Book Review: Alberto Savinio: Lo psichismo delle forme

Abstract

The Transparent L!fe and Other Poems contains a bilingual selection from Fontanella' s books La vita trasparente, Simulazione di Reato, Stella saturnina and Ceres along with two new texts. Michael Palma gives a fresh new life to Fontanella 's poetry in English. His translations are always highly skilled, inventive and at the same ti me seem natural. The Transparent Life includes mainly shorter lyric poems with only two long poemetti.1t too highlights Fontanella' s energetic transformation of the voyage motif while revealing other themes, the "Words for Emma" (his daughter) and the poems for his father. In these poems Fontanella writes powerfully on a universal subject: