The Translator’s Poem

A poem I was told by an elderly translator in Italy.

I HAVE FAMILY IN ITALY, but the first time I ever visited Milan was just a few years ago, with my father and brother. The half-marathon was on, and the free tram had been far too busy to help us get across the city. We rode that tram as far as we could, accompanied by a couple from the Netherlands who were in town to run the half marathon but had ended up unable to compete due to injury, before getting off and deciding to walk the remaining five miles into the city centre. We stopped in a cafe to get some bottles of cold water before we started walking. This is where I met Mario.

Mario was an elderly gentleman, almost 90, with a full head of grey and no facial hair, save for whatever stubble had blossomed since his morning cut. He wore, as all European elderly men do, an immaculate suit, and was sat on one of the two-seater tables, reading something on his phone. His phone was an old Samsung, barely functional, and he had a wallet flip-case.

I don’t remember how I got to talking with Mario. I don’t suppose I would’ve approached him, but I can’t imagine he wandered over to strike up a conversation either. Perhaps I did ask for directions; suffice it to say, we started talking, through google translate and exaggerated gesticulations. Very soon into our conversation it came up that I’m studying for a degree in philosophy and literature; Mario seemed greatly pleased by this fact. He began telling me about his life’s work - to translate the poems of Edgar Allen Poe from 19th-century English into modern Italian. He had written a book, a little PDF compendium of 55 of Poe’s works, and he told me that of those 55, only 7 kept their original rhyming structure in Italian. I wish I’d gotten a copy of that PDF. I really don’t know what prevented me from asking in the moment.

I noticed there was a dedication at the beginning of the book, which was also a poem, but not one of Poe’s. I asked Mario about this. He told me that he had lived in England for a brief while in the 1950s - there, as a young boy he’d met an older gentleman, who was a cleaner, and this cleaner had introduced Mario to poetry, the form which had given Mario his livelihood for over half a century. The cleaner had shown Mario a poem he wrote, for a woman that he’d loved, and Mario was so touched by the poem that he’d included it at the forefront of his book; this great study of poetry, dedicated to the humble man who’d introduced Mario to the form.

It’s been years since Mario told me this poem, and I never wrote it down, but still I can produce it from memory. The poem goes like this:

I do believe that God above

Created you for me to love

He picked you out from all the rest

Because he knew I loved you best

I had a heart so sweet and true!

Now it has gone from me to you

Take care of it as I have done

‘cause now you have two, and I have none.

The poem itself reads like a nursery-rhyme; simple, romantically plain. It’s a world away from the contemporary post-modern literary irony that dominates bookstores, the beguiling meta-post-auto-quasi fiction that we see so much of. It’s nothing but rhyming couplets and sentimental imagery, but I don’t think the power of the poem is ever to be found in technical complexity, and nor should it be mistaken for brilliance.

I think it’s the economy of emotion that makes these verses so striking, the shift from a pretty standard devotional gesture to an oddly calculated, arithmetic close. It’s a strange interpretation of love, one that seems so basic at a glance but is actually a struggle to pin down.

I can understand what drew Mario to this poem though, what made him put it at the beginning of his life’s work. For a translator obsessed with the rigid mechanics of Poe’s work, this unpretentious stanza represents, for Mario, poetry in the purest form; a raw and fundamental state, a verbal keepsake. It is the preservation of a feeling, from over a century ago.

I never saw Mario again. I didn’t take any contact details, nor was I able to track down his PDF book online. I don’t have much to convince you, or anyone, that he’s real, save for a little origami boat that he made me, while he walked us up the street, explaining to me the etymological influence of Shakespeare.