Sandro Penna (1906-1977) is considered to be one of the greatest Italian poets of the 20th century.
The stridently homoerotic themes of Penna's lyric limited his recognition, while subjecting his work to censorship during his lifetime and beyond. Most of his poetry remains untranslated into English, while the majority of existing English translations are out of print. A friend of
Pier Paolo Pasolini, discovered in the late 1920s by Umberto Saba, and endorsed by Nobel Prize winner Eugenio Montale, he deliberately stayed out of the literary world. Penna's epigrammatic, melancholy poetry, sensual and refined, is a seemingly simple hymn to the body and to difference. What emerges is a feverish, strange "joie de vivre" that still speaks powerfully to contemporary readers today.
