The idea of an experiment in translation section came to me because, as one can guess, I love translation. Some experiments were graciously ‘bestowed’ upon me by my lovely students, because I believe that translation can teach so much about a foreign language; others were the gift of fine poets and thinkers, people with a sure gift of language, who humour and delight me with their insight, because, as I have learned through the years, there is really never just one possible translation.  That would be like saying there is only one way of hearing, seeing, reading, thinking, understanding…If  each individual is, as Pirandello wrote One, no-one and one hundred thousand, the words they write can be that too. So just as every poem inspires something different in the reader, it does even more so in the translator who rummages among those words, verses and stanzas searching for a hidden light that will illumine his or her way. And like the Haulers in Valerio Magrelli’s poem, they too move those words that move them: “I too move house/ for words, words/ that are not mine/ and lay my hands on things/ I don’t know without understanding/ what I’m moving./ I’m moving me…”

This beautiful poem by Julia Leverone first came out in Yespoetry and can be found here.
More about the poet and translator here.
Arabella Bertola, writer/translator, can be found here and here.
Patrizia Sardisco, poet, can be found ‘poeting’ here and here.

Painting by Pierre Bonnard.