My translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s first book, Allegria, published by the amazing Archipelago Books in 2020, received the 2021 National Translation Award in Poetry from the American Literary Translators Association. My thanks to the judges!

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JUDGES’ CITATION

“Ungaretti’s first book-length collection of poems appeared almost a century ago. It transformed modern Italian poetry and announced the arrival of a unique voice in world poetry. Although conceived when he was fighting in the trenches of WWI, and penned on military postcards, blank spaces in letters, and the margins of newspapers, these poems are the antithesis of war and what it stands for. The slender poems celebrate life, inflecting its light, memory, and mystery, and seizing the eternal from the seemingly ephemeral in vivid and striking imagery. This elegant translation preserves Ungaretti’s economy and his pursuit of poetic purity.”