CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Selected Bibliography
Introduction
THE POEMS
Commentaries and Notes
The Italian poet Giosue Carducci (18151907) was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1906. He is remembered in Italy
as the country's foremost poet of the last half of the nineteenth
century, the voice and conscience of the nation in the final momentous
years of its struggle for independence and unity the culmination
of the Risorgimento and in the subsequent years of the Third
Italy. Although he is still studied in the schools and universities
of his country, he has been largely forgotten outside Italy.
Indeed, no editions or major translations of his poetry have appeared
in the English-speaking world for sixty-five years.
This selection of fifty-two of Carducci's finest poems, with facing
prose translations, introduction and a concluding section of commentaries,
undertakes to exhibit a broad selection of his work, including
some of his earlier polemical and political verses, the major
pieces which celebrate the Italian landscape, with their classical,
historical and autobiographical reminiscences, and the love-poetry
of both traditional and neo-hellenic inspiration. The anthology
opens with Carducci's most controversial poem A Satana,
and draws thereafter from the three major books of his verse:
Giambi ed Epodi (Iambics and Epodes), Rime nuove
(New Rhymes), and the Odi barbara (Barbarous
Odes); the latter including the greatest of his technical
achievements in unrhymed alcaic, sapphic and other classical metres.
David H. Higgins is Head of the Department of Italian at the University of Bristol.
272pp; (1994) cl 629 8 $59.95 / £35; pb 630 1 $28 / £13.95
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CONTENTS
Introduction THE POEMS Commentaries and Notes |
SOME COMMENTS BY REVIEWERS
"The editor clearly orientates the translations
towards the student who would otherwise have had considerable
difficulty with Carducci's many stylistic inversions and frequent
archaic forms of language." MLR
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See under Hispanic Classics