AT AN ODD ANGLE

This book sees the light after the passing of my dear friend Peter Dale at his home in Wales. Its title, At an Odd Angle, was Peter's choice and was first used in 2001 for a plaquette featuring three of his translations of my poems within the Series Door-to-Everywhere, Number 15. In 2002, he issued a second plaquette, titled Ecstasies, containing another three poems of mine-two translated by myself and one by fellow translator Brian Cole. I took it out of a drawer at my house in Oxford. It was a work crafted with four hands, a dialogue between two European poets translating each other's works-an idea we first conceived between 1996 and 2000, yet which has found its path only now, in 2024, in the spirit of a tribute. I translated only five of Peter's poems, and they appear for the first time in this book.

Peter's friendship was one of those rare and precious gifts that make expatriation a richer experience-a beacon for one arriving in a foreign culture. In my case, it was the journey of a poet already rooted in the literary milieu of my homeland who, one lucky day, came face to face with one of England's most renowned poet-translators of Dante Alighieri's Inferno in terza rima-a technical skill rarely found.