I just learned of the new The Faber Book of 20th-century Italian Poems (edited by Jamie McKendrick) and consequently learned that Italy had 20th century poets. But while I agree with Paul Bailey that the lack of biographical notes is a "serious omission," I don't see what the real problem is with leaving out the original Italian for a book of translations meant for the English reading public. All too often translators and publishers turn translated literary projects into scholarly codexes that scare (or bore) readers away, rather than just items for reading pleasure. I have no interest or need in seeing Dante's original Italian of the Inferno when I have Robert Pinksy's brilliantly rendered terza rima to turn to.

Of the 47 Italian poets included in this ambitious collection, four are incontestably great. They are Giuseppe Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo and the beguilingly witty and melancholy Umberto Saba, the bookseller from Trieste who only left his native city to hide from the Germans during the Second World War. Unfortunately, although Saba is represented with one of his finest poems, "The Goat", its sardonic and self-mocking humour is lost in a too-literal translation.

This is not a bilingual edition, which means that the curious reader is given no opportunity to compare the original poems with their versions in English. The absence of biographical notes is a more serious omission, since most of the poets are virtually unknown outside Italy. You could just about guess that Sandro Penna was a tormented homosexual, but a couple of lines explaining that his lyricism is rooted in frustrated anguish would have been helpful. Cesare Pavese is relatively well known, but something might have been said of his contribution to the neo-realistic movement of the late 1940s and 1950s in prose and poetry. The poems come at you out of nowhere in a variety of renderings — some inventive, some adequate, some faithful, some irritatingly obscure.