What was Italian poetry like in the years of extraordinary historical, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual change between the 1860s and the Unification of Italy in the 1960s? In A Selection of Modern Italian Poetry in Translation Roberta Payne provides a bilingual collection of ninety-two poems by thirty-five Italian poets, including works of classicism and passionate decadentism, examples of crepuscularism, and poetry by Ungaretti, Montale, and Quasimodo. Payne pays particular attention to poets of the fifties and sixties, futurists, and female poets. She notes that the futurists, who have rarely been translated, were particularly important as they were truly original, attempting to develop new notions of word, line, sound, and phrase. Such new notions make translating them particularly challenging. She also offers a large sampling from poets of the fifties and sixties, many of whom have won the Viareggio Prize. Poems by women in this volume reflect diverse schools and directions while maintaining a distinctly female voice. Containing the original Italian and the translation side-by-side, this volume offers a wonderful introduction to Italian poetry to scholars and general readers alike.

Italian poetry of the last century is far from homogeneous: genres and movements have often been at odds with one another, engaging the economic, political, and social tensions of post-Unification Italy. The thirty-eight poets included in this anthology, some of whose poems are translated here for the first time, represent this literary diversity and competition: there are symbolists (Gabriele D'Annunzio), free-verse satirists (Gian Pietro Lucini), hermetic poets (Salvatore Quasimodo), feminist poets (Sibilla Aleramo), twilight poets (Sergio Corazzini), fragmentists (Camillo Sbarbaro), new lyricists (Eugenio Montale), neo-avant-gardists (Alfredo Giuliani), and neorealists (Pier Paolo Pasolini)—among many others.

The most comprehensive collection in English of the founder of modern Italian poetry Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912)—the founder of modern Italian poetry and one of Italy's most beloved poets—has been compared to Robert Frost for his evocation of natural speech, his bucolic settings, and the way he bridges poetic tradition and the beginnings of modernism. Featuring verse from throughout his career, and with the original Italian on facing pages, Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli is a comprehensive and authoritative collection of a fascinating and major literary figure. Reading this poet of nature, grief, and small-town life is like traveling through Italy's landscapes in his footsteps—from Romagna and Bologna to Rome, Sicily, and Tuscany—as the country transformed from an agrarian society into an industrial one. Mixing the elevated diction of Virgil with local slang and the sounds of the natural world, these poems capture sense-laden moments: a train's departure, a wren's winter foraging, and the lit windows of a town at dusk. Incorporating revolutionary language into classical scenes, Pascoli's poems describe ancient rural dramas—both large and small—that remain contemporary. Framed by an introduction, annotations, and a substantial chronology, Taije Silverman and Marina Della Putta Johnston's translations render the variety, precision, and beauty of Pascoli's poetry with a profoundly current vision.

More than a century has now passed since F.T. Marinetti's famous "Futurist Manifesto" slammed the door on the nineteenth century and trumpeted the arrival of modernity in Europe and beyond. Since then, against the backdrop of two world wars and several radical social upheavals whose effects continue to be felt, Italian poets have explored the possibilities of verse in a modern age, creating in the process one of the great bodies of twentieth-century poetry. Even before Marinetti, poets such as Giovanni Pascoli had begun to clear the weedy rhetoric and withered diction from the once-glorious but by then decadent grounds of Italian poetry. And their winter labors led to an extraordinary spring: Giuseppe Ungaretti's wartime distillations and Eugenio Montale's "astringent music"; Umberto Saba's song of himself and Salvatore Quasimodo's hermetic involutions. After World War II, new generations—including such marvelously diverse poets as Sandro Penna, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Amelia Rosselli, Vittorio Sereni, and Raffaello Baldini—extended the enormous promise of the prewar era into our time. A surprising and illuminating collection, The FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry invites the reader to examine the works of these and other poets—seventy-five in all—in context and conversation with one another. Edited by the poet and translator Geoffrey Brock, these poems have been beautifully rendered into English by some of our finest English-language poets, including Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, Paul Muldoon, and many exciting younger voices.

Publisher description

A musician, musicologist, and self-defined “poet of research,” Amelia Rosselli (1930–96) was one of the most important poets to emerge from Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Following a childhood and adolescence spent in exile from Fascist Italy between France, England, and the United States, Rosselli was driven to express the hopes and devastations of the postwar epoch through her demanding and defamiliarizing lines. Rosselli’s trilingual body of work synthesizes a hybrid literary heritage stretching from Dante and the troubadours through Ezra Pound and John Berryman, in which playful inventions across Italian, English, and French coexist with unadorned social critique. In a period dominated by the confessional mode, Rosselli aspired to compose stanzas characterized by a new objectivity and collective orientation, “where the I is the public, where the I is things, where the I is the things that happen.” Having chosen Italy as an “ideal fatherland,” Rosselli wrote searching and often discomposing verse that redefined the domain of Italian poetics and, in the process, irrevocably changed the Italian language. This collection, the first to bring together a generous selection of her poems and prose in English and in translation, is enhanced by an extensive critical introduction and notes by translator Jennifer Scappettone. Equipping readers with the context for better apprehending Rosselli’s experimental approach to language, Locomotrix seeks to introduce English-language readers to the extraordinary career of this crucial, if still eclipsed, voice of the twentieth century.

The most comprehensive collection in English of the founder of modern Italian poetry Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912)—the founder of modern Italian poetry and one of Italy's most beloved poets—has been compared to Robert Frost for his evocation of natural speech, his bucolic settings, and the way he bridges poetic tradition and the beginnings of modernism. Featuring verse from throughout his career, and with the original Italian on facing pages, Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli is a comprehensive and authoritative collection of a fascinating and major literary figure. Reading this poet of nature, grief, and small-town life is like traveling through Italy's landscapes in his footsteps—from Romagna and Bologna to Rome, Sicily, and Tuscany—as the country transformed from an agrarian society into an industrial one. Mixing the elevated diction of Virgil with local slang and the sounds of the natural world, these poems capture sense-laden moments: a train's departure, a wren's winter foraging, and the lit windows of a town at dusk. Incorporating revolutionary language into classical scenes, Pascoli's poems describe ancient rural dramas—both large and small—that remain contemporary. Framed by an introduction, annotations, and a substantial chronology, Taije Silverman and Marina Della Putta Johnston's translations render the variety, precision, and beauty of Pascoli's poetry with a profoundly current vision.