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.
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!
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!
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.
Marc Di Martino 