On Jamie McKendrick and Erminia Passannanti's foreign connection

(Jamie McKendrick and Erminia Passannanti, Salerno, 1986)

On Jamie McKendrick and Erminia Passannanti's foreign connection

IIn the wide field of contemporary European letters, few dialogues are as fertile and suggestive as the one that emerges—across language, culture, and time—between British poet and translator Jamie McKendrick and Italian poet, translator, and scholar Erminia Passannanti. Though shaped by different poetic temperaments and intellectual lineages, both writers find common ground in their commitment to poetic inquiry, cultural mediation, and the philosophical depth of translation.

McKendrick and Passannanti met in Salerno, Italy, where McKendrick was a language assistant at the University of Salerno and she was an undergraduate student in the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures. They had a long-term relationship and both, though separately, settled in Oxford in the late 1990s.

The two poets offer distinct yet complementary modes of poetic practice. McKendrick, a British poet and translator, has been instrumental in translating Italian poetry into English, with acclaimed translations of poets such as Valerio Magrelli and Giorgio Bassani. Passannanti, an Italian poet, translator, and scholar, has a strong academic background, including two Ph.D. degrees and publications in the fields of literature, film studies, and translation. Her work often engages with Italian literature and cinema, reflecting a deep scholarly commitment.

McKendrick and Passannanti are connected not only through a past relationship, but also through their lifelong interest in poetry translation, which can be said to have been mutually stimulated. Jamie McKendrick’s poetry is marked by visual clarity and a painterly attentiveness to perception. Often drawing on his deep engagement with the visual arts, McKendrick creates poems that feel at once precise and elusive—filled with light, shadow, and ironic detachment. His diction is often spare, his lines composed with a sculptural economy that gestures toward meaning as much as it states it.

Passannanti, by contrast, operates within a more psychoanalytically and philosophically charged field. Influenced by figures such as Kristeva and Lacan, her poetic voice is intensely introspective and often probes the fissures of identity, gender, and language itself. Her lines bear the tension of thought pressing against its own limits, and her use of metaphor tends toward rupture rather than adornment.

Yet both poets share a fascination with what lies beneath or between—McKendrick with the unseen layers of perception, and Passannanti with the unspeakable residues of the self. Their poetry often unfolds in thresholds: between sense and nonsense, memory and forgetting, surface and depth.

Their practice of translation represents not just a technical act but an ethical and aesthetic commitment. McKendrick’s translations of Italian poets—Valerio Magrelli, Giorgio Bassani—reveal his sensitivity to tone, rhythm, and cultural nuance. He approaches the translated poem as a space for resonance, not replication.

Passannanti’s translations of English and American poets into Italian are a telling example of her poetics in action. Her translations of Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, T.S. Eliot, R.S. Thomas, the Brontës, Paul Muldoon, and Geoffrey Hill—to name some of the principal authors she has worked on—are always accompanied by critical essays. These translations thus become acts of interpretation, embodying the notion of translation as knowledge of the other’s culture. She was a visiting translator at the University of East Anglia (UEA), working within the department of the German novelist W.G. Sebald, who, at the time of Passannanti’s involvement in translation studies at UEA (1991–1995), was Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. In the late 1990s, Passannanti began a Ph.D. at University College London on the theme of Italian poetry (Franco Fortini) and Translation Studies.

For both poets, translation is not a secondary gesture, but a primary site of creation. It is where the boundaries between original and derivative dissolve, and where new poetic subjectivities emerge.

McKendrick’s thematic palette often includes visuality, illusion, displacement, and historical traces. His poems are observational but never merely descriptive—they are meditations on how we see and what we fail to see. Time, decay, and the moral weight of perception surface repeatedly in his work.

Passannanti’s poetry from collections as diverse as Macchina, La realtà, Mistici, Exstais, Poesie dalla terra dei morti, on the other hand, is saturated with psychic and existential intensity, and is often delivered in the style of dramatic monologues. Themes of existential drama, loss, and fragmentation dominate.

Yet again, there is an affinity. Both poets articulate a poetics of vulnerability—whether through McKendrick’s elegantly oblique lenses or Passannanti’s raw interrogations. Both resist closure. Both trust the image to carry more than argument.

Their intellectual efforts are perhaps most evident in their attention to cultural history. McKendrick’s essays in The Foreign Connection explore the echoes between poetry, painting, and translation, often within the frame of classical and Renaissance figures. Passannanti’s critical and poetic work similarly weaves between epochs—Dante, Pasolini, Shakespeare—tracing the ghosts of thought across time.