experiential backdrop of each poem, whereas a grounded sense of the deeply enlivening and relational dimension of aesthetic experience orients each poem’s discernment towards building worlds governed by an ethic of responsive care rather than consumptive use.

Marchionni is a multifaceted artist active in Bologna since the early 1980s. Her art practice spreads across multiple fields, including theatre, visual art, sculpture, multimedia installations and poetry. More so, her generative and collaborative approach has been crucially important to a number of long-standing cultural projects, including early contributions to Il Teatro del Guerriero, a major feminist theatre company active in Bologna in the 1980s and 1990s; the founding of Beatrix V.T., a feminist collective and artist book publisher active in the 1990s and early 2000s; and, most recently, a standing collaboration with artist Letizia Rostagno, with whom she has mounted many collective exhibitions and has published early excerpts of Cosecante Iperbole.*

The title of the collection – which can be translated both as Cosecant Hyperbole or Cosecant Hyperbola – creatively deploys the language of trigonometry to map out the unfolding dynamics of nurture between living beings in asymmetrical relations of reciprocity and exchange with one another. Writing about the origins of the title, Marchionni recently explained that nurture, in its most basic mammalian model of a breast (seno in Italian) offering milk and a mouth sucking at it, can be diagrammed by the trigonometric function of a hyperbolic cosecant, that is, the set of points whose distance from two fixed points, or foci, remains constant (hyperbola) that applies to the reciprocal of a sine (cosecant). In Italian the word for “sine” is “seno,” which also means breast – hence the implicit overlaying of the abstract trigonometric function onto embodied relations of nourishment and growth.

Marchionni’s pointed use of “Iperbole” as noun rather than modifier also gestures to a further layer of poetic resonance. In rhetoric, a “hyperbole” – etymologically, a “casting” or “throwing” (“bole”) “beyond” (“hyper”) – denotes a figure of speech that deploys excess or exaggeration for the sake of emphasis. Contrary to English, where a vowel switch allows us to distinguish the trigonometric function of the “Hyperbola” from the rhetorical figure of the “Hyperbole,” in Italian the same word applies to both math and rhetoric: “Iperbole.” The use of such word, then, as simultaneously a mathematical and rhetorical noun, underscores the relation of generative excess at play in the nurturing exchanges of the living, such that they cannot be reduced to the formulaic idea of exchange as a symmetrical relation between equivalent values – this latter being the formula governing commodity exchange, whose toxic and deadening influence permeates contemporary consumer culture worldwide.

Marchionni’s poetry has a particular rhythm to it, one that may be best described as a tumultuous cascading of images spilling onto one another in ways that are as deeply defamiliarizing as they are astonishingly insightful once the radiance of their multiple connections becomes perceptible.

Dazzlement and disorientation constitute my reactions to every first reading, as frequent enjambments and syntactical distensions that stretch sentences into surprising shapes force my mind to grasp at straws while I drown in the musical flow of the stanzas. When I turn to the thought of translating these pieces, an aggressive impulse to parse out each line in a quest to stabilize meaning invariably follows – the challenge of the task dawning on me like a tight cage suddenly sprung up around me and the poem. Then the back-and-forth negotiations of sense and sound begin, with such patient sifting eventually giving way to emerging new patterns and possibilities in another language.

As we know, the imperative towards equivalence (i.e., the fiction of a zero-sum game of substitutions between one language and another) shapes the outer contours of the process of translation in much contemporary practice. And yet, despite its normative hold, equivalence cannot exhaust the ongoing effects of transformative displacement that emerge every time a new translator applies her deep reading and writing skills to a text in transition between languages. These effects may be more accurately understood as diffractions than equivalences, insofar as they bear the traces of patterns of interference, amplification and boundary-making that tease out sense-making as an open-ended and constantly recontextualizing activity.

Every translation, in the end, bears the traces of the singularity of a reader’s own engagement – what stands out, what doesn’t, what seemingly goes without saying – and then what constitutes at first an insurmountable loss and the strategies for getting around it. Remarkably, beyond each translator’s singularity, the multilingual translations presented here also bear the traces of intense communal conversations, as Chiara, Letizia and I met regularly over Zoom for more than a month to workshop our texts. These extended conversations not only produced an unprecedented deepening of our understanding of each poem, but also instigated lateral conversations between the languages, such that they authorized creative swerves that we may not have considered otherwise. In the spirit of ellipse’s invitation to expand beyond the traditional representation of translation, the pages that follow offer a visual rendition of all the interpretive hesitations, discoveries and choices we made before, during and after our conversations. Each of our English, French and German versions, then, now diffract the Italian lines, extending and twisting each poem into dynamic new possibilities, for new readers to enjoy.

Toronto, November 2020
Elena Basile

* Il paesaggio nel tempo. Evocazioni, manipolazioni, condivisioni. Art exhibition catalogue and book curated by Letizia Rostagno. Poetry by Angela Marchionni and by Marina Moretti. Loiano (BO): Edizioni Beatrix V.T., 2013.