Lies in Color, Emanuel Carnevali, Oscar Fontaine

Like Dino Campana, Emanuel Carnevali experienced the fate of a "poète maudit": born in Bologna in 1897, he was still a child when he left for the United States, which was to become for him the symbolic place of life and literature. Very young, he found himself in the circle of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Sherwood Anderson, who welcomed him as one of their own. Carnevali wrote in English, his only language being that of exile, and thus brought a wild new breath to American poetry, whose novelty was fully appreciated. He met a tragic end: in 1922, struck by encephalitis, he had to return to Italy. He spent the last years of his life in a hospital near Bologna, where he received letters and visits from his friends across the Atlantic until his death in 1942. His poems are translated here for the first time into French.