Paolo Valesio (Special Tribute)

Professor of Italian 

Paolo Valesio, Dottore in Lettre, Facolta di Lettere e Filosofia, University of Bologna 1961, and faculty member at Yale since 1974: You are a linguist and a scholar of Italian literature, but most of all you are a writer. Your critical works in Italian and English have made you a well-known and respected critic of Italian literature in the country of your birth and in this country. Your ability to be comfortably at home in the literatures of two languages has made you an expert on comparative approaches to contemporary literature and creative writing. Your important book on Gabriele d’Annunzio, “The Dark Flame” has illuminated the philosophical and poetic thought behind the work of this poet, novelist, and dramatist, whose works make him the best interpreter of European Decadence in post-Risorgimento Italy. 

But at Yale, as in Italy, you have been first and foremost someone whose passion for the craft of poetry has infused your teaching and your life. You are the author in Italian of four books of fiction, and of eleven books of poetry, several of which have brought you honors and prizes. You are a valued member of editorial boards of American and Italian journals; the correspondent in this country for the Milanese Journal of Poetry, for which you write a regular column; and the associate director of the Italian Poetry Society of America. At Yale you not only galvanized an influential weekly poetry group that met in Calhoun College, but you are the founder and editor of the journal Yale Italian Poetry. Scholar, teacher, but most of all poet and lover of poets, as you retire from Yale to begin a new life in New York, those who value the arts in New Haven, in Italy and around the world thank and salute you.