The first comprehensive anthology of modern Italian poetry, in a beautiful bilingual edition
More than a century has passed since F. T. Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto" slammed the door on the nineteenth century and trumpeted the arrival of modernity. Since then, against the backdrop of two world wars and many social upheavals, Italian poets have explored the possibilities of verse in a modern age, creating one of the great bodies of twentieth-century poetry.
Even before Marinetti, poets such as Giovanni Pascoli had begun to clear the weedy rhetoric and withered diction from the once-glorious but by then decadent grounds of Italian poetry. And their winter labors led to an extraordinary spring: Giuseppe Ungaretti's wartime distillations and Eugenio Montale's "astringent music"; Umberto Saba's song of himself and Salvatore Quasimodo's hermetic involutions. After World War II, new generations--including such marvelously diverse poets as Sandro Penna, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Amelia Rosselli, Vittorio Sereni, and Raffaello Baldini--extended the promise of the prewar era into our time.
Surprising and illuminating, "The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry" invites the reader to examine the works of these and other poets--seventy-three in all--in conversation with one another. Edited by the poet and translator Geoffrey Brock, these poems have been rendered into English by some of our finest English-language poets, including Charles Wright, Paul Muldoon, and many exciting younger voices.

The fifth winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize is Geoffrey Brock's "Weighing Light." From the glinting scales in a painting by Vermeer to the white lines that disappear beneath a headlight's beam, Mr. Brock's poems measure out the often elusive weights and distances of the known world, confronting the unruly powers that threaten his burnished surfaces. His acute observations of landscape and of the smallest gestures that pass between people give rise to affecting human dramas both stark and deeply felt. Once read, his keen perceptions all the more striking for the expertly cadenced music of his language and his supple use of poetic form will be long remembered.

Geoffrey Brock, whose translations have won him Poetry magazine's John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, finally does justice to these slim, concentrated verses in his English translation, alongside Giuseppe Ungaretti's Italian originals. Famed for his brevity, Ungaretti's early poems swing nimbly from the coarse matter of tram wires, alleyways, quails in bushes, and hotel landladies to the mystic shiver of pure abstraction.

Cesare Pavese was one of Italy's great post-war writers. His poetry was revolutionary--both artistically and politically--rejecting the verbal and philosophical constraints of tradition and utilizing direct, colloquial language. His subjects were peasants, hobos, and prostitutes, and this bilingual volume includes all the poetry Pavese ever published, including work originally deleted by Fascist censors. A landmark volume.

Cesare Pavese (1908-50) was a novelist, poet, and translator and a major literary figure in post-war Italy. He brought American influence to Italian literature through his translations. Pavese's flight from the Fascists and subsequent confinement were reflected in his writings, which dealt with social struggle and revealed his sympathy for the oppressed. He committed suicide at the height of his literary powers.

A Kage-an Series Book

'Words connect the visible track to the invisible thing ... like a fragile makeshift bridge cast across the void' With imagination and wit, Italo Calvino sought to define the virtues of the great literature of the past in order to shape the values of the future. His effervescent last works, left unfinished at his death, were the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, which he was due to deliver at Harvard in 1985-86. These surviving drafts explore the literary concepts closest to his heart: Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude and Visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth), in serious yet playful essays that reveal his debt to the comic strip and the folktale. This collection, now in a fluent and supple new translation, is a brilliant precis of a great writer whose legacy will endure through the millennium he addressed. Translated by Geoffrey Brock 'The book I give most to people is Six Memos for the Next Millennium' Ali Smith 'Wonderful . . . full of wit and erudition' Daily Telegraph

What are Kafka's stories about? Are they dreams? Allegories? Symbols? Things that happen every day? But where and when? In this remarkable book, Roberto Calasso sets out not to dispel the mystery but to let it be illuminated by its own light. With his unique vision, imagination, and intellectual acumen, Calasso attempts to enter the flow, the tortuous movement, the physiology of the stories to discover what they are meant to signify and to delve into the most basic question: Who is K.?

From the internationally acclaimed author of "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and "Ka: an utterly original, fascinating interpretation of the work of Franz Kafka that is simultaneously an unprecedented exploration into the mystery of Kafka himself.
What are Kafka's stories about? Are they dreams? Allegories? Symbols? Things that happen every day? But where and when? Countless answers have been offered, but the question still arouses feelings of acute uncertainty. Many solutions have been proposed, but the essential mystery remains intact. In this remarkable book, Roberto Calasso sets out not to dispel the mystery but to let it be illuminated by its own light. To that end, with his unique vision, imagination, and intellectual acumen, Calasso attempts to enter the flow, the tortuous movement, the physiology of the stories to discover what they are meant to signify and to delve into a puzzling question: why are K. and Josef K.-the protagonists of "The Castle and "The Trial-so radically different from any other characters in the history of the novel? So, in the end, "the most basic question along the way is: Who is K.?
The culmination of the author's lifelong fascination with Kafka, "K. is a book of significant literary importance, the fourth part in a work in progress of which the previous volumes are "The Ruin of Kasch, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, and "Ka.

"From the Hardcover edition.