Search results for ""Author Patrick Worsnip""

The Poetry Book Society Autumn 2018 Recommended Translation. Asked to name the great Latin love poets, today’s reader is likely to offer Catullus, Ovid, Virgil, Horace. Propertius, a successor of the first and influential peer to the others, has not been blessed by posterity. Yet at their best his poems match any of the period. They are poems of love, of desire, of insecurity and obsession: of struggle, too, as they resist the Augustan Empire’s attempts to turn its love poets into propagandists. The result is a highly refined irony, a subtlety of tone and humour that is unique. Patrick Worsnip’s translations bring out Propertius’ playfulness and his psychological acuity, reinstating his poems at the heart of Latin literature’s golden age.

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Umberto Saba (1883-1957) is one of the great Italian poets of the twentieth century, as closely associated with his native city Trieste as Joyce is with Dublin. He received a sparse education but was writing distinctive poetry before he was twenty, ignoring the modernist groups which dominated the day. He came at personal themes in unexpected ways, using an unapologetically contemporary idiom. He acquired an antiquarian bookshop which prospered for a time, but his Jewish background placed him at risk with the rise of Fascism. When the Germans took northern Italy in 1943, he and his family went into hiding in Florence where they escaped detection until the Allied liberation. National fame came late in his life. 100 Poems is the most extensive selection of his work so far published in Great Britain. He emerges as one of the great European writers of his time. The book features writing from every period of his writing life. Patrick Worsnip's translations honour the poet's use of traditional Italian forms while using appropriately colloquial diction.

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