ABSTRACT
Translators ask questions, and are grateful for answers and encouragement, when they correspond with the poet or writer on whose words they are laboring. Yet published records of such relationships are rare. This is why Jaccottet traducteur d’Ungaretti (2008) is so absorbing. Collecting the letters that the young Swiss poet (b. 1925) and the elderly Italian (1888–1970) exchanged between 1946 and 1970, this volume, which is enhanced by José-Flore Tappy’s biographical annotations, offers insights into Giuseppe Ungaretti’s verse, chronicles Jaccottet’s literary coming of age, and reveals the linguistic, relational, and practical intricacies of a sometimes joint effort to render Ungaretti’s at once terse, compassionate, and philosophically resonant Italian poems and prose texts. Although the letters mostly restrict themselves to the fine points of translation or to topics such as proofreading, review copies, copyright, editors, and publishers, a “noble”—the term is quaint yet appropriate—literary friendship shines through these pages.
