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This translation makes The Buffoons, the first female-authored comedy printed in Italy, available to Anglophone readers for the first time. Published in 1641, this burlesque play depicts the mismatched sexual desires of a prince and princess. Although set in northern Africa, the comedy satirizes the Florentine court of Grand Duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici, one of Costa’s several elite patrons. By featuring the clownish antics of an unconventional cast of dwarfs, hunchbacks, and buffoons, it reflects the bizarre appetites and grotesque entertainments of the day. Ribald puns and commedia dell’arte-inspired slapstick abound, presenting the reader with a comic alternative to decorous women’s writing in early modern Italy.

Hairston has constructed a full personal, cultural and literary biography for d’Aragona, using newly discovered letters, archival material of other kinds, and contemporary theory about gender in women’s writing. Footnotes establish the intricacy of Tullia’s intellectual networks and her courting of intellectuals in rhyme. Hairston includes poems written to d’Aragona, including Girolamo Muzio’s long pastoral, Tirrhenia. She addresses with tact the question of how sexual Tullia’s relationships were with her various interlocutors. At times, as she says, one just can’t know, but that the issue is much less important than the poems themselves. I agree wholeheartedly. This is the editor Tullia has been waiting for: an indefatigable researcher, a creative biographer, and a precise and appreciative literary critic.
—Ann Rosalind Jones
Esther Cloudman Dunn Professor of Comparative Literature, Smith College

The figure of Tullia d’Aragona has long fascinated readers as the prototype of the “honest courtesan”, a woman who successfully exploited her physical and intellectual charms to win the adoration and respect of the Italian cultural elite. With Julia Hairston’s richly annotated edition of her collected verse, the product of more than a decade of scholarship, d’Aragona finally comes into focus also as poet. She emerges in this volume as one of the most distinctive protagonists in a key transitional moment in Italian literary history, when the aristocratic tradition of Petrarchist lyric began to be reshaped and democratized by its encounter with print.
—Virginia Cox
Professor of Italian, New York University

In the Spanish-speaking world, Miguel Hernández is regarded as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century-equal in distinction to Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz. He has never received his just acclaim, however, in the English-speaking world, a victim of the artistic oppression exercised during the period of Francisco Franco's totalitarian regime. Determined to silence the writer Neruda fondly referred to as his "wonderful boy," Franco sentenced Hernández to death, citing as his crime only that he was "poet and soldier to the mother country." Despite the fact that complete and accurate versions of his work were difficult to obtain even in Spanish for nearly fifty years, Hernández went on to achieve legendary status.
Now, for the first time, Ted Genoways makes Hernández's extraordinary oeuvre available in an authoritative bilingual edition. Featuring some of the most tender and vigorous poetry on war, death, and social injustice written in the past century, nearly half of the poems in this volume appear in English for the first time, making it the most comprehensive bilingual collection of Hernández's work available. Arranged chronologically, The Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández presents Hernández's remarkable emotional range as well as his stylistic evolution from the Romantic shepherd poet to poet of the prison cell. Thorough annotations and introductory essays illuminate the biographical basis for many of Hernández's poems, while a foreword by Robert Bly and an afterword by Octavio Paz provide a striking frame for the work of this essential poet.

"What a victory it is to watch springing forth from our murky thicket of half-commercialized poetry the silver boar of Hernández's words-to see the world of paper part so as to allow the language tusks and shoulders to emerge, shining, pressed forward by his genius. This generous selection of Miguel Hernández's work, arranged, shepherded, and largely translated by Ted Genoways, is an immense gift for which all of us should be grateful."-from the Foreword by Robert Bly

"To gather Hernández's poetry in such a large volume is to bring one of the 20th century's most important poets to life again. Without Hernandez, the world community of poetry would not be what it is today. The Selected Poems must be read if vital poetry is to continue another 100 years, with Hernández's voice as a cherished example of why great poetry is timeless."—Ray González, Bloomsbury Review

"As Philip Levine write in The Kenyon Review, Hernández is 'one of the great talents of the century,' and this collection is a good place to discover (or rediscover) his moving verses."—Virginia Quarterly Review

"Vivid, often volatile imagery describes wrenching emotions and events in The Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández: A Bilingual Edition. . . . Raw, passionate, despairing and celebratory, these poems are a true discovery."—Publishers Weekly

"Arranged in three chronological sections, the poems presented are not the complete works, but they are a large and representative sampling of the best. This is certainly the most comprehensive bilingual edition of Hernández's poetry available. In addition to the poems, the editor includes eight illustrations, important prefatory materials, and a short list of references, and an epilogue by Octavio Paz."—Choice

A rich selection of the remarkably diverse and powerful verse of the legendary filmmaker

Most people outside Italy know Pier Paolo Pasolini for his films, many of which began as literary works—Arabian Nights, The Gospel According to Matthew, The Decameron, and The Canterbury Tales among them. What most people are not aware of is that he was primarily a poet, publishing nineteen books of poems during his lifetime, as well as a visual artist, novelist, playwright, and journalist. Half a dozen of these books have been excerpted and published in English over the years, but even if one were to read all of those, the wide range of poetic styles and subjects that occupied Pasolini during his lifetime would still elude the English-language reader.
           
For the first time, Anglophones will now be able to discover the many facets of this singular poet. Avoiding the tactics of the slim, idiosyncratic, and aesthetically or politically motivated volumes currently available in English, Stephen Sartarelli has chosen poems from every period of Pasolini’s poetic oeuvre. In doing so, he gives English-language readers a more complete picture of the poet, whose verse ranged from short lyrics to longer poems and extended sequences, and whose themes ran not only to the moral, spiritual, and social spheres but also to the aesthetic and sexual, for which he is most known in the United States today. This volume shows how central poetry was to Pasolini, no matter what else he was doing in his creative life, and how poetry informed all of his work from the visual arts to his political essays to his films. Pier Paolo Pasolini was “a poet of the cinema,” as James Ivory says in the book’s foreword, who “left a trove of words on paper that can live on as the fast-deteriorating images he created on celluloid cannot.”
           
This generous selection of poems will be welcomed by poetry lovers and film buffs alike and will be an event in American letters.

Milo De Angelis, born in 1951, is one of the most important living Italian poets. With this volume, Susan Stewart and Patrizio Ceccagnoli bring to English readers for the first time a facing-page edition of his most recent work: his book-length elegy, Theme of Farewell, and the subsequent poems of That Wandering in the Darkness of Courtyards. These two books form a sequence narrating the illness and premature death, in 2003, of the poet’s wife, the writer Giovanna Sicari, a celebrated poet in her own right; they also trace De Angelis’s turn from grief, through time, back to the world. Immediate, perceptive, and woven from the fabric of everyday life in contemporary Milan, the poems never depart from universal human emotions of despair and awakening. Throughout his long career, De Angelis has renewed lyric poetry with the sheer intensity of his forms and insights, and the volumes offered here have won some of the most important Italian literary awards, including the coveted Premio Viareggio.