Anthony Geist & Adam L. Weintraub, ROME: PEDESTRIANS BEWARE

Writer and professor Anthony L. Geist and photographer Adam L. Weintraub present the book Rome: Pedestrians Beware, a trilingual edition of Rafael Alberti’s Roma: Peligro para caminantes, featuring exquisite and nuanced translations in English and Italian from the original Spanish by Anthony Geist and Giuseppe Leporace alongside visually evocative photographs of contemporary Rome by former PCNW Board Director, Adam L. Weintraub.

Rafael Alberti’s collection of poems set in vibrant Rome, his home in exile from Spain.

After his long exile in France and Argentina following the Spanish Civil War, Rafael Alberti’s final home in exile was Rome, where he wrote Roma: Peligro para caminantes (Rome: Pedestrians Beware). There, Romulus and Remus sneak down to the Tiber to suckle on feral cats, a jack of all trades pisses on the poet’s shoes, whistling as he walks away, and in the Campo de’ Fiori the poet compares sonnets with the wandering spirit of Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, all in the shadow of the glory of Rome’s imperial ruins.

Two suites of sonnets open and close the book, while in between, Alberti displays masterful poems in metered and free verse, rhyming couplets, and a numbered series of short poems. The blending of classical tradition with post-modern echoes the darkness and luminosity that exist within the poems, tinged with longing, nostalgia, love, as well as hope. In the end, the Eternal City is a refuge for Alberti:”I left for you all that I once held dear. / Oh Rome, my sorrow pleads, hold out your hands / and give me everything I left for you.”

This unique trilingual edition features exquisite and nuanced translations in English and Italian from the original Spanish by Anthony Geist and Giuseppe Leporace alongside visually evocative photographs of Rome by Adam Weintraub. Readers will want to take this poetic walk in Rome since what sometimes elicits caution, an aspect of danger, also becomes a destination for discovery.

Adam L. Weintraub is a professional photographer, adventure tour producer and serially distracted entrepreneur based in Seattle. His PhotoExperience.net tours combine inspiring locations, with local specialists offering insight and collaboration, in intimate settings. He recently dialogued with a dead Spanish poet in Rome, collaborating on a new trilingual interpretation of Rafael Alberti’s famous tome, Roma, Peligro para caminantes. His coffee table book, Vista Andina, offers a contemporary photographic perspective on the Andean region of Cusco, Peru; while his photographic essay on the cultural component of his favorite distraction, pisco, is Pisco Patrimonio. Adam is the founder of the famed Museo del Pisco (three locations in Peru: Cusco, Lima and Arequipa), sharing his passion with the world for Peru’s distinguished national beverage of choice. He now imports his own artisanal pisco, Patrimonio Suyus. He assists in efforts to create a permanent archive of the famed Peruvian photographer, Martín Chambi. Adam is a past three-term President of Blue Earth Alliance; and currently sits on the Board of Trustees for the Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle. He is widely published, hired, and admired for his personal work: www.adamw.com.

Anthony L. Geist is a professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, having taught previously at Princeton, the University of Texas (San Antonio) and Dartmouth College. He did his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of California, working summers as a heavy construction carpenter. He has published widely on Spanish and Latin American poetry, with an emphasis on the Generation of 27, the avant-garde and surrealism. He has also worked in visual studies, curating art exhibits and co-directing a documentary film on the Lincoln Brigade. His translation of the Peruvian poet Lucho Hernández was a finalist for the PEN Prize in 2016. In that same year he was knighted in the Order of Isabella the Catholic Queen with the rank of Cruz de Oficial.

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