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About PIER PAOLO PASOLINI: POEMS
Product Description "Sex, death, political passion, these are the simple objects to which I give my elegiac heart" Winner of the first Renato Poggioli/William Weaver Award of PEN American Center Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975), who is best known in this country as an inspired filmmaker, was also the most outspoken and original Italian writer of his generation, the author of distinguished and controversial novels and plays, political and literary criticism, and, above all, poetry. His poems are widely considered the most important contribution to Italian literature since Montale and, along with the work of Brecht and Neruda, represent the most powerful political poetry of the century. This dual-language book presents his major poems as well as an autobiographical essay, which together make for an outstanding introduction to Pasolini's exceptional gifts as a poet. Review “Translating Pasolini is a formidable task, requiring of the translator what Pavese called una simpatia amorosa for the original. In the case of Pasolini, that means a translator with a good ear for the literary and the colloquial, a sense of the echoes and inversions of past poetry everywhere present (for despite his modernity, Pasolini was a committed renewer of the tradition), and the range for conveying startling tonal shifts, from intensely lyric evocation to blunt confession to high polemical anger. MacAfee has done his work with both responsibility and brilliance.” ―William Arrowsmith “Superb translations [of] one of the century's leading writers.... Pasolini may have burnt himself out at a stake of his own making--but this book of poems testifies to his fire's continuing light.” ―Stephen Kessler, Santa Cruz Express “This truly splendid translation, in a bi-lingual edition, contains Pier Paolo's most important poems, including ‘The Ashes of Gramsci' and ‘The Religion of My Time'.” ―Doug Ireland, LA Weekly “Translating Pasolini must have been a tremendous task... Norman MacAfee did remarkably well... This is a solid introduction to Italy's greatest poet since Montale. The realization of the greatness of Pasolini's poetry was slow in coming... now we can see for ourselves.” ―Andrei Codrescu, Baltimore Sun “Pasolini's poems are extremely beautiful and touching...the gold every true poet offers, the sense of real life as it is lived.” ―Atlanta Journal Constitution “Pasolini seems to me indisputably the most remarkable figure to have emerged in Italian arts and letters since the Second World War.... His poetry is an important part of his passionate, proud, historically vulnerable body of work, a work in and with history; and of the tragic itinerary of his sensibility.” ―Susan Sontag “The publication of a volume of translations by Norman MacAfee of Pasolini's best poems reminds us what an extraordinary man he was.... Of his copious writings, his poems seem most likely to endure ... translated now with clarity, ingenuity, and fidelity by Norman MacAfee.” ―Edmund White, NYT Book Review “Forceful, readable translations of brilliant, scorching poems.” ―Patriot Ledger “...heralded by the Times Literary Supplement in 1982 as one of the three most important poets of the twentieth century.” ―American Book Review (the two others being Antonin Artaud and Aimé Césaire) “Translated here by Norman MacAfee with remarkable diligence and style," (The New Criterion), "these are unnerving documents of self-division, self-condemnation, and self-exaltation.” ―Vernon Young, Washington Post Book World “He was a liberating force in Italian literature and film... Here is the unmediated voice, full of discouragement, sensual joy, unhappiness, idealism.” ―Los Angeles Times “…astounding depth and variety… The translations are extremely effective--readable, faithful to the originals, and sensitively alive in nuance, allusion, and musicality.” ―Choice “Norman MacAfee's translations are lean and fluent, and they make Pasolini's work--so dependent on the spoken and dialect--eminently moving
