A Celebration of 20th-century Italian Poetry
Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco | 814 Montgomery Street | San Francisco, CA
The Center for the Art of Translation and the Instituto Italiano di Cultura present a celebration of 20th-century Italian poetry!
In honor of Italy’s “Year of Italian Culture in the USA,” join us for Italian poetry from the recent FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry, with spirited readings from editor Geoffrey Brock and translators W. S. Di Piero, Diana Thow, Michela Martini, and Olivia Sears.
This new anthology brings together a rich group of translations from across the past century and from across the English-speaking world. Edited by translator and poet Geoffrey Brock, the volume is a comprehensive bilingual anthology of 20th-century Italian poetry translated by various hands. Brock and his fellow translators will read their own translations, as well as translations by poets such as Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, and Allen Ginsberg in celebration of this landmark publication.
Geoffrey Brock is an American poet and translator. He is author of the poetry collections Voices Bright Flags, winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, and Weighing Light, winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in journals including Poetry, The NER, Subtropics, Cincinnati Review, Hudson Review, and elsewhere. He has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
W.S. Di Piero is a poet, essayist, art critic, and translator. He has taught at institutions such as Northwestern University, Louisiana State University, and Stanford, where he is professor emeritus of English and on faculty in the prestigious Stegner Poetry Workshop. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, Di Piero was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2012.
Diana Thow began translating Italian poetry while studying in Rome her junior year abroad, and moved to Iowa to pursue an MFA in literary translation in 2006 as an Iowa Arts Fellow, finishing her MFA with a thesis on the poet Amelia Rosselli. She has published translations in eXchanges, Carte Italiane, Mare Nostrum, 91st Meridian, and elsewhere. She is currently a PhD student at University of California Berkeley.
Michela Martini, a native of Genoa, Italy, received her MA in Italian literature from the University of Genoa. Her translations of Italian poetry, also in collaboration with poet Robert Hahn, have appeared in the Chicago Quarterly Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, The Literary Review, Poetry International, among others, and were anthologized by Geoff Brock in The FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry.
Olivia E. Sears is a translator of Italian poetry and founder of the Center for the Art of Translation, where she edited the journal Two Lines for over a decade. Her translations of contemporary poet Mariangela Gualtieri have recently appeared in Arkansas International, Circumference, The Common, and Copper Nickel, among others. She is currently completing a manuscript of Gualtieri’s poetry in English, When I Wasn’t Dying.