On the road, well, the sea. Where I've been reminded that my voice in English is as marked as any, not the neutral thing we often find ourselves assuming. This time it happened as I was trying to translate a local poet, Ligio Zanini, not translated before into English to my knowledge. He wrote in the dialect of Rovinj (Ruvaigno in his idiom), which is spoken by some six hundred people or so today, a number shrinking all the time. Zanini was quite a master of it, not the simple fisherman he impersonates in much of his verse. Hence the paradox and the challenge: a rustic but simultaneously sophisticated voice, close to the sea, marked by it, a poet using an apparently rough-edged language of expression that few will recognize let alone read or speak....
