reviews

Day Lasts Forever Reviewed in RHINO

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.

Day Lasts Forever Reviewed in Asymptote

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.

I’m not sure if this is a book, a butterfly, or a handful of angels. PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

Day Lasts Forever in the TLS!

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.