ITALIAN

Italo Calvino. Invisible Cities [Le città invisibili]. Tr. with new intro. William Weaver. Arion Press. 1999 [1972]. 164 pp. Limited Edition: $750.00. Invisible Cities is the seventh novel by Italo Calvino, whom many regard as this century's greatest master of Italian fiction. This edition is one of the more unusual books to be published by Arion Press, with each of 400 numbered copies containing twelve illustrations by Wayne Thiebaud, all copies signed by the artist, whose idea it was that his drawings would be invisible until the reader took the action of turning the page. Thus his drawings are printed on transparent sheets in different colors of ink, each matching the color on the following sheet, so that the images are revealed only when the transparent sheet is turned back over the preceeding page. The limited edition 14"x12" book also features a special form of ring binding and Italian millmould papers. In addition, 40 numbered copies of Thiebaud's etching, "Souvenirs of Cities," plus five signed artist's proofs, are available only to purchasers of this stunning volume. The price of the print is $1,750.00, bringing the total with the book to $2,500.00.

Dino Campana. Orphic Songs [Canti orfici]. Tr. I. L. Salomon. City Lights. 1998 [Editori Associate, S.p.A., Milano, 1989]. 183 pp. Paper: ISBN 0-87286-340-9. Pocket Poets Series 54. Bilingual. Dino Campana (1885-1932) wrote the unique, visionary Orphic Songs in 1914, while still in his twenties. Campana was then the "wild man" of Italian poetry, an outsider and vagabond who, after being declared hopelessly insane by army officials after the outbreak of World War I, was admitted to the asylum known as Castel Pulci and spent the remainder of his life there in abject isolation. In his Translator's Preface, I. L. Salomon describes Campana's verse as "a poetry unshackled and unchecked, nothing in it dependent on tricks and techniques. In his poetry there was an otherworldly music and unearthly splendor so like the dark landscape of Thule, Poe's ultimate dim dreamland. . . . The marks of his [Campana's] insanity are like stigmata on the corpus of this work."

Paola Capriolo. The Woman Watching [La spettatrice]. Tr. Liz Heron. Serpent's Tail. 1998 [Bompiani, Milan, 1995]. 214 pp. Paperback original: $13.99; ISBN 1-85242-520-2. Vulpius, a much admired young actor in a provincial rep company, develops an obsession with an unknown spectator whose gaze seems only for him, at first kindling fresh enthusiasm for mastering each role, then leaving him a slave to artistic perfection. With philosophical elegance and a macabre sense of comedy, Milanese writer Paola Capriolo draws the reader deep into this obsession, exploring the most compelling recesses of the theatrical experience where ritual and stylization dominate. Dark questions emerge about the power of representation and the dangers of sacrificing life to art. What is the nature of the actor's mask? At what point do performer and performance merge? Capriolo's previous novel, Vissi d'amore, was also translated by Liz Heron and published as Floria Tosca by Serpent's Tail in 1997.

Dante Alighieri. Dante's Lyric Poems: Revised and Expanded (Includes The Vita Nuova). Tr. Joseph Tusiani. Intro. and notes Giuseppe C. Di Scipio. Legas. 1999. 177 pp. Paper: $16.00; ISBN 1-881901-18-1. Bilingual. The poems contained in this volume represent Dante's earliest attempts at the art of dire parole in rima, as he strove to achieve his poetic mission of raising the Italian vernacular to a level of dignity (volgare ill ustre) achieved partly in Vita Nuova and fully in the Divine Comedy. Contents include poems from the Vita Nuova, Convivio, Canzoniere, Dispute with Forese Donati, Canzoniere:Love Poems, and Ecologues to Giovanni del Virgilio. Joseph Tusiani, who is known for his own Italian, English, and Latin poetry, based his translation on the latest critical edition of the Vita Nuova (ed. Domenico de Robertis) and Rime (ed. Gianfranco Contini) in the volume Dante Alighieri, Opera Minori, Vol. 1, Part I (Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, Milano-Napoli, 1984). Among Tusiani's many distinguished translations are The Complete Poems of Michelangelo, Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered and Creation of the World, Boccaccio's Nymphs of Piesole, The Age of Dante, Italian Poets of the Renaissance, and most recently, Pulci's Morgante (Indiana University Press, 1998).

Erri De Luca. Sea of Memory [Tu, Mio]. Tr. Beth Archer Brombert. Ecco Press. 1999 [Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore Milano, 1998]. 119 pp. Cloth: $22.00; ISBN 0-88001-678-7. During a summer holiday on an island off Naples in the 1950s, a sixteen-year-old boy, feeling guilty about Italy's recent wartime past, is chagrined to find his family reluctant to answer his questions. Go read books, they tell him; it's all there, but leave us alone. A local fisherman who befriends him is drawn into laconic replies that fill the gaps in the boy's awareness of both Italian and German responsibility. In this short, unsentimental novel, Erri De Luca evokes the sensibility of adolescence, the discovery of love, and questions of guilt and survival. De Luca's previous novels include Non Ora, Non Qui [Not Now, Not Here], Una Nuvola Come Tappeto [A Cloud as a Carpet], Arcobaleno (Vinegar, Rainbow],Alto a Sinistra [On High at Left], and Alzai [Towpath].

Veronica Franco. Poems and Selected Letters. Ed. and tr. by Ann Rosalind Jones and Margaret F. Rosenthal. University of Chicago Press. 1998 [Gruppo Ugo Mursia, Milan, 1995]. 300 pp. Cloth: ISBN 0-226-25986-2. Paper: ISBN 0-226-25987-0. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Bilingual. Veronica Franco (1546-1591) was a poet who articulated her pro-woman views in poems and letters usually written in a tactful, courteous style. She was not an explicitly feminist essayist or polemicist, but her frank eroticism and her impressive eloquence set her apart from the chaste, silent woman prescribed in Renaissance gender ideology. In the Familiar Letters, the translators have maintained the elaborate syntax of Franco's dedications but have given a slightly less formal character to the epistles themselves. Rather than imitate Franco's eleven-syllable lines, they aimed for a four-beat line in English and added prose summaries of each poem. The volume also includes introductions to both the series and the book itself, as well as an extensive bibliography.

(Romagnole) Tonino Guerra. Abandoned Places. Tr. Adria Bernardi. Guernica. 1999. 155 pp. Paper: $12.00; ISBN 1-55071-030-3. Essential Poets Series 74. In this collection of poetry, Italian screenwriter and poet Tonino Guerra captures the harshness and the magic of a culture and language that have disappeared. The original poems, written in the dialect of the montanari of Santarcangelo di Romagna in the province of Forlì, reflect the mixture of sardonic humor and whimsy for which he is known in his work with film directors such as Fellini and Antonioni. Included in this anthology are poems from four books: Il miele [The Honey], La capanna [The Hut], Il viaggio [The Journey], and Il libro delle chiese abbandonate [The Book of Abandoned Churches]. Translator Adria Barbardi found echoes of her own ancestry in Guerra's verse: "In these poems, I found things. Things? Lost things. Things I was not conscious of having lost, things I did not necessarily miss, but when I found these things, stumbled upon them, brushed against them, had them hurled from the pages at me, I recognized them immediately. They were fragments from somewhere far away, in memory, something like the aroma of rosemary, a smell so powerful, as Guerra writes in Il viaggio, it hits you from behind."

Mario Luzi. Phrases and Passages of a Salutary Song [Frasi e incisi di un canto salutare]. Tr. Luigi Bonaffini. Guernica. 1999 [Garzanti Editore, 1990]. 144 pp., Paper: $15.00; ISBN 1-55071-077-X. Essential Poets Series 84. Mario Luzi is perhaps the most prominent voice in Italian poetry after Eugenio Montale and is generally considered Italy's greatest living poet. This volume continues to explore the complexity of the relationship between writer, the written word, and the world, as he had begun to do in his previous work, For the Baptism of Our Fragments (Guernica, 1991). "The previous book," Luzi wrote recently, "has been read as a sign of conciliation, but it was traumatized by violence. The latest one is perhaps more directed toward an after, or something inward, as for instance the world of nature, the universe with its laws and its codes that sometimes speak to us." Phrases and Passages of a Salutary Song is a spiritual testament to the richness and beauty of existence in all its forms, composed and sung by one of Italian poetry's contemporary masters.

Marina Minghelli. Medusa: The Fourth Kingdom [Il Quarto Regno Medusa]. Tr. by Beverly Allen. City Lights. 1999 [Edizioni Tracce, Pescara, 1992]. 190 pp. Paper: $10.95; ISBN 0-87286-353-0. The myth of Medusa, who is typically seen only as a horrible, snake-covered, severed head, comes to us in an intriguing new guise in Marina Minghelli's novel, Medusa: The Fourth Kingdom. A young Italian woman becomes obsessed with a reticent, emotionally distant man. Her journal gives an account of their meetings, interspersed with her speculative reflections on Medusa as she might have been as an innocent girl, before being demonized and mythologized. In counterpart to the protagonist's own writings, another view of her story is taken down by a mysterious woman friend who adds a different perspective to this journey towards independence and empowerment. This novel is the first title in the new program, "Italian Voices," being launched by City Lights Publishing for the purpose of introducing contemporary Italian literature in translation.

Fortunato Pasqualino. The Little Jesus of Sicily Tr. Louise Rozier. Artwork by Ken Stout. University of Arkansas Press. 1999. 96 pp. Cloth: $22.00; ISBN 1-55728-572-1. Paper: $14.00; ISBN 1-55728-573-X. The Little Jesus of Sicily has been characterized as a poem in prose or as a basic canticle for celebrating life. The setting is pastoral Sicily shortly before World War II, and a child from a poor family has been entrusted to be the Messiah for one momentous day. In the tradition of Grimm's fairy tales, La Fontaine's fables, St. Exupéry's Le Petit Prince and Cervantes's Don Quixote, this engaging little novella works as both a children's story and a thought-provoking adult fable that blends imagination, poetry, and faith. Born in Butera, Italy, and now living in Rome, Fortunato Pasqualino is an important contemporary Italian writer with fifteen books to his credit. Louise Rozier's translation of The Little Jesus of Sicily won the 1996 Renato Poggioli Translation Award from the PEN American Center.

Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca). The Canzioniere, or Rerum bulgarium fragmenta. Tr. Mark Musa. Intro. Mark Musa with Barbara Manfredi. Indiana University Press. 1999 [1996]. 652 pp. Cloth: 0-253-33944-8. Paper: ISBN 0-253-21317-7. Bilingual. First paperback edition. The poems of Petrach's Canzioniere represent some of the most influential works in Western literature. Varied in form, style, and subject matter, these Rime sparsa, or scattered rhymes, contain metaphors and conceits that have been absorbed into the literature and language of love. The poems themselves were written over many decades, then revised, polished, and gathered by Petrarch into manuscripts which he sent out to patrons and friends. These were brought together in one final form and recorded in his own hand in 1374—the last year of his life. The collection includes 317 sonnets, twenty-nine canzoni, nine sestinas (one double), seven ballads, and four madrigals. Concluding this large volume are more than 100 pages of notes and commentary, bibliography, and bilingual index of first lines. Mark Musa is well-known for his translations of works by Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Machiavelli. He is editor of Dante's Inferno: The Indiana Critical Edition, a translation with scholarly essays by a number of Dantists.

Giorgio Pressburger. Teeth and Spies [Denti e Spie]. Tr. Shaun Whiteside. Granta Publications. 1999 [Rizzoli, 1994]. 260 pp. Paperback original: ISBN 1-86207-269-8. This is the tragi-comic account of one man's life through the fate of his teeth—from the loss of his first baby tooth swallowed by his father in a prison camp, to eventually being fitted with a set of dentures. Devoting each chapter to a particular tooth (each chapter is headed with a notation, such as UL "upper left" 6), the unnamed narrator charts fifty years of East European history. Having worked in numerous guises and a miscellany of trades and professions involving journeys across the globe, the hero stuggles with the demands and transformations of his body and, specifically, his teeth. Key moments of his life have uncanny parallels with his dental health. In each city he visits, he compulsively seeks out a Jewish Hungarian dentist. Metaphysical, philosophical, hyponotic, and unsettling, Teeth and Spies is a spy story, an adventure, and an angst-ridden psychological novel bristing with black humor. Giorgio Pressburger, Hungarian by birth but a resident of Italy since 1956, is also the author of The Law of White Spaces (Granta, 1992).

Giose Rimanelli. Moliseide and Other Poems. Ed. and tr. Luigi Bonaffini. Legas. 1998. 208 pp. Paper: $20.00; ISBN 1-881901-14-9. Italian Poetry in Translation 3. Bilingual. By writing most of Molisiede in his native Molisan dialect, Giose Rimanelli aligns himself with a major trend in modern Italian poetry, whose origin can be traced back to Di Giancomo's innovative approach that freed dialects from their rigidly traditional role as conveyors of local color and traditions. As Luigi Bonaffini explains in his introduction, "Moliseide . . . is a flight toward origins, literary as well as existential, and it assumes therefore a pivotal role in Rimanelli's work. His land of birth, Molise, is a metaphor of a lost universe, a place in the rich landscape of imagination and of memory where the essential link with core of being is still recoverable, where language can still be rooted in experience." Besides Rimanelli's Moliseide and Alien Cantica (1995), Bonaffini has translated poetry by Dino Campana, Mario Luzi, Guiseppe Jovine, Achille Serrao, Eugenio Cirese, and Albino Pierro. He is co-editor of Poesia dialettale del Molise (1993), a trilingual anthology of poetry in the Molisan dialect, and editor of Dialect Poetry of Southern Italy: Texts and Criticism (Legas, 1998), also a trilingual anthology.

Edoardo Sanguineti. Libretto [Libretto]. Tr. Pádraig J. Daly. Dedalus Press/Dufour Editions. 1998. 40 pp. Paper: $14.95; ISBN 1-901 233-20-0. Poetry Europe Series No. 5. Bilingual. Edoardo Sanguineti is one of the most important poets of the neo-vanguard movement in Italy. His poems capture the anguish, the wit, and the need for human love at this moment of world-wide milennial chaos. Sanguineti's exploitation of the music of the Italian language has made the composer Luciano Berio do settings of many of his poems. This is the first Sanguineti book in English translation, possibly due to the author's proclivity for word play, puns, jokes, and inventive juxtapositioning. Pádraig J. Daly accepted the difficult task of translating Libretto because the book excited him, because he finds Sanguineti's poetry so life-affirming, and because he believes that even the poorest translation may lead people to read more of him. A formal note: the seventeen poems in this volume are printed vertically, with the unusually long lines of each verse running up-and-down, rather than across, the page.

Vittorio Sereni. Variable Star [Stella Variabile]. Ed. and tr. Luigi Bonaffini. Afterword Laura Baffoni Licata. Guernica. 1999 [Garzanti Editore, 1981]. 84 pp. Paper: $13.00; ISBN 1-55071-087-7. Essential Poets Series 89. Vittorio Sereni's last book of verse and one containing, as the author himself underlined, perhaps his best poetry, was first published in 1981. That same year, it won the Viareggio Award for poetry. Answering a question on the meaning of the title, Sereni observed, "It has an allusive value, . . . but it is better for each individual to look for a meaning." The book's discourse centers on "variations" of a few fundamental themes, the most predominant being the theme of death. Laura Baffoni Licata explains that these constant thoughts of death are "counterbalanced, in an almost oscillatory movement of lights and shadows, by inventive—I would say solar— outbursts, attesting on the one hand to a vitalistic energy very much present in the poet, and on the other the great transfigurating power of this poetry."