Dora Markus
Eugenio Montale I Fu dove il ponte di legno E qui dove un’antica vita La tua irrequietudine mi fa pensare II Ormai nella tua Carinzia La sera che si protende La tua leggenda, Dora! È scritta là. Il sempreverde |
Dora Markus
Eugenio Montale I It was where the wooden bridge And here where an ancient life Your restlessness makes me think II By now in your Carinthia The night that stretches Your legend, Dora! It is written there. The evergreen Translation ©Matilda Colarossi |
This poem is part of the collection Le Occasioni, and is made up of two sections: a first part written in 1928 (inspired by the words of Bobi Bazlen about the beauty of a young woman from Moldavia called Dora Markus), and a second part written in 1939 with the explosion of WWII and the persecution of the Jews. To understand the complex origins of the poem, we need to remember that Montale did not know Dora Markus: he’d seen a picture sent to him by Bobi Bazlen accompanied by these words: «Gerti and Carlo are well. In Trieste, a guest, a friend of Gerti’s, with fantastic legs. Write her a poem. Her name is Dora Markus». The Gerti, whom Bazlen mentions, is Gerti Fránkel Tolazzi (Il carnevale di Gert). The two women merge in the poem. In fact, in 1939, when Montale goes back to writing it, the female protagonist is no longer Dora, but Gerti and possibly also Clizia. Homeland, therefore, may refer to Moldavia, where Dora was born, or Carinthia, home of Gerti Frankl (or possibly even Israel).This complicated intertwining of psychic and fantastic projections underlines the dark vision of the reality of 1939, and the horrors of what was to come, the diaspora, which forced so many to migrate (like the birds in the tempest in the poem): Dora, Gerti, but also Irma Brandeis, aka Clizia (Portami il girasole), who was forced to escape to the USA because of the racial laws of the time.
Quest’opera è distribuita con Licenza Creative Commons Attribuzione – Non commerciale – Non opere derivate 2.0 Italia.
Dear Matilda Colarossi,
I enjoyed reading again the English in your translation of Montale’s “Dora Markus”. As a native speaker in English, I years ago struggled with his use of iridavano. Not just the derivation of the form from iride, but what he was inviting us to see there on the embankment, in the market or on the sand, as her words formed and flashed and merged like so many eddies on the Adriatic. I lived in Vrsar, Istria across the sea for some time and the death of mullet was never a tragedy for me until I read this poem.
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Thank you for writing to me. I’m never quite sure I am reproducing exactly what I see when I read a poem (what is actually there and what I see are not always the same thing). Sometimes I am able to capture the essence (my understanding of it), sometimes I am not. Poetry is always more like recreating than translating, and solutions are always more subjective than they should be, I suppose.Thank you again for writing. I hope you weren’t too disappointed when you read it. – Mati
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Dear Mati,
Not at all was I disappointed. I work in parallel texts sometimes and realize with you the difficulty that comes with translation in aligning images, emotions and poetic forms arriving cross-culturally.
Robert Lowell I think was correct to call them “imitations” including his rendition of Leopardi (please excuse, I do not have these at hand).
No, the only thing perhaps in your rendering I would differ with is to change the word “Orient,” by substituting for it “the Levant,” as others I believe have done. However, some play could likely be given possibly to reflections by Montale on Moldova, farther to the East, now that you have furnished that additional context for the poem, and the tragic figure of Dora or other fitting persona.
Thank you for writing back to me. Congratulations on your successful and interesting blog/website.
Ciao for now,
Joseph
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Hello and greetings, Mati,
Joseph here again with a burning desire to ask you to consider a wild hypothesis, namely, whether, given the Bobi Bazlen remark to Montale about Dora’s fantastic legs, together with Montale’s lines about the dying mullet on the shore in the 1928 version of ‘Dora Markus,’ the painter Rene Magritte may have received some inspiration from reading the poem prior to creating his 1934 painting of the chimera in his work, “The Collective Invention.” [please refer to the link below for the image, as I cannot reproduce it here: https://www.renemagritte.org/the-collective-invention.jsp%5D
Thank you again for your valuable work and comnents, Mati.
Joseph
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