You have such wide-ranging commitments and unusual curiosities: organic gardening, Jewish and Italian cuisines, dancing, children’s theater, teaching mythology, poetry, fiction, translating… How have you reconciled the relationship between the art of poetry and the wider world?

I don’t really think about the poems. At first, they’re pretty much finger mischief. Then I start thinking: rhythm, shape, diction, image. I extend the poem further with associative imagery and I try to please my own ear with language that holds tension and surprise. Revision is definitely my favorite part of writing a poem. I don’t really like a blank sheet of paper.

This is where everything else you talked about comes in. I translate because there’s already something on the page. I can be a totally different person, with a different way of looking at things, a different vocabulary. The vegetables, flowers, cooking and dancing come in because they need attention daily and it’s good for the soul to care for something every day. Also, they helped me to stop obsessing about my kids once they were grown.

All the things we do are commitments until we do them long enough and they become who we are.

Mythology has always been an interest and a reference point for me. It teaches us every side of history — who’s telling the story and why they’re telling it that way. Sometimes the lie is more interesting than the truth, because it tells more about the teller.

All the things we do are commitments until we do them long enough and they become who we are. It all comes into my poems as frame of reference, association, rhythm, point of view, and the habit of caring.

Did poetry writing just happen naturally in your colorful life?

I’ve told myself stories since I was a small child, and at some point, I would get fixated on a word that delighted or disturbed me or on a rhythm that became fixed in my head. I think that fixation eventually became my first poems. I did write fiction at one point for about ten years, but I think the fiction was very close to how I write a poem, just without lineation and with a less subverted narrative.

How I came to write fiction is a better story. In my early thirties, I became ill and was unable to continue the work I had been doing, and I thought: what can I do for work if I’m confined to bed? In my dreams at that time there was a story being told, but I didn’t know whose narrative voice was telling it. Somewhere in the dream I would stop and say, “Whose voice is this?” This went on for about two weeks, and finally the great short story writer, Grace Paley, appeared in the dream as part of the crowd, and seeing her, I said, “Oh, that’s whose voice it is.” Then Grace came out of the crowd and said, “Foolish girl — don’t be so stupid. That isn’t my voice — it’s yours.”

And she was right — it was the voice I eventually learned how to use in order to tell story, and it’s even the voice that comes through in my poems. I had known Grace before that in the anti-war movement, and as a writer, but after that, I decided I would study with her and get an MFA in fiction at Sarah Lawrence so I could study with her. She also was my dear friend until her death last year. I had the great pleasure of doing poetry readings with her many times in her last years.

You’ve recently given a talk at the Frost Place on “Translation, Adaptation, Imitation and Theft.” This sounds very intriguing and witty. Why the word “theft”?

In that talk I spoke of the opportunity translation gives us to expand and deepen our range as poets. We project ourselves into the work of another poet and we learn more than just the craft of translation — we learn the real stuff of poetry. I’m an analeptic translator with no left brain so I need to get all the way inside the poem, otherwise I can’t figure out what’s going on in there, even with the best dictionary.

We project ourselves into the work of another poet and we learn more than just the craft of translation — we learn the real stuff of poetry.

Then I need to separate from the poems I just translated in order to write my own poems again. That’s where the adaptation, imitation and theft part comes in. These are the tricks I use to escape from the translation. I make a poem in response to the poem I just translated. Call it imitation or adaption, but I think of it as talking back to the translation using whatever parts are sticking to me, but breaking away from the translated poem into my own images and opinions.

Sometimes, I end up keeping only part of the new poem — an image, a word, a rhythm — but sometimes it comes out as a kind of dialogue with the poem that I translated. I do that with Pavese a lot. I broaden my associations to it, but keep the basic architecture of the poem, talking back to it about my own life. It really is a kind of theft, but I always feel that I’m honoring the poet and I always cite the poem.

Tell us more about the translations that you’ve embarked upon. How did this work become such a central aspect of your writing?

I think translation has given me much of my poetic education. It teaches me the poetics and rhetoric of work I admire. When I’m translating, I have to say the poem to myself several times, and then I start looking for the nouns, verbs, objects, which pronouns belong to whom. I get the picture of who is doing the talking and of the poem’s shape from the inside out. I begin to see the poem’s architecture — where it’s going and how it’s getting there. Then I figure out most of the words I couldn’t find in the dictionary, because the poem’s diction has become my diction. I start to understand what is untranslatable, but also the essence of poetry — the “unsayable,” as Rilke calls it.

Your translations of the Italian poet, Giovanni Pascoli, The Last Voyage, that you worked on with Deborah Brown and Richard Jackson, will soon be released from Red Hen Press. How did this book come about?

The Pascoli project began in Ferrara, Italy when Rick picked up an enormous book containing all of Pascoli’s Italian poems. (Pascoli had also written in Latin and Greek.) Rick lent me the book and I translated a few of the poems. After Rick discovered Pascoli had been a strong influence of Pavese’s, Rick, Deborah and I thought we’d translate some more of them to figure out what this meant, as we were already familiar with Pavese. It also became apparent to us that Pascoli had not been translated into English before.

We began to see the progression of an image narrative, in the elegaic lyric poems Pascoli wrote in his later years. (He had settled in Barga in the Apuan Alps north of Lucca in 1895.) He seems, in these poems, to be exploring this new landscape in which he has begun to put down roots, but is, at the same time, becoming more and more haunted by the spectre of death, which has preoccupied him since the murder of his father when Pascoli was ten years old.

Susan Thomas at a conference with American poets Maxine Kumin and Richard Jackson
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

We actually translated almost everything that Pascoli wrote in Italian. Rick, Deborah and I established a pattern, each translating a draft of one poem, then passing it to the others, who would comment and suggest changes. We all agreed the poems should follow the general form and stanzaic patterns of the original, with line breaks especially crucial. But we also agreed that the success of the poems in their “target” language would be the deciding factor in choosing to include poems in a collection.

Rick decided that we should tackle the late narrative poems inspired by Latin and Greek literature. In these, Pascoli transforms the scenes of his own life and expresses his own concerns through the voices of characters from antiquity.

In the longest poem, The Last Voyage, he speaks through Ulysses, nine years after his arrival home in Ithaca. Now Ulysses has the task of gathering his old shipmates and ship and must bury Poseidon’s oar in a land far from the sea. He retraces his famous first voyage and in recreating the voyage of The Odyssey through an old man’s point of view, he becomes an image for Pascoli’s own retreat into his past to evaluate his adventures, his triumphs and his failures.