ABSTRACT
In English-speaking countries, the poetry of Mario Luzi (1914-2005) has been present in a few translations but still remains insufficiently known. More than thirty years ago, the translator I. L. Solomon pioneered by bringing out In the Dark Body of Metamorphosis and Other Poems (1975), a selection that was later complemented in Ireland by Catherine O’Brien’s After So Many Years: Selected Poems (1990). Luigi Bonaffini then rendered Per il battesimo dei nostri frammenti (1985) and Frasi e incisi di un canto salutare (1990), two major books that were published in English by Guernica in 1992 and 1999. This was a promising start, but in comparison, in France where I am writing this, fifteen books by Luzi have appeared; that is, most of his poetry, several of his luminous essays, his play Libro di Ipazia (1993), which stages the violent transformation of paganism and Neo-Platonic thought into Christianity, and a version of Trame (1982), his collection of elegant, gently moving evocations, diary-like jottings, brief reminiscences, and travel narratives. This volume offers excellent examples of “short prose,” that fertile, multifaceted genre—as opposed to the comparatively circumscribed “short story”—in which contemporary European poets and writers also often express themselves.
