This is a reissue of Italian poet Paolo Ruffilli's long poem La gioia e il lutto, in a dual-language edition, Italian and English, with a translation by Irish poet and Augustinian priest Pádraig J. Daly. The poem uses a form traditional in both Irish and Italian poetry, where it goes back to Jacapone da Todi and beyond, in which various people comment on the agony and death of Christ, in order to shed light on the suffering and dying of a young man from AIDS.