A Note on My Quandary About Political Poetry
With an Attempted Translation of a Poem by Franco Fortini
Barry Schwabsky
After Trump won the 2016 election, I began to feel, as many others did, that I should get more actively political. Thinking the best course would be to pick one issue or area of concern to focus on, I joined Jewish Voice for Peace. But the truth is that, although I continue to support that organization to this day, I never became very active. I’ve never been a great one for marching. I do pessimism of the intellect better than I do optimism of the will.
At the same time, I thought that perhaps also my poetry ought to become more political. But how? The more I thought about it, the less I understood what political poetry is or could be. I decided that the best way to get a deeper understanding of it would be, not to try starting from first principles, let alone to proceed by depending on my own weak intuition to guide me, but to translate some poetry generally accounted political. This, I thought, would let me “try on” political poetry and see if and how it might fit me. I set to work on a poet I’d long been interested in, Franco Fortini, who besides being a great poet was also a prolific translator and a fierce critic/polemicist.