Customer Reviews

Listen & Enjoy Italian Poetry (Cassette Edition) (Dover Language Guides Listen and Learn)

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This audio CD would have been more enjoyable were it not for the wretched quality of the original recording. It sounds as though it were recorded from a grammaphone recording. It would have been far better to have a variety of male and female readers. Music in the background might have been nice, too, but not necessary. The voice on this recording is that of an old man, and while his diction is good, he sounds quite dated, and there is scratchy, static noise which permeates throughout. It sounds like a 90 year old recording.

Listen & Enjoy Italian Poetry (CD Edition) (Listen & Enjoy)
What attracted me to this collection was the range of italian poets listed in the product description. I already had Dante's "Inferno" and Petrarch's "Songbook", but this little volume promised a selection from Saint Francis, through, among others, Angiolieri, Bocaccio, Ariosto, Michelangelo, Tasso, D'Annunzio, Montale, ending with Quasimodo. All the names that I'd ever heard of and mostly never read. As if that was not enough, it included a CD with all the poems being read! It did not disappoint. Each poet is given one or sometimes two poems. The English version is NOT an attempt to create an equivalent poem in English and is all the better for it. As stated quite specifically in the introduction, the English is intended to help you follow the italian. In this it succeeds admirably. The book contained surprises, all pleasant. The introductions, those that I have read, are all very well written and informative - little thumbnail gems. And among the poets that I'd never heard of: La Compiuta Donzella with an astonishing and heartbreaking sonnet from the very dawn of literature in modern italian vernacular. If you are even THINKING that you might like to have a small volume of italian poetry with aid to comprehension, there could hardly be a better choice.

I have to admit I haven't studied this as much as I'd planned to, but I can say that it's just as good of an introduction to Italian poets as the Spanish poetry anthology by Dover in the same format. I have no complaints against the book. Even if you're just in it for the language practice it's still a much better way to find out about the Italian poets people in Italy would read than an Italian coursebook or even often an English-language critique. It's a shame Dover can't do this for more difficult languages like Chinese, Arabic, or Greek, in which such well-chosen bilingual anthologies are very lacking.