Join us for an evening with Taije Silverman, who will be reading from her translation of Giovanni Pascoli’s poems, Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli. This event will be free and open to the public.
Praised as “at long last a true rendering of the first modern in Italian poetry,” the Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli gathers work from throughout Pascoli’s career and brings his revolutionary mixture of farm slang and scholarly diction into a profoundly current vision. Providing scholarly notes as well as a chronology, this bilingual volume introduces English-language readers to the founder of modern Italian poetry, contextualizing a poet who moves easily between elm trees and the cosmos with his tenacious yet affirming grief. “Ultimately, Pascoli’s nostalgia takes radical form,” Silverman writes in the introduction, “as if the poet had written, ‘I wish I were there,’ over and over, and then very lightly crossed out every word but there.”
Taije Silverman’s translations of the foundational Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli were published this year by Princeton University Press; she collaborated with Marina Della Putta Johnston. Her own first book of poems, Houses Are Fields, was published in 2009. Recent poems and translations have been in The Nation, Ploughshares, The Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Silverman’s work has been in the 2016 and 2017 editions of The Best American Poetry series as well as in the 2016 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Honors include the Anne Halley Prize for best poem in The Massachusetts Review, residencies from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the VCCA, and a Fulbright Award in Italy. She teaches poetry and translation at the University of Pennsylvania.