Giovanni Raboni (1932-2004), born in Milan, was a translator, essayist and one of the major Italian poets of second half of the twentieth century. He translated Racine, Baudelaire and Proust, among other French writers, into Italian, and wrote newspaper reportage, literary criticism and political essays. His poetry collections total more than a dozen collections spanning the years from the 1950s to the first years of the twenty-first century. He wrote of the eternal themes--love, loss and death&#8212in an engaging, inventive and conversational style.