In this keen examination of Alfredo de Palchi’s lyrical oeuvre, Giorgio Linguaglossa refers to de Palchi as the missing link in Italian poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. From page one of this study, de Palchi’s voice is in constant dialogue with the Italian poets of his time. Linguaglossa gives us a complete picture of the relationship between de Palchi’s asymptomatic creative paradigm and what was taking place around him. While the majority of de Palchi’s life was spent outside of Italy, he continued to engage with Italy in his poetry, in translating Italian poets into English and for close to fifty years as co-editor, with Sonia Raiziss, of Chelsea magazine, a biannual that published a significant number of translations of twentieth-century Italian poets. Through Chelsea magazine de Palchi also became a conduit, bringing Italian poetry to non-Italian-speaking poetry aficionados in the United States. It is especially his own verse, written outside the geocultural boundaries that we know as Italy, which makes this study by Giorgio Linguaglossa all the more important.

Written when Ms. Bortolani was fifteen years old, The Siege (L'assedio) is driven by a brazen, exuberant voice and a linguistic acrobatics not unlike that of the most celebrated European teen prodigy poet--Arthur Rimbaud. Phantasmagorical and surreal, the poems move us through the chameleon-shadings of lust and love. Ljuba Merlina Bortolani was born in Bologna in November 1980. She is the author of three poetic sequences. She is a student at the University of Bologna. Michael Palma is a world-renown, prize-winning translator of Italian poetry. His terza-rima translation of Dante's Inferno will be published by W.W. Norton in January 2002.

Text in Italian with English translation on facing pages; prefatory matter in English.

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Italian by Sonia Raiziss. THE SCORPIAN'S DARK DANCE is a collection of powerful short poems by the distinguished New York author and publisher, written when he was a young prisoner of the Fascists at the end of World War II. Includes a short introduction by the translator. "His harsh, unrelenting stance and his beautiful and disquieting imagery belong to one who draws in the dark while longing for the light."—World Literature Today "De Palchi masterfully creates and expands singularly intense metaphors that sometimes convey a stony, Dantesque harshness or else a transcendent Montalean complexity. There are glimpses of redemption and self-insight, but they occur only intermittently and are clearly hard-won."—Small Press

John Taylor's brilliant new book examines the work of many of the major poets who have deeply marked modern and contemporary European literature. Venturing far and wide from the France in which he has lived since the late 1970s, the polyglot writer-critic not only delves into the more widely translated literatures of Italy, Greece, Germany, and Austria, but also discovers impressive and overlooked work in Slovenia, Bosnia, Hungary, Finland, Norway, and the Netherlands in this book that ranges over nearly all of Europe, including Russia. While providing this stimulating and far-ranging critical panorama, Taylor brings to light key themes of European writing: the depth of everyday life, the quest of the "thing-in-itself," metaphysical aspiration and anxiety, the dialectics of negativity and affirmation, subjectivity and self-effacement, and uprootedness as a category that is as ontological as it is geographical, historical, political, or cultural. The book pays careful attention to the intersection of writing and history (or politics), as several poets featured here have faced the Second World War, the Holocaust, Communism, the fall of Communism, or the war in the former Yugoslavia. Taylor gives the work of renowned, upcoming, and still little-known poets a thorough look, all the while scrutiniing recent translations of their verse. He highlights several poets who are also masters of the prose poem. He includes a few novelists who have fashioned a particularly original kind of poetic prose, that stylistic category that has proved so difficult for critics to define. Into the Heart of European Poetry should be of immediate interest to any reader curious about the aesthetic and philosophical ideas underlying major trends of contemporary European writing. John Taylor has lived in France since 1977. A frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, Context, the Yale Review, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and the Antioch Review (in which he writes the “Poetry Today” column), he has introduced numerous European writers and poets to English readers, often for the first time. Some of his works include The Apocalypse Tapestries, a book of poetry and prose based on the tapestries in the Chateau of Angers, and Paths to Contemporary French Literature (Volumes 1 and 2).

Giorgio Strehler Directs Carlo Goldoni uses Giorgio Strehler’s Goldoni productions (and Arlecchino servitore di due padroni in particular) as a means to defining his directorial aesthetic. The book provides a framework for examining the director’s career that is expansive rather than restrictive, using Goldoni and Arlecchino servitore di due padroni as a through-line for Strehler’s fifty-year career at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano. This research defines Strehler’s multifaceted style and brings to light interrelationships among his various works, creating a base from which a variety of subsequent critical inquiries can be made. It also establishes Strehler’s identity within the larger scope of the Italian theatre as a whole. Finally, it creates the critical challenge of finding more expansive notions of directorial style and concept that unite diverse ideologies without delimiting our understanding of the director. Crucial to understanding Strehler’s work with Arlecchino servitore di due padroni is his consistent reinterpretation of the play, which received no less than five distinct productions during Strehler’s lengthy career. His repeated reworking of existing productions provides a baseline for examining what elements were maintained and what elements changed or evolved. The four key influences that defined Strehler’s aesthetic in his work with Arlecchino were commedia dell’Arte, Bertolt Brecht, “refractive theatricality” and Jacques Copeau. Through these productions, Strehler created a dialogue with his audience and helped change the reputation of Carlo Goldoni both in his own country and abroad.

Italian poetry of the last century is far from homogeneous: genres and movements have often been at odds with one another, engaging the economic, political, and social tensions of post-Unification Italy. The thirty-eight poets included in this anthology, some of whose poems are translated here for the first time, represent this literary diversity and competition: there are symbolists (Gabriele D'Annunzio), free-verse satirists (Gian Pietro Lucini), hermetic poets (Salvatore Quasimodo), feminist poets (Sibilla Aleramo), twilight poets (Sergio Corazzini), fragmentists (Camillo Sbarbaro), new lyricists (Eugenio Montale), neo-avant-gardists (Alfredo Giuliani), and neorealists (Pier Paolo Pasolini)—among many others.

Although the great French novelists of the last two centuries are widely read in America, there is a widespread notion that little of importance has happened in French literature since the heyday of Sartre, Camus, and the nouveau roman. Curious American readers seeking new, up-to-date information and analyses will find in Paths to Contemporary French Literature a stimulating and much-needed guide to the major currents of one of the worldas great literatures. This critical panorama of contemporary French literature introduces English-language readers to over fifty important writers and poets. Emphasizing authors who are admired by their peers (as opposed to those with overnight reputations), John Taylor offers a compelling insideras view.

An object of this critical remapping is Elvira Notari (1875-1946), Italy's first and most prolific woman filmmaker, whose documentary-style work on street life in Naples, a forerunner of neorealism, was popularly acclaimed in Italy and the United States until its suppression during the Fascist regime.