This is exciting!
Mario dell’Arco was born in Rome on March 12, 1905 in Via dell’Orso, not far from Piazza Navona. Last Wednesday would have been his 120th birthday. We spent it at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Roma (National Library of Rome) in Castro Pretorio, celebrating his poetry and his life. Ostensibly, much of this was also a celebration of Day Lasts Forever, which has the distinction of being the first book of Dell’Arco’s work to be translated into English or, to my knowledge, any other language. This has been cause for some celebration among the Romanisti – scholars and enthusiasts of Romanesco and its culture – as Dell’Arco was the last of the “four greats” of Romanesco poetry – Belli, Pascarella and Trilussa being the other three according to no less an authority on the subject than Leonardo Sciascia – to have ‘crossed the bridge’ into English.
I am honored to have been invited to participate in this conference, hosted by Marcello Fagiolo dell’Arco, the poet’s son. My co-presenters are all accomplished scholars of Romanesco poetry – and Dell’Arco’s work in particular – who have been doing incredible work for decades to get him the recognition he deserves, including erecting commemorative plaques in Via dell’Orso (above) and at Castel Sant’Angelo (below), where a section of the gardens now bears his name.
When I began reading and translating Dell’Arco’s work, I spent most of my time in a vacuum. I had no inkling any of this existed outside of a few books published for his centenary. Suddenly, now it feels like it must have felt for Dorothy when her house landed in Oz; the world has gone from black-and-white to Technicolor in a very short time.
There is so much I could say about the event. Each presentation was distinct and rich in detail, ranging from a biographical portrait of his father and the deeply personal nature of much of his work (Fagiolo dell’Arco) to the playfulness of Dell’Arco’s encounters with the Latin poets Martial, Catullus and Horace, which he ‘Romanescoed’ (Onorati), to the second lives of Dell’Arco and Trilussa in translation (Marconi) and reflections on the art of translation (Duranti). My contribution was an essay I wrote in Italian – no ChatGPT – about my experience discovering Dell’Arco’s work and attempting to usher it to the other side of the Atlantic by hook or by crook. The curious reader can listen to the entirety of the presentations, where they were recorded and archived for posterity by Radio Radicale (click image below). The presentations are, of course, in Italian with readings of Dell’Arco’s Romanesco poems by the wonderful Gemma Costa and in English translation by Riccardo Duranti and myself. (You can click on the names in the sidebar to skip to the English-language content if you wish.)
As an added bonus, my sister filmed a couple of videos of me reading my translations of the poems “I Built a Wall” and “Heads or Tails?”. You can read selections from the book here.
Finally – and I could go on! – the event received a write up in Rugantino, a satirical paper published in Romanesco, founded in 1848 with the newly won freedom of the press (click image below). Bbona lettura e bbon ascolto!
If you’d like to order Day Lasts Forever – Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco, click this link or pester your local bookseller into ordering it.
Anthony Madrid has written a review of Day Lasts Forever for RHINO. This is the fourth review so far and the third in the month of February! Madrid has this to say:
This is my kind of thing. Seventy-one poems, all but one, this big: [pincer fingers emoji]. I just checked: almost every single poem is five lines. Many are four. So…epigrams!
Yes, epigrams! and some other things like short lyrics about cats and wine as well as laments for the loss of loved ones. Many of the poems are indeed five lines, though some push seven or eight lines. The thing to notice is just how much Dell’Arco packs into those few lines, a dense imaginative space. Madrid happily quotes five poems in full, and still manages a brief review. He takes issue with one poem, a translation of a translation of Martial. It’s fair game. Read the poems and decide for yourself.
Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco can be ordered from World Poetry Books or from you finest local booksellers.
Today marks exactly three years since Putin launched his most recent war of aggression against Ukraine. The war is senseless – all wars may be said to be senseless, but this one takes the cake. According to the Kyiv Independent, Ukraine has lost roughly 46,000 troops since the invasion began. Russia has lost just shy of 900,000 among those killed and wounded. The number of Ukrainians injured – including civilians – runs into the hundreds of thousands, not to mention the kidnappings, rape and torture victims, and other atrocities perpetrated by the Russians on innocent Ukrainian citizens. May this war end soon, and may it end with justice for Ukraine. Слава Україні! Slava Ukraini!
Below are a few poems I wrote an published during the first months of the war. I repost them here by way of solidarity with Ukraine and its people, as well as those standing with Ukraine on the right side of history.
Jason Gordy Walker has written a perceptive and insightful review of Day Lasts Forever for Asymptote. He gives a nice general summation of Dell’Arco’s themes:
Across the collection, many themes abound: the art of laziness, the nature of language, good architecture and the weather, the moon’s propaganda strategy, the heart of the scarecrow or the sunflower or the sundial, Jove and the deadly sins, the importance of life’s simple pleasures, self-isolation and the longing for reconnection, the absurdity of the artist’s life, watermelons and summer nostalgia, the history of Rome, light and darkness, a few unique felines. . . Is there hunting? Yes: some birds get shot. Is there wine? Plenty.
What’s not to like? Walker concludes with what I take as the highest praise:
As such, this modest, rewarding selection from a vast corpus should be required reading for any serious student of translated poetry, and [Mario dell’Arco]—honorably resolute in the dissemination of his Roman dialect—ought to be placed on the shelf next to Italian legends like Italo Calvino and Eugenio Montale.
Click on cover to order from World Poetry Books.
On March 12 – Mario dell’Arco‘s 120th birthday – I will take part in a presentation at the National Library of Rome with Marcello Fagiolo dell’Arco, Franco Onorati, Carolina Marconi, Riccardo Duranti & Gemma Costa on the topic of poetic translations from Romanesco. Below is the flyer for the event (in Italian). It is a great honor to be invited to speak about my experience translating the poems of Mario dell’Arco. If you’re in Rome or environs, feel free to drop in!
Roughly five years ago, then-editor of the journal Verse-Virtual Firestone Feinberg invited me to collect some of the poems I had been writing about my father and add some biographical notes in order to create a ‘portrait’ of him for publication. The ensuing piece, which I called “Starman” after one of the poems I had written (and ripped from the Bowie song of the same title) developed into my first book of poems, Unburial. “Starman” collects poems, biographical sketches and photos of the man who was my father, and whose sudden and premature passing left its mark on me in ways I am – now older than he ever was – perhaps still unable to fully understand.
February 11, 2025 marks thirty-five years without him.
I’ve made an Unburial playlist for anyone who wants to read the book in a different way, in which each poem is paired to a song that is meant to extend it or comment on it. It’s a pretty good playlist, I think!
Of course, my father is very much alive and well in the Romanesco poems of Mario dell’Arco, which I published last November. There are no extant recordings of my father’s voice, and no video footage (that I am aware of), so the poems in Day Lasts Forever serve also as a reimagining of his voice, a way for me to engage in dialogue with him through the medium of translation. You can read a review of the book by Anna Aslanyan in the Times Literary Supplement.
Ti amiamo.
I have a new poem at SOFLOPOJO – or South Florida Poetry Journal* – called “Light in Late September”. It’s a bit of a companion piece to a poem I wrote a few years ago called “Sestina for the Falling Autumn Light“, a variation on the theme of the changing of the seasons, the waning of the light and the gradual entry into the dark half of the year. My birthday falls in late September, so I guess it’s a time of introspection for me. At that time last year I had just returned from a trip to the United States and was feeling hopful about the future of America and the world. The Harris campaign was in full swing, and it really looked like she had a strong chance at not only winning the election but winning decisively. So it goes.
The poem took its initial inspiration from a walk near my house, in Umbria. The sky was doing its usual late summer light show, full of pinks and deep yellows, streaked with the white of clouds like an artist’s brushstrokes. Swarms of gnats gathered in the dusk. Birds cut across the sky in formation. Later I found that Keats mentioned the gnats in his “Ode to Autumn“, and that image made its way into my poem. (In practice, whatever I’m reading worms its way into whatever I’m writing in one fashion or another.) Fiat lux!
*For future reference, the poem is in the February 2025 Issue, #36, which can be found in their Archives.
I have a think-piece – I love that expression – at Mark Danowsky’s newsletter Stay Curious this week. The piece is about submission fees, as the title hints at. I don’t love them, as the title also hints at. Here is a taste:
As a poet with a personal policy of not paying submission fees – except for a good cause or the rare contest fee – the number of journals open to me steadily grows fewer and fewer, not to mention those which have gone defunct. Of course, there are always new journals cropping up to replace them, and while many of them are promising, there is nothing quite like a long-serving journal, one that has survived the storms of time like an old ship, weathered and battle-scarred.
Please read the rest at SC, if you’re interested.
We have a convicted criminal in the Oval Office, surrounded by a cabal of oligarchs and sycophants making up a kakistocracy – government by the worst people. Not a day goes by when I don’t ask myself how we got here a second time, and if we will collectively make it to the other side of whatever this is. It’s in such times that the power of art and literature reveals itself more fully, becoming a way to cope with the encroaching darkeness and find a way through the muck.
I have a sheaf of new poems at Judith Magazine, titled “A Failed Synonym for Love”, with a heartfelt introduction by editor Rachel Neve-Midbar, poet and translator of the poems of Vilna ghetto partisan and Israeli poet Abba Kovner. “Happiness”, was written just after the 2024 election. As an added bonus you get to read about how much I love bagels and lox!
No one can predict how bad things will get before they begin to get better again. Everyone must find their own way to resist evil: taking to the streets, calling their congresspeople, practicing everyday human decency – all of these counter the effects of malaise and disempowerment they’d like us to feel. “An artist is an artist”, as the recent song by Skunk Anansie goes, “and they don’t stop being an artist ‘cos of you, you know.” Rise up. Shteyt af!
Marc Di Martino 