Home Department: French and Italian
SLAT Areas of Specialization: Instructional Dimensions of L2 Learning, Sociocultural Dimensions of L2 Learning
Beppe Cavatorta, born in Parma in 1964, is a professor of Italian at the University of Arizona. His research interests include experimental writings, Italian futurism and the neo-avant-garde, the Second World War in literature and film, and the theory and practice of translation. His essays have appeared in journals like Studi Novecenteschi, Anterem, Rivista di studi italiani, Nuova prosa, il verri, Carte Italiane, NAE, Or, Italica, Italian Culture, and Lectura Dantis Virginiana. He is the editor of several books and anthologies: The Promised Land (with Luigi Ballerini, Elena Coda, and Paul Vangelisti, 2000), A. Spatola: The Position of Things; Collected Poems, 1961–1992 (2008), Balleriniana (with Elena Coda, 2010), Luigi Ballerini, Poesie 1972-2015 (2016), and Deconstructing the Model in 20th and 21st-Century Italian Experimental Writings (with Federica Santini). He is also the author of Scrivere contro (Writing against, 2010), in which he recreated a profile of experimental writing in Italy from the beginning of the twentieth century to the late 1960s, and highlighted works that had been categorized under spurious and often conflicting ideological headings. Cavatorta also specializes in the theory and practice of translation and cultural interchange. He has published his translations of several American poets into Italian in the anthologies Nuova poesia Americana: San Francisco (New American poetry: San Francisco, 2006), Nuova poesia Americana: New York (New American poetry: New York, 2009), and Nuova poesia Americana: Chicago e le praterie (New American poetry: Chicago and the Prairies, 2019). He also published the edition of the experimental novel The Porthole by Adriano Spatola (translated with Polly Geller; 2011) and, in the Journal of Italian Translation, the translation of Emilio Zucchi’s The Marrow of Evil, a selection of poems by Sergio Atzeni (both with Brenna Ward). He is currently translating with Federica Santini Anne Sexton’s To Bedlam and Part Way Back. Cavatorta is finally the co-editor (with Luigi Ballerini) of Those Who from Afar Look Like Flies, an anthology of Italian poetry from Officina to the present. This rather large and daring enterprise (2100 pages is the first tome, published in 2017 by University of Toronto Press) features poems by, among others, Pasolini, Roversi, Leonetti, Sanguineti, Giuliani, Porta, Pagliarani, Rosselli, Villa, Cacciatore, Diacono, Calogero, Majorino, Gugielmi, Raboni, Erba, many critical essays and statements on poetics, and bio-bibliographical notes etc. The second volume is in the making.