Collected Poems

Giorgio Bassani's COLLECTED POEMS offers anglophone readers for the first time the opportunity to experience his full poetic range.

First published in 1982, In rima e senza brought together all the poetry Giorgio Bassani wished to preserve. THE COLLECTED POEMS offers anglophone readers for the first time the opportunity to experience his full poetic range. Not only do Bassani's early poems foreshadow key themes of the fiction, such as his classic 'The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,' but his later free verse scrutinizes with a startling directness the life and work of this major Italian writer.

"Everything is connected in Giorgio Bassani's work, everything articulated through the first verses in 'Poor Lovers' Stories' to the last in 'Epitaph and In Great Secret' and through his entire lyrical and narrative production. And yet, there are twists, major fractures, starting with perhaps the most critical and poignant of all, the author's last production in verse, in which Bassani most likely reaches the apex of his artistic expression [...] Welcome back to life, dear Father, welcome back among us!"--Paola Bassani, from the Foreword

Poetry. Jewish Studies.

Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000), among Italy's most important twentieth-century novelists and poets, grew up in Ferrara under fascism, the son of upper-middle-class Jewish parents. He participated in the anti-fascist resistance, then lived and worked for most of his life in Rome. Alongside his many literary activities, he was a founder and president of Italia Nostra, the environmental and cultural association.

Peter Robinson is an award-winning British poet and Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading.

Roberta Antognini is originally from Canton Ticino in Switzerland, where she currently resides, and has a Laurea in the history of Italian language from the Università Cattolica di Milano, Italy, and a PhD in Italian literature from New York University. She is Associate Professor Emerita of Italian Studies at Vassar College, where she taught for over twenty years, and a member of the Committee of the Fondazione Bassani. Her research interests lie in the Middle Ages, Renaissance and twentieth-century Italian literature, and literary translation. She is the author of a monograph on Petrarch's letters, Il progetto autobiografico delle Familiares di Petrarca (LED, 2008), and co-editor of the collection of essays Poscritto a Giorgio Bassani (LED, 2012). In collaboration with Deborah Woodard, she has translated into English Amelia Rosselli's collections Hospital Series (New Directions, 2015) and Obtuse Diary (Entre Ríos Books, 2018). After retiring she has continued to read and write and, above all, translate poetry. Presently she is co-translating with Deborah Woodard another collection by Amelia Rosselli, Documento (Document), and with Peter Robinson Giorgio Bassani's poems, In rima e senza (In Rhyme And Without) (Agincourt Press, forthcoming 2023).