The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto - (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Andrea Zanzotto is widely considered Italy's most influential living poet. The first comprehensive collection in thirty years to translate this master European poet for an English-speaking audience, The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto includes the very best poems from fourteen of his major books of verse and a selection of thirteen essays that helps illuminate themes in his poetry as well as elucidate key theoretical underpinnings of his thought. Assembled with the collaboration of Zanzotto himself and featuring a critical introduction, thorough annotations, and a generous selection of photographs and art, this volume brings an Italian master to vivid life for American readers.

"Now, in [this book], American readers can get a just sense of [Zanzotto's] true range and extraordinary originality."--Eric Ormsby, New York Sun

"What I love here is the sense of a voice directly speaking. Throughout these translations, indeed from early to late, the great achievement seems to be the way they achieve a sense of urgent address."--Eamon Grennan, American Poet

Review Quotes

"Now, in The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto: A Bilingual Edition, American readers can get a just sense of [Zanzotto's ] true range and extraordinary originality. Mr. Barron has provided most of the translations, together with a perceptive introduction and a number of quite lovely illustrations (including several impish portraits of the poet himself), but he has also included translations by other hands, including the earlier versions by [Brian] Swann and [Ruth] Feldman."--Eric Ormsby "The New York Sun" (9/12/2007 12:00:00 AM)

"This inviting volume represents the most complete anthology to date of Zanzotto's work in English translation, including an ample selection of poems . . . and thirteen prose pieces that present some of the central ideas underpinning the creative project of an author considered to be one of the most original voices operating in Italy today."--Francesca Southerden=Rossi "MLR"

"This massive, handsomely designed, and copiously illustrated volume is the best possible introduction to [Zanzotto's] work, giving as it does an excellent impression of the scale of his acheivement....Zanzotto is a major voice in world poetry, one that urgently needs to be heard in the current political and social climate (not the least for his profound and consistent engagement with ecological themes). This splendid volume makes that possible."-- "Choice" (11/1/2007 12:00:00 AM)

"Translations of [Zanzotto] have tended to be sporadic and difficult to come by. The University of Chicago Press has now produced lavish hardback anthologies...with generous portions, in English and Italian, of all of the manin collections of verse, plus (in English only) selections from their prose wiritings.... Zanzotto deserve[s] to be much better known outside Italy...the translations are always serviceable at at times of high quality."--Peter Hainsworth "Times Literary Supplement" (1/4/2008 12:00:00 AM)

"Zanzotto is one of those rare poets who's grown wilder as he's gotten older; the poems of his old age are as strange and wacky as ever. . . . For six decades now he has been producing his astonishing verse."--Eric Ormsby "New York Sun"

"Given the importance of the chiseling of words operated by Zanzotto in all of his poetical works, the translations acquire utter importance, and they most often succeed

completely in rendering Zanzotto's experimental wording in all of its muting and translucent opacity.... Showing an attention in the selection of Zanzotto's works that goes beyond the desire to choose only the poet's most representative texts and following, rather, a conceptual thread, Barron succeeds in giving us a volume in which the three ever-shifting elements that constitute the basis of Zanzotto's poetry--landscape, language, and poetic subject--are showcased."

--Federica Santini "Annali d'italianistica"

"The range of Andrea Zanzotto's poetic achievements is stupendous--including his subtle and sustained dialogue with the landscapes of his native Veneto, his discerning appropriation of themes from Virgil and Dante, and his integration into verse of etymology, dialect, and drawing. Yet, throughout these diverse modes of writing, the imagery always remains vividly arresting, the voice authentic and engaging. Just as Stephen Mitchell's renderings of Rilke and David Hinton's of Wang Wei have done so much to enhance interest in those artists, these translations by Patrick Barron and his colleagues will make Zanzotto indispensable to English-speaking lovers of poetry."--John Elder, Middlebury College

-- "John Elder"

Outstanding Academic Title, 2007, from Choice Magazine-- "Choice"

"Andrea Zanzotto is one of the world's great nature poets, and this beautiful collection makes his poetry and prose amply available to English-speaking audiences for the first time. His work reveals the inextricable attachments between human experience and the physical world, attachments charged with extraordinary emotion."

--Scott Slovic, editor of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

"Zanzotto emphasizes the importance of place while simultaneously stressing that even the smallest corner of the world is beyond our ultimate understanding. In his poetry there's a line-by-line beauty and a fundamental humility that, when combined with his complex moral and philosophical vision, leave a reader with a stimulated and enriched heart and an agitated and excited mind."--Scott Bryson, author of The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry

About the Author

Patrick Barron is assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Award, the Rome Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for the translation of the poetry of Andrea Zanzotto.