An English Voice for Giorgio Bassani’s Poetry
In collaboration with
Primo Levi Center
Fondazione Giorgio Bassani
Presenting
The Collected Poems
(Agincourt Press, 2023)
by Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000)
Originally published as In rima e senza (1982)
Translated with an introduction and notes by
Roberta Antognini and Peter Robinson
The translators in conversation
Welcoming remarks by
Stefano Albertini, NYU
Luigi Ballerini, publisher
Paola Bassani, Fondazione Giorgio Bassani
For anglophone readers it has been possible for many years now to gain a good sense of Giorgio Bassani’s career as a novelist. At the heart of those fictions is The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, the book which cemented his international reputation, not least when discovered by an American audience thanks to Vittorio De Sica’s Oscar-winning film of 1970. However, the situation for his poetry has been very different, and until recently a reader without Italian has had little to go on to construct a full picture of Bassani’s creative achievement. The purpose of The Collected Poems, the first translation in English of his authorized poetic oeuvre, is to give readers access to the distinctly contrasting styles of poetry that he wrote early and late in life, and to allow readers of the fiction to place his prose within the framing publications of the early and late collections of poems.
The significance of poetry in Bassani’s life and literary formation shows in the ways his most famous novel revisits and elaborates the atmosphere and particular moments evoked in his early poems. Composed during and immediately after the Second World War, evoking the experiences of the Jewish community in Ferrara under the racial laws, and including his arrest and imprisonment for anti-fascist activities, the compactly rhymed early poetry explores the situations he will later develop in his fiction. The later poems, unrhymed, in expansive free verse, and written after the last of his novels, revisit and review the entire life and career of an established man of letters.
In bringing together both these different seasons of his lyric impulse, Bassani didn’t so much offer a transition from an outmoded style committed to the institutions of time-honored poetic formality to one superficially freed from those constraints, as rather invite readers to recognize the co-dependence of such ways of composing verse. In doing so, Bassani’s poetry summons us to open ourselves to the full range of the art’s possibilities and, as both readers and writers, to ourselves take up and carry them forward.
Giorgio Bassani was born in Ferrara in Emilia Romagna, Italy, in 1916 and died in Rome in 2000.
The Collected Poems of Giorgio Bassani is available now both in paper and ebook form, through Amazon, and Agincourt Press. For more information please visit agincourtbooks.com