Giovanni Pascoli’s Canti di Castelvecchio: the first complete English translation

Elena Borrelli and Stephen Campiglio, have published the first complete English translation of Giovanni Pascoli’s Canti di Castelvecchio with Italica Press.

Giovanni Pascoli’s Songs of Castelvecchio is an epic — of the countryside and of humanity’s place among the cycle of seasons. Despite the powerful influence of Canti di Castelvecchio on Anglophone poetry, fewer than a third of the poems in this collection have ever appeared previously in English. Here, for the first time, Elena Borelli and Stephen Campiglio present a new translation of the complete work. Pascoli weaves into the Songs his own autobiographical experience of loss, trauma, and closure. Castelvecchio becomes a symbolic space where past and present coexist, where the poet revisits and relives such emotional moments. The poet resists the progression of historical time. Instead, he favors a subjective, affective temporality, emphasizing regression and emotional suspension rather than progress or resolution. While evoking a circular notion of time, Pascoli envisions the end of human life in a spectacular conflagration of stars in the galaxy amid the indifference of a universe deprived of God.