A cura di Francesco Benozzo
In the vast tide covering with silence the lands of poetry in the whole of early medieval Europe, at the coastlines of Wales, some rocky plateaus emerged, with their new and powerful morphologies, modelled by centuries of poetic tradition. These were the songs of the bards, the wandering cantors of the great shamanic tradition, which for millennia characterised our perception of the world. The texts here translated – which as ‘texts’ obviously represent only a part of what the oral and sung performances of these Celtic poets were – are characterised by a visionary inclination, strongly tied to the elements of the physical landscape, and by a profound sapiential and animistic yearning which is unparalleled in the Western world.
Attached to the book there is a CD in which the author performs and reinterprets with his bardic harp some of the compositions translated.
Francesco Benozzo
Francesco Benozzo is Professor of Romance Philology and Linguistics at the Alma Mater University of Bologna. He coordinates the PhD Programme in World Literature and Cultural Studies; he authored more than 700 publications; he directs three international scientific journals and is responsible of many inter-university research centres. Since 2015 Benozzo, poet and musician, has been nominated annually for the Nobel Prize for Literature by the PEN Club International, which made public his candidatures.