Pascoli’s Tamarisks Published

Italica Press is happy to announce the publication of Giovanni Pascoli's Tamarisks, translated by Piero Garofalo. 

Tamarisks (Myricae) is Giovanni Pascoli’s first major collection of verse. Many of its poems center on manifestations of the rural. Nature is at once an interpretation and interpolation of humanity. These compositions explore the countryside, experience the seasons and their alternation, relate the rhythms of agrarian labor, seek the blooming flower, spy the secluded nest. The collection draws on everyday objects, the changing landscape, the Anthropocene, the disenfranchised, and the natural world to explore humanity’s relationship to nature and to the modern world. 

Tamarisks is a liminal text, rooted in the classical lyrical tradition. It heralded the innovations and experimentation of the avant-garde of the early twentieth century. In breaking with the past and articulating a new poetic language, it is a foundational statement for modern Italian poetry. Tamarisks’ poems and sections develop an internal dialogue that reflects the mediation between the poetic voice and external reality. Pascoli’s poetry is a single vast meditation that explores possibilities by engaging in diverse poetic strategies contemporaneously. The lowly tamarisk, at once humble and noble, is always poetry.

This publication joins Italica Press’s already published translation of Pascoli’s Convivial Poems.

Introduction, bibliography, first-line index, and notes, 330 pages.

New Reviews

We’ve recently had reviews of two of our titles that we’ve found especially interesting.

The first is Lorenzo Miletti’s review in Latomus of Rabun Taylor’s Ancient Naples: A Documentary History. Origins to c. 350 CE. He has high praise for the most recently published volume in our Documentary History of Naples series. Miletti lauds Taylor’s research and the scope of his coverage, his command of the written sources and of the most recent archaeological findings, and his ability to synthesize and interpret these for a broad audience of both specialists and more general readers. The review notes the volume’s up-to-date appeal for both an Anglophone and a wider Italian and international audience. Miletti concludes his review with some suggestions for a larger format, color-illustrated edition. Stay tuned.…

The second is Norman Jope’s piece in the latest Tears in the Fence on Ana Ilievska’s and Pietro Russo’s Contemporary Sicilian Poetry: A Multilingual Anthology. Jope has many very good things to say about the volume, its selection of authors and poems, and Ana Ilievska’s translations. He also raises the question of whether such a collection should reflect the universal themes raised by this wide array of authors — and foregrounded by the editors — or focus more closely on specific times, places, and contexts. These are interesting reflections, from a decidedly Anglophone perspective. 

Please have a look at both reviews.

View a YouTube Video on The Priest’s Hat

View a YouTube video by translator Steve Eaton on Verbal Exchange, “The Priest’s Hat: The Story Behind Italy's First Crime Novel,”  

Steve discusses the novel and author, the actual historical event on which De Marchi based this novel, and the sensational reaction of Italian society to this murder. Please have a look at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pXAXDS-LxU

New Reviews of Pascoli’s Convivial Poems

Elena Borelli & James Ackhurst’s new translation of Giovanni Pascoli’s Convivial Poems has gotten quite a lot of good critical attention this season, with reviews in Reading in Translation, London Grip, Gradiva, and Annali d’Italianistica.

Please have a look at: http://www.italicapress.com/index556.html

 

De Marchi’s The Priest's Hat Published

 

We’re please try announce the publication of The Priest’s Hat by Emilio De Marchi, translated by Steve Eaton & Cinzia Russi. This is the newest title in our Italian Crime Writers Series. 

This suspenseful, moving, and darkly ironic tale loosely based on Count Alessandro Faella’s murder of the priest Virgilio Costa in Imola in 1881. Against the background of late nineteenth-century Naples, the novel brings us the meltdown of an aging playboy, Carlo Coriolano, the last baron of a once-wealthy and powerful clan. 

U barone has squandered his inheritance and now can’t support his extravagant tastes. He’s been banned from his club and depends on his loyal, long-suffering housekeeper for pocket change. And if he doesn’t repay an old loan, he’ll soon be in jail. His solution is to lure to his crumbling, mortgaged ancestral estate a greedy old priest, murder him, and then take possession of the priest’s considerable riches. Of course, it all goes wrong, and the priest’s hat takes us through a mirrored maze of guilt and self-deception as the baron attempts to maintain his equanimity and social position.

A precursor of the Italian giallo genre, The Priest’s Hat was first published in 1887 in installments. Echoing the works of Dostoyevsky and Dickens, De Marchi intended this novel as an accessible yet literate exposé of contemporary Italian society with its culture of gossip, rumor, and superstition; of powerful gangs and clergy; of misleading new philosophies; a frivolous, inept, and corrupt media; and an inequitable justice system.