Translation Problem #2 - Moira Egan poem

Parthenocissus triscuspidata

I see another
plant in the dark garden and
I think he must be
a weeping willow
but when I ask him, he says: No,
he is a laurel
bound in an immense maze
of ivy that hangs from him.
Ivy does not
harm the host, hangs
symbiotically, and that's it,
in poetic pose.
Viola! he disappears
another lugubrious illusion,
I say, and he laughs.

I tried briefly to maintain the syllabics of the poem, counting the number of syllables in the Italian phrases and comparing them to what I was coming up with in English. I quickly realized that there was no way that this could be productive, as the Italian version inevitably has more syllables than the original English version due to the structure of the languages. If I had known the number of syllables in each line of the English original, then perhaps I could have tweaked mine to match.

I kept the line breaks the same, though I don't agree with all of them as I have it phrased here. Line 2 is particularly troublesome. I would almost never end a line on "and." If this were my poem, I would break the first three lines as follows:
"I see another plant
in the dark garden
and I think he must be"
In this case, however, I felt like it was important to keep the line breaks as they were.

I chose to leave the title in Latin. I didn't think anything could be gained from translating the title, since the Latin is the actual genus and species of the plant and isn't translated in the Italian version either. Also, I knew going into it that the poems that Moira shared with us in class had Latin titles as well.

Most of the decisions about wording were made kind of instinctively. It seemed to me that the gender of the weeping willow/laurel was revealed in the last line as "he," so I used that information to determine the pronouns leading up to the last line. I kept in mind that adjective usually follows the noun in Italian and switched them accordingly back into English. In my limited experience with Italian, it also seems that they add "a" and "that/this" in many phrases where an English-speaker would not, so I dropped "a" and "that/this" in several lines where it seemed awkward (lines 5 and 8). I struggled most with lines 8-9 and 13. In line 13, I chose to go with the more outrageous (and perhaps risky) "Viola!" because it is in fact outrageous and funny and seems most likely to spark the laughter in line 15. For that same reason, I kept "lugubrious," despite the fact that it is a word of much higher diction than the rest of the poem. It added to the over-the-top exclamation that seemed most likely to produce laughter.

Regardless of which phrase I used at the beginning of line 13, I really wanted that line to end with a comma, but there isn't one there. Each phrase I came up with seemed to demand a pause between "disappear" and "another." I didn't add the comma, and I am still slightly dissatisfied with the line as a result.