writing

Two Poems by Crescenzo Del Monte

Crescenzo Del Monte 1868-1935

What I enjoy most as a translator is bringing poetry or poets to the English language for the first time. I have enormous esteem for the many translators of Dante, Belli, Montale and other Italian poets who have benefited from the efforts of a multitude of translators. Each new translation offers up a slightly – or drastically – different take on the same poem or author. Taken together, they create a composite portrait of the original work, not unlike reading multiple biographies of the same person written from different perspectives and points in history. But there are so many important voices still lurking in the shadows of literary history, stalking the margins, and that’s where I like to spend most of my time.

Much of my translation work has dealt with the poetry of Mario dell’Arco, a poet almost completely unknown in the English-speaking world a quarter century after his death. He is not much better known in his native Italy, or even in Rome, his birthplace. This despite the fact that he had a six-decade long career, published dozens of collections of original verse as well as versions of classical Roman poets like Martial and Catullus, and wrote books of prose including biographies of his Romanesco predecessors Belli and Trilussa. The point being, I noticed a gaping hole in the literature and made a conscious effort to fill it. My hope is that others may take up the gauntlet and try their hand at Dell’Arco, adding something to the portrait I’ve begun to sketch into English of this great poet’s work.

What has any of this to do with Crescenzo Del Monte, you ask? Well, Del Monte is another poet who has gone the way of the dodo, to put it bluntly. Yet he is arguably one of the five major Romanesco poets: Belli, Pascarella, Del Monte, Trilussa and Dell’Arco, in order of birth. Del Monte differed from the others in that he was Jewish, and wrote in Giudaico-Romanesco, the dialect of Roman Jews. He was a versatile writer who wrote in Romanesco and Italian as well, and did many translations of others’ work into Giudaico-Romanesco, such as a version of the first canto of Dante’s Inferno.

Like Belli, Del Monte can be forbidding because of his meticulous renderings of his characters’ actual speech patterns, as can be seen in “O’ ‘nvitato a pranzo” (below), and the surfeit of Hebrew words which are often half-masked through transliteration (chalomme is the Hebrew word for ‘dream’, חלום, pronounced chalom). Also like Belli, he offered up copious notes to his poems; practically every one has a glossary of terms to help the reader along. He knew it wouldn’t be easy, but he was preserving a world in his work, a world that now exists encoded in the poetry he wrote between the destruction of the Roman ghetto and the Fascist racial laws. (To hear a reading of Del Monte’s “La Cena de Purimme” – “Purim Dinner” – which bears a close resemblance in both theme and language to “The Lunch Guest”, including the same rhyme of chalomme/makomme, click here.)

I was lucky enough to have been able to study Hebrew in at the Jewish Cultural Center in Trastevere as well as in the ghetto, where for a time classes were being held in the local bookshop, Menorah. I’m by no means fluent, but I have enough of a grasp on the language and its historical-cultural milieu that I can find my way through the jungle with a candle and a machete.

As far as I know, there have been no other translations of Del Monte’s work into English. If I’m wrong, please reach out and let me know! Sgrùulla!

Published in Packingtown Review.

*an alternate ending to the above poem – one more faithful to the original – might read: A cup of coffee and then nighty-night/tomorrow it’ll end up in the toilet.

Published in THINK

*line 8 of the above poem should read “with your long beak…”

“Light in Late September” at SOFLOPOJO

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.

Submission Fees and Their Discontents

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.

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.