The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni

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ISBN: 9780226748733

The Beach (La Spiaggia)

They’ve all gone away —

the voice was blathering down the receiver

Then, knowingly: — They’ll not return —.

But today

on this stretch of beach never visited before

those sunlight patches . . . Signals

of theirs, who hadn't left at all?

And when you turn they’re quiet, as if nothing.

What’s being wasted from day to day

is not the dead, but it’s those

patches of the nonexistent, lime or ashes

ready to become light and movement.

                                                            Don’t

be in doubt, — the sea’s strength assails me —

speak they will.

Viewed as one of the most important Italian poets of the last century, Vittorio Sereni (1913–83) wrote with a historical sweep unlike that of any of his contemporaries. A poet of both personal and political responsibility, he wrote of life under fascism, military defeat and imprisonment, the Italian economic miracle and cold war in Europe, and the resurgence of extreme right-wing politics, as well as the roles played by love and friendship in the survival of humanity. An equally esteemed prose writer, his pieces on the contradictions of war and the complex purpose of poetry and the arts in society are seminal contributions to Italian literature.

The first substantial translation of Sereni’s work published anywhere in the world, The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni is a unique guide to this classic twentieth-century poet. This bilingual edition collects the most representative poems from Sereni’s oeuvre, as well as a selection of prose works that extends the themes of his poetry. The book also contains examples of Sereni’s short fiction, published here in English for the first time. With a full chronology, commentary, bibliography, and learned introduction by distinguished British poet and scholar Peter Robinson, The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni is the only authorized rendering of Sereni’s verse in English.