front cover of Haiku for a Season / Haiku per una stagione
Haiku for a Season / Haiku per una stagione
Andrea Zanzotto
University of Chicago Press, 2012

Andrea Zanzotto is one of the most important and acclaimed poets of postwar Italy. This collection of ninety-one pseudo-haiku in English and Italian—written over several months during 1984 and then revised slowly over the years—confirms his commitment to experimentation throughout his life. Haiku for a Season represents a multilevel experiment for Zanzotto: first, to compose poetry bilingually; and second, to write in a form foreign to Western poetry. The volume traces the life of a woman from youth to adulthood, using the seasons and the varying landscape as a mirror to reflect her growth and changing attitudes and perceptions. With a lifelong interest in the intersections of nature and culture, Zanzotto displays here his usual precise and surprising sense of the living world. These never-before-published original poems in English appear alongside their Italian versions—not strict translations but parallel texts that can be read separately or in conjunction with the originals. As a sequence of interlinked poems, Haiku for a Season reveals Zanzotto also as a master poet of minimalism. Zanzotto’s recent death is a blow to world poetry, and the publication of this book, the last that he approved in manuscript, will be an event in both the United States and in Italy.

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front cover of Selected Essays and Dialogues by Gianni Celati
Selected Essays and Dialogues by Gianni Celati
Adventures into the Errant Familiar
Edited and Translated by Patrick Barron
University College London, 2024
The first English-language collection of critical essays by Gianni Celati, one of Italy’s most important contemporary authors.

Selected Essays and Dialogues is a collection of translations of Italian essayist Gianni Celati’s theoretical and musing work from the late 1960s to the present. Its topics range from environmental perception and archaeological conceptions of historical knowledge to street theater, writing, photography, cinema, and translation. The book provides a framework of key literary, theoretical, and artistic movements of the past fifty years, as well as a guide for English-language readers to place Celati’s work in historical, cultural, and biographical contexts.

Celati’s fondness for the unexpected ordinary tempts readers to wander and become lost in the webs of his daring thoughts. Indeed, a genial adventurousness can be found within all of his writings collected here, driven by an affectionate and light-hearted engagement with the surrounding world. This collection offers a taste of his adventures of the mind and body, led by a lithe sensitivity not restricted to the so-called high arts or letters, but also very much engaged with the everyday lives, places, and tales we all constantly share.
 
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