Libretto

Edoardo Sanguineti (1930 - 2010) was born in Genoa where he was for many years Professor of Italian Literature. His many awards and distinctions include the prestigious Premio Campiello for lifetime achievement. The most important poet of the avant-garde Gruppo 63 movement (which included Umberto Eco and Giorgio Manganelli), Sanguneti was also the translator of poetry by Joyce, Shakespeare, Brecht and a number of Latin and Greek writers. In addition to poems he wrote two novels, Capriccio Italiano / Italian Caprice (1963), and Il Giuoco dell'Oca / Snakes and Ladders (1967), as well as a number of plays; but it is as the author of playful, even exuberantly inventive poems that Edoardo Sanguineti is best known.

Pádraig J. Daly was born in Dungarvan, Co. Waterford in 1943 and works as an Augustinian priest in Dublin. He has published several collections of poetry, among them The Last Dreamers: New & Selected Poems (1999), The Other Sea (2003), Afterlife (2010) and God in Winter (2015). His translations include a selection from the Italian of Edoardo Sanguineti, Libretto (1999), which feature in The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, and Paolo Ruffilli's Joy and Mourning (reissued 2007), among others. Daly comments: "I write poetry as a way of understanding, questioning and celebrating God and the world." “Daly offers the most sustained attempt at serious religious poetry in Ireland and the distinct pleasure of the exquisite use of language.” — John F. Deane