In the panorama of XXth century Italian poetry, Giorgio Caproni represents a centrifugal force with respect to official trends. He has been more responsive to the Italian literary tradition in its entirety than to a particular school of his time. Nevertheless, Caproni's poetical experience is embedded in contemporary experience; it is aimed at answering everyday existential and ethical questions as well as searching for poetical forms adequate to express such questions. He is a poet who looks over and beyond the various poetical trends and schools of his time, who leans on the solid foundations of Italian literary tradition in order to restore it in a fragmentary mode for the modern reader's taste. What is striking in Caproni is what Pasolini once called his «chiusura metrica» [«metrical closure», in a 1956 essay now in Caproni's Tutte le poesie, p. 613], to which I would add the careful planning of his poetry, the lucid attempt to follow a path which remains constant in his collections of poetry. Relying on these features, Caproni has continued, more than other poets of his generation, to bring to our days his poetical message, always proposing new and surprising solutions. Given his continuous research on forms, and the difficulty in circumscribing his poetical experience to limited characterizing factors, I am constrained in the following pages to follow the progression of his entire production. I will quote from the definitive edition of Tutte le poesie, and will provide my own translations.

Born in Leghorn in 1912 (and consequently belonging to the same generation of Bertolucci, Bigongiari, Gatto, Luzi, Sereni, the so-called «Third Generation»), Caproni moved to Genoa when he was ten years old. The Ligurian city will become in many of his poems the mythical city. To practice his profession, that of an elementary school teacher, he went to various small towns until he moved to Rome in 1939. He fought in WWII on the western front and was actively involved in the Resistance. At the end of the war he established himself in Rome. His life lacked great events if we exclude the death of his young first love and that of his mother in 1950. Otherwise, his life was a very ordinary one: a beloved wife, a son and a daughter, a secure job as teacher. Caproni's poetical production has been constant, without significant gaps, if we exclude a brief parenthesis of silence right after the end of the war.

In Come un'allegoria [Like an allegory], which includes Caproni's first production from 1932 to 1935, one notices a strong mannered naturalism which will tend to disappear in subsequent collections. It is a continuous description of country sceneries, especially in changing moments: dawn and sunset, the passage of the seasons and the sentiment of it, epiphanies of fires and wind, etc. In these moments, young boys and girls are privileged characters, following a tradition which goes from Leopardi to Pascoli, and from Saba will go on to Penna. In these poems there is the entire life of a village seen through the eyes of youth in images of transition (p. 22 and 25):

«Labile» is one of the most used adjectives in these poems to describe the fragile world of the young poet. But «labili» are not the forms that the poet adopts in this first experience: one immediately notices his literary skills in many lines. There are bold metaphors with a strong alliteration as in this «nell'ora in cui l'aria s'arancia» (p. 16) [in the hour in which the air oranges] and a complicated alliterative play with sibilant and fricative letters as in these lines (p. 17):

Not to mention the clear parody of a poem by Foscolo titled «Immagine della sera» (p. 28):

in which we may clearly notice a lowering of Foscolo's mythical epic to one labeled by Giuseppe De Robertis as «epopea casalinga» [«domestic epic», in a 1957 essay now in Caproni's Tutte le poesie, p. 610], in referring to the «Stanze della funicolare». The title of this first collection comes from a line in the poem «Borgoratti» (p. 23):

The young girl is like an allegory of life before the young boy who looks at her face. He is ready to enter the adult world, the blurred and smelly world of the tavern.

This small-town and naturalistic dimension persists as background in Caproni's second collection,Ballo a Fontanigorda, which includes his poetic production from 1935 to 1937. Here again are mutable landscapes as well as fleeting young figures and fresh sensations. The young bride is «cosa tanto precaria» (p. 39) [a very precarious thing] like his lover Olga Franzoni, who died very young (p. 48). Nevertheless, youth remains a vivacious experience, a dance («Alla giovinezza» p. 40). In this collection is the first appearance of the beloved Rina, the poet's wife who lived in Fontanigorda. Moreover, the poet's first sexual feelings appear in connection with sea imagery. The emblem of Venus in the poem on p. 47 is in this vein, as is this quatrain of septenaries (p. 35):

In these poems the poet's discourse, frozen in the first collection on a descriptivism of the other--either landscapes or persons--became, as Antonio Barbuto has rightly noticed, a dialogue with the Other, who is constantly present in the second person pronoun. Also in this collection we find a strong attention to the sound effects of the words as we can see in this alliteration «ci colora/ l'ora» (p. 39) [which colors us/ the hour] and «al sonno, e sogna» (p. 42) [to sleep/ and it dreams] or even this anagram «amaro aroma» (p. 37) [bitter aroma] already in Montale (Vento e bandiere ). The Italian literary tradition is always present, as we can see from the phrasing of this stanza, very similar to Leopardi's style (p. 42):

Finzioni (1938-1939) [Fictions] is part, together with the first two collections, of what Caproni calls «Primo Libro» [First Book]. Actually, there is a real thematic continuity among these early collections. But in Finzioni we notice how Caproni has acquired a secure technique and uses rhyme with ease. In this collection, we read short poems with lines of six or seven syllables--mostly love poems. The landscape is still one of the sea on which the woman's image stands out as in this «Senza titolo» [Untitled] (p. 51):

Moreover, the reader should notice these lines: «Sei donna di marine,/ donna che apre riviere» (p. 55) [ You are a woman of seashores,/ a woman who opens coasts] and «Sono donne che sanno/ così bene di mare» (p. 57) [They are women who taste--but the translation may be also «who know»--/ so well of the sea]. In these recurring landscapes and moments of joy and dance, the poet lives his Romanza, a love story in which moments of sadness for the absence of the beloved person predominate, along with hopes for the future. In contrast with these feelings, there is also always the awareness of time's inevitable passing. The collection concludes with two sonnets, a metric form often used by the poet in his successive production. Here the poet summarizes the main themes of his work: the collective feast, the noisy joy of youth, the happy face of the woman, the taverns, the month of May, a month of passages which foreshadows «grandiose/notti più umane» [grandiose/ nights more human].

Cronistoria (1938-1942) is divided into two sections, «E lo spazio era un fuoco» [And the space was like a fire], and «Sonetti dell'anniversario» [Sonnets for the anniversary], which are extremely dissimilar in form and content. In the first section, which includes short poems, the woman's image is still in the foreground. It is a strong image of fire and burning, in which the color red prevails (p. 74):

Blood, embers, face, clothes are all symbolic elements which return obsessively in poems dedicated to the woman. Red is also the color associated with the poet's own youth, a season he left behind when he moved away to discover cities like Udine, Pisa, Rome, Tarquinia, Assisi (see «Finita la stagione rossa» p. 89 [The end of the red season]). In this work, the poet's language becomes closer to the essential and analogic language of the Hermetic school (p. 93):

Caproni chooses the sonnet (and also a caudate sonnet as in poem VII), a closed form, although used not in a rigid manner, to narrate in a dramatic and exclamatory tone the sad death of his young lover Olga. In a dialogue with the lost young girl, the poet re-evokes the happy season spent together with her, and the mourning («lutto», a thematic word reoccurring many times) in which he is now enveloped. It is a hymn to the precariousness of life and to the certainty of death (p. 99):

Il passaggio d'Enea (1943-1955) [The passage of Aeneas] constitutes the culmination of Caproni's first poetical season. It consists of five «poemetti» with a highly structured form in which the poet reflects on the human condition after a devastating war. It is a reflection on what happens and on what has to be done. The collection opens with two sonnets as a prelude in which the poet indicates the condition of his inner death («io ho fermo/ il polso», p. 117 [my pulse/ has stopped]), and the destruction caused by the war. The section «Gli anni tedeschi» [The German years] includes two «poemetti» - «I lamenti» [Laments] and «Le biciclette» [Bicycles] - and a closing sonnet. The poetry of «I lamenti» has a vigorous civic tone and underlines the weakening of life's values during the war, the uselessness of the poetical word in the face of such a calamity, the name's loss of value. This is a poetry impregnated with exclamatory sentences (exactly the lament's form) or interrogative ones, wanting in answers. The tail of the «poemetto» is the sonnet «Le biciclette. 1944» [Bicycles. 1944], an invocation to his woman not to abandon him when dawn comes («che disastro è nell'alba», p. 132 [what a disaster is in dawn]). This sonnet is linked by the title to the next «poemetto», also entitled «Le biciclette» [Bicycles], and dedicated to Libero Bigiaretti. It consists of eight stanzas of sixteen lines (close then to a combination of two ottava rimas) of rhyming hendecasyllables, very often by assonance but with fixed rhymes in the last four lines, which conform to the schema ABBA. The rhymes are always the same: A = «viso/diviso» [but we have «indiviso» in the last stanza] and B = «fu/più», with variants in the third stanza, «tu/più», and in the sixth «più/fu». We can see here how Caproni has reached a very sophisticated metric technique which will be repeated in the other «poemetti» of this collection but which the poet will abandon in his later production. In these poems, the poet has to express a moral tension and a lament, a circumstance which might have produced a highly rhetorical discourse if the poetry had not been forced by metrical schemas.

The bicycles bring the sound of youth, of a time in which the poet might have considered himself full of «ardore» [fervor], a time in which a magical woman, Ariosto's Alcina, was dominating the poet. That «tempo ormai diviso» [time now divided] is characterized by a series of mistakes, a time which may be taken back to its unity and existence by a different pedaling, one not done by the poet (p. 137):

«Stanze della funicolare» [Stanzas of the funicular] opens with an interlude which introduces us to the populist hell of a small dairy where a Proserpina/waitress waits upon a few patrons. The long poem describes a run on the funicular above Genoa, a trip on a vehicle which does not move the passenger from one place to a very different one. Indeed, the funicular elevates a passenger above the same landscape, only the perspective of the ascending person is changed. The poem is an unceasing trip towards death in twelve stanzas, which always conclude with a variant of «non è l'ora/ questa, nel buio, di chiedere l'alt» [this is not the time,/ in the dark, to ask for a stop. From this altitude of the funicular, which often is transformed into an ark in the poet imagination, one can see Genoa at the time of awakening, with all the inhabitants of the early hours: road-sweepers, market people, the trolley, girls, seamen, etc. All surrounded by the darkness and the first lights of morning in a dense and pervasive fog, which symbolize the difficulty of knowing the world (p. 148):

This is the human condition, the suspended trip in a landscape with only a few lights, enveloped in fog until (p. 148)

«All alone» [the title is in English] has three parts («Didascalia», «Versi», «Epilogo»). The first one is an introduction, and describes the poet's arrival in Genoa at night, in the dark, through «una porta stretta» [a narrow door]. The second, comprised of six stanzas of sixteen lines, similarly to «Stanze», describes the return of «Uomini miti» [Meek men] (so reads the incipit of each poem) to their home, in realistic snap-shots from the opening of the main door in the morning to the next day awakening, when they are ready to leave again. These are men who, in their «minimi traffici» [small businesses], live their life between faith and hope, two key words which recur several times in the «poemetto». The conclusion is highly negative (p. 154):

In the «Epilogo» we see how these meek men become the poet himself who finds himself knocking to a door through which one enters and exits Genoa. The poet then remembers his last entrance into Genoa: the «Salita della Tosse», the girls, the sea.

The «poemetto» which gives the title to the entire collection, «Il passaggio d'Enea», is also composed of three sections, also entitled as the sections of the previous «poemetto». This long poem, considered by critics to be Caproni's masterpiece, refers to a sculpture of Aeneas seen by the poet in a Genoa square. The sculpture represents Aeneas carrying his father on his shoulders, and taking his son by hand. In «Didascalia» (three stanzas of short lines) the poet finds himself in a roadman's house, and, hearing noises through the shutters, he sees that (p. 159):

In «Versi» (five stanzas of sixteen lines) the poet revokes again possible images linked to this passage of cars, the «denso fantasma» [dense phantom] of Euridices, the fields of the Cimmerii always wrapped in fog, up to the myth of Aeneas (p. 162):

As the poet himself has declared on many occasions, this is a very clear existential statement of a generation which came out of a destructive war, a generation without a past to lean on and facing a very fragile future. And at dawn the motors leave but the poet is not sure whether or not he is awake.

In «Epilogo», the poet, now tired, approaches the sea in the evening (p. 164):

In the appendix, the book contains several poems, almost all dedicated to Genoa, including the very long and fascinating final «Litania». This collection introduced Caproni to the small circle of contemporary poets to be remembered. Il passaggio d'Enea is a difficult collection, which would need extensive commentaries. Caproni has shown in these poems to have reached the highest point in that particular poetical season.

Of the same period are many poems Caproni collected in lI seme del piangere (1950-1958) [The seed of crying], but the style of these poems is quite different. Caproni goes back to the short lines of his first collections, but here he shows his technical maturity, especially in presenting us with the canzonetta-form, in which popular tone, spoken language, and prosaic mode prevail. We are far from the poetry of Passaggio : here the poems are more readable and cantabile, there are a few discrete enjambements, a easy rhyme, and many diminutives. These are used to evoke, in the cantabile «Versi livornesi», the unforgettable figure of Annina, mother of the poet and busy seamstress, and Leghorn as the happy background of her days until she died in 1950. Line after line, it is the story of Annina's life, Annina a symbol of youth who regenerates everything she touches and passes (p. 205):

Caproni revisits many places, the simple feelings of Leghorn's people, the bicycles, the seamstresses, the cafés. And in «Eppure» (p.219) [And yet] he describes his mother's wedding, and in the poem which gives the title to the collection her loss (p. 227):

The continuous light elegy is often interrupted with metapoetic considerations. See for instance the opening poem «Perch'io...». (p. 195) [Because I...], an evident allusion to Stilnovism and Cavalcanti, and «Battendo a macchina» [Typing] (p. 204):

These metapoetic considerations appear also in «La gente se l'additava» (p. 207) [People pointed her out], «Per lei» (p. 211) [For her], etc. The poet asks the question of how to talk about such a delicate subject (a common mother, a young seamstress, true and beautiful in her son's memory) without slipping into «Crepuscolarism» or, worse still, into romantic rhetoric. Caproni overcomes this obstacle by complicating his poetry with a concealed recovery of the literary tradition (Dante and Stilnovism, above all), masterfully using the popular and cantabile forms of the canzonetta and the ballad. The «Versi livornesi» conclude with this summarizing poem (p. 232):

This collection includes a section of «Altri versi» as well, with the same style and tone, but different themes (youth, the school days, May Day, etc.).

The following short collection Congedo del viaggiatore cerimonioso & altre prosopopee (1960-1964) [The leave of the ceremonious traveller & other prosopopeias] opens a new season of Caproni's poetry. Here we find some characteristics typical of the entire following production. First of all, Caproni abandons the closed metrical forms, and seldom uses rhyme. He adopts short lines and brief poems moving towards a more epigrammatic style in which an aphoristic tone, irony, and paradox prevail together with more stress on the spoken language. In this collection, the rhetorical figure of prosopopeia is the core of poetry: the poet introduces characters who speak about themselves. The prosopopeia presupposes the absence or death of the person who speaks, and in reality these voices of the poet are voices from another world. The voice of the poet, indeed, takes leave of the human conversation. He is ready to face the unknown where «il buio è cosí buio/ che non c'è oscurità» (p. 259) [the darkness is so dark/ that there is no obscurity]. The poet seems to have reached his destination (p. 258):

In «lI fischio (parla il guardacaccia)» [The whistle (a gamekeeper speaks)] the poet presents another theme, the ambiguity of hunting: «Il guardacaccia, caccia/ ed è cacciato» (p. 266) [The gamekeeper hunts/ and is hunted] while in «Lamento (o boria) del preticello deriso» [The lament (or haughtiness) of the fooled young priest] the poet introduces the religious theme through the blasphemous confession of the priest (p. 268):

In this poem the poet-priest narrates his conversion to the Church, with the help of a prostitute. The language arrives at obscenity and a strong invective is made against the corruption of the world, because everything is now under the market economy's spell. In conclusion, as a common priest the poet implores «perchè Dio esista» (p. 272) [that God may exist].

The following collection, lI muro della terra (1964-1975) [The wall of the earth - from Dante's Inferno X,2, where «terra» indicates the city of Dis] was enthusiastically received by literary critics. The collection is divided into sections of various lengths (sometimes a single poem), but with unitary content. The condition of despair is accentuated here. The poet becomes certain of his inability to break down the wall that prevents his knowledge of the Other and the world, and of his condemnation to a solitary life «nel grigiore/ che non ha nome» (p. 314) [in the grayness/ which has no name]. It becomes very difficult to find a way of saving he who is lost or is in the process of losing himself (p. 340):

This search for a light in the darkness, which wraps the poet like an insuperable wall, constrains him to necessarily ask for a guide, and consequently to pray to a supernatural being. Then the poet directly asks God to appear, to become light, but without success because God has disappeared or killed Himself: «(Non ha saputo resistere/ al suo non esistere?)» (p. 350) [(He could not resist/ to his existing?)]. This is a powerful theology of God's suicide: unable to bear the fact that His divine presence is no longer felt on the corrupted earth, He decides to eliminate Himself. This disappearance of God produces dizziness and confusion in human beings. The poet is not able to distinguish between the guide and the guided, as in this example, one among many, in which he asks his son to be his guide (p. 335):

where we may notice the resumption of the myth of Aeneas. There is also confusion between the I and the Other (often God) like in this poem (pp. 387-388):

Now the poet is not able to recognize the places where he was (p. 400):

All the factors, which hold together the identity of a person have completely disappeared: family ties, spatial location, religion, relationships with other people. Everything and everyone have left, leaving the poet to doubt the necessity of his existence («Lasciando Loco» (p. 365) [Leaving Loco]; «Parole (dopo l'esodo) dell'ultimo della Moglia» (p. 368) [Words (after the exodus) of the last inhabitant of the Moglia]). This poetry is highly epigrammatic and very close to paradox, by means of which the poet wants to demonstrate the discouraging logic of the modern human condition. This poetry is also extremely learned (many citations - even in English and French - and references to past poets, above all Dante), but the language comes closer and closer to the spoken form, and syntax and metrics are simplified.

The poems of Il franco cacciatore (1973-1982) [The free shooter] continue the aphoristic discourse of Il muro, varying the same theme of the disappearance of the Divine and of the solitude of man on earth. As we can read in this passage in prose:

Vi sono casi in cui accettare la solitudine può significare attingere Dio. Ma v'è una stoica accettazione più nobile ancora: la solitudine senza Dio. (p. 439)

[There are cases in which to accept solitude can mean reaching God. But there is a stoic resignation which is nobler: solitude without God].

This condition does not precipitate in Caproni a state of melancholy or rage: on the contrary it produces in him an «allegria indicibile» [unutterable joy], the happiness of being able to believe in God while knowing that He does not exist. The disappearance of the Divine is caused by the desacralization of the human being. In this condition, the human being has lost the knowledge of his «luoghi giurisdizionali» [jurisdictional places], namely the places where the human belongs (p. 446):

Even the journey of life appears to be a journey without a departure or arrival (p. 445):

The only certainty of the journey is death, which the poet contemplates from an even closer position («Mi sono avvicinato troppo./ Fra poco precipiterò» (p. 495) [I have come too close. / Very soon I will fall] and «Sono già vicino al Forte.// Son già dentro la morte». (p. 496) [I am already near the Fort.//I am already inside death]). Death is in any case a homicide/suicide [«Rivelazione» (p. 517) - «Geometria» (p. 502)] in which it is difficult to distinguish the victim from the hunter. Caproni does not see any form of redemption against death, nor the consolatory redemption of the poet through his poetry, as has traditionally been the case (p. 527):

Caproni's poetic discourse has indeed reached a total fragmentation and an obsessive repetition of the same themes. More and more often, his poems consist of only one word or one line. The syntax tends to be dislocated and become minimal. In these poems nominal sentences, unfinished sentences, and isolated verbs prevail: the homicide/suicide of the word.

The comprehensive collection of Tutte le poesie is closed by two sections. The first includes some unpublished poems that «si sono scritte da sole» [wrote themselves on their own], and these poems wish to be published, almost without the consent of the author. They are Versicoli del Controcaproni [Little verses of the Counter-Caproni] and are variants of the same theme we have already seen. See for instance the «Proverbio dell'egoista:» (p. 572)

Erba francese (1978) [French grass] is a sort of travel diary and is an impressionistic description (with the absolute presence of nominal sentences) of the Parisian places visited by the poet and his daughter Silvana. Short poems as postcards of memory (p. 602):

The complete works conclude with an added poem which has the function of a farewell to the world (p. 606):

But this is not so, because Caproni in 1986 published another book. Il Conte di Kevenhüller [The count of Kevenhüller] starts with a hunting notice posted by the count in 1792, and which is reproduced on page 11. The first part of the book represents a performance of an opera at the beginning of which the director dies. Caproni is an amateur violinist, and music plays an important role in his poetry. In this last collection, music is at the core of the project: the opera is divided in «Il Libretto» and «La Musica». It is the story of the hunting of a Beast, which successively metamorphoses into God, the I, the Name, and life in general. The rhythm of the poems become all together the rhythm of the hunt, and the reader obsessively follows this fugue, this impossible mission to catch Evil. It is also a continuous naming of the Beast (p. 32):

The beast haunting Caproni is the emptiness of the name, the fading of the word, the void which remains. Poetry thus becomes an increasing effort to avoid the disappearance of the word, even if it means that what remains is a dislocated nomination. In this collection, Caproni uses the same conventions as the preceding one: white spaces, nominal sentences, syntactical fragments, minimal presence of rhyme. In the second part titled «Altre cadenze» [Other cadences], Caproni collects several poems reflecting the theme of his last years. Among them is the singular poem entitled «(» which consists of the following line (p. 167):

whereas in the next page, the poem entitled «)» does not have any text. In 1991 Giorgio Agamben edited a new collection of poems on which Caproni was working before his death. The title of the collection, Res amissa (The lost thing) refers to the Good according to a note by the poet himself: «il tema è la Bestia (il male) nelle sue varie forme e metamorfosi. Tutti riceviamo in dono qualcosa di prezioso, che poi perdiamo irrevocabilmente. (La Bestia è il Male. La res amissa [la cosa perduta] è il Bene)» [the theme is the Beast (the evil) in its different forms and metamorphoses. We all receive as a gift something precious, that we irrevocably lose. (The Beast is the Evil. Res amissa [the lost thing] is the Good)]. In this new collection Caproni continues his search for an after-the death-of-God theology, as in this Invocazione [Invocation]:«Mio Dio, anche se non esisti, / perché non ci assisti?» [My God, even if you do not exist, / why do not assist us?]. This theme appears now to be linked to the necessary departure of the poet himself. Caproni reflects more in his last poems on death even if with an ironical vein. His epigrammatic style and crafty use of rhyme continues to characterize his poems, as in «La fatalità della rima» [The fatality of rhyme]:

Does this mean that Silence and Death have eliminated the Name and Poetry?

Caproni was a major figure in the Italian poetry of this century. It has been necessary to reconstruct step by step his entire poetical experience, because it is impossible to enclose this experience in a formula. Caproni always worked intensively and with extraordinary skill in the planning of his books, each of which has a unified theme. Caproni's book is never a simple collection of texts, but there is always a precise project behind it. If we need to find a unifying motif for his writing of poetry it may be his working and reworking of the form, as any great poet has done. We may call Caproni a mannerist poet: he obsessively repeats and uses a few themes, and he works in the presence of the entire Italian poetical tradition, which he appropriates with grace. See this homage to Tasso (in Tutte le poesie, p. 555):

But this search for forms and the labor to attain perfection are strictly connected with the depressing journey of life, now that Names and the Divine have ceased to have value and to exist.

BOOKS:

• Come un'allegoria (1932-1935) (Genoa: Emiliano degli Orfini,1936)
• Ballo a Fontanigorda ed altre poesie (Genoa: Emiliano degli Orfini, 1938)
• Finzioni (Rome: Istituto Grafico Tiberino, 1941)
• Giorni aperti (Rome: Lettere d'oggi, 1942)
• Cronistoria (Florence: Vallecchi, 1943)
• Stanze della funicolare (Rome: De Luca, 1952)
• Il gelo della mattina (Caltanissetta: Sciascia, 1954)
• Il passaggio d'Enea (Florence: Vallecchi, 1956)
• Il seme del piangere (Milan: Garzanti, 1959)
• Congedo del viaggiatore cerimonioso & altre prosopopee (Milan: Garzanti, 1965)
• Versi nella nebbia e dal monte (Trieste: Alut, 1968) with an etching by M. Maccari.
• Il «Terzo Libro» e altre cose (Turin: Einaudi,1968)
• Versi fuori commercio (Luxembourg: Origine, 1970) with French translation by J. Réda and an etching by G. Omiccioli.
• 4 poesie inedite di Giorgio Caproni - 9 dipinti di Mario Marcucci (Florence: Pananti, 1975)
• Il muro della terra (Milan: Garzanti, 1975)
• Poesie (Milan: Garzanti, 1976)
• Erba francese (Luxembourg: Origine, 1979)
• L'ultimo borgo (Milan: Rizzoli, 1980) edited by Giovanni Raboni.
• Il franco cacciatore (Milan: Garzanti, 1982)
• Genova di tutta la vita (Genoa: Edizioni S. Marco dei Giustiniani, 1983) edited by Giorgio Devoto and Adriano Guerrini.
• Tutte le poesie (Milan: Garzanti, 1983)
• Il labirinto (Milan: Rizzoli 1984)
• Il Conte di Kevenhüller (Milan: Garzanti, 1986)
• Allegretto con brio (Lugano, Switzerland: Laghi di Plivtice, 1988)
• Res amissa (Milan: Garzanti, 1991) edited by Giorgio Agamben

TRANSLATIONS:

• Marcel Proust, Il tempo ritrovato (Turin: Einaudi, 1950)
• René Char, Poesia e prosa (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962)
• Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Morte a credito (Milan: Garzanti, 1964)
• Guy De Maupassant, Bel-Ami (Milan: Garzanti, 1965)
• Blaise Cendrars, La mano mozza (Milan: Garzanti,1967)
• André Frénaud, Il silenzio di Genova e altre poesie (Turin: Einaudi, 1967)
• André Frénaud, Non c'è paradiso (Milan: Rizzoli, 1971)
• Jean Genet, Tutto il teatro (Milan: Il Saggiatore 1971)
• Federico Garcia Lorca, Il maleficio della farfalla (Turin: ERI, 1972)
• Wilhelm Busch, Max e Moritz ovvero Pippo e Peppo (Milan: Rizzoli, 1974)
• Jean Genet, Quattro romanzi (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1975)
• Guillaume Apollinaire, Poesie (Milan: Rizzoli, 1980)

ANTHOLOGIES:

• Luciano Anceschi and Sergio Antonelli, eds., Lirica del Novecento, includes poems by Caproni (Florence: Vallecchi, 1961), pp. 709-723.
• Giacinto Spagnoletti, ed., Poesia italiana contemporanea. 1909-1959, includes poems by Caproni (Parma: Guanda, 1964), pp. 507-521.
• Antonio Porta, ed., Poesia degli anni stettanta, includes poems by Caproni (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979), pp. 319-324.
• Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann, eds. and trans., Italian Poetry Today: Currents and Trends, includes poems by Caproni in translations (St. Paul, Minnesota: New Rivers Press, 1979), pp. 38-39.
• Piero Gelli and Gina Lagorio, eds., Poesia italiana del Novecento, includes poems by Caproni (Milan: Garzanti, 1980), vol. 2, pp. 609-627.

REFERENCES:

[The bibliography on Caproni is very extensive. The few titles I mention here are both a good introduction to the poet and a good source of bibliographical information.]

• Barbuto Antonio, Giorgio Caproni. Il destino d'Enea. (Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo & Bizzarri, 1980)
• Iacopetta Antonio, Giorgio Caproni. Miti e poesia. (Rome: Bonacci, 1981)
• Adele Dei, Giorgio Caproni (Milan: Mursia, 1992)
• Devoto G. - Verdino S. (editors), Genova a Giorgio Caproni. (Genoa: Edizioni S. Marco dei Giustiniani, 1982)
• Girardi Antonio, «Metri di Giorgio Caproni», in Cinque storie stilistiche, (Genoa: Marietti, 1987) pp. 99-134.
• Luigi Surdich, Giorgio Caproni: un ritratto (Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1990)

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