riddle

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, 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.

Antonio Malatesti (1610 – 1672) was a Florentine poet. His collection of riddles, Una Corona di Enigmi, was published in 1640. La Tina, a sequence of bawdy rustic sonnets, was dedicated to John Milton and presented to him in manuscript; a new edition, edited from this text by Davide Messina, was published in 2014. Malatesti’s later verse was collected in the posthumous Brindisi dei Ciclopi (1673).