On Jacob Glatshteyn’s Sacco and Vanzetti Poem

Jacob Glatshteyn’s poem about Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the celebrated Italian anarchists executed for murder on August 23, 1927, is both the greatest poem about the two men and among the least widely known; the goal of this article is to make the poem more broadly available for discussion. The means of arriving at that goal include a rigorously literal translation and a set of commentaries on particular lines of the poem, on its general themes and patterns, and on the relation between this poem and other poems on the subject. Among the themes explored are the poem’s temporality, its portrait of the city, its dramatization of character, its shifting refrains, its Christian imagery, and its broad range of pity and curiosity.