Giosuè Carducci

Giosuè Carducci (1835–1907) was the leading Italian poet of his age and the first Italian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1906. A professor of Italian literature at Bologna for over four decades, he set his classical learning and republican, anticlerical convictions against what he saw as the sentimental excesses of Italian Romanticism.

He is best known for the pagan, defiant “Hymn to Satan” and for the Odi barbare, which adapted Greek and Latin metres to Italian verse. The translations here are by the American writer Frank Sewall, from his 1893 English introduction to Carducci's work.