FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — An award-winning translation by John DuVal of work written by the Romanesco poet Trilussa offers English-speakers access to the mocking social commentary and occasional silliness that still delight Italians more than 60 years after the poet’s death.

“Trilussa’s poems can be successfully carried over into another language only by retaining — or, more precisely, recreating — the dexterity and the bite of the originals, and in John DuVal Trilussa has found his ideal translator,” said Michael Palma, a juror for the American Academy of Poets.

The academy has selected University of Arkansas professor DuVal as the winner of the 2006 Raiziss/de Palchi Prize for his translation of Tales of Trilussa, a selection of poems by Carlo Alberto Salustri. Salustri wrote under the pseudonym Trilussa, an anagram of his last name. Tales of Trilussa was originally published by the University of Arkansas Press, which has ordered a second printing since the announcement of the award.

Hear John DuVal reading from his translation. (Quicktime Movie)

 “The poetry of Trilussa is in Romanesco, which is the dialect of Rome — the way people speak in Rome, have spoken in Rome — an evolving language since the end of the Roman Empire,” DuVal said. “This prize has been particularly gratifying for me because the language is actually Romanesco rather than straight Italian, and I appreciate the fact that the award givers and the judges for this prize selected a book in dialect, which 20 years ago would not have happened.

“Secondly, it is gratifying to me because this is probably the book of translations that I’ve had the hardest time writing. Trilussa is a poet of tremendous variety. Every poem is different. He has funny, hilarious poems. He has serious poems. He has sentimental poems. Each time I did a translation I felt like I was starting over again,” he said.

In the introduction to Tales of Trilussa, DuVal wrote that the poet brought a comic-lyric sensibility to his poems, influenced both by late 19^th century Italian Crepuscolari poets, who emphasized simple language and subjects, and by “the popular canzonette sung in the Roman streets and dance halls.”

In “La Zampana” or “The Gnat,” Trilussa’s sonnet celebrates a gnat whose life ends when it is crushed between the pages of The History of Italy, becoming a smear “right in the Campaign for Independence.” In the final two lines, Trilussa captures the lesson of the gnat’s “mark on one of History’s pages”:

“In Italia, a un dipresso,
Se pô diventà celebri lo stesso.”

“A person’s chance for fame, however piddly,
Cannot be altogether squelched in Italy.”

Trilussa, who published his first poem in1887, was able to make his living with his sonnets, fables, satires and lyrics until his death in 1950. He was already well known nationally and internationally when the fascists assumed control of Italy. Trilussa did not claim to be an anti-fascist poet. Rather, Trilussa said, he was “simply not a fascist.”

“His satire exposed the pomposity and double-talk of everyone from street thugs to cabinet ministers. The fascists, when they took power in 1922, were no exception, except that there was a new element to satirize in the new regime: terror,” DuVal said. “Such poems as 'In the Shade’ and 'The Last of the Bogeyman’ become increasingly complex when we realize that they themselves make their author more vulnerable to the terror they mock.”

DuVal was introduced to Romanesco by his colleague, the poet Miller Williams, who one day at a party handed him a fat volume of Trilussa’s complete poems in Romanesco, saying, “Here, John — here’s something you’ll enjoy translating.”  Intrigued, DuVal taught himself Romanesco with the aid of Romanesco-Italian dictionaries and a Louisiana State University Press edition of Romanesco sonnets by G.G. Belli printed alongside what he calls Williams’ “masterful translations” into English. In addition to Tales of Trilussa, DuVal also translated The Discovery of America by Cesare Pascarella, which won the 1992 Harold Morton Landon Prize for the Translation of Poetry from the Academy of American Poets.

 “When I look back through this book, I can have two different sensations,” DuVal said. “Sometimes when I just leaf through the book I’m really impressed by the variety, and I take tremendous pleasure in reading it. But too often as I look through I’m impressed with a sense of coming short sometimes of Trilussa’s poetry, as I go from one poem to the other. There’s just so much to the original.”

DuVal and Louise Rozier, UA assistant professor in foreign languages, are working together on a translation of 'Na zeppa a l’occhio by another Romanesco writer, Giorgio Roberti.

DuVal is a professor and director of the program in literary translation in the English department in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. He will accept the $5,000 Raiziss/de Palchi Prize for Translation of Italian Poetry in a ceremony in New York in November.

To hear DuVal comment on translating Tales of Trilussa and his readings of two of the poems in both English and Romanesco, go to the sound files available for download at http://dailyheadlines.uark.edu/.