“Fresca marina” is a poem from “Acque e terre”, Salvatore Quasimodo’s first poetry collection, which was published in 1930 by Edizioni Solaria.

The majority of the twenty-five poems in the collection are written in free verse. The verses are of different length (12, 7, 8 and 9 syllable lines) and the entire collection, like the poem presented here, rotates around two distinct elements, Waters and lands. They are representative of his native Sicily, a landscape made of memories loved and lost in time. In describing Quasimodo’s verses, Montale wrote: “the soft and alary tempo of a hymn.” Needless to say, I fully agree.

The translation of the poem presents significant complications for any translator: Being a hermetic poet, Salvatore Quasimodo does not strive to be easily comprehensible or to use straightforward expressions and images. He prefers similes and symbols to create a language that must be interpreted. He also often makes use of the anastrophe, which is used to maintain the rhythm or rhyme in a poem or to make the reader dwell on an idea, for example by placing a certain word or phrase at the end of a sentence to emphasize it, as in this case (man, light, wave, sound, air, which recall the experiences of the poet as he looks out on the shore, filling our senses with every possible element); by maintaining this poetic device, the translator risks being themselves incomprehensible (“people will think you don’t know English grammar” I was told once, with regards to a translation, by an editor); by changing the word order, the translator risks paraphrasing what the poet intended to offer the reader. I, obviously opted for the first solution. As I told the above-mentioned editor, the poem isn’t about me and what people will think I know or don’t know.  – M.C.

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