On Translating Poems While Riding the Metro in Rome
Under the buildings— tufted clay, / Like tennis courts upended—runs the subway of Rome. I have been riding it for 36 years, on weekdays, to get to my workplace: a public health institute early on, a research hospital since the new millennium. The trip is 25 to 35 minutes, passing through 12 stations, and usually after a couple of stops I get to sit down. That’s when I can open my poetry books and the notebooks in which I translate them, while men and women come and go talking of the frozen fish they’ll have for dinner. Until recently, there was no signal, no field, in the trains—no...
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