Above: The Abbazia di Rosazzo (Abbey of Rosazzo) in the heart of the Colli Orientali del Friuli.
Perhaps nowhere else in Italy is the local dialect more beloved, alive, and vibrant than in Friuli.
Translator and poet Stephen Sartarelli has recently completed his English language translation of the entire corpus of poems by Italian 20th-century intellectual, poet, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975), whose Friulian poems continue to inspire the region’s current generation.
Stephen has generous shared the below translation, from the Poesie a Casarsa (Poems in Casarsa, 1941-43). Pasolini’s original, in Friulian dialect, follows.
Song of the Bells
When evening dissolves in the fountains
my village turns a forgotten color.
From afar I remember the frogs,
the moon, the crickets’ sad tremolo.
Rosario rings, trails off through the fields:
I have died to the song of the bells.
Stranger, do not fear my gentle flight
over the plain; I am a spirit of love
come back to his town from afar.
****
Ciant da li ciampanis
Co la sera a si pièrt ta li fontanis
il me país al colòur smarít.
Jo i soj lontàn, recuardi li so ranis,
la luna, il trist tintinulà dai gris.
A bat Rosari, pai pras al si scunís:
jo i soj muàrt al ciant da li ciampanis.
Forèst, al me dols svualà par il plan,
no ciapà pòura: jo i soj un spirt di amour
che al so país al torna di lontàn.
[...] last night’s COF2011 welcome dinner, Friulian journalist Adriano Del Fabro recited “Song of the Bells,” a poem in Friulian by Pier Paolo Pasolini and I read a translation by my friend, the great Italian translator Stephen [...]
By: Poetry in Friulian! Fantastic! « Do Bianchi on February 7, 2011
at 4:11 pm