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The Dimension of Loss is an extended and tragic reflection on that inescapable experience, evoking the loss of familiar places and of homes lived in, and also the loss of hopes, of affection, of meaning, of desire. In two long monologues from Enzo Lamartora’s volume It was (published in Italy in 2017), extensively revised by the author and translated by Michael Palma, we come to know two women whose family histories of anguish and emptiness have left them with a “feeling of loss / that enfolds us, that permeates us, / like a fog in the darkness of a forest.” Shot through with emotional intensity, rich in images both concrete and fantastic that suggest a battle scene viewed through the eyes of a child, the poems form what the author describes as "the rough draft of a life and a poem that might have been."

 

About the Author

Enzo Lamartora was born in 1965 in Naples, Italy. He studied medicine in Naples, and theater and psychoanalysis in Rome. From 2002 to 2007 he was the editor of Passages, a journal of arts and culture. His first two collections of poetry were Nel corpo tuo rimorso (2002) and La dimensione della perdita (2016); a selection of poems from these two books, translated into English by Michael Palma, was published in 2019 as The Autumn of Love. They were followed by It was (2017), a collection of seven long monodramas, the first two of which, extensively revised, form the present volume. His most recent collections are Disamore (2018), Attendersi di là (2022), and Rosso: Interludio (2022). His poetry has been translated into German and Spanish, and he has translated works by Yannos Ritsos, Arthur Adamov, Philippe Sollers, and Dominique Grandmont into Italian.

 

About the Translator:

Michael Palma is the author of the poetry chapbooks The Egg Shape (1972) and Antibodies (1997) and the full-length collections A Fortune in Gold (2000) and Begin in Gladness (2011), as well as Local Colors, forthcoming from Able Muse Press. He has also published Faithful in My Fashion: Essays on the Translation of Poetry and twenty translations of modern Italian poets, including prize-winning volumes of Guido Gozzano and Diego Valeri with Princeton University Press. His translation of Dante’s Inferno was published by Norton in 2002 and reissued as a Norton Critical Edition in 2007 and in the Norton Library series in 2021. His fully rhymed translation of the complete Divine Comedy was published by Liveright in 2024.