| THE ANGEL William Blake I Dreamt a Dream! what can it mean? And that I was a maiden Queen, Guarded by an Angel mild: Witless woe was ne’er beguil’d! And I wept both night and day, And he wip’d my tears away, And I wept both night and day, And hid from him my heart’s delight. So he took his wings and fled; Then the morn blush’d rosy red; I dried my tears, & arm’d my fears With ten thousand shields and spears. Soon my Angel came again: I was arm’d, he came in vain; For the time of youth was fled, And grey hairs were on my head. | L’ANGELO William Blake Un Sogno sognai! Che cosa significa? E ch’ero una Regina pura, Protetta da un Angelo mansueto: Affanno frivolo mai fu distratto! E io piangevo notte e giorno , E lui scacciava il mio pianto, E io piangevo notte e giorno, E gli nascondevo la gioia nel mio cuor. Così prese il volo e sparì; Poi il mattino roseo fiorì: Le lacrime asciugai e le paure armai Con dieci mila lance e clipei. Presto l’Angelo ritornò da me: Ma ero armata, invano riapparve; Ché la mia gioventù era passata, E la mia testa oramai era imbiancata. Traduzione © Matilda Colarossi 2024 |
Today would have been my mother’s birthday. I suppose, as with every one of us, a mother is an Angel of sorts. Someone who dries our tears, eases our heavy hearts, provides comfort. As we grow older, our Angel sometimes flees, or we flee from them, and we learn to fend for ourselves: through lessons learned, we arm ourselves with “shields and spears”. When our Angel returns, we are old and (sometimes) no longer in need of them.
I find this poem so sad. Blake’s simple rhyme gives the verses a quickness―like a child’s chatter, like the passing of time―that leads us swiftly through the phases of life: we see the “Queen” go from innocent “maiden” to worldly wise, “arm’d” and “grey”, in four moving quatrains.
As the poem opens, we find the speaker is in a state of perfect innocence: the child soothed, but also unwilling to be soothed (perhaps because they need or like the protection). What the poet calls “witless woe” refuses, in fact, to be persuaded, and the child even hides the joy in their heart (“and hid from him my heart’s delight”), so the angel flees (“he took his wings and fled”) because, perhaps, he knows that only through real pain and hardships does maturity come, only through our own strength and life experiences.
I though about Pascoli often while translating this: Pascoli’s Fanciullino never loses his innocence; that inner child never arms himself from the world , and it’s through that inner child’s eyes that life continues to be wondrous and poetry is born.
So I want to dedicate this poem to my mom, who, although I have “grey hairs on my head”, is still my angel.
I do not usually translate into Italian, but my mother’s Italian was better than her English so…I have tried to find solutions for the poetic devices found in the original: rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, etc. and feel I have succeeded in some places. As always, so much is lost in translation (especially when translating into your second language).-M.C.
Revisione dell’italiano: Leslie Giovacchini
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 
parallel texts: words reflected 
Hi, Mati,
It’s a coincidence, your mother being born on this date, June 2, and my brother and I remembering our own mother passing on this date, exactly twenty years ago. Our good angels they are, indeed.
As for Blake, I always found him difficult, mysterious and a challenge to read. His poem The Angel is another reflection on his seeming lifelong fascination with this form of reality. I can see problems in this piece that present many of the same challenges you face every day, working from Italian to English.
Foe example is rhyme scheme is inconsistent, not that Blake was a strict formalist, but his work generally appears balanced and symmetrical
When we examine the syllabification in the lines of the four quatrains, for example, we see great consistency, 7 and 8 mora throughout. The iambic meter varies appropriately with dactyls and anapests to account for this.
But the rhyme scheme is decidedly mixed, leading me to wonder if Blake left in the poem an unintended mistake or simply did not finish it. What do you think?
In Q.1 we have a, a, b, b.
In Q. 2 we have a, a, a, b, which is a little surprising.
In Q. 3 we a repeat of Q.1, this time with a surprising internal rhyme within the last couplet: tears, fears, spears, very tough to replicate in parallel, but you were very graceful with asciugai, armai, clipei.
In Q. 4, we return to the scheme a, a, b, b.
This situation ordinarily would lead us to consider this poem as more of a song-like ballad, where Q. 3 is a climactic bridge, or a bel canto variant, in operatic terms.
But this structural effect is diminshed by Q. 2’s aberrant a, a, a. b. So I think Blake really meant to write “day and night” on in the third line, which would fulfill the symmetry of Qs. 1, (2) and 4, as well as lend more dreariness to the emotional intent and import of Q. 2, but habitual speech robbed him of the variant that we see in the successful American song book piece. ‘Day and Night,’ here by the great Frank Sinatra: https://youtu.be/E10L8G67ozU?si=Ikf6q5jBapfjIMBZ
On the other hand, the reading could appear more mechanical if Q. 2 were revised to a, a, b, b, depending on the register of the reader.
At any rate, we can’t change the Blake, but knowing this ambiguity might help in developing a parallel. I queried the AI platform ChatGPT and it reported that statistically the phrase ‘night and day’ predominates over ‘day and night,’ but the Sinatra song proves it is just as effective in conveying the ennui of an unchanging situation. Perhaps Blake left it for dramatic irony.
Thank you for the opportunity to comment on your work, Mati. You provide a wonderful, generous site!
Cordially,
Joseph Alan Roberts
LikeLiked by 2 people
Hello and thank you for such a wonderful reply.
I have to be honest, I don’t know how to answer.
While I was trying to translate the poem, I noticed something I had never noticed before (and which your comment reminded me of): I “hear” the Italian with much more intensity (if that makes sense) than I do to the English, although I can’t express myself perfectly in Italian (at least not enough to translate into it).
For the whole translation, I kept thinking about it.
I like to think it’s because my mother spoke to me in Italian!
The sounds are different to me. I love the sound of Italian. I guess because English was (when growing up) the world around me while Italian was the one inside me.
In any case, thank you.
I’ll just add this (and it’s something I think about every time I translate poetry): maybe the great poets of the past are laughing at me from above for taking their every breath so seriously! They’re probably up there thinking, “hey, I just liked the sound of that word, verse, stanza…”
Mati
LikeLiked by 1 person
So, Mati! You grew up in an English-speaking setting, while your mother-tongue was Italian? I did not know this. If so, you obviously have a gift you use well. I grew up in a monolingual American English setting, and our mother would occasionally rattle off a few lines of verse from various sources she liked the sound of, one in particular she recited repeatedly, and it being the first lines from, guess who? Blake: Tyger, tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night . . . . And so, Mati, I have you to thank for bringing memory of this habit of my mother back to me! Not only this–I went back to look again at Blake’s poem Tyger, Tyger, and found in it another use of the ‘tears / spears’ coupling that we see in The Angel. My mother and I were both born in the city of Los Angeles, just another curious fact proving again in this case that there is something very evocative about poetry, including the intensity of the sound, as you mentioned. –Joseph
LikeLiked by 1 person