Susie Wild talks to poet, translator and editor Luca Paci, the Co-Director of the Italian Cultural Centre Wales, about the joys and difficulties of trying to represent the texture and variety of contemporary 21st century Italian poetry in one parallel text anthology.
It is an unusually sunny day in an unusual year when Luca Paci and I meet for iced coffee in the refectory before his next class at Cardiff University. The world is opening up again, but, we now know, only briefly and we are giddy with joy at being able to meet and discuss poetry and more in person rather than across screens and phone lines. It has been a period of collective grief and of personal grief, a time where crossing barriers with the shared experience of poetry feels more important than ever. After a devastating summer, Paci needs ‘to hug, to be more Italian’. We need to tame lines gone unruly in the production process, to discuss the last of the changes to the text. More than that, we need to reach out, and so we do. We begin at the beginning. With the impetus to start something, mark something, make something, in a time of too many endings…
What prompted you to put together this anthology of Italian poetry?
Everybody knows novelists like Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco and Elena Ferrante but if you ask people about Italian poetry I suspect you would struggle to find a name apart from Dante. There is very little contemporary Italian poetry published in the UK apart from the usual suspects: Montale, Ungaretti and Quasimodo who are really (male) mid 20th century authors. When it comes to the 21st century there is an awkward void. I am also passionate about poetry in translation. A language without works in translation is a diminished one and will soon wither.
Comments