Cover Art: original portrait of Vittoria Aganoor Pompilj painted by Italian artist Francesca Draetta. Private property (c) Francesca Draetta 2025.

Vittoria Aganoor Pompilj: Translated by Stefania Lucchetti – buy it on Amazon

Vittoria Aganoor Pompilj (1855–1910) was an Italian poet of Armenian descent and one of the most distinctive female literary voices of late nineteenth-century Italy.  Born in Padua into a cultivated family, she developed a poetic language of remarkable emotional intensity, combining classical elegance with a modern sensitivity to psychological conflict, longing, solitude, and the passage of time.

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Cover art: portrait of Vittoria Aganoor Pompilj by Italian painter Francesca Draetta, (c) 2025

Commentary: Stefania Lucchetti

It includes an original poem dedicated to Vittoria Aganoor Pompilj  by Stefania Lucchetti

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Vittoria Aganoor offers a poetry of extraordinary emotional vigilance.  Her poems seem continually to observe the movements of the self: desire as it becomes fear, love as it approaches loss, hope as it gives way to doubt, memory as it returns with almost physical force.  Aganoor turns often toward an experience that cannot quite be mastered by reason: the poem becomes the place where that experience can be examined, questioned, resisted, and finally given form.

Her principal collections, Leggenda eterna (1900) and Nuove liriche (1908), explore the tensions between passion and restraint, desire and disillusionment, and the elusive nature of happiness. Her poetry is distinguished by its musicality, intellectual depth, and acute awareness of the power and limitations of language. Although her literary recognition came relatively late, Aganoor established herself as an important voice in Italian poetry, leaving a body of work whose emotional and psychological complexity continues to resonate with contemporary readers.

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Stefania Lucchetti is a bilingual Italian essayist, translator, and award-winning poet who writes in both Italian and English. Born in Verona in 1975, she began publishing poetry as a teen while living in the United States. Trained in classics and law, she earned a JD from Università Cattolica in Milan and became one of the first Italian lawyers to specialize in telecommunications and new technologies, later qualifying as a solicitor in both the UK and Hong Kong. Alongside her legal career, she pursued studies in clinical psychology, deepening the humanistic perspective that informs her writing. Author of poetry collections and philosophical works on technological humanism, Lucchetti now brings her bilingual voice and literary sensibility to the translation and promotion of Italian women poets for international readers.