I don't know if it's the final frontier, but I certainly never thought I'd go there – at any rate, here I am, now a published co-translator from the Italian.

The forthcoming issue The TriQuarterly (No. 127) is devoted wholly to Contemporary Italian Poetry in the original with facing translations, and 16 pages of this handsome 248-page book (which retails for $11.95 at a well-stocked bookstore near you) is dedicated to Roberto Gigliucci's "Poemetto facile degli alberghi" and its facing English translation by Leonard Barkan and (a'hem) Chris King, entitled "Easy poem about hotels."

Not to give it all away to that rare soul who actually acts upon this notice, tracks down TriQuarterly 127 and buys the tome, but the title of Roberto's poem is heavily ironic, in that it names a narrative poem about his visit to the sites of notorious suicides in Roman hotels. Yes, this would be quintessential feel-good summer reading, from me to you, with a whole lot of help from Roberto Gigliucci and Leonard Barkan, not to forget the good, learned people at The Triquarterly, published at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Who am I? How did I got here? God knows, not by mastering the Italian tongue, of which I know precisely enough to order successfully off a Pasta House Co. menu.

It was Leonard Barkan – then, a distinguished academic at New York University and now an even more distinguished academic at Princeton University, and throughout these fancy academic changes my very dear friend and intellectual mentor – who suggested the project. Leonard knew Roberto from his days in Rome. He thought it would be fun to do a translation project together, while we were grinding out the editing of one of his many fascinating and decorated books of comparative literature, which I have had the pleasure of editing for some years now. Roberto was game.

So, Leonard would turn the Italian poem into more or less literal English, then I would both simplify it (typically, moving from Latinate to Anglo Saxon root words) and supe it up, give it spin and spice. Then Leonard would peg my version down a little closer to the Italian in spirit and significance. Then I would twist his version again and supe it back up. After a few turns back and forth of the literary screw of this sort, we would arrive at a poem in English that we both liked and that Leonard could live with as a relatively faithful rendering of Roberto's Italian. Roberto himself knows about as much English as I know Italian and left us completely alone with his every blessing.

Since I am holding out that some of you actually will go track down TriQuarterly 127 and install this handsome book on your shelves at home, I will append – not "Easy poems about hotels," the published evidence of our work together – but another of the poems by Roberto that Leonard and I co-translated in this way. There are even more where these come from. Perhaps a slim volume of them will appear one day. As an example of our work together, Leonard gave to me as the literal translation of the title of the collection: "Songs of Inert Love," which I suped up and simplified into "Songs of Love Gone Nowhere." Here is one:

A LITTLE SONG ABOUT THE SUN ON THE WALL

By Roberto Gigliucci
Translated by Chris King and Leonard Barkan

A wall with the sun
or a boy on a deserted beach,
an empty hotel
or a sweaty priest
under a sunset tree.
Or me, with arrogance for metaphors,
all my chandeliers
of fruit and crystallized light,
transfixed fountains and statues,
green tits in triumph
with ruby-colored berry nipples,
the sun in a summer ice cream cone, 
such a tedium of stuff and sofas
and pianos at the bottom of the sea.
I am overdressed,
I sweat and tremble, I burn and I am of ice
like other miracles that are going out of style,
I am leaping, down toward on high,
an ascending collapse of snows
and refractions, lacerated stars, explosive
diamonds and base make-up made up of sand-blasted planets.

I would like to stop, to pause in my flying,
to undress in the windy heat,
arrogant metaphors, get out of here
peacefully in a naked shade of oak.
Everything is really simpler still:
moving around the house, drifting
through the city, coming home
to eat, ghosting around the house –
to go out, to cruise around, to go shopping,
to forget your own language in your mouth,
to forget the brain beating in your own skull,
to eclipse midday in the mind,
to make sun dark, no, more a fresh
penumbra – to be naked in public
or alone in a pyramid of light
in a forest or a summer garden,
to be calm, naked, splendorous, spectral, dull.
No, even simpler:  I
want to dance with you, that's it,
just dance with you
(and that seems like no big deal?) –
in my empty room, no lamp lit,
I want to dance with you.  Because
I am in love with you.

That's about it:  I awoke
one hot winter morning in Rome
and had nothing else to say,
I didn't know how to say anything,
just over and over
that I am in love with you.
Rather than speak
I prefer to go naked,
sing or cry and mumble
the words of others (my friend, it's all you,
I pardon you, please pardon me),
or else fall down on the floor
like a tower of ice in water, myself
seized by spasms of hysteria and howling,
you slap me around, or I slap you around,
tears in our eyes and feet frozen with love,
awed that death doesn't collect me then
desperate, death do not come for this man
naked, your veins so swollen.

I could wander miserable and frizzy
soaked wet in the morning searching
out a theme worth poetry
along the winter river,
sun and bird glow
down streets of theatre,
the world which in mourning triumphs
(the wretched world, which delights you).
I could do all that.  But what's the point?
There's no subject better than your blood:
All your sweet body's blood,
hot steaming streams of you, clamorous
traffic jams in your body, confident
blood shining under your skin at night
at midnight, three in the morning, even at dawn when I
dream that your blood has turned to sand.

You know the bar in the Tuscolana, number one ninety-eight,
they sell tobacco;
that's where you buy your mild cigarettes,
the ones the state monopoly sells,
go ahead, buy them for me too,
there's a moon as gross as my soul tonight,
it's very late,
I can't sleep and I want to smoke
and then I want to think,
to think of you, your hat with the crooked visor,
blue as a night of high spirits when it's time to cry
and ask each other questions, the kind
that really matter. 

Last night at the station
of the metro, wind blew
black like a dug-out full of piss,
orphanage, wind from a tunnel
subterranean and humid, I saw
two legs slightly
bowed and I asked myself:
what can I expect from those legs,
some good, or only trouble?
Is it worth it to suffer
such vertigos of joy?
Wouldn't it be better to purge
each thing of its contrary?
No?  How the hell would I know?
What do you want from me anyway?
Metaphors or memories?

More info on TriQuarterly, but not yet about No. 127 as of this morning, at http://www.triquarterly.org.