Description
This is a beautiful and powerful bilingual collection of poems by one of Italy’s finest young poets. In a strong translation by Michael Daley, English-speaking readers can read poems covering politics, love, sex, and social justice. With an introduction by Jack Hirschman and a preface by Ivano Malcotti, along with the original Italian versions of the poems, this volume serves as a way of understanding modern Italian culture as well as Italian language.
San Francisco’s former Poet Laureate, Jack Hirschman, noted “the exquisite intimacy of many of her poems of love and despair,” as well as the “strength and resoluteness of her ‘civil’ or more directly political poems…. Daley’s translation captures Gazzino’s bitten-lip idiom, her implosive magmatic tension between ‘being-here’ and ‘being away.’ The work is strong, clear, passionate, and Gazzino knows how to develop an image. First published by Lietocolle in Como, Italy, this is a beautiful collection, and Pleasure Boat Studio is delighted to introduce her to American readers.
Lucia Gazzino is a young Italian poet who writes in her Friulan language as well as in Italian.
Testament
I cannot leave you my eyes,
eyes that find so much love in you,
neither these hands that would caress your skin
nor my lips that would drink in
the sweet liqueur of your words.
I cannot leave you my heart
nor my hair, cheeks, earlobes,
no gowns or jewels.
I leave you a place, a wind out of the North,
a sea, infinite, a perfume,
nocturnal.
I leave you only this trace of me.
Italian poet Ivano Malcotti –
“an organic diary of reflections that become reality in the full maturity of emancipation, in remembrance, in the amorous instinct. These are refined lyrics, extremely personal, with a sweet timbre – the lyrical mark of a great identity.”