rhymes, generally ABAB or ABBA, the two schemes often appearing together in the same poem; individual lines are mostly the standard short ones of the Italian tradition, but with variable stress patterns and free incorporation of longer lines or very short ones from time to time. Preserving the original stanza forms and metrical patterns in English seemed to me impossible if I were to keep at all to the literal sense of the poems. This I definitely wanted to do. My solution has been to give most lines relatively regular accentuation and to keep some measure of rhyming or assonance, and more so in some poems than in others which for one reason or other were rebarbative to passing into English. With luck the results have some feel of verse or poetry, and convey some shadow of the originals even if much of the poetic substance has inevitably dissolved.
Peter Hainsworth