Poet
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Franco Buffoni 1948-... country: Italy language: Italian |
teaches comparative literature at the University of Cassino. Besides numerous collections of his own poems he has published several anthologies of Italian poetry. He writes sober, measured verse, expressing a social, rather than political, commitment. Buffoni’s poems have been translated into Dutch, English, French, German and Spanish. Franco Buffoni (1948) lives in Rome and teaches English language and literature at the University of Cassino. His poetic work is one of a wide range of literary activities. As a literary scholar he has made his mark with the compilation of a large collection of translations of English Romantic poetry; as a translator he has been acclaimed for his renderings of ballads of Coleridge, Kipling and Wilde as well as a selection of poems by Seamus Heaney. As a promoter of literary translation, he is the founder and chief editor of Testo a fronte, a periodical devoted to the translation, and reflecting upon the translatability, of poetry. Buffoni published first collection of verse in 1979, and has since produced ten more, the most remarkable of which, Suora carmelitana e altri racconti in versi (Carmelite Sisters and Other Stories in Verse, 1990), won him the prestigious Premio Montale and three more literary awards. After his latest collection, Del maestro in bottega (About the Workshop Master, 2002) he began work on a new volume, Guerra (War), a title he also gave to the small selection included here. Buffoni was born and bred in Gallarate, near the Lago Maggiore. He studied in Milan, and later in London, Edinburgh and Germany. He has never, either then, or now in Rome, denied his Lombardic origins. This is true also for his poetry, in which he firmly adheres to the ‘Linea lombarda’, a tradition of unembellished verse, of images of the actually seen, of social (not necessarily political) commitment, known in the Netherlands to readers of Sereni and Fortini. Author: Karel van Eerd Translated by Ko Kooman Nell’acqua degli occhi (1979); Quaranta a quindici (1987); Suora carmelitana e altri racconti in versi (1990); Scuola di Atene (1991); Nella casa riaperta (1994); Del maestro in bottega (2002). Poets: |
