The Sepulchres From The Italian Of Ugo Foscolo

The most significant and adored works from the popular Italian poet Ugo Foscolo are collected in this lucid verse translation. Expressing the author s political, civic, and sentimental concerns, these poems captivate with their immediacy and intimacy. Each work reveals the inner recesses of a passionate, restless, and surprisingly modern mind."

Publisher description

A unique edition of a masterly prose work by one of Italy's most celebrated poets, and perhaps the greatest Italian novel of the Romantic movement. Saddened with his country's loss of freedom, disillusioned with life and racked with loneliness and ennui, university student Jacopo Ortis can only find some comfort in the company of his friends and in his love for Teresa. But when his studies call him back to Padua and he is separated from her, Jacopo's torments become unbearable, and he feels that there is only one way out of his misery – a symbolic gesture against fate, God and all the tyrants of this world. Allegedly based on the real-life tragic story of the Italian student Girolamo Ortis, and suffused with the author's own autobiographical experiences, The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis is a masterly prose work by one of Italy's most celebrated poets, and perhaps the greatest Italian novel of the Romantic movement.

Written as an epistolary monologue, Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis is a compelling portrayal of a troubled mind. Published here for the first time in the English language, it is presented with Foscolo's highly acclaimed poem, Of Tombs. Banished from his homeland and from the woman he loves, Jacopo Ortis lives with the insufferable feelings of disillusionment and betrayal. Gone are his youthful dreams of literary glory, and in their place only his embittered laughter at fortune, at men, and at God. In the anguish of his state he feels himself compelled to make one final, titanic, and tragic gesture to the rulers of his age.

Expressing the author's political, civic and sentimental concerns, these poems will surprise the English reader with their immediacy and intimacy. "e;On Sepulchres"e;, Foscolo's masterpiece, as well as being one of the pinnacles of European neoclassical literature, is still one of the most widely studied poems in Italy. Foscolo's poetry reveals the inner recesses of a passionate, restless and surprisingly modern mind.

Italian Literature before 1900 in English Translation provides the most complete record possible of texts from the early periods that have been translated into English, and published between 1929 and 2008. It lists works from all genres and subjects, and includes translations wherever they have appeared across the globe. In this annotated bibliography, Robin Healey covers over 5,200 distinct editions of pre-1900 Italian writings. Most entries are accompanied by useful notes providing information on authors, works, translators, and how the translations were received. Among the works by over 1,500 authors represented in this volume are hundreds of editions by Italy's most translated authors – Dante Alighieri, Machiavelli, and Boccaccio – and other hundreds which represent the author's only English translation. A significant number of entries describe works originally published in Latin. Together with Healey's Twentieth-Century Italian Literature in English Translation, this volume makes comprehensive information on translations accessible for schools, libraries, and those interested in comparative literature.

Covers comparative literature; English literature; Italian literature in the 18th and 19th centuries.