The Night Fountain

The Night Fountain discloses a great poet in the making, now veering into Expressionism, now surreal, but always with an imaginative prosody and a voice that admits us into its intimacy. There is at once abundance and refinement here, and many of the elements that ago into his great work. The translations are resourceful and inventive, keeping faith with the movement of the originals.

The Night Fountain is a Quasimodo's early poems, lyrical gems that reveal the translators' astute poetic sensitivity. Sonzogni and Dawe have captured the outpouring of a range of youthful emotions while heightening the reader's awareness of the young poet's debt to the classical and the lyrical in the Italian poetic tradition.... Allowing the young poet's sense for ritual to sit comfortably alongside his nomadic spirit, this collection of previously untranslated poems introduces the English-speaking reader to the linguistic richness of a young Quasimodo.

Salvatore Quasimodo was born — and lived — through historical tragedies which impressed his mind for ever. What one hears in his lines are the tears of mankind and its wail. Sonzogni and Dawe have captured the singular strength of Quasimodo and heard the penetrating voices of humanity. Their translations of this particular poet are a beautiful work of rendering history in rhyme and do more than justice to the art and the feelings of Salvatore Quasimodo. The night Fountain should be read and re-read, learned and re-learned, and must be at hand to every reader who can only gain from its penetrating elegy.