Peccato e luce [Sin and Light]. New York: The Venetian Press, 1949.

Peccato e luce [Sin and Light]. New York: The Venetian Press, 1949.

Giuseppe (later, Joseph) Tusiani (b. San Marco in Lamis (Puglia) 1924 - d. New York 2020) was a poet who composed in four languages -  Italian, Gargano dialect, Latin and English - an academic teacher of Italian literature, and a translator. Extraordinarily prolific as a poet, he was until his death in 2020 the last living link in the 21st century to Arturo Giovannitti, q.v., about whom Tusiani writes movingly in his three-volume autobiography. They both lived in the Bronx in the 1950s.

He was a modest man who sometimes seemed embarrassed by the attention and praise showered on him especially in later years. Tusiani taught Italian literature at the City University of New York, and edited several volumes of Italian literature in English, in addition to his poetry. He was the first American to win the coveted Greenwood Prize awarded in England for poetry in English.

One night in about 2010, I had the pleasure of hearing Tusiani recite from a number of dialect poems he had translated into both standard Italian and into English, and understood for the first time the richness, robustness, earthiness, and onomonopoetic nature of dialect poetry, which seemed that magical evening to put standard Italian, however beautiful, to shame.

Cesare Foligno, who wrote the preface of this work, was Serena Professor of Italian at the University of Oxford and Professor of English at the University fo Naples, who had an enormous influence on the teaching of Italian in England.

Giuseppe Tusiani

The Venetian Press

1949

20.5 x 13cm; 39 p.

Italian