Yesterday was Rome’s 2779th birthday, and eight new translations of Romanesco poet Mauro Marè dropped in Issue 13 of World Poetry Review. There was no connection between the two events I can discern, though it was a nice coincidence. Here is the first of them, “Cutthroat Urbs” (“Bbojja nostrurbe” in the original). This poem is fairly indicative of one of Marè’s more prevalent later moods. I’ve attached the original poem below. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the sonnets of Gioachino Belli will notice the doubled consonants, a typographic hallmark of his work which Marè brings back in his later poems (and which had been ironed out of Romanesco verse since Belli’s day). This is the first poem of Marè’s that struck a chord with me and made me attempt a transation. That first line…