Last Voyage: Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli Paperback – October 1, 2010

Excellent version of the Odyssey, good translation, Definitely worth reading.

This makes much of Pascoli's best work available to English-speaking readers

Giovanni Pascoli was an Italian 19th-century poet, 1855-1912. In his poems, there is a sense of space, with space often as a metaphor for absence. "Silence, all around: from far away you hear/only the gusting of the wind..." [from "November"]. "I can hear from such a distance,/the farewell of a steam engine..." [from "The Kiss of Death"] Pascoli himself has suggested that his early poems are an elegy for his father, who died while young in an assassination that was never solved. But the later poems retain this elegiac tone too.This elegiac, slightly mournful, though lyric quality comes to full fruition in Pascoli's long, multipart poem "Last Voyage" ("L'Ultimo Viaggio" in Italian) written toward the end of his life. This is a reworking of Homer's "Odysseus" in which Odysseus does not return home to Ithaca, but in a deep sleep passes it by and retraces parts of his voyage from Troy. Pascoli is so masterful with the mournful, melancholic tone that this poem of classical content covering about 50 pages (in the English) would not be called an epic, but rather, however improbably, a long lyric poem.Odysseus like Pascoli passes by the conventional, given subject occupied by a different destiny. Though the translations sensitively, empathetically impart Pascoli's sensitive, ruminative mood in full, one wonders if the original Italian title "L'Ultimo Viaggio" wouldn't have been better translated "Ultimate Voyage." For in Pascoli's hands, Odysseus voyages to his death. He returns to the enchanted isle goddess Calypso who wraps the hero in the "cloud of her hair...[after] the sea returned him."