Multilingual Short Works Collection 014

Poetry refuses to stay in one place. These brief, devastating works move across five languages and a century of European feeling, from the quiet forests of Danish verse to the grief-haunted streets of Italian memory. The collection gathers short pieces chosen by LibriVox volunteers who understood that some poems lose their骨架 in translation, that Verlaine's melancholy or Pascoli's mourning lives in the particular music of its original tongue. Here you'll find a limerick in Esperanto (playful linguistic gymnastics), Paul Verlaine in three different French originals plus a German translation, and two Italian poets: Parini's "La caduta" and Pascoli's "X Agosto," written in memory of his father who was murdered under mysterious circumstances on the night of St. Lorenzo. Each piece is a small door into a different emotional world. This is for the reader who loves language itself, who wants to hear the sound of sorrow in Italian or feel the particular shade of sadness that German can make.