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Poet and Translator

Rina Ferrarelli is a poet, occasional critic, and translator of Italian poets Giorgio Chiesura, Leonardo Sinisgalli, Bartolo Cattafi, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Franco Fortini. Her poetry and translations have won several awards including the Italo Calvino Prize from the Columbia Translations Center, and have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, anthologies and textbooks.

Ferrarelli immigrated to the United States from Italy at the age of 15. Her collections of original poetry explore her place as an emigrant/immigrant; the loss of both her parents as a young child; loss of country, culture and language as a second kind of orphanhood; and finding a new home and family in a new language. Her books include Home is a Foreign Country (Eadmer Press, 1996) and Dreamsearch (malafemmina press, 1992).

A third collection, The Bread We Ate, as yet unpublished, places her in a long line of emigrant/immigrants in her family: men who worked in the mines or construction, women who waited with their children at home or in mining camps, sometimes for years, working the loom or the needle. A bilingual collection of her poems, This Other World (Quest’Altro Mondo) is being considered for publication in Italy.

Ferrarelli translates the poetry of men defined in some way by World War II, as soldiers, dissidents, prisoners of war, in flight from persecution and as witnesses to squalor, absurdity, outrage and despair.

•Giorgio Chiesura (b. 1921), author of La zona immobile which she rendered Light Without Motion (bilingual, Owl Creek Press, 1989), was a Venetian lieutenant deployed in the battle of Sicily who refused to fight for the fascist government and was interned in various camps in Germany and Poland. His poesie-racconti detail his experiences during his three-year imprisonment. Ferrarelli was awarded the Italo Calvino prize for this book.
•Leonardo Sinisgalli (1908-1981) was born in Montemurro, Lucania (Basilicata) and served as an artillery officer during the war. After he was discharged from the army he was arrested by the SS and taken to the notorious Tasso prison in Rome because his name was found in the address book of a suspect. Thanks to his wife who knew German he was released after a short stay. Although Sinisgalli has several poignant lyrics about the ware, his main theme is of childhood as a paradise lost. His collections garnered many awards, and Ferrarelli’s translated collection, I Saw the Muses (bilingual, Guernica, 1997) was one of five finalists for the Landon Translation Prize.
•Bartolo Cattafi (1922-1979) was born in the province of Messina, Sicily, and began writing poetry after a medical discharge from the army following a nervous breakdown. His poetry takes cognizance of the absurdity of war, and his ironic and at time sardonic tone expresses the disillusionment of post-war Italy. He published several award-winning collections during his lifetime, and Poesie 1943-1979 edited by Vincenzo Leotta and Giovanni Raboni was published posthumously (Mondadori, 1990). Ferrarelli’s collection, Winter Fragments: Selected Poems 1945-1979 (bilingual, Chelsea Editions, 2006) comprises a selection of his lyrics.
•Ferrarelli’s numerous translations of the poetry of Salvatore Quasimodo and Franco Fortini have been published in various collections and journals. Although too old to be drafted, Quasimodo did not escape the war. He lived in Milan where he witnessed its squalor, outrages, and despair. As is true of other older poets, the war changed his poetics, his language.
•The war was an entirely different experience for Fortini, a Jew whose last name was originally Lattes. To escape persecution he took his mother’s name and hid in the houses of friends until he could escape to Switzerland. Eventually he returned to Italy to work as a Partisan. Fortini’s poetry is always politically and socially conscious.