by Catherine Theis

This week, the University of Chicago Press’ Phoenix Poets Series has released Jolanda Insana’s Slashing Sounds, the first full-length translation of her poems in English. As her translator, it’s a pleasure to share Insana’s fierce, caustic, and imaginative voice with English readers. Her poems do all kinds of things that traditional lyric poems do not do, for which I am grateful. Namely, Insana’s poems challenge our ideas about why we read poetry. Do we read poetry to feel good or to have some kind of magical epiphany in the final line? Sometimes Insana’s work invites both responses, but often we are invited to experience the very human feelings of anger, jealousy, and sorrow.

Born in Messina in 1937, Insana was a translator of Greek and Latin texts, including the work of Sappho, Euripides, and Martial. Her translation work greatly influences her poems. In Slashing Sounds, there are traces of Latin and old Italian, discussion of semantics, vignettes about Petrarch, and meditations on the state of literary history. For Insana, original poetry and translation are deeply intertwined. The poet-translator cannot help but write about how difficult (but necessary!) translation can be. Also embedded in this work is a critique of patriarchy, war, and the challenges of being a female artist. In short, this is a book that is anti-establishment. Part punk rock, part tender address, Slashing Sounds recasts the female speaker as a tour de force, someone who uses both language and silence in their offensive advantage. Her insults and rants are a kind of performance, reminding us that poetry gives voice to all kinds of histories at the word level and at the story level. 

One of the reasons I felt compelled to translate Insana is that she was a translator in her own right. I find it extremely moving when a writer recognizes they are only a small part of a monumental literary tradition that is constantly shifting and changing. In other words, it’s a beautiful thing when a writer acknowledges their role in a larger community or other writers and readers.

Poets who are also translators are a special breed. In my own life, I’ve found poet-translators to be generous, patient, gracious, and deeply committed to the art of translation. Insana describes her own translation practice as an “entrance into another’s workshop,” and as a kind of “courtship.” Both descriptions rely on the embodiment of the writer. In other words, for Insana, translating a writer means getting to know them as a person, appreciating their similarities but also respecting their otherness. I felt invited into her workshop from her very first poem, “I Said Nothing,” because there was so much the speaker said! Over the course of several years, I found myself in deep conversation with Insana’s voice, arguing with her turns of phrase, asking questions, consulting dictionaries, and asking other poets what to do when no clear answer was available. Translation implies multiple communities at its reception. For this reason (and many others), Insana’s poems will be of interest to readers of Italian literature, language, poetry, history, as well as those of us who have experienced heartbreak and betrayal. Everyone, really!

Contemporary American poetry often suffers from not enough strangeness. Whether it’s the proliferation of MFA programs (Charles Bernstein rants about “official verse culture”), prize culture, or playing it safe to attract more readers, many poems published today are generic. They lack voice and vision. Slashing Sounds does not fall into this category. Insana’s poems are raw with the bitterness of life and speak to an idiosyncratic voice that doesn’t care what you think of her. I admire the speaker’s courage to say unpleasant, unkind things. To call things out for what they really are. To see the beauty in the violence of life.

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Slashing Sounds

• by Jolanda Insana
• Translated by Catherine Theis
• Original title: Fendenti Fonici
• 96 pages  
• Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
• ISBN: 978-0226835747
• Publication Date: October 21, 2024
• Treat your bookshelf to a taste of Italy! Order the book here.

Other links:

• Reviews on University of Chicago Press
• Mentions in Poetry Northwest and The Massachusetts Review
• Poetry Foundation profiles on Catherine Theis and Jolanda Insana
• Interview with Catherine Theis
• Follow Slashing Sounds on Instagram at @slashing_sounds

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“The music in Insana’s work is also something I needed to be mindful of, I wanted to keep as much ‘noise’ in my translation as possible.” — Catherine Theis

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