"In the biographical note accompanying one of her books, Cristina Campo said of herself: "She has written little and would like to have written less". That little is almost all collected in this book and will impose an observation on every perceptive reader: these pages belong to the most beautiful Italian prose has been shown in the last fifty years. Cristina Campo was unforgivable, in the sense that the word has in the essay that gives the title to this book: like Marianne Moore, like Hofmannsthal, like Benn, like Weil, she had the "passion for perfection". She could not otherwise have written the pages that are read here on Chopin or on the fairy tale, on the Arabian Nights or about language. "I salute a wisdom among the strangest today" Ceronetti once wrote from Campo. Perhaps the time has come for readers to realize that in Italy, among so many promoters of their own mediocrity, this "trappist of perfection" also lived"--

Cristina Campo (1923–1977) was born in Bologna and brought up in Florence. A congenital heart malformation kept Campo out of school and social life for much of her childhood, forcing her into a reclusion enlivened by her reading. A bona fide autodidact, she had by her teens begun to read deeply in Italian, French, German, Spanish, and English literature. After World War II, Campo moved to Rome, where she became acquainted with Eugenio Montale, Curzio Malaparte, and Roberto Bazlen, among others. Intensely private, she almost always published under pseudonyms (Cristina Campo being one of them) and translated—Simone Weil, Katherine Mansfield, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf—far more than she wrote. Although she had always been a Catholic, in the 1960s Campo’s faith became more fervent; she spent long periods in convents and strongly opposed the Second Vatican Council’s relinquishment of the Latin liturgy. Her heart continued to cause her serious trouble throughout her life, and she died in Rome at the age of fifty-three.
Alex Andriesse was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1985. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Granta, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Prodigal, and Literary Imagination. He has translated several works from Italian and French, including Bernardo Zannoni’s My Stupid Intentions, available from New York Review Books, and the first two parts of François-René de Chateaubriand's Memoirs from Beyond the Grave. He is an associate editor at New York Review Books.
Kathryn Davis is the author of eight novels, most recently The Silk Road, and a memoir, Aurelia Aurélia. She is the senior fiction writer on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University.