Valduga, Patrizia

Patrizia Valduga, born in 1953 in Castelfranco Veneto, is a poetess and a translator. She first enrolled for a Medicine degree, but after 3 years she decided to study Literature and Philosophy at Venice University, where she attended Francesco Orlando's classes, which would have a great influence on her poetry production. In 1983, she made her debut with her poetry collection "Medicamenta", where she combined modern topics with classical metres such as ballad, terza rima and sonnet which, thanks to their rigid rhyms and syllable seuquence, give the poem a stronger impact. The same technique is used for the love topic in "La tentazione" (1985), "Medicamenta e altri medicamenta" (1989) and in "Cento quartine e altre storie d'amore" (1997), in which she harmoniously combined everyday and literary language, and for the pain topic in "Corsia degli incurabili" (1996), in which the use of sirventese together with fast rhyms makes these topics less hard. In 1998 she founded the magazine "Poesia". Patrizia Valduga also authored a poem,"Donna di dolori", turned into a text for the theatre and staged by Franca Nuti winning both the 1992 Duse Prrize and the 1995 Rondone Prize. Her translations of John Donne, Moliere, Paul Valéry and Shakespeare are very much acclaimed. In 1998 she edited "Richard III" for the collection "Scrittori tradotti da scrittori" published by Einaudi. In a relationship with Giovanni Raboni for 23 years, in 2006 she wrote a postface to "Ultimi versi", a posthumous collection of unpublished writings by Raboni, dedicating 23 moving poems to her partner.