A port­fo­lio of recent trans­la­tions of mine from the Ital­ian is fea­tured in the spe­cial Trans­la­tion issue of Cam­bridge Lit­er­ary Review.

The selec­tion is titled “Four Gen­ovese Poets,” and con­tains an excerpt from Labor­in­tus by Edoardo San­guineti, the late lumi­nary of the neo-avant-garde in Italy, and shorter pieces from younger poets who bear the stamp of his influ­ence: Piero Cad­e­mar­tori, Paolo Gen­tilu­omo and Mar­cello Frix­ione. (My attempt to invoke the Cam­bridge School in a short note therein may be strained but is apt.)

The timing of these pub­li­ca­tions bears a remark. I began trans­lat­ing Prof. Sanguineti’s poetry and essays sev­eral years ago but never had the con­fi­dence to write him for per­mis­sion to place them in pub­li­ca­tion. I only did so ear­lier this year, and received a gen­er­ous note sup­port­ing my work. I placed poems of his in CLR and Lana Turner over the past sev­eral months, but he never got to see them. Word came that he passed away on May 18. He suf­fered from ill health for years, and suc­cumbed to inter­nal injuries fol­low­ing a surgery. It is a blow to the lit­er­ary world, and one that I antic­i­pate will be felt more the more his work is read and studied.