Modern Italian Poets

"An interesting and timely study of a key trend in contemporary Italian poetry translation, Modern Italian Poets sheds new light on the development of the quaderno di traduzioni." -- Francesca Billiani, Senior Lecturer in Italian, University of Manchester "The translation of poetry has been an important activity for a large number of modern and contemporary Italian poets, yet this activity has not received the attention it deserves. Jacob Blakesley's Modern Italian Poets demonstrates the existence of a vast literary body of work whose significance is so profound that it warrants redrawing the map of modern and contemporary Italian poetry." -- John Picchione, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, York University

Modern Italian Poets shows how the new genre shaped the poetic practice of the poet-translators who worked within it.

In 1948, the poet Eugenio Montale published his Quaderno di traduzioni and created an entirely new Italian literary genre, the “translation notebook.” The quaderni were the work of some of Italy’s foremost poets, and their translation anthologies proved fundamental for their aesthetic and cultural development.

Modern Italian Poets shows how the new genre shaped the poetic practice of the poet-translators who worked within it, including Giorgio Caproni, Giovanni Giudici, Edoardo Sanguineti, Franco Buffoni, and Nobel Prize-winner Eugenio Montale, displaying how the poet-translators used the quaderni to hone their poetic techniques, experiment with new poetic metres, and develop new theories of poetics.

In addition to detailed analyses of the work of these five authors, the book covers the development of the quaderno di traduzioni and its relationship to Western theories of translation, such as those of Walter Benjamin and Benedetto Croce. In an appendix, Modern Italian Poets also provides the first complete list of all translations and quaderni di traduzioni published by more than 150 Italian poet-translators.