Pascoli’s Convivial Poems now in dual-language translation

Italica Press is pleased to announce the publication of a new dual-language edition of Giovanni Pascoli’s Convivial Poems, translated by Elena Borelli and James Ackhurst.

Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912) is renowned as one of the founders of modern Italian poetry. Embodying the Zeitgeist of fin-de-siècle Italy, his works are inspired by French Symbolism and Decadentism. They also draw on the classical tradition so alive in Italian culture. His unique poetic voice is filled with traditional metrical forms, an uncanny use of onomatopoeic language, and a multilingual vocabulary. He fills his depiction of nature with haunting images and a disquieting sensitivity. 

Convivial Poems (Poemi Conviviali) is named for Il Convito, the literary journal where these poems first appeared. The collection represents one of Pascoli’s highest achievements. Like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and contemporary post-modernist works, it revisits the classical world to draw new symbols for the modern condition. 

Convivial Poems consists of twenty poems, with facing Italian and English, each devoted to a classical figure, fictional or historical. Ulysses, Helen of Troy, and Alexander the Great, among others, are the protagonists of these stories, but they are also signifiers for themes such as desire and the quest for identity in a modern universe deprived of God. Exquisitely written in a language that at times replicates the forms of Latin and Greek, these poems encode the past into the present and blend the old and the new in a vibrant modernist style.

“One of the greatest poets of all times.” — Seamus Heaney

Introduction, notes, glossary, 
dual-language poetry. 332 pp.

Musto, Writing Southern Italy, New Revised Edition

Italica Press is pleased to announce the publication of the second, revised edition of Ronald G. Musto’s Writing Southern Italy before the Renaissance. This is the first comprehensive book in English to examine the works of trecento historians of the Mezzogiorno. It introduces these writers, their lives, works, sources, language choices, narrative communities and strategies, and their styles and forms. 

Musto brings to bear current methodological and theoretical frameworks to develop this analysis. Central to his examination are the role of trecento visual language and the impact of fictional forms on this historiography. He traces the fine line between historia and fabula and the ability of trecento writers to absorb and utilize the symbolic forms deployed by such artists as Giotto, Lorenzetti and Francesco da Barberino and such romances as Meliadus, the Contesse d’Anjou and Constance. 

To illustrate and test these analyses, Musto offers case studies examining rituals of punishment and prison dialogues. He traces the development of a grand narrative — the black legend of the Angevins — through Petrarch, Villani, Boccaccio and Gravina. A final chapter compares trecento historiography to that of the southern humanists.

This second, revised edition is published by special arrangement with Routledge. It presents revised text; revised and updated notes; a chronology of persons and events; and a complete, updated and comprehensive bibliography. It also incorporates selected new source materials and secondary research published since that first edition. For consistency of reference, all numbering of chapters, subsections, annotation and pagination remain the same as in the hardcover edition. 

Italian Crime Writers

We’re happy to say that our new Italian Crime Writers Series continues to grow and has started to receive some nice reviews. 

A Conspiracy of Talkers, by Gaetano Savatteri, gets a fine review by Andrew and Suzanne Edwards in the 10 September 2021 issue of Times of Sicily. 

Agony, by Federico De Roberto, is reviewed by David Hebblethwaite in the August 22, 2021 issue of David’s Book World. 

The first volume in the series, Quo Vadis, Baby?, by Grazia Verasani, has already received high praise by Jeanne Bonner in the December 2018 issue of Three Percent.

All these titles are available in hardcover, paperback, and digital editions, at very reasonable prices. Please investigate!

Catalog 59 Now Online

Our Italica Press Catalog 59, for Summer 2021, is now available and ready for download. It contains eleven new and recently published titles, plus our complete backlist.

As we emerge from an extended year of Covid lockdowns, this new season offers a rich selection of medieval and Renaissance texts, history, and modern Italian fiction. We’ve also now completed two ongoing series and have launched a new one.

We are pleased to announce the publication of several important new medieval and Renaissance titles. The first, a new volume in our Studies in Art & History, is Irving Lavin’s The Art of Commemoration in the Renaissance, his Slade Lectures at Oxford, newly edited by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin.

Catherine M. Jones and William W. Kibler offer the first modern English translation of Huon of Bordeaux, a perennial favorite since its first appearance in the thirteenth century as a French chanson de geste. 

We are also very pleased to present James A. Palmer’s first complete English translation of The Chronicle of an Anonymous Roman: Rome, Italy, and Latin Christendom, c.1325–1360. Available previously only in partial versions focusing on Cola di Rienzo, the Anonimo Romano’s work is now published in its entirety with introduction, notes, index, and bibliography.

The next two volumes in our Documentary History of Naples complete that series. Rabun M. Taylor presents Ancient Naples: A Documentary History: Origins to c.350 CE, the first comprehensive survey of ancient Naples in the English language, tracing the history of the city from its origins into late antiquity. 

Charlotte Nichols & James H. Mc Gregor’s Renaissance Naples: A Documentary History, 1400–1600 offers the first English-language collection of sources to treat the city of Naples from the end of the medieval into the early modern period.

Thomas F. Coffey and Maryjane Dunn have completed the first English translation of The Sermons and Liturgy of Saint James: Book I of the Liber Sancti Jacobi. This is the fifth and final of a series publishing modern English translations of and commentary on the Codex Calixtinus in our Compostela Project.

Kiril Petkov brings us another important Mediterranean text with his From Cyprus to Lepanto, an annotated translation of the History of Giovanni Pietro Contarini on the battle of Lepanto in 1571 and its contexts. 

Finally, we’ve published four new titles in our Modern Italian Fiction series. The first is New Italian Voices, translated and edited by Cinzia Sartini Blum and Deborah L. Contrada. This major new collection includes accomplished, award-winning Italian writers from India and Syria, Eastern Europe, North and sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Italy.

Ivy, by Nobel Prize winning novelist Grazia Deledda, has been translated from the Italian, with introduction, by Mary Ann Frese Witt and Martha Witt. It is part of our ongoing project to publish Deledda’s corpus.

The next two works are part of our new series of Italian Crime Writers. The first is Agony, the first English-language translation, by Andrew Edwards, of Federico De Roberto’s Spasimo, a psychological-detective novel set in 19th-century Lausanne. De Roberto, a master of verismo, is celebrated today for his acute political, social, and psychological insights. 

The second moves to the closing days of World War II in Sicily with A Conspiracy of Talkers by Gaetano Savatteri, translated by Steve Eaton. American Lieutenant Benjamin Adano investigates some missing U.S. Army trucks, while the Carabinieri craft a conspiracy to implicate an innocent man for a mayor’s murder and to protect the dead man’s enemies. 

 

Huon of Bordeaux published

We are pleased to announce the publication of Huon of Bordeaux in its first modern English translation by Catherine M. Jones and William W. Kibler.

The adventures of Huon of Bordeaux have been perennial favorites since their first appearance in the thirteenth century as a French chanson de geste. Within decades there were spin-offs and a prequel. The story was reprinted, popularized, and translated from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. It became a staple of children’s literature as well as the basis for theatrical and operatic works. By the twentieth century, it had become the inspiration for fantasy writers.

Jones and Kibler’s verse translation sings with grace, humor, and wit. For both teaching and for pure literary enjoyment, this first modern English translation of Huon of Bordeaux will be a major complement to the corpus of medieval French epic literature. 

“Huon of Bordeaux is on a much higher level. We do not feel that it is simply being made up out of the author’s head. It has its roots in legend and folklore, without which it is hard for romance to have the necessary solidity.” 

— C. S. Lewis

First modern English translation.
Introduction, notes, bibliography, 
glossary, and list of characters.
354 pp.