Like a pilgrim, or a spiritual vagrant, crisscrossing the country-always rolling on the very fabric of the continent: westwards and eastwards, to the eternal oceans, and from
the northern vast plains down through the Appalachian, to the deep recesses of the lowlands, to the swamps-infallibly enough I would always return to my dwelling in Princeton.
Many a time the lonely night was devoted to the contemplation of the moon of New Jersey, as I licked the wounds of a sore soul. I always wondered, how different that pale, ghostly circle of a moon was, from the one I encountered elsewhere above...

Vincenzo Cardarelli (pseudonym of Nazareno Caldarelli, 1887-1959) journalist, poet, and literary critic, led a solitary, dignified existence, from a humble background, through self-taught education and innumerable peregrinations, until his final days in poverty and loneliness. He stood and sought for all that a true artist and intellectual has to stand and seek for: the uncompromising authenticity of art.

Until now, with the sole exception of a few poems translated by the great Irish poet Desmond OGrady in the late 1950s, the work of Vincenzo Cardarelli had remained precluded to the English...