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The good reception obtained by the translations of Donne's poems included in the volume on Elizabethan authors has encouraged me to continue my work not that there don't already exist excellent Italian translations (for example those by Giorgio Melchiori and Roberto Sanesi); but any selection, however representative of an author, gives but a partial view of his work and in the case of a spirit like Donne's, eternally suspended between medievalism and modernity, ascesis and libertinism, elaborate stylishness and montaigne-like simplicity, there lays always in wait some surprise, some readjustment of our evaluation of a figure that is so important not only for the comprehension of the cultural life of his time, but especially for the influence that even today he still exercises on our sensibility (I need only quote Brodskij and Valduga), more than a century after his being rediscovered.
Considering the bulk of the work, we have decided, with the site's editors, to divide it in six volumes, and to publish the four volumes that were ready, hoping to be able to offer the Italian public within a short time the complete translation of Donne's poetical works. 

Fiornando Gabbrielli

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