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.

Luis Gómez’s Floods of the Tiber now in English

The Tiber River winds through the center of Rome. In the 16th century, the river was fundamental to the city’s life, providing water supply for drinking, washing, and industrial uses, as well as local fishing. Its rapid current powered Rome’s grain mills, which ground the flour that was the basis of its food supply. The Tiber was also the depository for tons of sewage and other refuse that the city generated daily. Yet, just as the river supported Rome’s life, it also threatened it. 

Since antiquity, the Tiber had flooded periodically, often with devastating consequences. With the city’s growing population clustered in the low-lying flood plain near the riverbanks and the increasing severity of events due to climate change, the Tiber flood of October 8, 1530 was catastrophic. It was also a bitter sequel to the traumatic Sack of Rome of May 1527.

Luis Gómez’s The Floods of the Tiber of 1531 was motivated and informed by his own experience of this disaster. It bears eloquent witness to how he used his humanist methods and scholarship to cope with personal and community crisis. Gómez provides an eyewitness account of this major environmental disaster and an example of how contemporaries analyzed the causes and consequences of such events. 

This translation by Chiara Bariviera, Pamela O. Long, and William L. North is a collective effort of different expertises ranging from Roman archaeology and topography to late ancient, medieval, and early modern history of science, technology, urbanism, and culture. 

The editors have produced a clear, accurate, and readable English version of the original 1531 Latin edition — here also transcribed in full for the first time — accompanied by an informative introduction, expert annotations, and comprehensive bibliography.

176 pages, 17 illustrations, introduction,
notes, bibliography, index.

 

Carolina Invernizio’s The Modern Sinner Published

 

Italica Press is happy to announce the next title in our Italian Crime Writers Series. 

Carolina Invernizio’s The Modern Sinner opens with a crime that will haunt the narrative and its characters beyond the last page. Invernizio creates the aristocratic femme fatale and worldly seductress named Sultana, who plays with men, bewitching them onto paths of dissolution and betrayal. Invernizio’s men are too frail to escape her or too unaware to notice her deviousness. Husbands and lovers become victims and pawns to her charms. 

As Sultana’s arch-nemesis, Invernizio invents a vengeance-seeking country girl, Anna Maria, who weaves a dangerous web to entrap her prey — a web dangerous for herself as well as for everyone else involved. 

One of the earliest examples of the serialized female crime novel, The Modern Sinner is a masterpiece of the genre. Its twists and turns entrance from chapter to chapter as the reader follows the shifting fates of two women engaged in mortal combat, each one hiding her calculations and objectives. 

Translated from the Italian, with an introduction, by Andrew Edwards.

Introduction. 258 pages.

A New Title in Italica's Italian Crime Writers Series

Contemporary Sicilian Poetry published.

Italica Press is happy to announce the publication of a new anthology of Sicilian poets. Contemporary Sicilian Poetry: A Multilingual Anthology spans six generations of poets born in Sicily beginning in the 1940s. Fifty-five authors, many still living and working there, are represented from a wide variety of regions, some writing in Sicilian and others writing primarily in Italian. 

Ana Ilievska and Pietro Russo have selected the poets and characteristic examples of their work. The translations from Italian to English by Ana Ilievska are presented on facing pages. Poems in Sicilian include an Italian version below the Sicilian text. 

In his introduction to the volume, Antonio Sichera, professor of Contemporary Italian Literature at the University of Catania, asks “whether there really is such a category as contemporary Sicilian poetry.” 

The editors answer this question affirmatively. The poets in this anthology share a flow of verse that moves through lyrical eruptions and layers of silence. Under these, if one listens well, one can sense an energy that breaks into the fabric of everyday life. 

Foreword, introduction, notes, appendices.

Multilingual Sicilian/Italian/English poetry. 492 pp. 

 

Deledda’s Modernist Masterpiece now in English Translation

Italica Press continues it publication of the works of Nobel Prize winner Grazia Deledda with The Dance of the Necklace, translated with an introduction by May Ann Frese Witt and Martha Witt.

In The Dance of the Necklace, Grazia Deledda moves away from the countryside of her native Sardinia to create a classically modern, urban narrative. Writing in a more spare, experimental style, she uncovers the “vain anguish of our strongest passions: love, ambition, and the instinct to appear more than what we are.” 

A pearl necklace symbolizes the “dance” of jealousy, greed, and love, both erotic and familial, which unites and divides the three main characters: an aunt and her niece who share the same name and a young count seeking to regain his family’s bartered string of pearls. 

An innocent deception turns on itself to explore the nature of the double and the mask: two topoi of modernity. Like Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, and Annie Ernaux, Deledda delves into what it means to be a woman, alone and aging, living in a world where she is increasingly unwanted and invisible despite her lingering desires. 

According to the critic Margherita Heyer-Caput,the novel is one of Deledda’s “most conscious and disquieting expressions of modernity.” It challenges the labels often applied to this writer and overturns established critical categories to question margin–center hierarchies applied to her work. The Dance of the Necklace is a remarkable and rare example of Deledda’s modernism.

First English translation of La Danza della Collana (1924), with an introduction, by Mary Ann Frese Witt and Martha Witt.

Introduction, notes, bibliography.
124 pages.

 

Two fine new reviews

We’re happy to share with you fine new reviews of two of our titles. 

The first is of The Sermons and Liturgy of St. James, edited by Thomas F. Coffey and Maryjane Dunn. Kyle C. Lincoln’s take appears in the February 2023 edition of The Medieval Review. We have reposed it here.

The second is Salvatore Pappalardo’s appreciation of Giovanni Pascoli’s Convivial Poems, translated and edited by James Ackhurst and Elena Borelli, in the February 27, 2023 issue of Reading in Translation. We have reposted this review here.