Carol Ann Duffy: scandalous my poetry? No, surprising

Are they in chronological order?

Yes, from 1985 to 2022, with the last one being unpublished. And it is my favourite.

With the agreement of the author, translators Floriana Marinzuli and Bernardino Nera, and publisher Nicola Crocetti, I share it with readers:

When then

I knelt in the garden then,

trying to cultivate a flower from your name;

where flowers languished on the stems,

as long as you gave permission to rain.

Hiding in the bush, a wren -

When it was time, I wished my heart had done the same.

Do you think your way of writing poetry has changed in the last 40 years?

I think so. I think I have acquired a kind of hard simplicity, I have become more economical.

And has your thinking on love changed since then?

Yes. When I was a teenager I guess my ideas were similar to those of my parents, my model was a very traditional and Catholic family, as my parents were. There was the idea of getting married and being with someone for the rest of your life. I was changed by life.

Do you think there is something different when it is a woman, or a lesbian woman, who writes a poem?

No, love is universal.

And the way to express it? .

It is the same. I think romantic, passionate love between two people is the same whether it is two women, two men, a man and a woman. Love for children or parents is different. Many of Shakespeare's sonnets are about homosexual love, but people read them to heterosexual marriages, because they are universal. The most popular is the sonnet CXVI, in the collection Love Poems is my version, which bears the same title.

Is poetry a form of knowledge?

It is a form of exploration. When I write, I do not know something that I might discover when I reach the end of the poem. Perhaps the reader can say 'I recognise this', but for a writer it is more a form of discovery. Finding words for something that has no words, bringing something to light.

Yes, that's what I wanted to ask, does poetry give knowledge?

Yes, but sometimes it also gives doubts. All I know is that I know nothing.

I put the last question to the translators Floriana Marinzuli and Bernardino Nera. What was it like translating your poetry? .

(Nera) We immediately caught his voice and found very familiar themes, which aroused great interest in us. (Marinzuli) It is difficult to reproduce the sound, the sensorial, rhythmic aspect of the poems, we worked on the content also because a dialogue was created in three voices, there was always a very direct contact with Carol Ann to dispel any doubts. For these love poems, we aimed neither at fidelity nor infidelity - if you let us get past these puns - but at recreating the creative process through the Italian texts. (Nera) They are very different languages and it was difficult to reproduce rhymes, assonances, puns. (Marinzuli) In some cases we created new puns in Italian. What is said in 'translatology' to be faithful to the text does not make much sense in poetry.