Day Lasts Forever by Mario dell'Arco

Day Lasts Forever

by Mario dell’Arco

Translated by Marc Alan Di Martino

World Poetry 2024

Mario Fagiolo was born for the first time in Rome in 1905. Then, in 1946, he was born again as the poet Mario dell’Arco. As only second births can, dell’Arco’s opened a floodgate of verse: at least one new book rattled out from the tip of his pen every year until his death in 1996. First efforts were marked by a flirtation with traditional forms, the sonnet especially, but those who know him remember him as—and the grand sweep of his career attests to the incessant tinkerings of—a specialist of the miniature: epigrams, fables, and snatches of speech, the stuff of myth and the stuff of the street were the grist to his ever-turning mill.

Dell’Arco was something of a maverick, not entirely without precedent, but conspicuous all the same for his decision to write in Romanesco, one of the major dialects spoken in the city of his birth. It’s to this one slightly alienating fact, probably, that his failure to appear in English translation anywhere but the occasional academic journal can be credited. But now from World Poetry comes Day Lasts Forever, the first English-language collection of dell’Arco’s work. Marc Alan Di Martino, an accomplished poet in his own right, has done an impressive job with the translation.

The book is decidedly a selection—a skeleton of a body of work—maybe only a selection of a selection: sixty-two poems plucked from a fifty-year career can’t help being anything but. Most of the poems are brief, five or six lines in all, which can make for quick reading. But there’s never the sense that this isn’t an ample harvest (one worth returning to, at that). The healthy fear that what’s been left out would tell the truer story simply feels unfounded. However personally inspired, the quality and variety of Di Martino’s picks do nothing to obscure both the range of dell’Arco’s ability and the consistency of his themes.

Take a poem from the very beginning, “Sloth,” from 1946’s Red Inside:

            Who more than me? Lying on the grass

surrounded by poppies and snapdragons,

I feel myself the lord of all creation.

The sky is too blue, though:

I fish a smoke from the pack

and blow a cloud above my head

so tomorrow it rains, and I can stay in bed.

Now, five years before his death, “Blackbird,” from 1991’s Roma Romae:

            Black as coal,

Night swallows it whole.

            Drowning in darkness, its beak

(a fleck of light) pecks at the sky: tin,

tin. It opens—sunlight comes roaring in.

We have, in the first poem, the wonderful image of a lazy, jaded lounging god, tired out by, maybe even a bit bored after, the labors of creation. In the second—the briefest fable of a blackbird grown sick of blending in—emerges the approximation of a creation story. One of the joys of a good many of these poems is the way in which they play fast and loose with physical reality. The fantastic has never been hard to come by, but dell’Arco is a master of the subtle, creeping detail. Consider “The Scarecrow,” from Paper Star (1947), in which a sparrow carries the gift of life:

            Head bowed, arms limp at his side,

he lies down in the middle of the field.

Birds fly around him, bold and snide.

His overcoat is torn; a lone sparrow

finds some straw and weaves a lucky burrow.

            One day he feels a shiver in his chest,

fingers around and finds the weight:

right over his heart it comes to rest.

Instead of beating, it goes tweet!

Every poem in the book sits across from its original. So-called facing-page translations have always been a boon to language learners. In this case, it doesn’t really matter if you’re interested in Romanesco. There’s a kind of puzzle-addicts delight in the act of cross-referencing alone. Di Martino’s nimble lines don’t always rhyme as readily as dell’Arco’s (“side” and “snide,” “sparrow” and “burrow”), but that’s probably a good thing.

Other poems give a sense of the man as he lived. Fagiolo or dell’Arco or both, who knows—the same had been said of Clemens and Twain—but it’s clear that the persona could be proud and cruel. A poem called “How I Like It” gives a spin on justified enmity:

            I close the curtain tight so you can’t see.

Piece of cake, right? But it’s no joke.

You need a trained eye and a bit

of inspiration if you want to hit

your mark. And I’m a master at it.

So you live on the piano nobile, dressed

in your Sunday best, well-bred?
Left your Mercedes double-parked?
            Too late. My spit lands on your head.

How many poems can make you smile? Dell’Arco is an expert in eliciting this response. Short of oversimplifying, he was a poet of the people. And it’s poems like these, with their clarity of sentiment and facility with the music of ordinary speech, with their lively blend of self-assurance and judicious awe, that are capable of reminding you just how fun the genre can be. Day Lasts Forever strikes a welcome tone, both world-weary and playful, that is just as at home in this century as it was in the last.

Eric Bies is a high school English teacher based in Southern California.