Sometimes compared to Robert Frost or AE Housman, Giovanni Pascoli was a “major force at the crossroads of modern Italian poetry”. And yet, there has been only one earlier English translation in the British Isles – a posthumous, limited edition by Seamus Heaney.
Danielle Hope’s dual language book is all the more welcome since (as William Oxley has written) “her farming childhood ... merging with her university work in London, Genoa and Emilia-Romagna, has made her specially suited for conveying for the reader the limpid, thoughtful poetry of Pascoli”.