My Life, I Lapped It Up: Selected Poems of Edoardo Sanguineti
Oberlin College Press, October 2018
Paper $14.95 (ISBN 978-0997335545)
My Life, I Lapped It Up is the first comprehensive English translation of one of postwar Italy’s most important poets. Edoardo Sanguineti (1930-2010) is best known as an influential member of the Italian intellectual avant-garde that rose to prominence in the 1960s. During his 60-year career, he published more than 20 volumes of poetry, as well as librettos, novels, plays, books of literary and social criticism, and translations. This collection highlights his most psychologically probing and approachable poems, featuring work from his mid and late career.
Praise for My Life, I Lapped It Up:
Edoardo Sanguineti remains as contemporary in 2018 as he was in 1963. Will Schutt's translations are a substantial delight, navigating both Sanguineti's acrobatic syntax and his unpretentious yet endless range of references. The tongue-tip pleasure of the original Italian is everywhere apparent in Schutt’s English, with colloquialisms like “a total sexy-booze and -schmooze” and “the muscle-mush of tourists” providing consistent and gleeful force. This selection conveys the irresistibly irreverent tone of a major modern Italian author, and elegantly recreates the invention and pathos for which Sanguineti is revered.
—Taije Silverman
One of the marks of a skillful translation, particularly of poetry in translation, is that the reader, reading along, simply forgets that it’s a translation. In My Life, I Lapped It Up, Will Schutt has achieved this end. Using a poet’s focus on sound and language, Schutt brings us (preserving parentheticals and the linguistic mash-up of the original) the wordplay, the anarchy, the skip and scrabble of Sanguineti. The speaker avers that “the Aeolian harps do not play for you,” but I’d beg to differ. “Let’s talk, please, about life’s pleasures”: “to sleep in the sun … to drink wine (French, if possible...)”—to find an important Italian poet rightfully rendered into spiky, readable, pleasurable poems in English.
—Moira Egan
Photo Credit: Giuliana TraversoÂ
