Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Italian and introduced by Philip Parisi. Alfonso Gatto (1909-1976) was among Italy's foremost 20th-century poets. Italo Calvino considered his work "the largest poetic testimony of the man of the Resistance, felt as an eternal and necessary human prototype. Perhaps never as in the poems of Gatto...do we discover that temperament of the day and the sentiments of the struggle." Here war, death and the search for justice are infused with beauty, metaphysical wonder and the celebration of life. The selection is drawn from ten collections, including Poesie d'amore/Love Poems (1941-1949), La storia delle vittime/History of the Victims (1962-1965), and Desinenze/Endings.

Author City: ITA

Alfonso Gatto (1909-1976) was among Italy's foremost 20th-century poets. Together with Mario Luzi, Vittorio Sereni and others, he belonged to the second generation of Italian "hermetic" poets—after Giuseppe Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale and Savatore Quasimodo. All were influenced by the French Symbolists. The selection here includes prewar, war and postwar poetry taken from ten collections, including Poesie d'amore/Love Poems (1941-1949) and La storia delle vittime/History of the Victims (1962-1965). In 1976 Gatto met an untimely death in a car accident near Rome. His final book of poems, Desinenze/Endings, was published posthumously.