Selected Poems of Luigi Pirandello by Luigi Pirandello

Selected Poems of Luigi Pirandello by Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello, an author best know for his plays, novels and short stories, was also a life-long poet. At the age of twenty-two, he published his first collection, Mal giocondo (1889, Troubled Joy), followed quickly by three further volumes, Pasqua in Gea (1891, Easter in Gea), Elegie renane (1895, Rhenish Elegies) and Zampogna (1901, Bagpipes). In 1912 he published his final volume of poetry, Fuori di chiave (Offkey), but he continued to publish poetry in literary journals and anthologies until his death in 1936.

In a literary career that spans the turning of the twentieth century, his poetry reflected many of the currents of his time: modernism and relativism, the tension between faith and science and the place of the individual in a world devoid of coherence. He writes movingly of nature -- silent, indifferent, unconscious, enduring -- as the very antithesis of chaotic human activity. He writes of life and death, children and coffee, of love, earth and dreams. His style might seem traditional -- more traditional than would be expected of an author whose work for theater surpassed mere innovation -- and while his forms might be conservative, his ideas matched the spirit of his age.

As the translator George Hochfield writes in his introduction, These poems reveal a somber and sensitive man, the dramatist, who, when the play is over and the curtain is drawn, comes to the front of the stage and addresses the audience directly.

This dual-language edition presents for the first time in English translation a selection of work from the entire range of Pirandello's poetic output. George Hochfield offers a sensitive and wise interpretation of that poetry.

Appendices include a selection from Arte e coscienza d'oggi (1893, Art and Consciousness in Our Time) and from Pirandello's Biographical Letter of 1914.

Dual-language Poetry

Introduction, bibliography, chronology, first-line indices, notes and appendices.

256 pages.

Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) was an Italian playwright, novelist, and poet. Born to a wealthy Sicilian family in the village of Cobh, Pirandello was raised in a household dedicated to the Garibaldian cause of Risorgimento. Educated at home as a child, he wrote his first tragedy at twelve before entering high school in Palermo, where he excelled in his studies and read the poets of nineteenth century Italy. After a tumultuous period at the University of Rome, Pirandello transferred to Bonn, where he immersed himself in the works of the German romantics. He began publishing his poems, plays, novels, and stories in earnest, appearing in some of Italy's leading literary magazines and having his works staged in Rome. Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), an experimental absurdist drama, was viciously opposed by an outraged audience on its opening night, but has since been recognized as an essential text of Italian modernist literature. During this time, Pirandello was struggling to care for his wife Antonietta, whose deteriorating mental health forced him to place her in an asylum by 1919. In 1924, Pirandello joined the National Fascist Party, and was soon aided by Mussolini in becoming the owner and director of the Teatro d'Arte di Roma. Although his identity as a Fascist was always tenuous, he never outright abandoned the party. Despite this, he maintained the admiration of readers and critics worldwide, and was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature.