Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Italian by Pasquale Verdicchio. This bilingual edition of METROPOLIS is one of the central works of the noted Italian experimentalist, Antonio Porta. Born in 1935, Porta reveals the terrors and excitement of living in the 20th centuryas he charts the two complimentary functions of truth and falsity. For Porta, these poles are at the opposite ends of cultural experience: "The products of definition are a so-called 'high' culture, which aspires to epigraphic and dogmatic conclusions; and a 'low' culture in which the definition is used as a prevaricatory tool of information at all levels."

Author City: MILAN ITA

Antonio Porta, pseudonym of Leo Paolazzi, was born in Vicenza in 1935, but lived in Milan most of his life. In addition to his noteworthy career as a member of the Italian Neo-Avant-garde, specifically a founding member of Gruppo 63 and the Novissimi, he wrote literary criticism for various newspapers and magazines, and taught literature at the Università di Bologna, the Università di Pavia and the Università di Roma, La Sapienza, as well as Yale University. He died of a heart attack in Milan in 1989.