Voice Portraits: Evenings Will Return… The Voice of Italian Poetry
6:30 pm PDT
Olivia E. Sears and Julia Nelsen read translations of contemporary Italian poets as well as the great 20th-century masters for the opening of Voice Portraits, a synesthetic art exhibit curated by Giovanna Iorio.
The Italian Cultural Institute San Francisco(opens in a new tab) will exhibit voice portraits of seventeen among the Italian poets of the twentieth century present in the Poetry Sound Library Archive: Giuseppe Ungaretti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Edoardo Sanguineti, Alfonso Gatto, Giorgio Caproni, Franco Fortini, Sandro Penna, Alda Merini, but also contemporary poets such as Antonella Anedda, Carlo Bordini, Mariangela Gualtieri, Valerio Magrelli, Claudio Damiani, Mariapia Quintavalla, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Patrizia Cavalli and Giovanna Frene.
Next to each portrait, the visitor will be able to listen to the original voice of the author/authoress from whom the portrait was generated. The voices are accompanied by the original text in Italian and the English translation of the poetic texts, a unique opportunity to intensely experience the most engaging Italian poetry through image, voice and translation. The exhibition celebrates the poet’s voice and its eternal beauty through a highly original synesthesia of image, sound and word.
The voice portraits are spectrograms created by the multimedia artist Giovanna Iorio starting from the recording of the poet’s voice reading his own composition.
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.
Julia Nelsen translates from and into Italian. She holds a Laurea magistrale from the University of Milan and a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She has published essays on Italian futurism and avant-garde magazines, with interests ranging from poetry to media studies. Alongside her research, Julia has worked as an educator, translator, and copyeditor for various organizations and publications in the US and abroad.