Department of English

Celebrate International Poetry Day (Sept 30) by reading Taije Silverman's new translation of the major Italian poet, Giovanni Pascoli. Working with Marina Della Putta Johnston of the Italian Studies, Prof. Silverman has produced the first comprehensive translation of Pascoli's poetry in English, selecting poems from throughout his career. 

Copies can be purchased from Princeton University Press here: https://press.princeton.edu/titles/30388.html 

"This is a lyrical and learned introduction to one of modern Italy's essential poets. The quiet openness and aesthetic finesse of Pascoli's 'little' poems sound far truer to us today than the ringing odes of his near-contemporaries Carducci and D'Annunzio. It is Pascoli, in the end, who speaks to us most hauntingly and memorably. Silverman and Johnston have brought him wonderfully alive for contemporary readers."—Jonathan Galassi

"This sensitive translation makes accessible to a new audience of English-language readers a body of work that often has the beautiful, lucid simplicity and compelling complexity of haiku, while capturing the mysterious depths of loss, longing, and evil. This exquisitely crafted bilingual volume is a gift to all who cherish the renewal of perception and understanding of our shared humanity, which only the great poets, like Pascoli, can provide."—Rebecca West, University of Chicago

"What a marvelous book! Here at long last is a true rendering of the first modern in Italian poetry, a quiet foundational figure poised between centuries, a secret force akin to Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost. These translations of Giovanni Pascoli shine with the tears of things."—Edward Hirsch, author of Gabriel: A Poem