Sometimes the hidden coordinates of a lifetime’s work can be precisely mapped. In the case of Andrea Zanzotto, the great Italian poet who turned 86 this October 10th, they are three. First, his birthplace of Pieve di Soligo, a village which Mr. Zanzotto calls “the bellybutton of the world,” in the northern Italian region known as the Veneto. To the south, the ancient Montello woods form another of his coordinates; for him, nature and history are so entangled there as to be inseparable. And finally there are the Dolomites, which he has called “a rarefied, suspended world” whose summits rise up into “a timeless, mathematical light.” These landscapes have shaped his remarkable poetry. In fact, the poems, from the quiet lyrics of his youth to the zany and extravagant outpourings of his later years, sometimes seem to trace the very bumps and hollows, as well as the high peaks, of that terrain.

A selection of Mr. Zanzotto’s poetry, beautifully translated by Brian Swann and Ruth Feldman, appeared in 1975 but has been long out of print. Now, in “The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto: A Bilingual Edition” (University of Chicago, 481 pages, $35), edited and translated by Patrick Barron, American readers can get a just sense of his true range and extraordinary originality. Mr. Barron has provided most of the translations, together with a perceptive introduction and a number of quite lovely illustrations (including several impish portraits of the poet himself), but he has also included translations by other hands, including the earlier versions by Mr. Swann and Ms. Feldman.

At first glance, Mr. Zanzotto may seem to be that gruesome being, an “experimental poet.” In his mature verse, he uses eccentric line breaks, blank spaces, typographic squiggles, scratchmarks, road-signs and even pictographs. His vocabulary can be bizarre. He loves rare words; in fact, he seems to be a poet who never met a word he didn’t like. Terms drawn from botany, geology and physics rub shoulders in his verse with military slang, snatches of dialect and even baby-talk. In one of his greatest poems, “Yes, the Snow Again,” he inserts the line “gnam gnam yum yum slurp slurp.” This is off-putting until you realize that he’s presenting a forest as it appears to a toddler, for whom it resembles an enormous “five-and-dime store” packed with goodies. In the same poem he gives us “archaic skies acidulous as Cimbric gibberish.” The packed sounds force us, like children reciting a tongue-twister, to smack our lips as we say them. (In the Italian, it reads “cieli arcaici aciduli come slambròt cimbrici,” a real Cracker Jack box of crunchy consonants.) Mr. Zanzotto isn’t just drunk on words, he’s crazed by them.

In “Behind the Landscape,” his first collection, from 1951, Mr. Zanzotto evoked the landscape of his childhood in delicate accents:

The windows and apple trees
Of home gleam on my return,
The hills are first
Over the sky-soaked finish line,
The golden water is all in the pail
The sand all in the courtyard
Together rhyming with the hills.

Ten years later, in “IX Eclogues,” he is still trying to find a language equal to those early vistas. In “The Oak Uprooted by the Wind,” he catches a human echo in a fallen tree:

oak tumbled at my feet, as I kneel in vain to lift you as one lifts a stricken father, prostrate in vain to listen in you to our in you ancient futile gasps, futile cries.

The penultimate line falters on purpose; he isn’t describing a broken tree, he’s listening to it and the language stumbles in sympathy.

In the 1980s, Mr. Zanzotto worked closely with Federico Fellini, particularly on “The City of Women” and “And the Ship Sails On.” For Fellini’s “Casanova” he composed a poem in “pseudo-Venetian dialect,” happily included here. The dialect poems reveal a different Zanzotto; he is direct and plain-spoken in saluting this “poor speech, of the poor, but pure.” When the little dialect poem “Herdsmen” was read on local Italian radio, the station was swamped by calls from enthusiastic shepherds who’d been listening while tending their flocks; the fact that he called them “kings of Arcadia” probably didn’t hurt.

Mr. Zanzotto is one of those rare poets who’s grown wilder as he’s gotten older; the poems of his old age are as strange and wacky as ever, and yet, they too come out of the landscape of his origins. “Remain true to the earth,” the 19th century German poet Friedrich Hölderlin once wrote. Hölderlin has influenced Mr. Zanzotto profoundly; he often invokes his prophetic lines. Of course, Hölderlin paid dearly for his vocation. He went mad and spent the last forty years of his life in virtual silence. Zanzotto has been luckier. For six decades now he has been producing his astonishing verse. He has never stopped listening to his father the oak.

eormsby@nysun.com