1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910247445003321

Autore

Mancini Donato

Titolo

Snowline / / Donato Mancini

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Brooklyn, NY, : punctum books, 2015

Toronto, Ontario : , : eth press, , 2015

©2015

ISBN

9780692374528

Edizione

[First edition.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (56 unnumbered pages) : illustrations; PDF, digital file(s)

Soggetti

Poetry, Modern

Poetry by individual poets

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Sommario/riassunto

“Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” François Villon’s most famous line is a kind of translation, a variation of the old “ubi sunt” trope: Where are the things that used to be? But Villon specifically asks: Where are the snows? Even in the thick of a snowy winter, this snow is not the same as the remembered snows. The difference is affective, but it is also ecological: the world’s climate is dramatically changing. Winter itself is changing.  Donato Mancini has collected over eighty translations of Villon’s line, from Thomas Urquhart’s 1653 translation of Rabelais’s quotation of the line, all the way up to translations by Florence Dujarric (2013) and Michael Barnholden (2014). From these he has arranged forty – a number that once stood for a countless number, like the forty thieves or the forty years of the biblical flood – into a booklength poem.  Taking a cue from Caroline Bergvall’s “Via,” but deviating from it in significant ways, snowline traces how Villon’s line has changed and yet stubbornly stayed the same over six hundred years. It is a meditative and pointedly nostalgiac book: You will grow older as you read it, and the world around you will continue to melt into air.