Angels of Youth
by Luigi Fontanella. Trans from the Italian and Preface by Carol Lettierei and Irene Marchegiani Jones. Introduction by Rebecca West. Xenos Dual-Language Edition, Riverside CA., 2000.

In their Preface, Carol Lettierei and Irene Marchegiani Jones inform us that Angels of Youth was originally published in Italian in 1996. At that time it won two prestigious literary prizes in Italy: the Orazio Caputo in 1998 and the Olindo De Gennaro in 1999.

Luigi Fontanella, professor of Italian at State University of New York, Stony Brook, has also published two books of fiction, one of which, the novel Hot Dog, I reviewed in this column, and several books of criticism. He writes a weekly column for America Oggi that focuses on the Italian language: dialects, etymology, and other curious linguist issues that his readership often brings to his attention.

With the appearance of Angels of Youth in English, Lettieri and Marchegiani Jones write in their informative Preface that they “hope the present translation will increase public interest in poetry that, while unique, will represent trends and directions in contemporary Italian as well as Italian-American poetry.”

The location of the dual language edition of The Angels of Youth helps to redefine and update the terms of the discourse over what constitutes Italian American literature. Not present in Fontanella’s poems are those iconic signs of earlier Italian American works of working-class neighborhoods, traditional family structure, religion, and a sentimentalized reconstruction of the past. The appearance of the Italian in the text also serves as a sign of a cultural border crossing and recrossing, where the bicultural experience does not lead always in modern society to total assimilation.

As Primo Levi wrote about the translator’s art, each language presents barriers to translation, but it is the translator’s responsibility to attempt to bridge the linguistic and cultural gap. The lyricism of Fontanella’s line in Italian is captured in Lettieri and Marchegiani Jones’ lyrical sentence structures in English. But it must be admitted that the translator’s art is sometimes not always apparent to the English language reader.

The translator’s task is not merely to translate words but to succeed at that mysterious task of capturing the cultural sense of one language in another. What is lost goes unseen by the non-Italian reader, much like what is lost when the traveler crosses borders and attempts to resettle in another culture.

Born near Salerno, Italy, in 1943, Fontanella studied at the University of Rome and then at Harvard University, where he completed his Ph.D. He taught at numerous eastern universities before settling at Stony Brook. Since his arrival in 1976, he has remained a constant traveler between the U.S. and Italy.

He never severed his ties linguistically or culturally with his homeland. Fontanella is a representative of that post-World War II generation of Italian émigrés who came to North America and immediately entered the university system. Their Italian American experience is distinguishable from that first great wave of immigrants who came to North America at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Struggle and discrimination were not a significant aspect of these immigrants’ lives nor do these themes seem to have greatly influenced their writing. However, as Lettieri and Marchegiani Jones point out, in spite of a favorable post-war economy and universities open to their rapid assimilation into the American educational system, their work still reflects that bicultural experience common among North American Italian writing of any generation.

While Fontanella’s poetry is influenced by the Italian poetic tradition, it also reflects those themes common in North American Italian literature of separation and loss, that same tension that is found in nearly all North American narratives and poetry. These are poems in which the poetic voice speaks from a borderland where memory and desire frame the voice’s perception of reality. Ironically, because post-war aviation makes it easier to commute between Italy and America, the tensions within the bicultural, Italian American experience in Fontanella’s poetry are exacerbated not diminished.

As Rebecca West writes in the Introduction, this makes Fontanella’s “inbetweeness” more concrete, not merely a sentimental idealized construction of a lost past. Contemporary Italy is not lost in a fog of nostalgia.

There are four sections to Angels of Youth: Ceres, Stanzas for Emma, Ars Poetica, and Ballads and Songs. Ceres is the mythical goddess of agriculture. She serves as an appropriate sign of rebirth in the work in opposition to the themes of history, separation, and loss. The tension between the mutability of past experiences and the present is represented by Fontanella in Angels of Youth by the curious recording of both the location, date, and even time of day, down to the minute, of the location of nearly every poem.

These curious signs at the end of the poems serve to relocate in specific space and time the imaginary reconstruction of events culled from memory and feelings. Memory and the past are seemingly rescued from abstraction, though language is and can only be their only refuge.

In the poem “Inwood,” Fontanella writes, he is “amazed at forgetting / who I am and who I am living / a new instant already veils the preceding one / and I am here to retrace / footprints suspended by Time.” In another untitled poem Fontanella recalls an incident from childhood, of children playing, leaves rustling, “a serpent fleeing perhaps / or perhaps a boy on roller skates / appearing disappearing before my eyes.” The scene is fleeting, passing quickly before the observer’s eyes and now before the mind’s eye. But the postscript locates it, “Inwood Park, New York, April 1987.”

In “Ceres” the problem of time passing is reclaimed in the poems, “Sequence for My Father.” In these poems Fontanella reflects on his deceased father, both the details from his father’s life and their special relationship.

Friends and incidents are recalled, including his father’s “many friendly enemies,” who have also died. Reflecting on his father’s life (Monte Porzio-New York-Monte Porzio, June/December 1987), Fontanella writes, “I find myself thinking about you at my age now / recognizing in horror the mercilessness of time / and how little I have left.” But these are not poems of resignation. In a succeeding poem he writes that in life “only the blazing matters, / the stoking of the fire.” As he says later in Ars Poetica both the “invisible’ and the “visible” are resolved in the creativity of poetic form.

Fontanella dramatizes this same loss in these lyrical poems about his relationship with his own daughter, Emma, in “Stanzas for Emma.” (Rebecca West informs the reader that Emma is Fontanella’s daughter). The Emma in the poems is not imaginary. This fact is important in poems that also struggle against the tyranny of representing the commonplace and time past in art.

He finds in quotidian details of life those fleeting moments of grace and beauty between a father and a daughter, who is growing and who lives too far away. Emma becomes yet another sign in Fontanella’s poetry of the separation that is central to the immigrant experience. But the themes that emerge from the poetry cannot be easily separated from the reality of the father/daughter relationship. The searing passage of time is always at odds with the timeless, universality implicit in each poem.

Fontanella recalls the past in its concrete details: toys from Emma’s childhood, incidents recollected from when she was a toddler, and those mute but loving moments between teenager and father. He recalls the first time she tried to grasp water and the first time she held a tiny bird.

He writes “Tonight I think of those white horses / that filled my childhood tales / in the dark next to my bed / of those toy trains from a make-believe Wild West / of the desert steppes, of the lush savannas / of Nemo and the sons of Captain Grant . . . .” But at its end, “Suddenly / it turns cold and from here all borders are / lost or uncertain.”

Like his recollection of his father, Emma serves as a unifying element in the poet’s imagination. Though Emma is destined to grow up, in Fontanella’s poetic line her “life is a tender unity.” Fontanella writes, Emma is both “the vanishing dream” and the unity of past and present: “When I am with you, / I can no longer tell yesterday from today.” The poet’s imagination wars against separation, the inevitable consequences of modern life, time passing, and even death. But in their place is the consolation of art, of poetry and the poet’s imaginary recreation of events.

These poems express, as Rebecca West writes in her Introduction, that the “connection between experience and language is tenuous at best, an impossible goal at worst.” In “Once Again,” from the section Ballads and Songs, writes that once an airline attendant on a flight mistook “destination” for “destiny.”

This error becomes for Fontanella yet another opportunity to speculate on the modern complex social condition where borders are blurred and the individual’s fate uncertain.

Fontanella writes that “Someone on the plane giggled at the gaff / others realized instantly / how error and juxtaposition alone / once again controlled / checkpoints and crossroads, agreements and infractions.”

For the traveler, the predicament of living in between, on the borderland of cultures, coincidence is more a factor than union, serendipity more a factor than preparation. But finally art helps to locate and transcend the mutability of emotions and remembrances. As Fontanella writes in an untitled poem in Ars Poetica, “The blank page quivers / in the autumnal air / leaf after leaf / falling from above / as the tree turns bare / the page grows full.” Coram, November 1992.

Prof. Ken Scambray, a correspondent for I’Italo-Americano for over twenty years, teaches North American Italian literature at the University of La Verne. He is the author of A Varied Harvest: The Life and Works of Henry Blake Fuller (Univ. Pittsburgh Press) and The North American Italian Renaissance: Italian Writing in America and Canada (Guernica Editions), Surface Roots, (Guernica), and Queen Calafia’s Paradise: California and the Italian American Novel (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press). He is co-founder of Italian American Writers of Southern California.

 

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