Songs of Castelvecchio (Italica Press Poetry in Translation Series)

Giovanni Pascoli’s “Songs of Castelvecchio” is an epic — not only of the countryside but of humanity’s place among the cycle of seasons. While evoking a circular notion of time, Pascoli envisions the end of human life in a spectacular conflagration of stars in the galaxy amid the indifference of a universe deprived of God. Pascoli weaves into the “Songs” his own autobiographical experience of loss, trauma, and closure. Castelvecchio becomes a symbolic space where past and present coexist, where the poet revisits and relives moments tied to grief. Pascoli resists the progression of historical time. Instead, he favors a subjective, affective temporality, emphasizing regression and emotional suspension rather than progress or resolution. Despite the powerful influence of “Canti di Castelvecchio” on Anglophone poetry, fewer than a third of the poems in this collection have appeared previously in English. Here for the first time, we present a new translation of the complete work. “One of the greatest poets of all times.” Seamus Heaney