Gianluca Rizzo – författare

One of the first and most important Italian playwrights to move away from the commedia dell’arte tradition of improvisation, Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793) wrote more naturalistic “comedies of character” that featured the dialect and situations of everyday life in Venice.Five Comedies collects a selection of Goldoni’s finest plays, annotated and translated into English: The New House, The Coffee House, and “The Holiday Trilogy” (Off to the Country, Adventures in the Country, and Back from the Country). Editor Michael Hackett provides an introduction to Goldoni and his performance tradition for directors, actors, and designers, revealing the masterful construction of Goldoni’s plays, while an afterword by Cesare de Michelis carefully reconstructs the playwright’s life and times.

Poetry on Stage focuses on exchanges between the writers of the Italian neo-avant-garde with the actors, directors, and playwrights of the Nuovo Teatro. The book sheds light on a forgotten chapter of twentieth-century Italian literature, arguing that the theatre was the ideal incubator for stylistic and linguistic experiments and a means through which authors could establish direct contact with their audience and verify solutions to the practical and theoretical problems raised by their stances in politics and poetics. A robust analysis of a number of exemplary texts grounds these issues in the plays and poems produced at the time and connects them with the experimentations subsequently carried out by some of the same artists. In-depth interviews with four of the most influential figures in the field – critic Valentina Valentini, actor and director Pippo Di Marca, author Giuliano Scabia, and the late poet Nanni Balestrini – conclude the volume, providing invaluable first-hand testimony that brings to life the people and controversies discussed.

Though known primarily as a sculptor and painter, Michelangelo was also a poet. In his lifetime, Michelangelo wrote over 300 poems, many of which were works of devotion and love poems of a spiritual and mystical nature.In 1961, Joseph Tusiani offered the first English translations of the complete corpus of Michelangelo’s poems. These translations illuminated the subtleties of both the source and target language, giving Michelangelo’s verse a freshness, a depth, and an inventiveness that time has not been able to obscure.The Complete Poems of Michelangelo reproduces Tusiani’s masterful translation. In addition to Tusiani’s introduction and translations, this new edition contains Michelangelo’s original Italian poetry, a chronology of his life and works, a biographical profile of Tusiani, and an interview with Tusiani exploring his musings on classic literature and the subtle art of translation. The Complete Poems of Michelangelo sheds light on Tusiani’s many exceptional accomplishments during his long and prolific life as a scholar, poet, translator, and artist.