“A New Girl in a New Season”: Stevens, Poggioli, and the making of Mattino domenicale MASSIMO BACIGALUPO Mattino domenicale ed altre poesie (1954) was the only volume of Wallace Stevens to appear in another language during the poet’s lifetime, and it may still be unequalled for its editorial as well as critical quality, the more so as it offers in the endnotes Stevens’ own invaluable comments, written for his admiring translator, Renato Poggioli. Poggioli was an outstanding scholar of Russian and comparative literature, author (among other volumes) of The Theory of the Avant-Garde and of a massive Italian anthology of Russian poetry, Il fiore del verso russo. He was, in addition, an impassioned translator, as shown by his verse renderings from the Russian, which are often in rhyme. In one of his letters to Stevens he mentions that he has also translated Novalis, Rilke, Guillén, Valéry and Saint-John Perse. 1 Born 1907 in Florence, Poggioli grew up in the city’s thriving intellectual milieu and published articles and translations in Solaria, a major literary journal with international ambition (1930-34), while spending periods as lecturer in Prague, Warsaw, and Vilnius. When in 1938 Italy introduced racial legislation, he left the country with his wife, to teach first at Smith and Brown, then at Harvard. One typical course he gave at Harvard, “Romantic Poetics,” offered a reading of major documents of romantic theory (de Staël, Chateaubriand, Sismondi, Stendhal, Hugo, the Schlegels, Wordsworth, Manzoni, Puškin). Poggioli died in 1963, aged 56, in a car accident in California. This was a major loss, for his work is consistently first rate. 2 His epistolary relation with Wallace Stevens was an important one, as readers of the Letters know, because of the comments that he elicited from the Hartford poet. Poggioli’s side of the correspondence, at the Huntington, fills in the picture telling us something of the person to whom Stevens responded, and making us appreciate this unique moment in the history of Stevens’ international reception. It was owing to the curiosity and poetic intelligence of Poggioli that Stevens had the pleasure of seeing a book of his verse elegantly published in a foreign language. This language, curiously, was not French, with which he had conducted such a long-standing affair, but clear- vowelled Italian--an appropriate tongue, one wound imagine, for the clarity which is 1 The Renato Poggioli Translation Award, established 1978, is regularly awarded by the American Center of PEN, for translations-in-progress from Italian literature. Poggioli also translated Isaac Babel’s novel Red Cavalry (1932). 2 Two notable volumes of criticism were published posthumously by Harvard University Press: The Spirit of the Letter and The Oaten Flute. Stevens is barely mentioned in them. For information on Poggioli see Harry Levin’s “Preface” to The Spirit of the Letter (vii-xi) and Pipicelli, “Profilo” (with Bibliography). I am thankful to Poggioli’s friend and collaborator, professor Giorgio Luti of Florence, for providing some hard-to-come-by materials.