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A representative collection of Elizabethan poems, mainly by Shakespeare and John Donne, with parallel English texts, translated with feeling by Fiornando Gabbrielli, introducing us to the great sensibility of that period, mingled with the irony that we know from Shakespeare’s plays, but forthright and sincere in setting on paper and analysing human feelings. The last poems of the collection are a fascinating exercise in re-translation: one of Petrarch’s sonnets, translated into English in the 16th century by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, is then put back into Italian by Gabbrielli, revealing the mechanisms of transformation that the process of translation always implies.

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