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Giovanni Pascoli: O Little One and Selected Poems
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About Giovanni Pascoli: O Little One And Selected Poems
Product Description Pascoli stands in the doorway. He is both a last romantic and Italy’s first modern poet. Beloved for his poems of family and the nest, he is also one of the first voices of modern depth psychology. Steeped in the Italian landscape and drawn into the spell of little creatures, he catches the natural world with scientific accuracy, becoming one of our earliest ecological poets. A revolutionary who writes with emotion about the rural poor, he also reports on the first wave of Italian immigrants to the new world. This collection assembles Giovanni Pascoli’s central and prophetic study of the imagination, O Little One, an extensive selection of poems delineating his long career, and a late and previously untranslated essay on the poetry of dead languages. The translator’s introduction examines Pascoli’s place as a liminal figure, situated at the conjunction of multiple worlds, casting a visionary light on whatever he beholds. Review John Martone has managed to rediscover the poetry and prose poems of one of the great Italian poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Giovanni Pascoli. There’s such a deep plangency and nostalgia to be found here, resurrected for us in an American idiom which evokes, among others, William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley, skillfully embedded in the haiku-reinforced forms that all four poets so quietly and yet brilliantly employ. And yet for me there’s something more in Pascoli, something of the luminousness of the little child within each of us: that sense of awe and wonder, which the winds and storms of time do what they can to erase, but which these poets, singing (and weeping) a century apart, return Odysseus-like to us in poem after poem. Oh, that still faint, necessary music! How beautiful it is! And how restorative. — Paul Mariani John Martone offers anglophone readers an essential Pascoli. He renders Pascoli’s voice with an evocative sparseness that effectively captures the sense of sudden, precise sensory impressions against a nebulous, hazy horizon. These translations allow us to hear the echoes of Wordsworth while drawing out Pascoli’s modernity through renditions that resonate with imagism. “In the case of poetry, one has to draw close in order to hear it.” Martone brings Pascoli closer to us. — Maria Rosa Truglio Giovanni Pascoli “addresses the deepest part of himself” and in doing so addresses the nature of language. Here is a moral harmony; a manifesto for a poetry of common memory and dream. Pascoli, quite simply, names truth; while of the nineteenth century, he is utterly contemporary. There is much of timeless poetics here, something of Blake’s visionary innocence, something of Whitman’s self-contradictions, yet Pascoli has his own tragic sadness to reconcile: He is unique. In John Martone he has met his perfect translator. Martone matches Pascoli’s erudition and intelligent ordering. He brings us a clarity from the limpid and sometimes conflicting apparent simplicity of Pascoli’s work. O Little One is vital to everyone who loves poetry. — Gerry Loose Martone’s translations convey with grace the simplistic beauty of Pascoli’s verse, in both prose and poetry, and allow English-speaking readers to enter into his world. Most anyone with an interest in poetry and world literature would enjoy Martone’s translations, but I particularly recommend them to Italian American readers as a means of opening a window onto their cultural heritage. Pascoli’s works were written during the same historical period in which the great wave of Italian emigration to America began, and they give voice to the anguish and tensions of the times. The theme of home and family as symbolic places of refuge, scenes from Italian country life and its natural surroundings, reflections on death and grief, an exploration of the relationship between language — in dialectic, standard or classical form — and transcendent understanding, and, at the heart of O Little One, the relia
