Richard Signore 9311 S.W. 53 St.

Miami, 3,432 words (305) 595-3338

Fl

First Serial Rights (c) 2000 R. Signore 33165

'IN THE MIDST OF THAT DARK LAND'

by

R. P. SIGNORE

Uncle Pat was always quick to lend me money and tell me stories about coming to America in 1922. He worked for five cents an hour, lived in a cluttered Boston tenement, and refused to speak Italian because he didn't want anyone to think he wasn't an American. He even changed his name from Pasquale to Pat and told people that his parents were people he boarded with and not really his parents at all. Later, much later, in the 1960s, he resuscitated his heritage and took great pride in the accomplishments of his family. Family, in fact, became the center of his entire emotional life. "You know, I have thousands of friends in the world, but the only people I invite to my supper table are my family." The "family" that went to Uncle Pat's house for supper was a varied assortment of Italians who also extolled the virtues of family: Uncle Joe who built houses and started a prosperous construction business in Central Florida; Uncle Tony who moved to Ohio, became a mayor of a small town and protested movies like The Godfather; and Aunt Flossie who no one thought would accomplish anything after her accident in the clothing factory. The factory failed to put doors on the
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elevator's opening, and, one day as she leaned in to see if the elevator was coming down, the elevator hit her on the head and crushed her collar bone. She sued the factory for negligence, won enough money to start her own seamstress business, and took to a bottle of Anacin tablets a day for pain. But the one relative Uncle Pat was most proud of was his nephew, John Ciardi. Whenever I visited Uncle Pat's small condominium in Hollywood, Florida, he never failed to show me the autographed books of Ciardis poetry. He put the books in a very special place: on a trophy shelf over the television, and Ciardi's most famous work, the translation of Dante's "Divine Comedy," was displayed like a religious shrine. Now I was an arrogant boy with a BA in English, and the belief that I could write better poetry than most American poets, including John Ciardi. I dismissed his work and thought it was inconsequential. I also thought his translation of Dante's "Divine Comedy" was nothing more than a limp rendering of a masterpiece. Of course, I didn't speak, read or understand Italian, but such things didnt seem to matter then. So, when Uncle Pat announced that the great translator himself would be coming to town and was going to have dinner with him and Aunt Josie, I nudged myself into the evening with full intentions of letting Ciardi know my opinions. Aunt Josie wasn't impressed by the coming of Ciardi, or for that matter, with any kind of family event. She was far more concerned with her indoor garden and the high cost of airconditioning; but she was happy that Uncle Pat was finally going to be able to show off his famous nephew, even if she secretly believed that he was no one very important. "Ill make something special," she insisted, We will show him that we arent peasants.

Now during this time I worked for the State of Florida as a social worker and waiting for my career as a poet to blossom. My job was to determine if indigent patients in nursing homes were eligible for Medicaid, which meant I spent most of the week inside smelly rooms with abandoned
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souls who drooled on sheets and talked about a life that was over. Some never even moved their bodies, although their brains were alive enough to detect cockroaches moving across their armygreen blankets or some nurses aide sneaking in their room and stealing their untouched suppers. The entire situation was pretty grim and I planned on staying on the job long enough to save some money and spend a year wandering towards California. Anyway. during a visit to one of the state nursing homes, I met Domenic Rosati. He was 84 years old, a small man with wispy gray hair, a pale mustache, a leather-tan face and curious brown eyes that seemed to be always sizing you up. He was spry, strong and energetic, and, most of all, he loved two things: opera and Dante. He immigrated from Italy in 1935, fleeing Mussolini who wanted to draft him and an ex-wife who wanted to kill him. He hid in Pennsylvania and worked in the coal mines under a phony name. He then found a job on the railroad and traveled around the country in a caboose. He married three times and ended up living with his only child, a son, in a small apartment on South Beach. The two of them took care of each other until someone shot his son in the stomach. A month later the son died and three months later, unable to keep up with the rent, Rosati was evicted from the apartment and placed in a nursing home by a county agency. I developed an immediate fondness for Rosati. I took him out for drives and bought him lunch. I listened to him talk about Puccini and Italy and the brown shirts., and how he got black lung disease in the coal mines, and how to really cook Italian food so it would really taste Italian: "Garlic and onions. Always garlic and onions." We spent many afternoons walking around downtown Miami, and under the warm afternoon sun, we talked about Dante. "Ah, Dante!" Rosati sighed. "Now there was a great man. The greatest poet that ever lived. They wanted to burn him alive, along with his son, but they exiled him instead. A great man! After his death, his bones were lost in Ravenna, but his own ghost, his own ghost, returned to show a priest where the bones were hidden. Another time his ghost had to return to show
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his son where the lost 113 Cantos of the "Paradisio" were hidden." Then Rosati tilted his head back, rolled his eyes and sang "Ma quando to sarai;nel dulce mondo Priegoti cha a la mente altrui mi rechi." He was completely surprised when I asked him to translate what he had just recited. He sneered. How could an Italian not know the Italian language? No one could translate Dante. He had to be read in his own language ! Translate him and you destroy the music and the rhyme! No, it was simply impossible. I told him about John Ciardi and how he got his reputation for his translation of Dante. He snickered and said that he doubted the translation was anything more than Ciardi's idea of how Dante should sound. It was probably worthless to everyone except Americans who were too damned lazy to learn another language. So I gave him a copy of Ciardi's translation and asked him to look it over and comment on the quality of the work. He turned away and said I was too much of a pest and that we should stop having lunch together. I didn't understand his sudden change of attitude but I kept away from him for three weeks. Finally, he called me and asked me to visit him. He was sitting in a wheel chair looking frailer than before. His lower lip slightly trembled and his left hand twitched against the shiny wheel. "I think I've had a little stroke," he said. "I wanted to see you before I died." "Don't talk like that." "You are a foolish boy. You understand very little." "What are you talking about? All I did was ask you to look at Ciardi's translation and you decided you didn't want to speak to me again. What was all that about, anyway?" He furtively glanced around the empty corridor that led to the dank rooms of the dying. "Don't you understand? I can't read. I memorize everything I hear. I only went to the first grade."
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"Well then, how did you learn Dante?" "My wife. My first wife. She read to me and I memorized." Now I understood why he asked me to read everything when I took him out. Menus. Billboards. Advertisements. The newspaper. I thought his eyes were going bad. I never suspected he couldn't read. I was embarrassed, but I still wanted to know what he thought about Ciardi's translation. I told him to tell me from what canto he was reciting and I would find the lines and read him Ciardi's translation. He resisted, but the more I pressed the issue the more he loosened and then agreed to translate a small portion of the text, most especially the "Inferno." For weeks Rosati recited passages from the "Inferno" and translated them aloud while I copied his translations into a notebook. We lost ourselves in medieval Florence: the wars of the Guelphs and Ghibbilines, the dark forest and the procession of demons and beasts from hell. I felt that I was at last close to, if not actually touching, the true spirit of Dante. The Dante the "people" learned as they worked in the cities and toiled in the fields. I heard Dante as Dante must have intended - from the lips of the common people and not the university scholars who chopped everything into grants and self-advancement. As we translated Dante I also knew that I was preparing for my dinner at Uncle Pat's house. I wanted to present Ciardi with solid evidence that I had discovered the essence of Dante, and, furthermore, I had discovered that his translation was far inferior to a common peasant's translation. Yes, I was in training, reveling in having Rosati as my conduit to Dante. Once Rosati remarked that I was using him, but he kept on translating anyway. I would tell him the canto number and the line, read out the Italian in my worst accent, and then he would remember the entire passage and recite a translation. Soon, I had enough material for my meeting with Ciardi.

Ciardi was a large, earthy man with a round belly and a wife who enjoyed talking about
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everything except poetry. She was patient and tolerant but generally bored until her interest was peaked when I mentioned marijuana and LSD. I told them I had experimented with LSD and that it was an hallucinatory experience that reminded me of being inside a poem by Blake. I told them about wandering through a tall field of ferns in the early morning, and the dew on the leaves looking like a million diamonds, and my friends exuding colorful auras filled with emotions, and that afterwards I knew that something had been permanently changed inside me. Ciardi didn't like the word "something" - too vague - and described the hallucinations brought on by ingestion of the ergot in the Middle Ages. In general, he looked on my experience with disdain, but did mention that he had teenagers who he thought were beginning to experiment with marijuana. He really didn't know and was having a hard time telling if they were high or just acting like silly teenagers. All in all the conversation was mostly awkward and disjointed. Towards the end of dinner the talk centered on Uncle Pat's description of working as an ice cutter on the lakes of New Hampshire and ferrying the ice back to Boston in the dawn darkness of winter. He did it seven days a week for what amounted to pennies in salary. I brought up that the work sounded like being in one of the circles of hell. Ciardi smiled, but he didn't realize that I had finally found an opportunity to bring up his translation of Dante. "You know, I've read your translation of Dante a few times now..." I said, prodded on by too many glasses of wine and youthful belligerence. Ciardi nodded appreciation while his wife helped Aunt Josie clear the table. "And, well, you don't mind if I comment on it, do you? I now suspect that Ciardi knew what was coming. His demeanor reeked with resignation. No doubt he had been through such snotty grilling more than one time in his life. He benignly looked at Uncle Pat who seemed pretty much oblivious to my change of voice. "Tell me what you think," Ciardi replied. "I'm always curious about what young people think
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of my work." He sat quietly like the Buddha. Perhaps he believed that the child should attack the adult and attempt to demolish the structures of thinking and art. Whatever. I couldn't control my John Simon imitation and spewed out such philippics as "flat and unoriginal," or "often contrived" or "stilted and lacking in emotion and passion." I concluded with "It is my strict opinion that no significant contribution was made with this translation and a more accessible and careful job should be done with any future attempt at translation." If you were to ask me now what I meant then, I wouldn't be able to tell you. I had just come out of the Douglas Bush , or was it I.A. Richards' school of criticism ? You know, spout off such things as "aesthetic experience is the harmonious integration of impulses," or "the categorical appeal of the line must be inherent in the substructure of the metrical line." In short, speak in generalities about something specific, then pretend that the generality is specific. Or even more, criticize what you yourself have never done and could never do! Needless to say, Ciardi wasn't amused; but neither was he upset. He sat in his stillness, moved his fork and knife to a place where Aunt Josie could reach them and brushed some bread crumbs into a small pile. "Contrived?" he asked. "Interesting." "You know, the metrics," I said, suddenly an authority on the Florentine literary tongue and the complexity of the terza rima. "You should never have rhymed the poem. It creates an aura of artificiality." Ciardi leaned back and spread out his large arms as if he wanted to fly away from the table. Uncle Pat, now suspicious of my tone of voice, asked Aunt Josie to put on some coffee and waved away the smoke from his pipe so it would not swirl around Ciardi. "I considered writing without rhyme," Ciardi said, " but then, I had spent so much damned
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time on the book that I said the hell with it, it's time to move one." I didn't know what to say. My criticism was punctured at the center. I tried to keep on digging, just to show off, but I think Ciardi never considered me an equal. "Well, the fact that you kept the rhyme created an awkward pattern of speech, and I have it from a good source that it's the kind of speech that is more American that Italian." Ciardi was now visibly tired of the conversation and rubbed and patted his large paunch. "And what source do you have that tells you I wrote American and not Italian?" Oh, I was ready for him. I opened my notebook of Rosati's translations. "These are sections from the Inferno that were done by a client of mine in a nursing home. He's 82 and has memorized all of Dante." I handed Ciardi one of the translations and he started to read it with what I thought was a skeptical eye; but then he started to grin. He asked to see more, and he intensely read them for 4 or 5 minutes. Then he handed them back to me. "These are wonderful," he said, "and quite possibly the best I've ever read. It has rhythm, feeling, the entire sensibility of what the original is all about. Is there any chance I could read more?" I was stunned! Ciardi wanted to read more! "I think so," is all I could say. "Maybe I can get him to do more." "Good, I'd like to see them when you finish. Maybe something can be worked out." The evening ended with a great deal of patting on the back and nice to meet you and please make sure you send me those translations and, yes, if you've done your own writing I'd like to see that, too. The next day I felt disappointed by my efforts to corner Ciardi into some defense of his work, and I also felt silly for wanting to embarrass him. But, at the same time, I was happy over his response to Rosati's work. I even thought it possible that Ciardi could help publish the translations and I would receive credit for being the intermediary. I decided to bring Rosati the good news
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Only young people are convinced that life is meaningful. Age brings on suspicion. Faith sneaks in and out of the psyche and all one can do is desire some safe spot beyond the flesh.

When I returned the following Monday to Rosati's nursing home, I was told by the head nurse that he had been taken to Jackson Hospital for emergency treatment. In the middle of the night he had sliced his wrists with a razorblade. An attendant had discovered his body about two hours after he had done it, and no one yet knew if he had survived. I knew Rosati had been depressed - he often complained that everyone he knew was dead but I never expected him to attempt suicide. I rushed to Jackson promising to spend more time with him even if it meant less time for myself. I'd help him out of his depression by collaborating on the translations. Together we'd create the best American version of Dante in existence. I arrived at Jackson and went to the floor where they kept people who tried to commit suicide. A Cuban nurse with a very round face didn't understand me too well, so I had to search for a translator. By the time I found one I was pretty aggravated and insisted on knowing where my client was being kept. The translator calmed me down and asked the Cuban nurse a question in Spanish. "Muerte. Muerte," the Cuban nurse said. She held up two fingers. "Dos horas. Dos horas. No mas, no mas aqui."

I wrote Ciardi a few times after Rosati's death, then I didn't write him for many years, not until Uncle Pat died. I called attention to the evening at Uncle Pat's and he only remembered it as being enjoyable. This began a short correspondence in which we exchanged a few ideas about modern poetry. He wrote that he wanted to write a book about the Italian immigrant experience, but that he was finding little time to write anything. His letters were often placid and patiently resigned,
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and only once did I note an edge of sarcasm when I asked him about writing as a career. He wrote: "My advice is that the young never need practice in spilling there (sic) souls. We all need to. But first we must labor (and last and forever) in the hope of mastering our means....You can always throw discipline away. But what about these yaks who never had discipline?---what have they got to throw away? And my question includes Corso (whoever he never became) and Ginsberg (who may be beginning to grow up too late)." For some reason, now lost, I never replied to Ciardi's letter and it was the last time we corresponded. I heard him on he radio a number of times afterwards tracking down the meaning of some words, a search for roots, an immigrant's quest. Then I read of his death in the newspaper. I never imagined that he was old enough to die. I wanted to write a poem for him, perhaps an elegy, but nothing special came to mind. Instead, I went to my study and read his translation of Dante.

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