The massacre of the Innocents by Giambattista Marino and translated by Erik Butler

This is poetry from Italy.

The massacre of the Innocents by Giambattista Marino translated by Erik Butler is published by Wakefield Press. This is a Book originally written in Italian. This was published in 2015.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781939663085E12.

The massacre of the Innocents, by Giambattista Marino and translated by Erik Butler, brings an Italian baroque imagination into English through one of Christianity’s most violent episodes. Marino’s seventeenth-century poetics are associated with extravagance, ornament, intensity, and rhetorical dazzle, and Wakefield Press’s edition suggests a work valuable as both literature and recovered historical force. The title is brutal, but baroque brutality often arrives covered in gold, image, and elaborate motion. I would read this book for the tension between horror and artifice. How does a poem make violence visible without becoming simple? How does beauty behave when the subject is atrocity? Butler’s translation offers a way into a literary world where excess is not decoration, but a method of confronting terror.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.