The Poetry of Burchiello ─ Deep-fried Nouns, Hunchbacked Pumpkins, and Other Nonsense

The Poetry of Burchiello: Deep-fried Nouns, Hunchbacked Pumpkins, and Other Nonsense is the first complete English translation of the poetry of Domenico di Giovanni, nicknamed il Burchiello (ca. 1404–1449). A highly influential Florentine poet of the fifteenth century, and a barber by trade, Burchiello composed poetry that inspired numerous imitators and influenced writers for centuries afterwards. Ironically, however, he specialized in a nonsensical style that destabilized semantic meaning and that continues to baffle readers. In this bilingual edition of Burchiello’s poetry, Fabian Alfie and Aileen A. Feng attempt to render Burchiello’s non-sensical poetry into readable English while maintaining the experimental spirit of the original.

Fabian Alfie is Professor of Italian at the University of Arizona. He is a specialist of the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, including Dante and Boccaccio.? The focus of his research is the comic-satiric tradition of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, and he has published books on Rustico Filippi, Cecco Angiolieri, and Dante’s insulting exchange with Forese Donati.

Aileen A. Feng is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Arizona. She?specializes in early modern literature, especially Petrarch, Petrarchism in Italy and France, neo-Latin humanism, and the Querelle des femmes. With Unn Falkeid, Feng is the co-editor of Rethinking Gaspara Stampa in the Canon of Renaissance Poetry, and the author of Writing Beloveds: Humanist Petrarchism and the Politics of Gender.