Carducci: Selected Verse

The Italian poet Giosue Carducci (1815-1907) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1906. He is remembered in Italy as the country’s foremost poet of the last half of the nineteenth century, the voice and conscience of the nation in the final momentous years of its struggle for independence and unity - the culmination of the Risorgimento - and in the subsequent years of the Third Italy. Although he is still studied in the schools and universities of his country, he has been largely forgotten outside Italy. Indeed, no editions or major translations of his poetry have appeared in the English-speaking world for sixty-five years. This selection of fifty-two of Carducci’s finest poems, with facing prose translations, introduction and a concluding section of commentaries, undertakes to exhibit a broad selection of his work, including some of his earlier polemical and political verses, the major pieces which celebrate the Italian landscape, with their classical, historical and autobiographical reminiscences, and the love-poetry of both traditional and neo-hellenic inspiration. The anthology opens with Carducci’s most controversial poem A Satana, and draws thereafter from the three major books of his verse: Giambi ed Epodi (Iambics and Epodes), Rime nuove (New Rhymes), and the Odi barbara (Barbarous Odes); the latter including the greatest of his technical achievements in unrhymed alcaic, sapphic and other classical metres.