Centuria

Giorgio Manganelli

Giorgio Manganelli was an Italian journalist, avant-garde writer, translator and literary critic. A native of Milan, he was one of the leaders of the avant-garde literary movement in Italy in the 1960s, Gruppo 63. He was a baroque and expressionist writer. Manganelli translated Edgar Allan Poe's complete stories and authors like T. S. Eliot, Henry James, Eric Ambler, O. Henry, Ezra Pound, Robert Louis Stevenson, Byron's Manfred and others into Italian. He published an experimental work of fiction, Hilarotragoedia, in 1964, at the time he was a member of the avant-garde Gruppo 63. Centuria, which won the Viareggio Prize, is probably his most approachable; it was translated into English in 2005 by Henry Martin. Agli dei ulteriori comprises a linked collection of short pieces, including an exchange of letters between Hamlet and the Princess of Cleves and concludes with a fake learned article on the language of the dead. He died in Rome in 1990. He was an atheist. Italo Calvino called him 'a writer unlike any other, an inexhaustible and irresistible inventor in the game of language and ideas'.