Presentation of the books “Dolce terra di Marca” curated by Borgiani-Emanuelli-Mazzarini and “Botanica Arcana” by Moira Egan

Antonio Luccarini presents Moira Egan
Michele Polverari presents Dolce Terra di Marca

Dolce terra di Marca
curated by Laura Borgiani, Flavia Emanuelli, Mirella Mazzarini
with 27 original illustrations
publisher: Pequod

The folktales maintain in our time the ability to enchant; the many transpositions and transcriptions, the theater, the multimedia, the movies, in which are continually restated testify to their vitality. The tale speaks to the imaginary of the people, offers alternatives to everyday life with an immediate style, basic, linear, suggestive.
Dolce terra di Marca collects the tales of the Marches in the dialect in which they were transcribed from the voice of the people, by scholars such as Antonio Gianandrea, Guido Vitaletti, Luigi Mannocchi, with the help of a current translation in Italian, to make it possible to understand unusual slang terms, sometimes even unknown. The fairy tales concerning the Marche that Italo Calvino has included in his book Fiabe italiane (Folktales Italian), are presented in the original dialect version for take account of their “being of the Marches”.
Each tale is accompanied by reading notes, aimed to grasp with immediacy significant aspects of the same, critical issues and aspects of the local context. The illustrations that accompany them are cured by the students of the International School of Comics in Jesi, who interpreted them with their own sensitivity.
Dolce terra di Marca is a book observant to the culture of the area, to the values of a civilization that the tale tells, in the pleasure of listening and reading. A thorough introduction traces the evolution of studies on the folk tale, aimed at those who know how be passionate about this genre.

Laura Borgiani, Flavia Emanuelli, Mirella Mazzarini, from Marche, have collaborated, for a postgraduate specialization, for a study of analysis about the folk tale of the Marches. Years later, they found themselves again, after different job experiences - a teacher, an official of the cultural heritage, a school manager - to work together about the folktale of the Marche to rediscover its value and vitality. So has came the project to promote awareness and dissemination of a wealth of memory linked to the identity of the Marche.

Botanica arcana / Strange Botany
Moira Egan
bilingual edition, Italian translations by Damiano Abeni

After that the American poetess Moira Egan has fallen in love, has married the translator Damiano Abeni and has moved to Italy, she soon realized that she would no longer have written sonnets as a bad girl, such as Sex and the City, which made her well known, inducing comparisons with the poetess Edna St. Vincent Millay. But what to write? While adapting to her new life, to the Mediterranean, to live with a husband who is a passionate botanist amateur, an idea came to her mind: to follow the example of Marianne Moore, the great poetess who has innovated the American poetry, writing poems in syllabic verses that celebrate everything that is unusual and strange in creatures, in geological formations, in art objects.
In Botany arcana, each poem draws its fundamental metaphor from a plant, a fruit or a Mediterranean flower.
In these poems, Moira Egan celebrates the always deeper familiarity with the wedding oath, as well as with the unusual flavors and new stimuli of the Mediterranean landscape that has adopted her.
Maria Grazia Calandrone wrote: “Egan attacks firsthand with a fun loving botanic feeling: tender, humorous, sad, sardonic, educated and 'American' in quickness, in certain jargon's effects and light lunges on tasty home interiors seen as spying by an ajar door. But nature, translocated in poetry, always contains a metaphorical shift, starting from the ego that acts in the verses.”

Moira Egan was born in Baltimore (USA). She studied at Bryn Mawr College, John Hopkins University, and Columbia University where James Merrill awarded her the David Craig Austin Prize. Her works have appeared in many prestigious magazines in the United States and in several anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2008. Her poems have appeared in translation on Nuovi Argomenti (New Topics) and Lo Straniero (The Stranger). In 2009 she published La seta della cravatta / The Silk of the Tie (L’Obliquo). With Damiano Abeni and Joseph Harrison has published Un mondo che non può essere migliore: Poesie scelte 1956-2007 (A world that can not be better: Selected Poems 1956-2007) (Sossella Editore, 2008), a wide selection of poems by John Ashbery.

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