Last Dream

Winner of the 2020 Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets.

Translated by Geoffrey Brock. An essential new translation of one of Italian literature's most celebrated poets. Giovanni Pascoli stands as a towering figure at the threshold of modern Italian poetry, yet he is little known in English. He wrote his best poems in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth, in an extraordinary burst that included his three most important collections, Myricae, Canti di Castelvecchio, and Primi poemetti. In this volume, translator Geoffrey Brock offers a personal anthology that conveys the wide-eyed spirit and formal beauty of the originals.

"This collection is a revelation. In Geoffrey Brock's impeccable versions, Pascoli becomes a poet who demands to be read out loud. Time and again I found myself stopping to savor a phrase, a line break, a rhyme, a stanza. And then reading the poem over from the start. 'The Sleep of Odysseus' is heart-stopping. It's difficult to overstate my admiration for that tact, grace, and formal imagination that shape these remarkable translations."--Clare Cavanagh

"A champion of childlike intuition, muted tones, and 'small things, ' Pascoli has until now been confined to his corner of the map. In this personal anthology, poet and translator Geoff Brock conveys to us the best of Pascoli. His Pascoli is the author of subtle, bewitching poems that look both inward and outward, celebrating the natural world and the inner life of humble objects: kites, walking sticks, the little nests of spring. Brock has kept the rhymes and meters, and his deeply intelligent remakings breathe new life into the old idiom."--Will Schutt

"Brock has mastered the formula behind the magic of Pascoli's poetry. [...] Indeed, to our modern ears used to free verse or to poetry deprived of any musical patterns, these poems sound positively, and pleasantly, old fashioned. The result is a truly remarkable achievement where the intricate imagery and the malleability of the English language at the expert hands of Brock provide the reader with translations that are poems in their own right."--Elena Borelli, Reading in Translation

Poetry. Italian Studies.