Sandro Penna

Sandro Penna ( born June 12, 1906 in Perugia, † January 21, 1977 in Rome ) was an Italian poet and storyteller.

Life

Penna was born in 1906 the son of a grocer in the central Italian Perugia, but survived after spending time in Trieste and Milan in 1929 with his mother († 1966) in Rome. Despite training as an accountant, he had no steady job and life constantly, yet increasingly aged, struggling with poverty. At first he worked occasionally as a salesman in a bookstore or art dealer; his later main source of income were journalistic opportunity work for newspapers and magazines.

Penna mostly wrote poems as well as some, mostly very short stories. His first poems appeared in 1932. Penna lived openly homosexual and was like his more famous contemporaries, friends and supporters Umberto Saba and Pier Paolo Pasolini fixed on older boys. Many of his narrative poems and prose miniatures are impressionistic sketches or snapshots of a strolling through the city observer, where boys show up casually in a City River ambience and disappear. It may be due to Pennas preference for boys as a subject of his poems that the public reception of his work so far only restrained done, although Penna is one of the major Italian poet of the 20th century.

Works (selection)

• Poetry, 1938
• Appunti, 1950
• Arrivo al mare, 1955 ( short stories )
• Una strana gioia di vivere, 1956
• Poetry, 1957
• Croce e delizia, 1958
• Stranezze, 1976
• Tutte le poesie, 1970
• Un po 'di febbre, 1973
• Confuso sogno, posthumously in 1980

Works on German

• Torment and delight. 60 poems Italian and German, Selected. u speak. by Reinhard von Marwitz d. Beck and Glückler, Fribourg, 1985, ISBN 3-924175-02-0
• Fever [39 stories ] from d Ital. by Bettina and Toni Kienlechner, Nachw Pier Paolo Pasolini. Beck and Glückler, Fribourg, 1987, ISBN 3-924175-12-8
• My boy has little springs. Italian- German poems, Selected. and trans. by Christoph Ferber. Pano, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-290-17507-8