Slashing Sounds - (Phoenix Poets) by Jolanda Insana (Paperback)

About the Book

"Jolanda Insana (1937-2016) is a Sicilian poet who has long been under-recognized outside of Italy, and Catherine Theis's stellar translation of Insana's first full collection, Slashing Sounds, is the first book-length English-language edition of the poet's work. Originally published as Fendenti fonici in 1982, these poems channel an idiosyncratic, albeit carefully curated, Sicilian dialect that Insana used to capture the vernacular life and street-level spirit of the region. Through this specific voice, Insana nevertheless finds a full spectrum of possibilities for human expression-the vulgarity, hilarity, intimacy, and outrage of a population expressed through its slang, obscenities, and terms of endearment. Insana's daring, fiercely embodied work pushes the boundaries of the notion of poetry as an elitist institution. What makes Slashing Sounds so immensely satisfying is its irreverence toward all forms of literary piety whatsoever: these poems are as subversive, snarky, and funny as they were over forty years ago, and the result is a book that feels utterly and perennially contemporary"--

Book Synopsis

The first collection of Italian poet Jolanda Insana's work to be published in English, featuring transgressive poems that evidence the power of language.

Jolanda Insana's Slashing Sounds uses invectives, fragments, epigrams, and epigraphs to construct poems that pulse with the texture of an idiosyncratic Sicilian dialect. The poems in this collection are ferocious, irreverent, strange, snarky, and otherworldly. Insana's commitment to contentiousness, her brutal and skeptical eye, and her preoccupation with language make Insana's poetry particularly arresting. For Insana, there is no subject more worthy of our interest than language's misfires and contradictory impulses--language being the ultimate arrow, forging a direction in the world and forcing a turn toward whatever reality appears in front of you.

The first book-length collection of Insana's poetry published in English, Slashing Sounds is a powerful offering that addresses a lack of female Italian voices in Anglophone poetry publishing.

Review Quotes

"In poems that often take the form of lists and intimacies, the author, a translator herself, is translated with purposeful style."-- "Poetry Northwest"

"Slashing Sounds introduces to English-language readers a gloriously guttural voice that will change how you think about twentieth-century Italian poetry. Theis handles Insana's explosions of Sicilian dialect and Latin phrases, as well as her inventions, digressions, crystalline assertions, and curses, with playfulness and keen attention. This book is a jagged and thrilling serenade 'against the dark sad wind.'"--Stefania Heim, author of "A Table That Goes On for Miles"

"Insana describes translation as the 'entrance into another's workshop, ' and with Slashing Sounds translator Theis emerges from Insana's atelier armed with rare treasure, forged of gems and dung, boiled lexemes and holophrasis, marionettes and rusty nails, busted balls and perfumed nooses. This first collection in English captures Insana's acerbic wit as she lashes out at the constraints of convention and received belief, a necessary addition to the limited chorus of Italian women's voices in English: 'don't accept the power / that shits in the mouth of reason.' The unsettling quality of Insana's language is fueled by tension among her tongues--colloquial spoken Sicilian clashing with learned Italian and occasional Latin and Greek phrases. Insana's rants and insults also embody a spirit of performance, and Theis has proven a brilliant interprete of her work, in the many meanings of that Italian word: performer, translator, messenger."--Olivia E. Sears, translator of "Simultaneities and Lyric Chemisms," by Ardengo Soffici

"Insana was a wild, difficult poet--a self-inventing alchemist, a vulgar-tongued classicist--who has finally found a translator up to the task of bringing her into English. 'Translation is not loss, ' asserts Theis in her dazzling translator's note: 'It is joyful accumulation.' And Slashing Sounds is her proof."--Geoffrey Brock, author of "After"

"With the original publication of Slashing Sounds, Insana arrived as a new voice in modern Italian poetry, and, in Theis, the book has found an ideal reader and translator. Theis is beautifully attuned to the performative aspects of Insana's verse--the push and pull of grammatical and affective moods, the propulsive prosody of disjunction and enjambment, the jumpy narratology of scene change and disclosure. This translation is utterly contemporary and utterly timeless, capturing the spectrum of possibilities for the human voice registered by Insana's work in the modern Sicilian dialect--the vulgarity, hilarity, intimacy, and outrage of a population expressed through its slang, obscenities, and terms of endearment."--Srikanth Reddy, Phoenix Poets series editor and author of "Underworld Lit"

About the Author

Jolanda Insana (b. 1937, Messina, Italy; d. 2016, Rome) is the author of several volumes of poetry, beginning with Sciarra amara in 1977. In addition to writing poetry and teaching classics to high school students, Insana was also a prolific translator of Greek and Latin, including works by Sappho, Euripides, and Martial. Insana won the Viareggio Prize for poetry for La Stortura in 2002 and the Premio Pascoli Prize in 2009. Catherine Theis is the author of the poetry collection The Fraud of Good Sleep and the play MEDEA, an adaptation of the Euripides story. She teaches at the University of Southern California.