<snip>
£7.99, but presumably not a parallel text? And from what you say above,
even my minimal Italian ought to look at her own words. Can you recommend a
(preferably cheap) Italian edition? Is _War Variations_ indeed her
collected poems, or are there more?
<snip>
*War Variations* is perhaps her best known work: two sets of linked short
texts, mature but fairly early, roughly 160 pages, give or take; bits of it
were published in the Gruppo '63 anthology, although it was written between
1959 and 1961.
According to the London Library's catalogue, the Green Integer edition _is_
a parallel text. This is more important even than it might have been
ordinarily, not only (or least) because of her penchant for musical games
with syllables such as 'dis' or 'con' and with polysemous words such as
'per', but also because of what Giovanni Giudici calls her 'semantic short
circuits' across the languages she knew ('che sia fatta la volontą del cane'
= 'may dog's will be done' or 'car de foglie secche e gialle...' = 'cars de
dry and yellow leaves...' are two such).
Unfortunately translations I have seen and/or made myself read a bit like
the debris left from close reading rather than something stronger.
As to editions, there isn't as yet a collected. *Le Poesie*, which I have
(650 pages or so; E19.50 in Italy but £25 or so in Britain), includes
youthful work written in English and French but omits *Sleep*, a later
English collection, as well as some later of the later work in Italian.
But I shall be interested to hear how you find her.
CW
_______________________________________________
'Listen people, I don't know how you expect to ever stop the
war if you can't sing any better than that'
- Country Joe McDonald, Woodstock 1969
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