Synopses & Reviews
Writing clandestine sonnets in local dialect for more than 15 years while leading a respectably conformist life of letters and bureaucracy, Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli erected a lasting poetical monument to the people of 19th-century Rome. Set against the checkered background of the city of the six Pspope, priests, princes, prostitutes, parasites, and the poorBelli's sometimes scandalous sonnets deal with life's elementals love, death, sex, food, money, family, religion, and politics. In his immense oeuvre, sampled here in a sizeable and varied selection of the best poems, people from every course and manner of life have their sayhousewives, mothers, beggars, lovers, businessmen, popes, whores, doctors, thieves, lawyers, priests, pen-pushers, actresses, gossips, and many more. Their voices and preoccupations are brilliantly and accurately rendered in this volume by Mike Stocks, one of the finest sonneteers of our day.
Synopsis
Cecco Angiolieri, the enfant terrible of Italian literature, loved women, gambling, food, and wine. It is said that he found comfort for his bad luck at dice and with Becchina, his unreciprocating lover, only by pouring venomous scorn upon his miserly parents. Ceccos outbursts of rage against his fate and his earthly view of the worldpoles apart from the Stil Novo of Cavalcanti and Dante, the target of some of his fiercest sonnetsare perfectly encapsulated in his poetry, which is presented here with the facing Italian text in C. H. Scotts beautiful verse translation. This volume also includes Dante Gabriel Rossettis translations of Cecco Angiolieris poems.
About the Author
Anthony Mortimer has also translated Petrarch's Canzoniere and Michelangelo's Poems and Letters.