Translating Poetry
"Why do you translate poetry?" someone asked me lately. Simple. Because I am a masochist and I cannot help it! Translating is my job, but translating poetry has become a beautiful habit too in the past couple of years. The result may not be perfect, but I always strive to say "almost the same thing," as Umberto Eco suggests. I have been lucky enough to translate poets such as Jack Hirschman or Michel Butor that have been published or exhibited. And, I am now collaborating with an Italian online review, Patria Letteratura , that is giving me the opportunity of translating poems I love by poets I either know or have been in contact with for reason of the biography I am writing or, simply, by poets I admire. Only once I decided to give up translating a poem. It is a long poem written with a Joyce-like language and the continuous puns and wordplay make it impossible to render into Italian. You either lose the puns or the meaning of the words in the process. Every t