italian

Giacomo Leopardi

Giacomo Leopardi (1798 – 1837), poet, translator, essayist, and philosopher, is considered one of the greatest Italian poets, together with Dante and Petrarch. He grew up in the small town of Recanati, a conservative backwater in Italy’s Marche region. His parents were reactionary nobility. His mother was cold, stingy, and committed to not giving Leopardi any money. Besides having squandered much of the family fortune on gambling, his father had spent considerable sums amassing an enormous library of some 20,000 volumes.

 

Wendy Sloan

Wendy Sloan practiced labor law with the firm of Hall & Sloan before returning to poetry. Her work has been published in journals including Measure, Mezzo Cammin, The Raintown Review, Blue Unicorn, Big City Lit and Umbrella. Sloan’s translations have appeared, or are forthcoming, in The Chimaera and Measure. She was a finalist in the 2006 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award Competition.

 

 

Fosildo Mirtunzio (Pseudonym)

Fosildo Mirtunzio was the pseudonymous and otherwise unknown author of Veglie auttunnali [Autumnal Vigils], published in Venice in 1796. The translations of his two poems in this issue, as well as the two from Malatesti, will appear in the forthcoming anthology Dancing with the Sphinx: Riddle Poems, edited by Kate Light and Kathrine Varnes.

 

 

Giovanni Raboni

Giovanni Raboni, born in Milan in 1932, worked as an editor and critic. His status as perhaps the greatest Italian poet of his generation is attested to by the inclusion of his complete poems, L’opera poetica (2006), in the prestigious Meridiani series of standard Italian authors. He also published several volumes of critical essays, as well as translations of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal and Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, among many others. He died in September 2004.

 

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