Giovanni Pascoli’s popularity in Italy is akin to that of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and E.E. Cummings in the United States, and his popularity, through a series of recent English translations, is growing among anglophone readers.
Stephen Campiglio and Elena Borelli are close to completing the first full translation into English of Pascoli’s 1903 volume of poems, Canti di Castelvecchio, and have begun to submit book proposals to various publishers. Should the manuscript be accepted soon, it will take its rightful place among this recent wave of other Pascoli translations (see below) and will also be auspiciously timed to coincide with the forthcoming Italian film on Pascoli’s life and work, “Zvanì,” directed by Giuseppe Piccioni, with Federico Cesari playing the role of Pascoli.
By way of historical context: in the decades following Pascoli’s death in 1912, there were only three publications of his selected poems translated into English, but with a new century, a resurgence of critical attention on his work would take place, including that of Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney, who published in 2013 (posthumously) The Last Walk, a translation of Pascoli’s 16-poem sequence, L’ultima passeggiata, a year after delivering a lecture on Pascoli in Bologna, entitled “On Home Ground.”
Heaney’s international fame served to further an already-growing interest in Pascoli’s work by other translators who would eventually produce seven book-length translations from 2010 to 2024. Five of these volumes are selected poems, containing only a small sample from Pascoli’s Canti di Castelvecchio (the 2022 title, a complete translation of Poemi Conviviali, and the 2024 title, a complete translation of Myricae). Thus, not only will Campiglio and Borelli’s book-length manuscript of Canti di Castelvecchio result in the first complete translation of this title into English, but it will also bring to anglophone readers dozens of poems presently unknown in English.
Copyright: The work of Giovanni Pascoli is in the public domain.
Author Bio
Giovanni Pascoli, born in 1855 in San Mauro in the Romagna region of Italy, earned a Classics degree at the University of Bologna. His first book of poetry, Myricae, was published in 1891, and in 1906, he replaced his mentor, Giosuè Carducci, as chair of Italian Literature at the University of Bologna, following several years of teaching appointments at secondary schools. In 1895, he had bought a house in Castelvecchio, a hamlet in the Tuscan town of Barga, which became his permanent home for the remainder of his life, and where the poems of Canti di Castelvecchio (1903, 1907) were written. After publishing a few more books of poetry, Pascoli died of cancer in 1912. His house in Castelvecchio has since been transformed into the “Pascoli Museum” and San Mauro maintains the “Accademia Pascoliana,” where scholarly conferences and events are held.
Translator Bios
Stephen Campiglio holds an M.A. in Education from Assumption University and serves as an administrator in Workforce Development and Continuing Education at CT State Community College: Manchester, where he also founded and directed for 12 years the Mishi-maya-gat Spoken Word & Music Series. He recently co-edited Noh Place Poetry Anthology (2022) and was selected as one of the winners in the 2024 contest, Mapping Worcester in Poetry: Poems in and Out of Places. His poetry and Italian translations have appeared of late, or will appear, in Aji Magazine, The Closed Eye Open, Gradiva, Hole in the Head Review, Italian Americana, Open Doors Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Poet Lore, SLAB, and SurVision, and a featured selection of his poems translated into Italian by Barbara Carle will appear in the next issue of Journal of Italian Translation. Campiglio has published two chapbooks, Cross-Fluence (2012) and Verbal Clouds through Various Magritte Skies (2014).
Elena Borelli holds a degree in Classics from the University of Bologna and a Ph.D. in Italian Literature from Rutgers University. From 2012 to 2016 she was Assistant Professor of Italian Literature at the City University of New York. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of Italy at the turn of the 20th century, with a focus on Giovanni Pascoli and Gabriele D'Annunzio. Her book, Giovanni Pascoli, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and the Ethics of Desire, explores the notion of desire at the nexus of art, philosophy, and politics in the works of these two authors. Elena teaches courses of Italian language and culture at King’s College London (UK), where is she Deputy Team Leader for Italian, Latin, and Linguistics at the Modern Language Centre. She has also published on the topic of literary translation and is herself a translator, working for journals such as Journal of Italian Translation and Reading in Translation. Her English translation of Pascoli’s Poemi Conviviali/Convivial Poems, in collaboration with James Ackhurst, was published in 2022 by Italica Press (New York, NY).
