Overview

In The Boxer, Gabriele Tinti returns to the ancient bronze known as the Boxer at Rest, a figure seated, battered, unvanquished, and draws from it a sequence of poems as spare and unrelenting as the object itself. These are not elegies for victory, but meditations on endurance, on the dignity of damage, on the silence after violence and the long life of the defeated body. Tinti’s lines are cut to the bone. Refusing ornament and consolation alike, they inhabit a world in which strength is indistinguishable from suffering, and survival itself becomes a form of defiance. Across these pages, antiquity is not revived but confronted, its beauty inseparable from brutality, its heroes stripped of myth and left with only their wounds. This edition presents the poems in Italian and English, allowing the full weight and cadence of Tinti’s language to resonate across both. What emerges is a work of rare severity and clarity, a book that does not describe the boxer, but becomes him.

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9781971559070

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Reviews

Seeing the Boxer at Rest was like a thunderbolt. My psychic borders broke as it instantly embedded itself in my inner museum. -- Jerry Saltz A remarkable and powerful object that seems to speak across centuries about the risks and nobility of the athlete and the way in which art can turn banality into beauty. -- Lynda Nead

Author Information

Gabriele Tinti is an Italian Poet whose work engages directly with classical antiquity, often composed for performance in museums and archaeological sites. His texts have been read by actors including Kevin Spacey, Willem Dafoe, and Abel Ferrara at institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum. His poetry is marked by its austerity, physicality, and sustained dialogue with ancient art. David Graham is a translator working from Italian into English. He translates catalogues for art exhibitions and museums, including the Venice Biennale and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, and also works with poetry. He grew up in New Zealand and moved to Europe in 1982. He lives in Venice. Nicholas Benson is a translator working from Italian into English. His translations include Attilio Bertolucci’s Winter Journey; Aldo ­Palazzeschi’s The Arsonist, for which he received an NEA Translation Fellowship; and, with Elena Coda, Scipio Slataper’s My Karst and My City, which received the 2022 John Florio Prize from the Society of Authors (UK).

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