Peter Covino

PETER COVINO

Translator

Translations

Peter’s newest translation project, What Sex Is Death? Dario Bellezza Selected Poems, (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025) won the Wisconsin Press Prize for Poetry in Translation and the 2025 Raiziss/de Palchi Book Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

What Sex Is Death? - book link
As a FY 2019 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Fellowship in Translation, Peter’s work on 20th- and 21st-Century Italian and Italian American Poets, such as Dario Bellezza, Livia di Stefani, Maurizio Cucchi, Vivian Lamarque, Giorgio Bassani, Ricardo Cordiferro, Righi Simplicio, Efrem Bartoletti, and Maria Mazziotti Gillan has appeared in such publications as The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, Modern European Poets 1960-2008 (Graywolf P.), ItaloAmericana: The History of Literature by Italian in the U.S. (Fordham UP), the Academy of American Poets, Arkansas International, Asymptote, the NEA website, Colorado Review, Guernica, Interim, Poetry Foundation, Witness, and Words without Borders.
Peter Covino - Dario Bellezza - What sex Is Death

Publications

Peter Covino - Dario Bellezza - What sex Is Death

Winner of the Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation, selected by Geoffrey Brock

“Dario Bellezza—mentored by Morante and championed by Pasolini, who called him ‘the best poet of the new generation’—remains one of the essential Italian voices of the latter half of the twentieth century. As an out gay man, he wrote transgressive poems of love and sex and polemic (by turns tender, brash, angry, defiant) as the gay-rights struggles of the sixties and seventies morphed into the AIDS crisis of the eighties and nineties. Thanks to poet-translator Peter Covino’s scrupulous yet daring versions, which are labors both of love and skill, American readers can now trace the arc of Bellezza’s career, from his early Invective and License to his final Proclamation on Glamor—each an aching, disruptive testament to ‘this infected world.’”

—Geoffrey Brock, University of Arkansas

Peter Covino’s translation of What Sex Is Death? by Dario Bellezza (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025) has won the 2025 Raiziss/de Palchi Book Prize from the Academy of American Poets, judged by Anna Kraczyna, Jennifer Scappettone, and Charif Shanahan.

Judges Anna Kraczyna, Jennifer Scappettone, and Charif Shanahan wrote of the winning translation: “With the publication of What Sex Is Death?, creatively edited, translated, and introduced to the Anglophone public by Peter Covino, a necessary yet heretofore largely eclipsed chapter in the history of Italian contemporary poetry is restored to a wider public. Some seventy poems from a career encompassing more than twenty books appear here in all their fleshly ardor and invective: Covino’s labor ushers us whole into the Rome of this queer iconoclast composing in the wake of Rimbaud, its beasts and hemlock drinkers, demonstrating that in a world hankering after angels ‘The real / triumph is that of the quotidian.’”

Praise

“A carefully curated volume composed of more than seventy essential translations of Bellezza’s poems. A prizewinning multivolume author of verse in his own right, Covino offers non-Italian readers a most adept and lyrical series of translations that seem, in themselves, original compositions.”

Anthony Julian Tamburri, Distinguished Professor and Dean, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute

“In this groundbreaking book, Italian American queer poet Peter Covino for the first time introduces an English-speaking audience to Dario Bellezza’s riveting work through a complex theoretical introduction, incisive selection, and nuanced translation. The volume emphasizes Bellezza’s invaluable impact on the emergence of an Italian queer culture—here conceptualized as providing an innovative perspective on contemporary Italian literature—while it also contributes to the shaping of a transnational Italian queerness.”

Caterina Romeo, Sapienza Università di Roma, author of Interrupted Narratives and Intersectional Representations in Italian Postcolonial Literature

Bellezza, Dario. “Practical Activities.” “A Relocation.” “To Anna Maria Ortese.” Trans. Peter Covino. Poets.org, 2025. Online.

Bellezza, Dario. “Snakewoman.” “III – Rome.” “Secret Death.” Trans. Peter Covino. Guernica, January 2025. Online.

Bellezza, Dario. “My House the Entryway.” “Practical Activities.” Trans. Peter Covino. Arkansas International. Vol 9, Fall 2020: 48-49. Print.

Bellezza, Dario. “Glamor.” & Eight Poems. Witness. Trans. Peter Covino. Spring 2015: 20-37. Print.

  • Lamarque, Vivian. “At Vacations End.” Trans. Peter Covino. The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry. Ed. Geoffrey Brock. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2012, 531-532.
  • Bellezza, Dario. “To Pier Paolo Pasolini.” “[I listened to death in my dream.]” Trans. Peter Covino. Atlanta Review 27.2 (2011):57. Print.
  • Bellezza, Dario.“[I believe I should have a child].” “[I licked you between dirty sheets].” Cavalli, Patrizia. “[Almost always he who is content is also vulgar].” Cucchi, Maurizio. “Letter and Prayer.” “[From the Cairo to Loreto].” “[He left throwing us].” “[Why do you breathe on my head?]” Lamarque, Vivian. “At Vacation’s End.” “To Pasolini.” Trans. Peter Covino. Modern European Poets (1968-2008). Ed. Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer.  Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2008, 61-66. Print. Compiled and edited Italian section and provided translations of nine poems with biographical notes.

  • De Stefani, Livia. “‘Poet to Poet’: “Nocturne n 2.” “Nocturne n 4.” “Nocturne n 6.” “Nocturne n 10.” Trans. Peter Covino. Journal of Italian Translation Vol 4. 2. (2008): 1-7.  Print. Translated four poems with a biographical note.
  • Gillan, Maria Mazziotti. “Due Poesie.” Tuttestorie, traduzioni da Peter Covino (Italy) Fall 2000. Print. Translated two poems into the Italian.