Dark Room

Poetry. Translated from the Italian by Emanuel di Pasquale. "A discreet connoisseur of Italian poetry of this century will quickly see in Ruffilli's verses the continuity of a noble tradition, made of refined poverty, of contracted music, up to the extreme limit of inaudibility, which reaches its high point in the poetry of Giorgio Caproni; and he will think, then, of certain tangents, even thematic, between the present story in Camera oscura and the unforgettable story of Annina in Seme del piangere. But just as easy, and certainly owed, will be to watch how Ruffilli works on his verbal and sentimental material with a sort of tenacity and 'scientific' impassibility, which is not Caproni's regarding how the very stillness of the photographic image constitutes a 'moving' and formal correlative."—Giovanni Raboni, from his afterword

Born in 1949, Paolo Ruffilli attended the University of Bologna, where he studied modern literature. After a period of teaching high school, he became editor with the Milanese publisher Garzanti, and is presently the general editor of Le Edizioni del Leone in Venice. As an editor, he has not only supported contemporary poetry but also shown a scholarly interest in the Italian literature of the nineteenth century, preparing editions of the Operette Morali of Giacomo Leopardi, Ugo Foscolo's translations of Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey, and Le confessioni d'un italiano by the poet, novelist, and patriot Ippolito Nievo. Ruffilli has also written a biography of Nievo. He has published criticism in a number of periodicals, and is the regular literary critic of the Bolognese daily Il Resto del Carlino.