in “Il Pietrisco”, Issue 3, 2025. University of Manchester
Massimo Gerardo Carrese’s ‘Il cervo è io’ (2024, ‘The stag is I’), translated from Italian into English by Rosabel Green, takes us into a mind-bending journey through the twists and turns of the author’s imagined geometries. The stylised, abstract nature of the narrative contrasts with its playful tone. Green offers an illuminating account of her three-step translation process. This ultimately relies on the spoken word in order to capture the natural flow of the original, showing that – for this particular text – less is more. (from “Introductory note”, by Monica Boria and Ángeles Carreres, September 2025)
“Il cervo è io”
di Massimo Gerardo Carrese
Che ero in montagna e non c’era nessuno. C’eravamo solo io e un cervo e il silenzio. Non è che io fossi andato lì con il cervo è che il cervo è saltato fuori dal bosco e si è trovato a duecento metri da me e io da lui. Eravamo equidistanti. Se io mi spostavo erano duecentodieci metri per me e duecentodieci metri per lui se lui restava fermo. Se anche lui si spostava allora dovevamo ricalcolare le nostre distanze ma eravamo comunque sempre equidistanti a prescindere se a spostarmi ero io o il cervo. Ero già in sintonia con il cervo. Allora mi sono fermato e ho fatto finta di non vedere il cervo e che pure il cervo ha fatto finta di non vedermi e che lui faceva piano per andarsene da dietro ai cespugli e che già non eravamo più equidistanti perché dai duecentodiecimetri ora lui era distante da me più di me ma era sempre la stessa distanza da me solo che equidistanti mi fa pensare all’equino e non al cervo ma volevo dire che lui si muoveva e io no, comunque sempre equidistanti eravamo è chiaro questo, non è che se io mi sposto e tu no io sono più lontano da te. Cioè sì sono più lontano da te ma siamo sempre alla stessa distanza. Ecco perché si chiamano le relazioni a distanza perché comunque non cambiano anche se lei vive a Pistoia e tu a Molfetta non è che poi lei è più lontana da te che però la gente ti dice sempre uh ma lei è così lontana da te come fai a sopportare una relazione a distanza e io poi devo spiegare che non è una relazione a distanza ma è una relazione equidistante e che seppure io andassi a Pistoia a fare l’amore con lei comunque avremmo una relazione più ravvicinata ma sempre equidistante ma dicevo del cervo e io facevo che guardavo da un altro lato così lui pensava che io non lo vedevo e che non fosse visto e che io penso che lui non mi vedeva e che non sono visto neanche da lui. Hai visto il cervo? Dove?
in SpuntiSunti, déclic 2024
“The stag is I“
translation by Rosabel Green
That I was in the mountains, on my own. It was just me, and a stag, and silence. It’s not like I went there with the stag – the stag jumped out from behind the bushes and ended up like two hundred metres away from me. And me from him. Equidistant. Like, if I moved, it would have been two hundred and ten metres for me and two hundred and ten metres for him if he stayed still. And if he moved as well, well then we would have to recalculate our distances. But we would still be equally far from each other – no matter which one of us moved. I was in sync with the stag already. So, I stopped and I pretended not to see the stag and that the stag was pretending not to see me and that he was gonna leave behind the bushes and that we weren’t equidistant anymore because, now, he was more than two-hundred-and-ten metres away from me. But it was actually still the same distance, it’s just that “equidistant” makes me think about equids, not about deer. Anyway – as I was saying – he was moving and I wasn’t, but we were still clearly equidistant. It’s not like if I move but you don’t then I’m further away from you. I mean yes, I am further away from you, but we’re always equally distant from each other. Like, that’s why we call them long-distance relationships – because even if she lives in Pistoia and you live in Molfetta, it’s not like she’s any more distant from you than you are from her. But then people always say to you ughh, she’s so far away, y’know, how can you handle being in a long-distance relationship? and then I keep having to explain that a long-distance relationship is still an equidistant relationship, like, even if I went to Pistoia to make love to her, sure we’d be closer together, but it would still be equidistant. But, anyway, back to the stag. I looked the other way so he thought that I couldn’t see him and that he hadn’t been seen, and so that he thought that I thought that he hadn’t seen me and that I hadn’t been seen by him. Have you seen the stag? Where?
Context
‘Il cervo è io’ is a work of micronarration found in Massimo Gerardo Carrese’s SpuntiSunti (déclic edizioni, 2024), a collection of pieces born from the author’s fascination with number games, anagrams and the mental mechanics of imagination, and developed over the past 15 years.
The text primarily explores the layers of imagination and speculation we move through when we reach for a fleeting idea, which Carrese depicts as a stag. The piece’s focus on the distance between narrator and stag alludes to the conceptual space between an unstable idea and its concrete realisation. The dangers and possibilities inherent in this space are revealed as the narrator ponders it, his digression on the semantics of ‘equidistant’ causing him to lose sight of his original idea but bringing new insight into the ‘equally distant’ nature of human relationships. The nature of silence and its role in stimulating the imagination also emerges as a key theme. We are told early in the text that the narrator finds himself in silence, and yet the narrative is anything but that; noisy, dynamic and multifaceted. The quiet of the forest intensifies the narrator’s internal monologue, drawing out his imaginative process. This resonates with Carrese’s working practice; as he shared with me in an email (2025), he spends much of his time walking and thinking, and as his inner voice fills the silence around him, he finds that imagination and observation become entwined. The notion of imagination also informs the piece’s narrative form. Carrese’s work is deliberately agrammatical, refusing to be restricted to the confines of acceptable grammar. The prescriptive standards of written language do not apply to the language of imagination, the narrator’s vehicle for exploring the text’s central ideas. The narrative, although not a stream of consciousness in the strict sense, captures the dynamism of ‘thought language’ with its own distinct value. The resulting text is confusing but not incomprehensible; highly conceptual and yet deliberately underdeveloped, with sentences whose syntax is as dynamic as the imagination driving them. As such, it benefits from being read aloud, synthesised by the reader’s own dynamic thought processes.
Translator’s note
My approach to this translation developed over three drafts. The first was literal; an
exercise in understanding the original text. With the second, I sought to refine, but I
found myself imposing an inappropriate ‘correctness’ upon the piece. It read as terse
and overwrought, lacking the qualities of authentic ‘thought language’.
My third draft took a new approach. I was partly inspired by Carrese’s creative process,
which I learned – thanks to email exchanges – involved paying attention to his stream of
consciousness and preserving it in writing. It was also influenced by sharing my second
draft with another translator; as we spoke, I found myself explaining sections of the
piece by verbally rephrasing them in a more natural way. And so arose my final
approach: I spoke the story of the stag as it came to my mind and recorded it, comparing
it to my written translation, then re-recording and reworking the piece.
Resulting filler words (such as ‘like’) and non-standard choices (such as ‘And me from
him’) reflect what is acceptable to our ‘thought grammar’ – or at least mine, the only
thought grammar I can authentically represent. In the original Italian, some nonstandard structures are also included to create ambiguity, such as when the narrator
‘h[a] fatto finta […] che pure il cervo ha fatto finta’. The lack of subjunctive creates
confusion around a supposedly ‘pretend’ action that the stag takes, a confusion that
cannot be rendered fully in English.
Punctuation in the original Italian is minimal, but I found its addition necessary in some
cases. I replaced some conjunctions with punctuation – for example the hyphen
replacing ‘è che’ – and in the opening sentences I inserted commas for the sake of
rhythm, which felt in keeping with their clarity and simplicity in the original Italian.
However, to maintain the oscillation between moments of clarity and long, unchecked
digressions, which gives the piece much of its dynamism, I have left longer and denser
sentences largely unpunctuated. That said, I have added some sentence breaks where
they aid comprehension, given the relative lack of syntactic freedom in English.
