William Blake's last great visionary epic was being written c. 1804 and not certainly complete before 1820.
It is an extraordinary poetic and iconographic work that marks the climax of one of the most original geniuses of English (and not only English) literature and art. Its originality is in the vanguard of literary Modernism and closely anticipates pictorial Surrealism.
The present book, in two volumes, has been edited by Marcello Pagnini, one of the major Italian anglicists and one of the founding fathers of structuralist and semiotic criticism.
The first volume produces a facsimile of the original. William Blake, engraver and poet, invented a printing method which enabled him to create works in which words and images combine to form beautiful and richly illuminated plates. He printed privately his engraved copper sheets and subsequently coloured them.
The copy presented here, the finest of five extant specimens indicated by Blake's canon as Copy E, has been until recently the property of Mr Paul Mellon of Washington, who however has finally donated it to the Yale Center for British Art.
The present edition of Jerusalem is published in Italy for the first time in its illuminated and unabridged form.
The second volume comprises: an ample historical and interpretive introduction to Blake's philosophical, religious, and artistic 'systems'; a transcription of the original linguistic text with parallel Italian translation; an iconographic interpretation; a rich array of explanatory notes; and a glossary of terms, ideas and symbols.
An accurately annotated edition such as this assists the reader in his extremely arduous labour in achieving an accurate understanding of the text and in forming an interpretation of his own.
A box (size 215 x 305 x 50 mm) contains the volume with the plates and the volume with bilingual text (312 pages), both bound with colour printed dust-jackets.