Maria Borio’s Transparencies, translated from the Italian by Danielle Pieratti, centers around the metamorphoses of screens, mirrors, windows, and reflective surfaces, as the speaker states, “I want transparent–that perspective over the world.” That multi-dimensionality can be found as the speaker contemplates how “if we scratch a scene breaks through–/ two nude bodies/ try hurting themselves,” observe “a soft line chasing itself” before the aquatic center, or imagine how “in the water you become a dolphin.” The collection is deeply rooted in Borio’s landlocked homeland of Umbria, Italy, where the illusion of perspective in paintings by Renaissance masters like Giotto and Pierro della Francesca becomes “a point of internal/ escape,” as the speaker observes keenly her world of irons and leaves, of the hill and the sea. Rather than solipsism, Borio’s escape is relational. Throughout, she asks, “With what other word would you touch me?” “With what other word might we live forever?”
Maria Borio is the author of two collections of poetry: Trasparenza (Interlinea, 2019) and L’altro limite (LietoColle, 2017). Her latest book of nonfiction is Poetiche e persone. In 2024, her collaboration with Tom Schulz, Briefe aus der Roten Wueste / Lettere dal deserto rosso, translated by Pia-Elizabeth Leuschner and Paola Del Zoppo, was released in Germany by Gutleut Verlag. She is the editor and co-translator (with Jacob Blakesley) of Fifty-five poems by Emily Dickinson, selected by Jorie Graham and published by Crocetti Editore in 2025. She is the poetry editor of Nuovi Argomenti, founder of poesiæuropa (an international summer school), and professor of contemporary Italian literature at the University of Perugia.
Danielle Pieratti is the author of the poetry collections Approximate Body and Fugitives, which was selected by Kim Addonizio for the 2015 Idaho Prize and won the 2017 Connecticut Book Award for poetry. Her poems and translations have appeared in Boston Review, AGNI, Words Without Borders, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University and studied translation at the University of Connecticut, where she was a 2024-2025 Humanities Institute Dissertation Fellow. Danielle served as poetry editor for Asymptote magazine from 2023-2025 and currently teaches at the University of Connecticut, where she directs the Connecticut Writing Project – Storrs.
Tiffany Troy: What is the act of literary translation to you?
Danielle Pieratti: To answer this question I feel compelled to rely on the definitions of more experienced translators than myself. Luckily, in 2016 Words Without Borders compiled a wonderful collection of 36 translators’ metaphors for translation. One of these translators, Aron Aji, compares translation to a “hall of mirrors,” and this metaphor resonates with me because it captures the translative tension between equivalence and distortion, the commensurate weight of translations as originals, and the ongoing osmosis between source and target text that’s enacted by successive readings of both. I just read Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The Language of Languages, and he compares translating to a bridge, or a conversation, analogies that effortlessly reinforce the mutuality of the languages, texts, and people it involves. Generally speaking, I’m drawn to theories of translation that esteem translators as creators and that challenge myths of equivalence. But since I came to translation relatively recently, and primarily as a poet, my thoughts on literary translation reflect first and foremost my feelings about my own poetic practice. Maybe this is why, contrary to notions of translation that encourage translator neutrality, I find translating literary work to be extremely personal, conjuring my complex relationship with the language I translate from as well as deeply held convictions about art and creativity.
TT: In your Translator’s Note, you describe how the triangle of the city, country, and human permeate throughout the work of Italian poet Maria Borio. What is your personal journey to first encountering and then translating her work?
DP: I was lucky enough to learn about Maria’s work via translators Marco Sonzogni and Peter Constantine, and I was immediately drawn to her condensed, image-infused style. I translated a few poems in the fall of 2019, and then dove more heavily into the book in the spring of 2020, so I was reading it in the first months of the pandemic. The book’s central theme of transparency, of the surfaces through which we experience each other and the world—screens, mirrors, windows, reflective surfaces—all resonated so deeply during that time. And the thread of city, country, human, which Maria develops through such rich, evocative, unusual sensory details, struck me perhaps because we were so cut off from the outside world during lockdown. Picturing the urban and rural landscapes she evokes felt especially moving from that perspective of essential captivity.
TT: I love that thread Borio develops. In “Perspective,” Borrio writes, in describing arriving “to the blue at its 15th-century center, the Piero Della Francesca fresco” and feeling “I want transparent—that perspective over the world.” Elsewhere, she writes of silence, with a desire to be reached, be touched, and live forever, even if it hurts, in “Limits.” How do you feel Borio constructs perspective through words, and in some way pushes against the limitations of words, the way the Renaissance painters push against the delimitations of their frame?
DP: What a fantastic question! “Perspective” and “Limits” absolutely do this work of establishing and then testing the narrow points of view in which they’re complicit as works of art. Both make mention of edges and lines of demarcation; indeed, when I picture the train rails in “Perspective” I imagine the converging lines of an artwork constructed in one-point perspective. Another poem that I think captures the tension between the artist’s world of constructed limitations and the world beyond is “Letter, 6:00 a.m.,” which features a photograph of a woman that portrays “whatever life wants to appear”—the desire of both artist and subject to be viewed in a particular, constructed way. That poem, however, simultaneously disputes the idea of art as delimiting by asking, “If you write down a moment does it grow?”, thereby considering the ways viewers and readers expand a work through their application of multiple perspectives. I think Borio’s poems capture this tension between art as limitation and art as infinite expansion. Translation captures this tension too—the necessity of having to choose one word among so many other alternatives while simultaneously invoking the alternatives themselves. It’s an exciting place to be!
TT: Was carrying this translation project from the fall 2019 with the first few poems to delving more deeply in translating the book in earnest in the spring 2020 a collaborative process with Borio, and/or others in the translation community? Was there anything you discovered in the process?
DP: It absolutely evolved into a collaborative process, particularly when the possibility of producing a book together became more of a reality. Maria and I had a number of virtual meetings during which we discussed the meanings and translations of certain words and phrases; and having her input made me much more confident about the finished work. Maria was consistently flexible and open to translations that perhaps took liberties with the work but allowed for musicality or multiple meanings in the English. The title is an example—in Italian, the title is singular: “Transparency.” I wanted the English title to feel a bit more concrete, so I went with “Transparencies,” which I think somehow evokes both transparency in the abstract as well as transparency as a physical quality. The organization of the book was a slightly less collaborative process. The structure deviates significantly from Trasparenza, largely because it features fewer than half of the original’s poems. I curated the English collection to accommodate the extra length required by its bilinguality as well as the reading habits of current Anglophone audiences, which I feel are accustomed to a particular kind of sensory density and concision, especially from a debut collection. So the final book, while it contains the same (though fewer) section titles in the same order, and for the most part inserts each poem under the section heading in which it appears in the Italian, includes significantly fewer sections and fewer poems, and I did move one or two around. I was so taken with “Creatures,” for example, that I wanted it to be the poem’s opening work, so I moved that out of its original section. I made these decisions independent of Maria, and she approved them later.
TT: In “Eye, Screen,” Borio writes, “Observe, don’t ask the form, / ask everything else what it is,/ this writing or frail fingernails, /anonymous biographies or anonymous words.” Towards the end of the poem, she continues: “Again they told me to halt on form,/ form that written or lived is never the same./ With thoughts like fingernails/ I tie disunited on screen.” How did you bring Borio’s poetic forms into the comparatively rhyme-poor English, with different rules governing syntax and grammar?
DP: I think what helped me tackle Maria’s form was precisely one of the things that initially drew me to her work, which is that her fragments, silences, cadences, and even syntax for me echo those in a lot of the Anglophone poetry that I love, perhaps reflecting her rich reading in English literature and the influence Modernist Italian and English poetry have had on one another. English is indeed rhyme-poor, but its assonances, consonances, and cadences can be incredibly musical, and while the English sounds don’t match those of the Italian exactly, I think overall they unite the work in the same way Maria’s sounds do. I also found Maria’s use of white space to be particularly thoughtful, and that intentionality was a joy to bring over into English. One formal observation that I’ve found fascinating as a translator and editor is that poets in different languages often treat the line break differently. In Anglophone poetry, historical precedent urges us to read through the line break, acknowledging it mostly as a sonic pause rather than a syntactical one. The poetic tradition of some other languages is often to use the line break as another form of end-stop or punctuation. Acknowledging this meant I often had to resist the urge to add punctuation (like the em-dash, for example) at the end of Maria’s lines in translation, even though to do so might produce more fluency for an English reader.
TT: This delicate balance between legibility for the English-reader and preserving the syntactical pause in the Italian is fascinating, Danielle. You are an accomplished editor, educator, translator, and poet. What would be your advice to aspiring translators?
DP: Oh gosh–this is tough, because I’m much more experienced as a poet, educator, and editor than I am as a translator! I’d have to say, though, that perhaps because I’m an experienced poet I started out of the gate with a lot of confidence, and I made mistakes by taking liberties at first that I later questioned. It took me some time to realize what I didn’t know. My advice is to do the opposite and take it slow—continue to check yourself, your motivations, and your biases. Be aware of your responsibility (rather than fidelity) to the original, which can vary depending on the audience’s familiarity with the writer and the text. Be purposeful about your choices to domesticate or foreignize. And expect to make mistakes. With respect to publishing—don’t overlook the possibility of translating a new, exciting writer whose work you love. Many make the mistake of attempting to publish translations of established or canonical works, thinking that these might have more of a reading public. When I was editing for Asymptote, we were much less likely to accept these than new works by emerging authors that thrilled us. And I think there’s a lot to be said for translating someone who you can actually speak to and get feedback from, rather than someone who is no longer with us, especially for new translators. One of the first insights I gathered from my early translation classes was that living writers, particularly untranslated ones, are for the most part more than happy to hear from translators seeking to translate their work. As a poet, I feel indebted to the generous translators who have brought my work to global audiences, and I think the majority of writers around the world would feel the same. As long as new translators know that they must eventually ask permission to publish work that is not in the public domain, they should have confidence in contacting authors whose work they admire and want to translate. Most writers are delighted to hear from fans.
TT: In closing, do you have any closing thoughts to your readers of the world?
DP: Lately I’ve become interested in untranslatability and in the power translators and writers have to encourage linguistic nuance and variability rather than neutralize it. I’m wary of the pressure that translatability into English places on world writers due to our language’s dominance in the global market. (Scholars like Emily Apter and David Gramling have written extensively on this.) So I think my closing thought would be that as writers and/or translators we should seek to maintain this tension between linguistic particularity and translatability for new and growing audiences. Translators have done an amazing job of tackling experimental work in ways that both reflect and defy that work’s essential untranslatability. My hope is that, no matter its economic viability, more writers in languages around the world will produce work whose marginalized status, use of dialect, translinguality, or experimentation may pose difficulties for Anglophone translators, that Anglophone translators who are up to the task will seek to translate it, and that groundbreaking publishers of translation like Tupelo Quarterly will continue to publish it.