Well, it’s been a week with all the mishaguss in the US, the horrible tragedy on the Potomac and so much other madness around the world. I think when something nice happens it’s a good idea to share it. This really surprised me – I wasn’t expecting to Day Lasts Forever to get reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement! The review is quite enthusiastic, almost as if Mario dell’Arco is a super fun poet to discover. (Which he definitely is!) In fact, the reason I committed to translating his poetry was so that other readers could discover him the way I did so many years ago in a secondhand bookshop in Rome. He put a smile on my face, and got me thinking – an irresistible combination in a poet. Here is a taste of the review:

Dell’Arco’s work has been almost unknown to anglophone readers until now. This book-length selection, translated by Marc Alan Di Martino, is a bilingual edition featuring several dozen poems, often just a few lines long, their themes ranging from Rome to love, from solitude to cats. The names of the author and the translator, arranged alongside each other, themselves read like poetry. Di Martino’s imaginative translations refract the light of the originals at unexpected angles, now preserving things (for example, the letters of the alphabet used as hooks in “The Illiterate Fish”), now playing them up, rendering “bruciato” as “burnt to a crisp” or transforming “un peso morto” into “a ball and chain at my feet”.

You can read sample poems from the book here.