All the Right Lines

Before taking off to study in Italy, Alicia Lincoln ’09 met with Robert Cording, professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program, to discuss the various writing opportunities that she could pursue abroad.

Lincoln, an English major with a minor in Italian and a concentration in creative writing, wanted to see those three passions come alive. Cording, who is overseeing Lincoln’s senior-year thesis on poetry, encouraged her to translate Italian literature into English.

Students who participate in Holy Cross’ Study Abroad program develop an Independent Cultural Immersion Project, designed to immerse them in an aspect of the local community of their choice.

Her dreams of translating Italian into English as part of her project were answered shortly after she arrived in Florence. Elisa Camporeale, academic advisor at the University of Florence, suggested translating poems by Giovanna Fozzer, who happens to be Camporeale’s aunt.

Lincoln’s translation of 16 poems by Fozzer has now been published in a book (appropriately titled Sixteen Poems) by Il Bisonte Press (Florence). Nearly all the poems in the handsomely produced 56-page book focus on nature and vary in length and stanza. The book also contains a lovely translator’s introduction titled “Crossing the Language Barrier.”

“Signora Fozzer was very understanding of my limited linguistic capabilities, and she was really passionate about her work,” says Lincoln. “Also, she didn’t talk to me like a student; she was very professional and treated me like a peer and coworker even though I’m much younger and still in school.”

Fozzer doesn’t speak English, so working with her was challenging. “I think she can read it and write it fairly well, but we only spoke in Italian, which sometimes was really frustrating for me because I couldn’t always explain myself intelligently,” Lincoln says.

The only help Lincoln received was from Margherita Pieracci Harwell, an Italian professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who offered direction with complex and thorny translation issues. In an afterword, Harwell writes that Lincoln’s “love of poetry, and natural enthusiasm for reading it, opened her mind to an understanding of texts far above her abstract knowledge of vocabulary and structures. But it was also indispensable, a very rare perseverance and stubbornness in her commitment, to get the best possible results out of the potentialities of her native talent and to face over and over again the trial of overcoming the recurrent difficulties.”

In addition to improving her Italian and publishing the book, Lincoln, from Fitchburg, says her greatest achievement was the personal growth she experienced during her year abroad.

“Studying abroad was hard. I had a very difficult and challenging year away,” she says. “There were certainly positive aspects, like traveling and learning about new cultures.  I wasn’t expecting to be homesick. It was definitely worth it though. I came home a much stronger and more open-minded person. Studying abroad made me appreciate everything I have: my friends and family, Holy Cross, the United States — and peanut butter!”

Pictured: Alicia Lincoln ’09 stands next to the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Related Information:

• Study Abroad Program