BOOKS
Poetry and Translations
BRIEF HOMAGE TO PLUTO
AND OTHER POEMS BY FABIO PUSTERLA
Princeton University Press 2023
Lockert Library of Translation
2019 Raiziss / de Palchi Award
For the past four decades, acclaimed poet, essayist, and translator Fabio Pusterla has extended the tradition of twentieth-century Italian poetry from his perch on the border between Switzerland and Italy. A citizen of both countries, with one foot in the province of Como and the other in Lugano, Pusterla blurs the traditional boundaries between country and city, the living and the dead, individual and collective memory, self and others. “Hell,” he writes in the title poem of this selection, “is not being others.”
Pusterla lives and breathes in these new translations by award-winning poet Will Schutt. In the delicate play of sound textures, in the sinuous syntax and natural diction, the poems create a solid sense of place—mountains, lakes, streams, villages, occasionally an urban tableau. They move from Rilkean meditations to historical and sociological narratives, wounded by Italy’s past and vicious present. Pusterla doesn’t sound like derivative late-twentieth-century Montale or Pasolini: his voice is entirely his own—authentic and passionate.
MY LIFE, I LAPPED IT UP: SELECTED POEMS OF EDOARDO SANGUINETI
Oberlin College Press 2018
FIELD Translation Series
UPNE Indiebound Powells Amazon
2016 NEA Translation Fellowship
2016 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant
My Life, I Lapped It Up is the first comprehensive English translation of one of postwar Italy’s most important poets.
Edoardo Sanguineti (1930-2010) is best known as an influential member of the Italian intellectual avant-garde that rose to prominence in the 1960s. During his 60-year career, he published more than 20 volumes of poetry, as well as librettos, novels, plays, books of literary and social criticism, and translations.
This collection highlights his most psychologically probing and approachable poems, featuring work from his mid and late career.
WESTERLY
Yale University Press 2013
Yale University Press 2013
Yale Series of Younger Poets
From the Judge's Foreword:
"Will Schutt's Westerly takes on nothing less than, on the one hand, the ways in which we, the living, both late and soon, make our stumbling way westward, mostly oblivious to the fact of mortality and, on the other hand, how the dead make their resonant way back to us, sometimes as memory, sometimes as guide directing us toward and through the inevitable. . . . This is a book of uncommon wisdom. . . . Its poems sustain me. They give me hope - which may very well be, among gifts, the one we need most."
—Carl Phillips
"Everything in [Westerly] heralds a seriously important career."
—Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)
THE BREAKING OF A WAVE
BY FABIO GENOVESI
Europa Editions 2017
Shortlisted for the 2018 ALTA Italian Prose in Translation Award
A young girl struggles with her beloved brother's accidental death, her mother's depression, and fitting in at school in Fabio Genovesi's touching, funny, and imaginative new novel. Thirteen-year-old Luna lives in a small town on the coast of Tuscany. She is smart and funny. When her beloved brother Luca drowns in a surfing accident, Luna's mother retreats into herself. At school, stricken by her loss yet determined to carry on, Luna makes a new friend and ally, the eccentric Zot, a boy from Chernobyl. Luna believes that Luca still speaks to her through a whale bone washed up on the nearby shore. Luna's fantasies clash with the lies–even the well-intentioned ones—of the adult world in this touching, vibrant novel by the author of Live Bait. Luna is an unforgettable character—vivid, stubborn, highly imaginative, determined to become her own person.
STARTING FROM SCRATCH:
THE LIFE-CHANGING LESSONS OF AENEAS BY ANDREA MARCOLONGO
In times of peace and prosperity, one can turn to Homer to learn valuable life lessons, to experience the thrills and terrors of war, and to read about hair-raising adventures in distant lands. But when things do not go as planned, when we unexpectedly find ourselves at the center of an epoch-defining upheaval, then, writes Andrea Marcolongo, we must look to Virgil’s Aeneas for an example of adaptability and resilience.
In Marcolongo’s fresh, nuanced portrayal, Virgil’s Aeneas emerges as a multiform, deeply human hero, striking in his vulnerability and capacity for empathy. His journey of rebirth and rebuilding, from the ruins of Troy to the shores of Italy, teaches us that when all seems lost, with hope, perseverance, and a little bit of luck, we can seek and find new beginnings.