Frank Stanford Translated into Italian and a Conversation with the Translator, Luca Dipierro

10 min readAug 1, 2024

Frank Stanford’s poetry was translated into Italian by Luca Dipierro. Dipierro pertinently titled the translation Acqua Segreta (Secret Water). The headshot of Frank dressed in a kimono on the cover gives readers a fantastic look at the poet. In the book, the English text faces the Italian translation. It’s a handsome book.

Cover of Frank Stanford book, Acqua Segreta, translated by Luca Dipierro

Poets may be recognized, or even popular, when they are alive, but that’s not the case for most of them, including Frank Stanford. He was not really well-known during his lifetime. That said, he wrote letters to many people who became famous writers in their lifetimes. Many Stanford readers know that he met Allen Ginsberg. They met at the University of Arkansas on Friday May 2, 1969 (John Wood “With Allen in Arkansas: an Ozark Diary” 2012). Even with Ginsberg, of all the poems he wrote, he’s best known for only one of them, “Howl,” which is an incredible achievement in itself. No telling which poems will ripple through the waters of time long after those who wrote them. Poets’ works tend to be forgotten once they die.

For poets’ works to not only endure but also become translated into other languages after their lifetimes seems pretty miraculous. Many who try writing poems fail, and most people give up trying to write them. So, it is really a miracle when poets’ posthumous writings get published as individual poems or, for the luckiest, as a book.

This moment brings to mind another poet often associated with Frank Stanford, Franz Wright. Foundlings Press out of Buffalo, NY will publish a collection of his poems, actually lyrical fragments, that are, at the time of typing this, unpublished. The collection, with an introduction by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, will include an audiobook: “Wright’s own voice in the original recordings of these fragments.” Here is the cover for At His Desk in the Past:

Franz Wright book cover for At His Desk in the Past published by Foundlings Press

Many people still await Franz’s next full-length book, though he passed away in 2015. I felt happy when I recently saw his work translated into Spanish by Gerardo Cárdenas. Here’s the cover of that book:

Book cover for Franz Wright translated into Spanish by Gerardo Cárdenas

Like Wright’s poetry, Stanford’s poems continue inspiring other poets, artists, translators, and the like.

I enjoyed a conversation with the artist who translated Frank Stanford’s poems into Italian, Luca Dipierro. He was born in Italy, and he now lives with his partner, writer Leni Zumas, and their son in the United States. Theaters, galleries, and film festivals around the world have shown his work. Dipierro is the author of two books of short prose, Biscotti neri (Madcap 2011) and Nei paesi infimi (Edizioni Prufrock Spa 2024).

Here are some questions that I asked and Luca’s repsonses:

In the introduction to Acqua Segreta, you point out something I had not thought about before. You allude to a C.D. Wright comment about Stanford being a “non-career” poet, and you mention that he was completely unknown outside the United States for “more than forty years after his death.” How did you find Frank Stanford’s writings, and what attracted you to his poetry?

I encountered Stanford’s work in 2005. I had just moved from Italy to the United States, and was living in Baltimore. Every other week, I would take a Greyhound to New York City and immerse myself in the city (mostly getting lost because I didn’t know my way around). I would often visit St. Mark’s Bookshop, a really cool bookstore that had been around since 1977 (and unfortunately closed down in 2016 due to a rent hike). St. Mark’s had a great selection, extremely well curated, with lots of titles from small presses. I browsed the shelves to discover authors I had never heard of before. At the time, I was mostly interested in North American literature. That’s how I discovered Garielle Lutz, Lydia Davis, Russell Edson, Yannick Murphy, Stanley Crawford, among others.

One day, I stumbled upon The Light The Dead See, the Stanford anthology curated by Leon Stokesbury in 1991. I was immediately drawn to it, right from the cover. The graphic design was very basic, unattractive. In those days, the kind of stuff I was hungry for didn’t have a good design, at least not in a traditional sense. I wasn’t sure if the image was a photograph or an illustration. Of course, I would later discover that it was a painting by artist Ginny Crouch, Frank’s second wife. The image on the cover of The Light The Dead See depicts a chair in the middle of a field. The chair just stands there, uninviting and kind of lonely. There is an atmosphere of something about to happen, but something that you can’t wait for and only have to be available for, if that makes sense.

I have always been drawn to “mute objects of expression,” to quote Francis Ponge, and I was compelled to open the book and flip through it. I was struck by the imagery, by the way images were cut and juxtaposed. I think there is a bit of dada in Frank Stanford.

The first poem I read was “Narcissus to Achilles.” It’s a poem I keep returning to, it contains everything that interests me in Fran Stanford’s poetry. There is a dichotomy, or rather a dialectical relation between identity and otherness, sameness and difference. Identity is the river, the Mississippi, the “ever-changing never-changing murky water” of which Nick Cave sings in “Saint Huck,” a song inspired by Mark Twain and the mythology of the River. The other is represented by the boot, the inexplicable, the disruptive, that which questions the law of identity (A=A).

Literary and art movements from the beginning of the 20th century have been particularly interested in the displacement of everyday, common objects. Surrealists and surrealist-adjacent paintings and texts are densely populated by gloves, chairs, tables, hats, pipes, shoes, and boots. Open Max Ernst’s Une semaine de bonté: it’s almost a dictionary of these objects. Of course, there are many layers in Stanford’s poem.

There is the reference to Greek mythology, which shows up occasionally in his work. In the voice over of It Wasn’t A Dream, It Was A Flood, Stanford draws an interesting parallel between the American South and ancient Greece (“not so much the Greek state but the Greek mythology”). Again, I see this as a dynamic between here and far away. The other is within the same. Identity is constantly pierced. There is always something that breaks through in Stanford’s poetry, an image, a word, a line, perhaps something that demands to be extracted, to become something else, to be somewhere else.

I think that the core, the “figure in the carpet,” of Stanford’s work is inherently connected to the problem of translation, of a thing becoming “almost the same thing,” to use Umberto Eco’s expression.

Oh, I love Eco’s books, especially On Ugliness (Rizzoli 2007) and History of Beauty (Rizzoli 2004). His book about lists brings to mind Stanford’s fondness for listing in his epic poem, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (The Battlefield).

In all, I found at least twenty-three pages that included references to Italian culture (in the second edition published by Lost Roads in 2000). Will you speak to Frank’s many references to Italian culture? Also, when you translated the poems into Italian, were you reminded of any Italian poets?

One of my favorite Italian images in Stanford’s poetry: “june bugs/listening to Leoncavallo,” from “Transcendence of Janus.” There is the composer of I Pagliacci, of course, but also the very Italian Janus. Again, a mythological figure, one of the few Roman gods that were not inherited from the Greeks, god of transitions, of doorways, who could see the past and the future but not the present. It’s a strange form of knowledge, skewed, not fully accessible. I wonder if the relation between Stanford and Italian culture was of the same kind, a way of searching for something without knowing exactly what it is.

The Battlefield is an incredible book but not my favorite work by Stanford (that would be the collection You). In my introduction, I call it “perhaps the most important underground novel of 20th century American literature.” It may be a stretch and a bit of a provocative statement, but it really depends on what we call “novel.” I prefer thinking about the novel as a polymorphous, shapeless genre, an exuberant, hard-to-contain, highly experimental form, rather than the lean, transparent storytelling device that is has mostly been reduced to by the publishing industry nowadays. Referring to the exceptional, ungovernable form of the novel, Henry James wrote that it is a “loose, baggy monster.” That’s how the German Romantics saw it: a shape shifting container, tied to the aesthetics of the fragment and of the unfinished. There is something unresolved and youthful in The Battlefield. I can’t really think of any Italian poets or writers who remind me of Stanford. Maybe, and only occasionally, Pasolini, minus the political. Ungaretti in a few instances.

You curated and translated a fabulous collection of poems for those who first encounter Stanford’s poetry. It’s quite useful, even for people who read only English. Did you pick poems you personally liked, or what made you chose the poems for Acqua Segreta (Secret Water)?

Personal taste had a lot to do with the selection; of course, it was unavoidable. This project has also been a way of documenting, pinning down my own history with Stanford as a reader, an almost twenty-year trajectory. There were poems that I really liked and would have loved to include, but I wasn’t able to transpose successfully because they contained a lot of slang and regional dialect, for example poems such as “The Kite” or “The Brake.” Besides personal preference, the main criterion was trying to offer a view of all the different modes and tones of Stanford’s poetry that was as comprehensive as possible. Impossible task, of course. I wish I could have included more poems, but there were editorial limitations, as well as issues of translation rights.

If rights were not an issue, would you consider translating The Battlefield? Are you interested in translating more of Frank Stanford’s writings, maybe the short stories?

I don’t think there is anything that is untranslatable, because I believe, with Walter Benjamin, that translation is the true survival of the work, is the work itself that keeps living, and not, as more commonly perceived, an appendix or approximation. This said, The Battlefield would be a monumental undertaking. I really admire it, and I keep marveling, every time I open it, at the monstrum that is that book, but I don’t have enough love for it in me. Also, I am not a Stanford specialist and have no interest in an academic type of dedication.

Translation is not my profession, but rather a way of getting very close to authors and books that I feel a kinship with, that I share the road with, a road that keeps winding, sometimes dramatically.

Incredible. What did you learn about yourself as a writer and about Frank Stanford’s poetry through the creation of Acqua Segreta (Secret Water)?

I like this idea that you are putting forth, of translating as a way of knowing yourself. I have been a writer and a visual artist for way longer than I have been a translator. I don’t think that Frank Stanford has influenced my writing or my art (the chemical composition of our soils is different), but his work always holds the power of loosening something, of allowing for something to emerge, to take shape. My new book of short prose is coming out this fall and is called Nei paesi infimi (“In the smallest lands,” something like that). I wrote it mostly while I was working on Acqua segreta, and I believe that translating Stanford definitely helped me with that sense of irresponsibility that is always at the core of making (in the sense of poiesis) something out of nothing.

In my opinion, translating poetry is different than translating prose or nonfiction. Poetry translators learn about other cultures and languages through a uniquely empathic sensibility. People read poetry not for informational purposes but more for experiential reasons. What magic, taking words from their original languages to access universally consoling perspectives that have the ability to move human beings no matter the language they come from.

Luca Dipierro’s work carries on the tradition of sharing poets across space and time. Italian readers can now experience Frank Stanford’s unique insight into the American South of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s . Fantastico!

Frank Stanford Translated into Italian and a Conversation with the Translator, Luca Dipierro

Written by Ata Moharreri

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