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Quaderni di YiP

Yale universitY

This first issue of Quaderni di YiP is dedicated to Alfredo De Palchi, poet and supporter of the cause of Italian poetry in the United States.

Quaderni di YiPvolume i

2001

Quaternio: Four Questions on Poetry

Yale universitY

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Quaternio: Four Questions on Poetry

Contents / IndICe❄

ernesto livorni, PrefazionePaolo valesio, Introduction: “Who Says Words with my Mouth?”

the questIon of tradItIon / la questIone della tradIzIone

Paolo euron, Mitologia, imitazione, poesia: Parole guida nel romanticismo italiano e tedescoroberta de monticelli, Mario Luzi and the Powers of the Word the questIon of translatIon / la questIone della traduzIone

graziella sidoli, Translations And Simultaneities: The Case Of Marinetti’s “Mafarka le Futuriste, Roman africain”ann snodgrass, Through the Lens of Modernism: 20th-Century “Dolce stile” and the Translation of Bilingual Intertext

the questIon of lImInalIty / la questIone della lImInalItà

alberto bertoni, Italiani in Americamichael Palma, The Road to Rome, and Back Againluca somigli, Italian Poetry North of the 49th: Writing (of) Italy in Canada

9 11

25 41

65

75

85 97

103

the questIon of voICe / la questIone della voCe

letizia lanza, Un esempio di poesia femminile: Bianca Grazia Tarozzilucia re, The Poverty of Women’s Poetry: A Genealogy of Silence note Cards / sChede

121 125

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PreFazione

❄

I l Quaderno è il luogo dell’appunto, dell’annotazione preziosa, che magari si stende in fretta perché si pensa di recuperare ed arricchire più tardi; il luogo dove avvengono le misurazioni per approssimare

il vero, per poterci tornare a meditare in un secondo momento, una volta stabilite le coordinate generali. Il quaderno è il luogo dello stato nascente del pensiero, nel quale il magma della riflessione viene a sedimentarsi un poco, pur sempre rimanendo colata lavica destinata a ben altri fondi, ad altri approfondimenti. Il quaderno è il luogo dell’investimento, che sancisce l’impegno preso con se stessi per l’avvenire.

La tradizione italiana ed europea della modernità è sempre stata attratta da questa formula di intervento critico che ha il senso dell’immediatezza, che mira a stabilire alcuni punti fermi in forma di appunto, sposando la concisione anche con l’approssimazione pur di dire subito, pur di circoscri-vere il campo di lavoro sul quale si tornerà magari con rinnovata passione e sedimentato giudizio.

Molto spesso i quaderni prendono il loro titolo da un luogo: ci si po-trebbe divertire a verificare questa formula vincente sfogliando l’elenco di una serie distesa di quaderni che sono stati diffusi soprattutto nella seconda metà del Novecento. Il quaderno iniziava e finiva per identificarsi con un luogo, anche quando la connessione era o diventava piuttosto casuale. Il quaderno è, d’altronde, anche luogo di coltivo, orto dove pur si minia il frutto del ciclo lavorativo.

Il luogo dei Quaderni di YIP è, ovviamente, YIP. Yale Italian Poetry. Con ciò voglio dire che i Quaderni, oltre ad essere, generalmente parlan-do, il luogo dell’appunto, come ho detto, sono anche e soprattutto il luogo dell’appunto alla poesia. Se YIP si dedica in primo luogo alla poesia, pur relegando la seconda parte del progetto alle sezioni di poetologia e di re-censioni (sezioni, quindi, fondamentalmente impegnate nel discorso critico sulla poesia), i Quaderni offrono l’altro fianco, quello che, con soluzione ambivalente e doppia, è l’appunto alla poesia. L’appunto diventa interrogazi-one costante della poesia, interrogazione che non può non porsi che sotto le forme del discorso critico; si tratta, però, di un discorso critico sempre in cammino all’interno di se stesso, che non si vuole presentare come punto

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QUATERNIO: FOUR QUESTIONS ON POETRY

fermo, ma come punto di partenza.Quaderni di YIP, quindi, dedica ampio spazio all’altra faccia della

proposta di YIP; tuttavia, i Quaderni non vanno presi, a mio parere, come il complemento della rivista che li specifica ed a cui rimandano nel titolo. I due progetti non vogliono combaciare, come se si trattasse di due cocci rotti di un’interezza. Tra i Quaderni e YIP rimane una sbavatura: il luogo in cui si addensa l’energia, l’adesione che acclama la sua propria appartenenza.

ernesto livorni

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introduction: “Who saYs Words With mY mouth?”

❄

The Context

We begin the neW exPerience of the Quaderni di YIP — flanking our four-year young journal, YIP. Yale Italian Poetry — with excitement and with many hopes, but also with a humbling sense

of the difficulties ahead. All over the world, poetry keeps confirming its indispensability, but its status continues to be a precarious one. For all the current rhetoric about globalization1 it seems that the questions posed by poetry cannot even be clearly perceived (let alone solved) outside of local contexts, both spatial and temporal. I will begin, then, with a brief char-acterization of the Yale context of these Quaderni as I see it at this point.

In her 1998 speech, “Setting the Scholar’s Table,” Dean Susan Hock-field quoted from the Yale historian Jaroslav Pelikan’s work on Cardinal Newman, where Pelikan speaks of “the four legs of the university table”: “The advancement of knowledge through research, the transmission of knowledge through teaching, the preservation of knowledge in scholarly collections, and the diffusion of knowledge through publishing.”2 There would be a safe, but not very interesting, and ultimately unrevealing, way of incorporating the recent history of work on modern and contemporary Italian poetry at Yale into this quaternary taxonomy: namely, compiling a list of library resources, items from the catalogues of academic courses, and professorial appointments. It would be neither a short nor an irrelevant list (it would, to mention just one item, include the large and well-known col-lection of manuscripts and books related to the Italian Futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, carefully preserved in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale). But in my brief sketch I must concentrate on an essential idea of the situation seen in its current and basic challenges. Thus, leaving aside the general academic structure (but without neglecting its vital supporting role, for which I am grateful to my colleagues and stu-dents as well as to the administration), I will focus on that part of the local context which is directly relevant to a project like that of Quaderni di YIP: the context of work on Italian poetry in fieri, or in statu nascendi, or (to use

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less Latinate phrasings) work on/around/out of Italian poetry rather than generically “about” it; that is, work on Italian poetry as a means, not only as an object, of knowledge. Returning, in this perspective, to our quaternary list, I will mention at least:

a) the bi-weekly meetings of the “Yale Poetry Group” (YPG), devoted to sharing poetical writings and open not only to members of the Yale community but to every interested person in New Haven (a piece, however little, of leg number one: “the advancement of knowledge through research”);

b) workshops devoted to the teaching of creative writing and translation in Italian, as a regular part of the undergraduate curriculum (“the transmission of knowledge through teaching”);

c) developments like the recent donation of the “Alfredo De Palchi and Sonia Raiziss Papers” to the already mentioned Beinecke Library3 , and the bequest to Beinecke and to the Manuscripts and Archives section of Sterling Memorial Library of a faculty member’s collection of books and manuscripts of modern and contem-porary Italian poetry (“the preservation of knowledge in scholarly collections”);

d) and, finally, the journal activity pertaining to leg number four of the schol-ar’s table (“the diffusion of knowledge through publishing”) — an activity that is obviously central to the present project and thus deserves a little longer description.

After the pioneering and desultory experience of the important jour-nal Yale Italian Studies founded by John Freccero in the late seventies (a journal, at any rate, that did not include creative writings in either prose or poetry), the journal of modern Italian literature L’anello che non tiene, which includes short stories and poems, directed by Ernesto Livorni, has made a contribution to the Yale conversation on Italian poetry in the final decade of the past century. In 1990 Antigones also appeared: a poetry flyer largely devoted to new Italian poems in the originals with facing transla-tions; it was freely distributed to friends of poetry in colleges, bookstores and coffeehouses around New Haven and abroad. This publication lasted with some irregularity for seven years, thanks to the editorial and financial generosity of Massimo Lollini, Chiuti Li, and especially Adrienne Defen-di.4 In 1997 I founded YIP. Yale Italian Poetry, and … I wish I could say “the rest is history,” but of course my collaborators and I are in no position to adopt such a triumphal tone: the struggle has just begun. However, the material precariousness of any poetry publication does not exempt me from the present task of delineating its relevant context and ideas.

YIP. Yale Italian Poetry5 has, I believe, a special position among Italian (and not only Italian) literary journals in the United States today. YIP com-

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bines the presentation of new and/or unpublished Italian poems (from all periods), poetical translations into/from Italian, and reviews of poetry books, with something else and more: poetological writings and — beginning now — poetic prose (see Graziella Sidoli’s contribution in this Quaderno, about poetic elements in the language of a novel). Thus, YIP’s focus on poetry is both fully committed and critically differentiated. The Quaderni di YIP constitute a decisive step forward in such a critical differentiation; in particular (but not exclusively) they develop the critical-philological aspect of our poetry enterprise. But let me return to YIP for a moment.

From the beginning,6 I saw YIP’s mission as that of bringing together four different poetic communities or poetic tribes. (No negative sense is attached to the latter term: by using the word “tribe” I simply designate a quantitatively limited group of writers and readers, which however possesses a history and style, hence a dignity, of its own.) These different groups are: the ancient community of Italian poets in Italy (the metropolitan poets), the historical community of generally or generically American poets (how “American” is any American poet?), the old tribe of Italian-American poets (including Italian-Canadian poets — see Michael Palma’s and Luca Somi-gli’s papers in this Quaderno), and finally the new tribe of expatriate Italian poets, in America and elsewhere (see the contributions by Ann Snodgrass and Alberto Bertoni).

For quite some time — but only now we slowly begin to realize the poetological implications of this historical development — Italian poetry has really been Italophone poetry: that is, Italian poetry is no longer written exclusively in Italy (assuming that this exclusionary autochthony has ever been something more than a myth). What we are witnessing today is not only the traditional poetical “interinanimation” (to extrapolate from John Donne’s suggestive verb)7 between Standard Italian and its “dialects” (some of which have, as it is well known, the status of minor Romance languages on their own), but also the interinanimation of Italian and other national languages. Whether the various communities and tribes involved will rise to the challenge of such a full dialogue remains to be seen; in any case, YIP documents and analyzes this challenging phase in the international life of Italian poetry.

The polylingual aspect of YIP (which is also a distinctive feature of its Quaderni) is an integral part of its mission. I tentatively use the term “polylingual” (although I know that it is less than fully precise in this case) because the word “bilingual” suggests a compilation in which every com-

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ponent text is present in a double, facing-page, version — and this is not the case of YIP, where what happens is that some texts are in Italian and others in English; this linguistic co-existence symbolizes the fluid nature of linguistic alternations in our time, as well as the “extraterritorial” but deeply involved position of YIP with regard to the daily modes of existence of Italian poetry in Italy.8

But there is another crucial aspect of the mission of YIP that has not been explicitly enunciated in the journal until now, and yet it is at least as important as the other. If the aforementioned task of international coop-eration in the work of poetry can be framed in a cultural-anthropological perspective (thus lending itself more easily to formulation and support), this other one is more epistemological — thus less popular but, in the long run, decisive. I refer to the combination of the pragmatic discourse of po-etry with academic discourse — a problem that is much debated today on the international scene (especially in France), and that was evoked at the beginning of this essay, when I spoke of “poetry as a means, not only as an object, of knowledge.” Here I will confine myself to saying that the very existence of YIP and its Quaderni signals an optimistic attitude toward the possibility of seriously combining the two discourses without falling back into the invidious clichés that often separate them. But such a combination cannot be a matter of mechanical distinctions: thus it is not the case that YIP is the locus of “poetry” while the Quaderni di YIP define the space of “philology.” We hope that a continuous and intense dialogue between the pragmatics of poetry and the theoresis of criticism (what we might call the two faces of poetology) will circulate both within the journal YIP and within its Quaderni, without rigid divisions and separations.9

But a discussion of poetry unrelieved by poetical passages maps out a terrain that is too arid. In order to go beyond this desert, I will now consider some of these “passages,” in the several senses of this term: as segments of literary works, but also as transitions, as paths, as journeys, and as exchanges of words or skirmishes.

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The Mouth

In the preceding section I dealt with the here-and-now. Here I would like briefly to address what might be called the chronotopic context — which at first glance looks like the old here-and-now decked in Hellenic garb, but which sounds different; and this is more than enough for our purposes, because in poetry sound is of course crucial. Greek terms like chronos and topos, however tamed by usage, maintain an ineradicably mythological connotation; and this is what is needed, because the concern here is no lon-ger (to repeat) with a precisely geographical or topographical localization, but with a quite different context — a place that is both here and nowhere, a time that is both a “now” and a panchronic continuum. I am speaking in short of that venerable genre illustrated, among other great authors, by Boccaccio: the defense of poetry (and in evoking this monumental conceit I am as auto-ironic and unavoidably parodic as I am serious).

Once upon a time Joseph approached his brothers, “[a]nd when they saw him far off, before he came nigh them, they thought to kill him. And said one to another: Behold the dreamer cometh. Come, let us kill him, and cast him into some old pit” (Genesis 38: 18-10).10

“Behold the dreamer cometh” … Although not professionally a bard, Joseph was a seer, and as such he was immersed in a poetic semiosphere, that is, in the (atmo)sphere of a spiritual poiein. Since then (but surely also before then), the poet — seer or not seer — has been the marginal person, the ghostly presence, the uninvited guest at the banquet (including, often, the scholar’s table) — at best, the precariously tolerated jester.11 I speak elsewhere of “the poet in contempt,” borrowing an expression that the seventeenth-century spiritual poet George Herbert applies to himself — although in his capacity as a country parson rather than as a poet.12 The danger of this category lies in its contagiousness: the poet who feels himself to be an object of contempt is open to the luciferine temptation of viewing non-poetic people (sometimes called, with a racial label, “philistines”) with the same contempt, thus compounding a state of alienation.

Once we begin to look at things in this sobering perspective, we see another table side by side with the one assigned to the scholar: the table of poverty, or the table of the anti-banquet (as such, anti-Platonic as well as anti-Rabelaisian). The four legs of this table are: material poverty, intellec-tual poverty, emotional poverty, and spiritual poverty. In this sad quaternio, material poverty is of course the gravest and most urgent: with respect to it,

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all the other forms of poverty are derivative. Any philosophy or theology that obfuscates this hierarchy cannot, in the final analysis, be accepted. With respect to this basic kind of poverty, poetry is powerless — it reveals itself as dramatically poor.13 It is perhaps not otiose, then, to remark the paronomastic similarity of the two English words poetry and poverty …14

But poetry recovers its power with respect to the other three pover-ties: for poetry is one of the strongest antidotes available for intellectual, emotional, and spiritual poverty. It is difficult to see how, without poetry, it is possible to avoid despair. This great curative aspect of poetry is what generates its complicated dialectic relationship with respect to that other structuring of spiritual activity that is religion. It is impossible to go into these problems here. I simply note that only at the level of these large questions (esthetic, ethical, spiritual) does poetry reveal its full power as a form of research, or means of knowledge.

Some of the essays in this Quaderno were originally read as papers at the second annual symposium of the meritorious but short-lived Italian Poetry So-ciety of America (founded by Luigi Fontanella), which was held at Yale in the Fall of 1998.15 The title of the symposium was, “The Mouth of Poetry: In Italian in America.” The lines that provided that title transcend the occasion of that gathering, and they call for some comments here. The relevant Auden passage is:

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all: The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.16

Auden’s lines are immediately relevant to the international poetic inter-inanimation with which YIP and its Quaderni are involved, for they issue from an expatriate poet (indeed, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” was the first poem that Auden composed in the United States, and the collection Another Time was the first among Auden’s books to be published in the United States before appearing in England).17 These lines, however, are also more broadly pertinent to the general status and question of poetry. It has been variously observed that Auden’s poem is a qualified defense of art and specifically of poetry.18 But further reflections seem in order.

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The basic meaning of “poetry makes nothing happen” is, of course, that ‘poetry does not make anything happen;’ but there lurks unavoidably in the background (especially for the Italian reader, instinctively accustomed to sit-uate a negative adverb before the negative substantive nothing) the possibility of what could be perhaps be called a “misreading,” but is actually a re-reading that enriches our perception of the poem: ‘poetry causes nothingness to come about.’ This Leopardian re-reading19 leads to a far from fruitless meditation on the nature of poetry, as suspended between two different philosophical possibilities: poetry hurling the word into the abyss of nothingness, or poetry bodying forth nothingness.20 Such a central question is not addressed in the philosophical discussions mentioned in note 19; thus it requires a separate development (which of course has to be left for some other occasion).

As for the “mouth,” this word is part of a whole network of images in the poem: “The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day” in the first stanza, the “mourning tongues” in the second stanza, “The words of a dead man” in the fourth stanza (all belonging to section I), and the “unconstraining voice” in the fourth stanza of section III. Also, the intense line, “A way of happening, a mouth,” actually contrasts two different modes of being of po-etry: poetry as the fluidity of a happening that cannot be pinned down to any specific event or entity, versus poetry as a definite place in the concreteness of a body. Apropos of this concreteness: the mouth (as Dante suggestively and reticently began to analyze in the Convivio, in an incomplete list) is the organ of eating and smiling and kissing (the erotic implications of this definition of poetry by Auden remain to be explored); and it is also the or-gan of talking: in order to create a dialogue, recite a poem, utter a prayer, and so forth. Thus poetry is identified with the organ that most concretely produces poetry, in its original status as an oral utterance.

But the thought that gives the title to this introduction is not contained in the above line from Auden. It is a more radically contemplative thought, represented by a line from the world master of mystical poetry, the thir-teenth-century Persian Sufi thinker Jelalludin Rumi:

The day is coming when I fly off, but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice? Who says words with my mouth?21

Poetry, ultimately, is not about total intellectual control. Poetry is such a powerful celebration of humanism precisely because it flows from/into something beyond the strictly human.

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The Quaderno

What remains to be done is to briefly introduce the contributions to this first issue of Quaderni di YIP. The quaternary structure of this Quaderno22 is simply meant to introduce a certain order in the discussions of the several questions — not to suggest that these large questions are going to receive a definitive answer, nor to evoke a common ideology or methodology; also, these divisions are relative and flexible, and one should not be surprised that they overlap in some of these essays. While each one of these contri-butions embodies an autonomous point of view, their unifying thread is their ability to extract, in different ways, some general concepts from the empirical variety of the specific objects of research.

I hope that I am not excessively symmetrical when I notice that this quaternio of questions might be further subdivided into two groups: the questions of tradition and translation are closely connected (as the qua-si-homophony of the Italian terms, tradizione and traduzione, iconically suggests), and on the other hand the psychological question of voice is often also a part of the general anthropological question of liminality.

In the section of tradition: Paolo Euron, in his “Mitologia, imitazione, poesia: Parole guida nel romanticismo italiano e tedesco,” examines, on the basis of a first-hand contact with the crucial German writings, the am-biguities of the initial debate on Romanticism in Italian poetic culture; and Roberta De Monticelli, with her “Mario Luzi and the Powers of the Word,” follows a central line of spiritual genealogy (Augustinian and Dionysian) as it weaves its way through Luzi’s later poems, studying this relationship in terms of a dialogue between the poet and some master theologians rather than as a mere application of certain abstract concepts to poetical images.

In the part on translation: Graziella Sidoli, in “Translations and Simul-taneities: The case of Marinetti’s Mafarka le Futuriste, Roman africain,” pays refined attention to the poetic ambiguities (with the related problems for translation) in the novel, and posits the question of the role that a “phan-tasmagoric language” may play in a literary text; for her part Ann Snodgrass, in “Through the Lens of Modernism: 20th-Century ‘Dolce stile’ and the Translation of Bilingual Intertext,” subtly studies literary hybridization in the English poetry of Amelia Rosselli and the possibility (at least in poetry) of language being unfaithful to itself.

As we come to the question of liminality, Michael Palma (“The Road to Rome, and Back Again”) raises the problem of translation as something

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that might not reinforce “particular poetic impulses in the translator/poet, but on the contrary tends to siphon them off so that their opposites may rise to the surface;” Luca Somigli, with “Italian Poetry North of the 49th: Writing (of) Italy in Canada,” remarks that “the fruitful and provocative paradox of Italian-American or Italian-Canadian poetry is that what makes it possible is precisely the fact that ‘Italian’ is a site of contested meaning, a signifier whose relation with a referent is constructed in the process of elaborating a poetic practice;” while Alberto Bertoni (“Italiani in America”) remarks, apropos of Italian poets active in the United States, that “non propriamente di esilio si possa nel loro caso parlare, quanto di una erranza […] a doppio senso di marcia, con un’onda di ritorno che dal centro si dirige verso le zone di confine, senza più alcuna intenzione o possibilità di conquista.”23

Finally, in the section devoted to the question of voice, Lucia Re, with her “The Poverty of Women’s Poetry: A Genealogy of Silence,” authorita-tively analyzes the tormented thought of certain Italian women poets, among whom Cristina Campo and Antonia Pozzi are particularly significant;24 and Letizia Lanza (“Un esempio di poesia femminile: Bianca Grazia Tarozzi”) gives us a thumbnail sketch of a contemporary poet.

I can only reiterate, in closing, what I said at the beginning: this intense first issue of the Quaderni di YIP makes us aware of the delicate and im-portant challenges awaiting us.

Paolo valesio

1 I refer to my article, “La lingua approssimata,” Poesia: Mensile internazionale di cultura poetica, XIV, 148 (Marzo 2001): 60-62.2 I quote from the pamphlet Matriculation Ceremony for New Students — Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (Yale University, August 26, 1998, p. 6).3 Currently these papers run to eight boxes, and include: miscellaneous poetry manuscripts by several authors, biographical sketches of various Italian poets, poetry translations (in-cluding editor’s proofs of Italian poems translated into English), literary correspondences, autographed offprints and broadsides, cassette tapes, etc.4 The latter’s abnegation culminated in the preparation of a book, Antigones: A Lyrical Enterprise (1990-1997), Menlo Park: Medusa Press, 1999. It gathers all the texts printed in Antigones, Numbers 0-29, and it is a rare and precious book, handmade and issued in a very limited number of copies. 5 This is the full and correct title of the journal. We refer to it currently as YIP not only for brevity but also in order to evoke a certain Futurist atmosphere as an homage to the pio-neering Italian role in poetic modernism, although this is not the dominant style of YIP (no

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detail is too small, while giving an account of a poetical enterprise). 6 See “Why Italian Poetry,” YIP. Yale Italian Poetry, I, 1 (Spring 1997): 9.7 “When love, with one another so / Interinanimates two souls;” from “The Ecstasy,” lines 41-44; cf. John donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1975, p. 55. (Early printed editions of this poem, and sev-eral manuscripts, show the variant reading interanimates, which looks like a lectio facilior and is the form recorded in the OED. To me, interinanimates resonates with a surplus of expressiveness.)8 “One of the goals of YIP. Yale Italian Poetry is to create dialogue about what it means to read and write in a foreign language and in a foreign land,” writes Joseph Luzzi in YIP II, 2 (Fall 1998): 101-102. 9 For instance, some of the contributors to this issue of the Quaderni are also writers of poetry and some are not; but their critical dictions (either in English or in Italian) show no trace of this. Does this mean, then, that the difference does not matter? Of course not: it is precisely this difference that gives birth to an indirect but real dialogue among these critics.10 Quoted according to the “Douay-Rheims Bible” (1899 re-edition), Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, 1989 [1971].11 We can see now that the third of the questions on poetry that articulate this Quaderno, “The question of liminality,” is in a certain sense overdetermined (which does not mean, of course, superfluous). The liminality of the poet writing in a minority language within his/her community is an intensification of the generally liminal condition of the poet qua poet.12 “The Country Parson knows well, that both for the general ignominy which is cast upon the profession, and much more for those rules, which out of his choicest judgment he hath resolved to observe […] he must be despised” (I quote from chapter XXVIII, “The Parson in Contempt,” of A Priest to the Temple, or, the Country Parson his Character, and Rule of Holy Life [1632]; see george herbert, The Country Parson, The Temple, ed. and intro., John N. Wall, Jr., preface, A. M. Allchin, New York, Paulist Press, 1981, p. 95. It is true that, in his status as a parson, Herbert has at his disposal certain theological reassurances on which the poet cannot automatically count — for the quoted passage immediately continues in this vein: “[…] he must be despised; because this hath been the portion of God his Master, and of God’s Saints his Brethren, and this is foretold, that it shall be so still, until things shall be no more.” It is true also that, in the immediately following chapter XXIX (“The Parson with his Church Wardens”), Herbert does not hesitate to evoke and invoke disciplinary measures, to maintain a modicum of respect, which are not available to the poet … And yet the parallel I am sketching is not superficial: this situation, in which some peculiar individual in the community is despised “for those rules, which out of his choicest judgment he hath resolved to observe,” is the pre-modern religious genealogy of the modern (Romantic and post-Romantic) secular status of the poet. 13 Attempts to deal poetically with material poverty have traditionally taken the form of high-minded and well-meaning realizations of the genre of invectiva — supposedly on be-half of the poor and downtrodden. But the tragic totalitarian developments in the twentieth century have tainted many of these poetic invectivae.14 Apropos of overdetermination: the poverty of women’s poetry evoked by Ann Snodgrass and analyzed by Lucia Re in this Quaderno turns out to be a particular instance of the general nexus between poetry and poverty. 15 The symposium was cosponsored by the Sonia Raiziss Giop Charitable Foundation and by Yale University. Poets who read on this occasion include: Peter Carravetta, Alessandro

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Carrera, Patrizia Cavalli, Rosita Copioli, Maurizio Cucchi, Alfredo De Palchi, Luigi Fonta-nella, Pier Massimo Forni, Ernesto Livorni, Mario Moroni, Eugenia Paulicelli, Silvio Ramat, Antonio Riccardi, Annalisa Saccà, Davide Stimilli, Paolo Valesio. 16 This is, in its entirety, the single stanza constituting section II of the three-section poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats (d. Jan. 1939),” dated at the bottom “February 1939” — cf. W. h. auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson, New York: Vintage International, 1991, pp. 247-249. The poem was originally published in the New Republic of March 8, 1939, then in the collection Another Time published in 1940 by Random House.17 For some of us, these lines contain an even more localized suggestion: New Haven, the small city where Yale University is located, could very well be one of those “raw towns that we believe and die in.” 18 According to Fuller, the mouth is “both Yeats’ ‘voice’ and the mouth of the metaphorical river” and the idea that art “teaches the free man how to praise” (stanza 9 of the poem) is that it teaches, in this eve of the war, “to begin to value order above disorder, even though that order is only the order of art” (cf. John Fuller, W. H. Auden: A Commentary, London: Faber and Faber, 1998, pp. 288-289). According to McDiarmid, “His [Yeats’] poetry survives his political interest not through humility or sensitivity, but through sheer talent. Poetry itself has a survival instinct, and great poetry creates its own world even when poets try to free it into other worlds: ‘it survives, / a way of happening, a mouth’” (cf. lucY mcdiarmid, “The Poet in Wartime: Yeats, Eliot, Auden,” as excerpted in Critical Essays on W. H. Auden, ed. George W. Bahlke, New York: G. K. Hall; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada; New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1991, p. 108.19 The debate on Leopardi, poetry, and nothingness is an important one in the context of contemporary Italian thought: see, among others, on the one hand emanuele severino, Il nulla e la poesia: Alla fine dell’età della tecnica: Leopardi, Milano: Rizzoli, 1990 (and also Cose arcane stupende: L’Occidente e Leopardi, Milano: Rizzoli, 1997), and on the other hand Sergio Givone, especially in chapter 6, “Uno sguardo dal nulla,” of Storia del nulla, Bari: Laterza 1995. An anthology of Italian and French writings on nothingness between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century is found in Le antiche memorie del nulla, introduzione e cura di Carlo Ossola, versioni e note di Linda Bisello, Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letter-atura, 1997; these texts establish the genealogy of the pre-modern and modern discussions (see for instance pp. XXX-XXXI of the introduction). 20 This “parasitical” reading is really (to repeat) a re-reading rooted in the literary tradition; suffice it to quote a well-known exchange — a “passage” of words as a passage in a fencing match: ” Hamlet. The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing — Guildenstern. A thing, my lord? Hamlet. Of nothing” (it is the end of scene II in act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet). 21 See “Whoever Brought Me Here Will Have to Take Me Home,” in The Essential Rumi, trans. by Coleman Barks, with John Moyne, A. J. Arberry, Reynold Nicholson, New York: HarperCollins, 1995, p. 2. Among the variations on this theme, I mention only the follow-ing: “I need a hundred mouths to say this, / but I only have this one! // A hundred thousand impressions from the spirit /are wanting to come through here. / I feel stunned / in this abundance, crushed and dead” — from the poem “Ayaz and the King’s Pearl,” ibidem, p. 128. While avoiding any hurried rapprochement between Eastern and Western poetry, I cannot however help noticing the remarkable similarity between the poetic tone of the above-mentioned George Herbert and that of Rumi — a similarity that, obviously unrelated to source relationships and confessional solidarities, is all the more important in order to

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better understand the nature of contemplative poetry. As for the Biblical parallelisms suf-fice it to recall: “All the kings of the earth shall praise thee, O Lord, / for they have heard the words of thy mouth” (Psalm 138: 4; quoted according to The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocryphs, ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977 [1962]).22 In choosing the title Quaternio for this first Quaderno I also alluded of course to the com-mon etymological root (the Latin numeral quattuor “four”) of the Late Latin term quaternio, later revived by Carl Gustav Jung, and the Italian word Quaderno.23 Bertoni also remarks on the fact that all the poets he is discussing are simultaneously involved in the organized cultural activity of academic institutions. I add that the most significantly experimental Italian poet of his generation in the United States, Alfredo De Palchi, is an important exception to this rule: as a non-academic intellectual, he constantly and constructively makes the university poets aware of the pitfalls of rigid thinking. 24 Apropos of the “mendicant female self” of which this essay speaks: I cannot forget my only and fleeting encounter some years ago, in a humid Roman afternoon, with the poet Amelia Rosselli sitting on a stoop and wearily munching on a slice of bread. Her seared face tragically brought to mind the dilemma of poetry and humanity.

the Question oF tradition

✥

la Questione della tradizione

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mitologia, imitazione, Poesia: Parole guida nel romanticismo italiano e tedesco

Slavica gewidmet

❄

Modernità. Romanticismo

Quando rimbaud scrive «il faut être absolument moderne1» ha diciannove anni. Davanti a sé, o meglio, ormai praticamente quasi dietro di sé, ha la poesia moderna. È il 1873. Quando Leopardi

scrive che per fare poesia non è pensabile non rifarsi ai modelli dell’antichità greca e latina2 ha vent’anni. È il 1818 e Leopardi deve ancora risolversi per quella ‘svolta verso il bello’ che lo condurrà ai Canti. Entrambi cercano di definire la fisionomia della propria poesia in base a una missione o a una destinazione extrapoetica. La preoccupazione di Leopardi è quella di forte stampo restauratore e conservativo di mantenere l’unità della lingua italiana richiamandosi alle sue origini vere o presunte e opponendo le consuetudini letterarie classiche ai modelli che premevano dall’estero; gli dèi dell’Olimpo sono più poetici di un paesaggio inabitato, ma gli dèi non in quanto repertorio di figure in senso neoclassicistico, quanto perché personificano meglio e in modo già ‘collaudato’ i sentimenti che l’uomo può provare di fronte alla natura: e da che mondo è mondo l’uomo non è mai cambiato. Il proposito di Rimbaud è di promuovere la poesia a luogo di un’esperienza inedita e sovrannaturale, un’esperienza che è veramente, come ci ricorda il termine tedesco Erfahrung3, un er-fahren: un viaggio visionario dopo il quale non si è più quelli di prima. Ma nelle affermazioni dei due poeti non ne va solo di questo: in esse sono anche poste le condizioni del rispettivo fare poetico, l’orizzonte della possibilità della loro scrittura. L’asserzione di Rimbaud che bisogna essere moderni ha il suono, collocata così in conclusione di Une Saison en Enfer, un po’ della rassegnazione e un poco del buon proposito, dell’esortazione, forse del progetto. Ma che cosa significa essere assolutamente moderno? Questo proposito conferisce una collocazione tutta particolare alla sua poesia e sottolinea, come vedremo, la sua vocazione profondamente romantica. Essere moderno innanzitutto

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THE QUESTION OF TRADITION / LA QUESTIONE DELLA TRADIZIONE

significa ammettere che esiste ed è riconoscibile uno sviluppo, che l’uomo non è sempre uguale a se stesso ma che nella sua vicenda si dà un prima e un dopo, che esiste un progresso e una sua storia. In secondo luogo quest’af-fermazione significa che l’esperienza poetica è parte essenziale di questa trasformazione, di questo «viaggio tra le cose», e quindi del progresso dell’uomo. Ma la frase di Rimbaud – ed è questo che ora ci preme – si trova in un suo testo poetico: così si definisce il terzo aspetto fondamentale: «il punto più importante della letteratura del diciannovesimo e del ventesimo secolo è la riflessione sulla letteratura stessa. […] il continuo tentativo di una coscienza di raggiungere la comprensione di se stessa»4. La letteratura della modernità è riflessione, tematizzazione di questa riflessione, dovesse pur significare alla fin fine la messa in questione di se stessa come lettera-tura. Se i primi due aspetti dell’affermazione di Rimbaud collocano il poeta genericamente nella modernità, il terzo aspetto fa dell’autore di Une Saison en Enfer un poeta specificamente moderno. Leopardi, invece, tematizza la poesia considerandola dall’esterno: in veste di saggista, o meglio: in veste di libellista un po’ astioso e conservatore che attacca la nuova, dilagante moda romantica. Leopardi e Rimbaud si pongono, idealmente, al principio e alla conclusione dello stesso movimento: con loro si compie la parabola romantica. Nei loro atteggiamenti opposti si riflettono le condizioni e le circostanze per cui il romanticismo, in due terre in cui non era nato ma vi era giunto in certa misura come prodotto d’importazione, non poteva non essere oggetto di un equivoco e evidentemente – nello stesso tempo – essere occasione delle elaborazioni più alte.

Noi, pur limitandoci a considerare gli scritti italiani programmatici o divulgativi delle idee romantiche redatti tra il 1816 e il 1818, dai quali isol-eremo alcuni tratti fondamentali, tenteremo il confronto con le formulazioni classiche dei teorici tedeschi del primo romanticismo. Da Friedrich Schle-gel e da Novalis trarremo alcuni concetti chiave del romanticismo che ci aiuteranno a intendere la situazione italiana, concetti che come vedremo si prestano più per il loro carattere operativo che non per il loro uso polemico come invece vennero fatalmente intesi a suo tempo. Prova ne sia che se ora le polemiche italiane sull’imitazione della natura o sul carattere popolare della poesia romantica presentano solo più un inte-resse storico, gli argomenti provenienti dall’area tedesca che le hanno motivate sono rimasti vitali e in essi ha trovato formulazione il moderno dibattito estetico5. Tra le due aree non vi è stata una relazione diretta. La polemica italiana scoppiò nel 1816 con la pubblicazione dell’articolo di M.me De Staël Sulla maniera e l’utilità

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delle traduzioni6. Dal libro della Staël De L’Allemagne7, apparso nel 1813 e ampiamente diffuso in Europa e in Italia, deriva il repertorio dei luoghi comuni che nell’immaginario quotidiano si lasciano definire come ‘roman-tici’, talvolta semplicemente il risultato di una suggestiva semplificazione e volgarizzamento delle tesi dei pensatori tedeschi8. L’articolo, apparso sulla Biblioteca italiana, divise gli studiosi tra i conservatori ligi all’imitazione dei modelli classici e i romantici, convinti questi ultimi della necessità di superare il bizantinismo dei critici, di dover rinnovare l’ambiente asfittico italiano aprendo ai modelli stranieri e all’imitazione della natura e di quanto è vivente; come poi tale imitazione potesse aver luogo, resta una questione aperta a varie soluzioni. Di fatto, comunque, gli articoli apparsi nel 1816 sul Conciliatore e i cosiddetti Manifesti romantici di Giovanni Berchet, Ludovico Di Breme, Ermes Visconti9, lo stesso Discorso di Leopardi, mostrano una reazione più critica che propositiva: manca generalmente la ricerca del principio di una poetica che si possa definire romantica: si avverte in essi la necessità da una parte poetica (reazione al neoclassicismo e a una cultura mummificata), dall’altra civile (appoggio al Risorgimento) e queste sono ragioni sufficienti (ma non necessarie) di adesione alla, o di rifiuto della, nuova moda letteraria.

Dal confronto, e anche ripercorrendo per così dire a ritroso il frain-tendimento delle idee romantiche, potremo chiarire alcuni temi di gran peso nel successivo dibattito estetico, alcune questioni rimaste irresolute o abbandonate alla soglia della polemica italiana.

La ricezione e la polemica italiana sul romanticismo

È da notare come in Italia il dibattito teorico sulla poesia romantica abbia principalmente luogo a livello di manifesti, di proclami volti a spie-gare i caratteri di questa nuova moda letteraria e di lettere in risposta, o contro-proclami, volte a controbattere i primi. Sul piano della riflessione estetica si tratta di ammettere e di legittimare oppure di negare la legitti-mità e il diritto all’esistenza in ambito artistico di un gusto, di modelli, di una maniera. Il romanticismo è percepito più come fatto di costume e manca ad esso quel carattere speculativo, e spesso dialettico, o perlomeno ambivalente, che segna la sua nascita in Germania. Il romantico in Italia viene prevalentemente considerato (e comunque con vent’anni di ritardo sulle elaborazioni tedesche10 e attraverso una fonte indiretta quale il De

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l’Allemagne) come un effetto e un dato compiuto visibile nei contenuti e nei caratteri formali di certe opere in prosa o in verso, ma mai da un punto di vista strutturale, come un principio operativo.

«Per la mia definizione di romanticismo mi occorrerebbero 125 pag-ine», scrive Friedrich Schlegel nel 1798 al fratello, e Novalis non ne dà una definizione ma sostiene che bisogna ‘romantizzare il mondo’: per Novalis romantico, quando nei suoi scritti ricorre il termine, suona più come una funzione che permette di riconsiderare la nostra collocazione di moderni, non di definirci semplicemente mediante una contrapposizione agli antichi; comunque non è mai un’etichetta applicabile a posteriori a un’opera. In Italia, tra il 1816 e il 1818, dove i testi teorici decisivi del ro-manticismo tedesco non vengono letti semplicemente per ignoranza della lingua e, abbiamo visto, ci si serve di traduzioni e informazioni di seconda mano, mancano totalmente gli strumenti per un’elaborazione teorica della questione e quindi per la valutazione della sua portata11. Tuttavia si tenta una definizione sintomatica del romantico, operazione in se stessa molto antiromantica12. In questo modo, anzi, trovano una sorta di legittimazione, quasi di ufficiale formalizzazione, proprio quei caratteri deteriori dello pseudo-romanticismo, dai paesaggi tempestosi alle scene orride, dai chiari di luna al sentimentale allo svenevole, tutta quella casistica inesauribile di termini polivalenti volti a definire l’indefinibile che ben descrive il ro-manticismo come categoria psicologica13. Questo perché i suoi detrattori o sostenitori italiani si sono scagliati contro – o espressi a favore di – paesaggi tempestosi e scene orride e chiari di luna. Non che tutto ciò non abbia il suo peso (dunque non è delegittimata neanche l’interpretazione corrente che ci autorizza a qualificare romantico un paesaggio fortemente suggestivo), ma la discussione su questo piano non ci aiuta certo a capire il perché di queste immagini e il loro occorrere nella poesia e la loro interna necessità.

Un esempio di come si cerchi di caratterizzare il romanticismo attra-verso i suoi aspetti esteriori lo troviamo in uno dei cosiddetti manifesti, che per lungo tempo godette di particolare fama, la Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo al suo figliuolo14, apparsa nel 1816, in cui Giovanni Berchet presenta la traduzione di due ballate di Bürger qualificate come esempio di «ballate romantiche». Esse sono tali perché «basate sul meraviglioso e sul terribile», sentimenti forti per suscitare i quali il poeta deve rifarsi a temi forti, sentiti e condivisi dalla più parte dei lettori. Romantico diventa sinonimo di ricavato dalla tradizione popolare, espressione dei sentimenti del popolo, anche quando questi sconfinano nella rozzezza. E in fatto di

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emozioni forti i tedeschi sarebbero maestri perché, per ragioni climatiche e sociali godono di poca varietà e quindi devono in qualche modo intensificare le sensazioni per «muovere gli animi piacevolmente». Questa fantasiosa caratterizzazione del romantico come emotivo risponde bene alla lettura generale che ne diedero gli italiani. I tedeschi, era opinione diffusa, sono costituzionalmente portati alla riflessione e alle forti emozioni per smuovere un sangue stagnante. Ma perché anche per noi mediterranei l’imitazione dei classici – normativa per tanti secoli – non va più bene? Perché occorre «interrogare direttamente la natura» e tali sentimenti naturali, formulati poi in termini religiosi o superstiziosi, risultano essere la voce della natura. Da questo teorema consegue il corollario che anche Omero e i classici a loro tempo furono romantici. Questa nebulosa difesa del naturale come qual-ifica del romantico non coglie certo nel segno ma avanza due onorevoli propositi che nella letteratura italiana, nel 1816 e non solo allora, erano più ignoti delle più barocche mitologie celtiche. Innanzitutto che occorre rendersi «coevi al proprio secolo e non ai secoli seppelliti», pena la perdita di lettori che si rivolgeranno agli autori stranieri. Berchet mette in guardia di fronte alla europeizzazione della cultura e al rischio che corrono i poeti italiani di ritrovarsi a scrivere solo più per i propri colleghi, ostaggi di una tradizione paralizzante e non suscettibile di venir messa in questione, fatto che peraltro si è verificato puntualmente, se paragoniamo l’accoglienza che il pubblico riserva alle letture poetiche rispettivamente in Germania e in Italia. In secondo luogo, nel malinteso nome del romantico, per Berchet lo scrittore italiano deve – e lo fa per la prima volta tanto tematicamente e in modo esplicito – individuare, o meglio costruirsi, un proprio pubblico. Attraverso la tendenza innata alla poesia (a sentirla, se non a produrla) e la predisposizione ai sentimenti che la caratterizza, lo scrittore deve rivolgersi a una categoria di lettori che, a differenza dell’insensibile ottentotto e del sofisticato parigino, dimostrano semplicemente attitudine alle emozioni: questi lettori sono i destinatari della sua poesia, questi sono il pubblico sul quale occorre modellare la produzione e alle cui aspettative ci si deve attenere. E questo pubblico forma il popolo. Questa definizione di popolo attraverso l’attitudine alle emozioni è forse il dato più originale e italiana-mente ‘romantico’ dello scritto di Berchet.

Nel suo Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica Leopardi ritiene invece che le emozioni forti siano una sorta di spezia per una cucina a buon mercato adatta a popoli che non sono il nostro: «l’orridezza è uno dei caratteri più cospicui del sentimentale romantico» e l’efficacia dell’im-

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itazione poetica dei romantici trae forza, oltre che dall’uso sconsiderato e ampio del ripugnante e dell’orrido, anche dalla stravaganza e dalla novità dei temi trattati. Il poeta romantico, cattivo cuoco, non viene a capo di nulla con i soli ingredienti naturali, imitando la natura come hanno fatto gli antichi (imitazione e antichi, due concetti problematici che, messi in discussione, formano anche il fulcro delle argomentazioni dei romantici tedeschi). In questi passi è già evidente l’interpretazione leopardiana del romantico come movimento moderno in continuità – e non in rottura – con l’illuminismo e come tale contestabile in quanto anti-naturalistico.

Questa che possiamo definire sensibilità esasperata, criticata o esaltata dagli italiani, per i tedeschi non è che un aspetto del problema. La priorità accordata al sensibile è in ultima analisi un tentativo di recuperare per altra via il sovrasensibile: il corpo, scrive Novalis, non è che il tempio dello spirito e lo spirito non può aver voce altrove che nel corpo. Il tentativo dei primi romantici tedeschi, di Friedrich Schlegel, di Novalis, fu quello di rivelare la doppiezza della realtà e di pensarne entrambi i termini. Lo stesso concetto di ironia, spesso teorizzato da F. Schlegel come agilità dello spirito, come visione a volo d’uccello della pienezza della totalità del reale disunita, diventa nei romantici italiani gusto per l’ironia in senso retorico, diventa la falsa ritrattazione sul modello della lettera di Berchet (appunto: semiseria). Pensare non è che il sogno del sentire, sostiene ancora Novalis. Questo ci porta a una conclusione: l’infinito, grande tema dei romantici e mèta delle loro aspirazioni, pare compendiare in sé tutti gli altri temi. Esso vale quindi da modello. L’infinito è oggetto del pensiero ma, nello stesso tempo, pare sottrarsi a ogni esperienza che non sia quella dell’intuizione. È percepibile nelle sue articolazioni e nel suo declinarsi nel tempo, ma questa sua facoltà costituisce anche il suo inganno, la perdita del suo carattere più proprio: l’infinità. Ma l’infinito stesso non è pensabile se non nel finito. Ed è questo forse uno dei tratti più caratteristici del romanticismo: il tentativo di pensare l’infinito come contenuto nel finito, un «doppio movimento che va verso l’infinito ma per ritrovarlo nel finito stesso»15, senza sopprimere né l’uno né l’altro termine. La poesia romantica non ha a che fare né con l’orrido né con il sentimentale né con la natura o il popolare in sé, ma ha a che fare piuttosto con un’esperienza non discorsiva in cui gli opposti si toccano. Quella che su un piano psicologico è inquietudine e lacerazione tra due destini o tra due possibilità, sul piano filosofico rivela la sua natura di pensiero che mette in gioco gli opposti.

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Mitologia classica e mitologie romantiche

Gli interpreti francesi e italiani del romanticismo attaccano gli apparati mitologici dei classicisti come un repertorio obsoleto di figure che ormai hanno perso ogni contatto con la natura che un tempo le aveva motivate e che quindi non si devono più imitare. Appartengono a un mondo che ha gioito dell’immediatezza e che non ha conosciuto il cristianesimo né la riflessione, il mondo degli antichi, per cui ormai non ha più senso riconos-cere loro alcun valore normativo. Ancora una volta entrano in primo piano due concetti chiave strettamente connessi: imitazione e antichi. L’attacco vede quasi tutti i letterati romantici schierati sullo stesso fronte. Pagine interessanti sono quelle di un apparente reprobo, il giovane Leopardi, che scrive in difesa della mitologia classica. Non si tratta una rivalutazione del suo uso ornamentale in senso neoclassicistico, quanto, ancora una volta, una scelta di segno anti-illuministico. La mitologia va incontro ai sensi, si presta alle finzioni, è «più naturale che ragionevole, non altrimenti che la poesia»16. Le sue immagini non sono un repertorio di decorazioni ma la personificazione delle forze naturali che ha prodotto lo spirito umano ancora fanciullo, animato da stupore e meraviglia. Esse, quindi, sono innanzitutto un prodotto naturale allo stesso titolo della poesia. Non mettono in questione la conoscenza, «il poeta non inganna gli intelletti, ma solo le fantasie17 ». Non si tratta quindi di menzogne assolute, ma di menzogne poetiche. Fine del poeta non è l’ingannare, quanto il dilettare, e quindi – assolto il poeta da ogni colpa morale e teoretica – un inganno vale l’altro e la mitologia classica si presta allo scopo meglio delle favole nordiche. Il diletto però, ammette Leopardi, scaturisce dall’imitazione. Di che cosa? «Ufficio del poeta è imitare la natura, la quale non si cambia né incivilisce»18 . Ora «la ragione è nemica fondamentale della natura»19 e solo la mitologia classica ci riconsegna a un rapporto con essa qual era nei tempi primitivi. La mi-tologia viene quindi salvata come un primo prodotto della natura, naturale esso stesso.

Forse i letterati estensori dei manifesti romantici si sarebbero indignati sapendo che, in pagine impubblicate, quello che sarebbe passato alla storia come il più grande poeta romantico italiano intendeva così la mitologia. E sarebbero certamente rimasti senza parole sapendo che il teorico del roman-ticismo Friedrich Schlegel la pensava in modo simile: la mitologia aveva un suo diritto a esistere. Tuttavia è completamente diversa la motivazione di Schlegel, e la differenza non è da poco. Nel suo Gespräch über die Poesie20

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egli prevede una nuova mitologia che «dev’essere la più artistica di tutte le opere d’arte». Lo spirito, come propone l’idealismo, determina se stesso e non è determinato dall’esterno, quindi il suo movimento costante è quello di uscire da sé per tornare a sé e restare se stesso. Questo è per Schlegel un realismo (perché rivela una struttura profonda della realtà) «che non potrà presentarsi nella forma della filosofia o di un sistema» e che trova forma adeguata solo nella poesia. Ecco che la poesia può produrre una «veduta mitologica della natura» che è anche una visione d’insieme che sfugge alle scienze sistematiche. Lo spirito produce forme che può contemplare in maniera sensibile-spirituale. La poesia è il «mite riflesso della divinità nell’uomo». La mitologia che ne consegue è «una tale opera d’arte della natura. Nel suo tessuto si realizza il sommo; tutto è relazione e trasformazi-one, informato e trasformato, e questo informare e trasformare è il procedi-mento suo proprio, se mi è concesso esprimermi così. E qui io trovo quella grande somiglianza con quella grande astuzia della poesia romantica, che si mostra non in singole trovate, ma nella costruzione del tutto. […] Questo è il principio di ogni poesia: sospendere il procedere e le leggi della ragione ragionante e trasferirci di nuovo nella bella confusione della fantasia, nel caos originario della natura umana, per il quale io finora non ho trovato nessun simbolo più bello del variopinto brulichio degli antichi dèi»21. Da questa citazione risulta come le analogie tra Schlegel e Leopardi non siano casuali (mitologia come testimonianza della vitalità della natura e dello spirito) ma come in Schlegel la mitologia sia innanzitutto un prodotto della poesia, e non viceversa. Per Schlegel la parola poetica apre quel luogo in cui la trascendenza fa irruzione nella contiguità degli eventi. È la poesia in primo piano, ed essa si impone attraverso una sua coerenza interna. Siamo sul livello della lingua e della sua originaria produttività, non su quello dei contenuti. La trascendenza si rivela come struttura del reale – e non come verità consegnata – che emerge quando si sospende la logica quotidiana e oggettivante. È chiaro allora che per Schlegel non sono più in questione le figure che occorrono nelle opere letterarie o le situazioni che le motivano o i temi. Decisiva è la funzione che le figure (provengano dalla mitologia classica o celtica, siano storiche o fittizie...) assumono una volta inserite nel tessuto del testo poetico. Romantico non è il tema né è la definizione di un genere, ma la visione del tutto volta a rappresentare in modo organico la produttività dello spirito. In questo senso vi è una rivalutazione della mitologia classica di segno completamente opposto a quella dei neoclassici, laddove gli stessi detrattori italiani della mitologia non seppero pensarla diversamente dai classicisti.

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La questione dell’imitazione

In realtà da questa differenza emerge una frattura che è anche quella che caratterizza la moderna riflessione sull’arte e che pone Schlegel e Leopardi su due versanti opposti. Per quest’ultimo imitare significa imitare la natura, meglio ancora: imitare quelle imitazioni esemplari della natura che sono le opere classiche, create quando l’uomo non aveva ancora i sensi attutiti dalla civilizzazione. «Molti e gravissimi, o lettori, sono i mali che ha reca-to all’immaginazione il grande accrescimento dell’intelletto»22. Intelletto e immaginazione sono in contrasto. L’immaginazione, per di più, non ha nulla a che vedere con la verità, semmai solo più con le forme primitive della natura. Diversi anni prima Kant aveva posto alla base della possibil-ità di fondare giudizi sintetici a priori, quindi a base della nostra facoltà conoscitiva, l’immaginazione produttiva. Essa fornisce all’intelletto, indip-endente dalle cose, gli schemi astratti della realtà oggetto di conoscenza.23 Qualche anno più tardi Immanuel Kant riconoscerà nel giudizio estetico il libero gioco di immaginazione e intelletto in cui la libera spontaneità dell’immaginazione incontra la necessità della natura e in questo modo si rivela all’uomo la sua destinazione sovrasensibile e gli si apre il mondo della libertà24. Nella poesia la mia libertà incontra la necessità della natura, questo è il punto di non ritorno della riflessione romantica. Per F. Schlegel e Novalis e in genere per i filosofi tedeschi la Critica del giudizio di Kant sarà un libro decisivo e, di fatto, segnerà la nascita dell’estetica. È chiaro che allora un concetto come immaginazione avrebbe perduto lentamente il suo significato di stampo illuministico e sostanzialmente privativo di facoltà opposta alla ragione e limitata al diletto. Per Schlegel infatti imitare la natura significa piuttosto riproporre l’originarietà dello spirito a un livello superiore e cogliere oltre l’intelletto l’origine comune di poesia e conoscenza. Per Leopardi dunque la poesia si contrappone alla scienza, mentre i tedeschi cercavano di fondarne l’unità. La poesia in Italia non può che sperare di sopravvivere come «rifugio della natura», in una posizione subordinata e di ripiego di fronte all’incalzare non solo di ciò che sarà (la scienza) ma anche di ciò che è stato (l’invadenza dei classici). Invece il proposito di imitare la natura nella sua forma originale, alla luce dei presupposti che s’imporranno con l’avvento della filosofia dell’idealismo, deve essere attuabile secondo una diversa strategia.

La prima chiara testimonianza che il principio di imitazione si trovava ormai in una crisi irreversibile risale al 1788, al saggio Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen in cui Karl Philip Moritz, anziché l’imitazione

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sintomatica della natura, ossia l’imitazione degli effetti della natura quali cose, figure umane o forme, consegna all’artista il compito di un’imitazione genetica della natura, ossia una imitazione della sua facoltà produttiva. Non è l’opera che deve imitare la natura bensì è l’artista che lo deve fare. L’opera d’arte, allora, non sarà più qualificabile in quanto conforme a canoni esterni ma solo in quanto essa è un tutto in sé concluso, un mondo a sé, che «comprende le perfette relazioni del grande tutto della natura, altrettanto reale e vero come essa stessa, nel suo piccolo»25. L’opera non riproduce una immagine del mondo, ma ne riproduce lo schema, l’intera struttura interna, il diagramma.26 È chiaro che questa prospettiva non risolve numerosi prob-lemi: innanzitutto, se l’arte è imitazione della natura, che valore può avere per noi? perché non accontentarci dell’originale? E poi: come collocarsi di fronte alle imitazioni di secondo, terzo grado quali quella proposta da Leopardi di oggetti come le figurazioni mitologiche che a loro volta sono imitati? E, ancora, che hanno a che fare con la natura le regole e i canoni che noi rileviamo nei modelli classici? Sostenere che gli antichi fossero ingenui e primitivi rende meno astute e ‘ragionate’ le loro convenzioni?

Ci avviciniamo lentamente a un punto fondamentale che accomuna romantici tedeschi e italiani: la ricerca di un principio che giustifichi la poesia, antica o moderna che sia. Berchet che chiama romantico Omero, Leopardi che propugna l’imitazione della natura e difende la mitologia clas-sica, F. Schlegel che difende qualsiasi mitologia, e poi Moritz, non sospetto di romanticismo, che non parla di mitologia… Vediamo intanto che alle argomentazioni degli italiani manca uno specifico estetico. Ecco quindi la ragione delle lunghe classificazioni di cos’è e di che cosa non è romantico, di cos’è accettabile e cosa no. Si tenta la via contenutistico-descrittiva della poesia, l’interpretazione dei temi, non quella formale. Il proposito è chiaro: porre un aldilà del linguaggio che nella sua neutralità giustifichi la scrittura e sia luogo dell’evento poetico. La poesia appare tutto fuorché parola: è natura, è godimento sensibile, è meraviglia, è formalizzazione mitica delle emozioni primitive, è imitazione, è la sensibilità degli antichi, è sentimen-to religioso, è comunque conseguenza di un fatto già accaduto. La poesia rispecchia questo stato di cose antecedente senza metterlo in questione. Il suo principio costitutivo è eterogeneo alla scrittura. Ora questo fu chiaro già allora: «i romantici si sforzano di sviare più che possono la poesia dal commercio coi sensi per li quali è nata e vivrà fintantoché sarà poesia, e di farla praticare coll’intelletto, e strascinarla dal visibile all’invisibile e dalle cose alle idee, e trasmutarla di materiale in fantastica e corporale che

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era, in metafisica e ragionevole e spirituale». Una constatazione capace di indignare qualsiasi classicista, e difatti è con indignazione che Leopardi scrive queste parole27. Altri sostengono invece: «Che la Romantica sia per sè un solenne genere di letteratura non è più da porsi in dubbio; resta da desiderarsi tuttavia una più completa e meglio definita Poetica di esso genere. Io credo che questa sia opera da tentarsi con maggior successo in Italia che altrove»28. Ludovico Di Breme aveva intuito che «il romanticis-mo era stato prima una poetica e una estetica, e poi una poesia»29, anche se probabilmente non comprese fino in fondo quanto questa condizione fosse essenziale alla moderna poesia.

Poesia e riflessione. La modernità?

Ora è il momento di ritornare alle considerazioni liminari poste in apertura di questo saggio. Esiste uno specifico della poesia? La domanda è allettante ma così posta non può ottener risposta. Allora (ed è questa la formulazione dei romantici): esiste uno specifico della poesia moderna? Sì, il fatto che essa si sappia tale, in quanto moderna, ossia contrapposta alle forme precedenti, e si sappia in quanto poesia, ossia produca una poetica. «I poeti o saranno natura, o cercheranno la natura perduta»; gli uni saranno gli ingenui, gli altri i sentimentali; antichi gli uni, moderni i secondi.30 Così Friedrich Schiller propone, nel 1795, la distinzione famosa, designando sentimentali e moderni quelli che hanno coscienza del proprio stato e non possono più credere che «la natura ha sempre ragione e l’arte sempre torto». Dunque la distinzione tra antico e moderno ha una base esistenziale e la frattura non può in nessun modo essere superata con la decisione di adottare tuttavia le forme antiche. La differenza tra antico e moderno si fa allora conoscitiva e non polemica. Gli antichi assumono tutto un altro aspetto, rimangono esemplari nella loro vicenda, non normativi con le loro opere. La poesia romantica è opera del poeta che ha consapevolezza di questa frattura tra immediatezza dell’antichità e riflessione della modernità. E sapere di essere poeti e di essere moderni diventa una riflessione costitutiva dello stesso fare poetico. Allora sì che il punto di partenza della riflessione sulla moderna poesia è la constatazione della avvenuta e irrimediabile frattura tra antico e moderno. Per Leopardi le figurazioni risultate dalla felice fanciullezza dell’umanità vengono messe in pericolo dalla ragione ed egli quindi difende la poetica della meraviglia e del fanciullo che nomina

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stupito le cose; poetica che (bisogna pensare a Pascoli) avrà successo nella letteratura italiana. Ma tale prospettiva avrà come conseguenza da una parte una sempre maggior fiducia nel carattere intuitivo e ineffabile della poesia, dall’altra una svalutazione della riflessione come elemento costitutivo del fare poetico e, infine, la perdita dello specifico della modernità: presupposto dell’efficacia della poesia oggi come tremila anni fa è che l’uomo non sia cambiato e che la natura oggi non sia diversa da quella dei greci31 . Esatta-mente il contrario propongono i romantici tedeschi: è proprio la poesia e la scoperta del carattere poetico della realtà che segna la soglia della modernità come età romantica, come età che riconosce se stessa come proprio oggetto e che siassume il compito di romantizzare il mondo.

«La peculiarità del linguaggio è proprio quella di preoccuparsi soltanto di se stesso. […] Se infatti si parla soltanto per parlare allora si pronunciano le verità più splendide e originali. Per il linguaggio accade lo stesso che per le formule matematiche – costituiscono un mondo a sé. […] Proprio perciò vi si rispecchia l’insolito gioco dei rapporti tra le cose. Soltanto attraverso la loro libertà esse sono membri della natura e soltanto nel loro libero moto si manifesta l’anima del mondo»32 . Questa illustrata da Novalis nel 1799 è la parola che sta alla base della realtà romantica. L’esperienza della lingua – e non della mitologia, non della natura –, della lingua nel suo carattere fondante, segna l’inizio dell’avventura romantica. L’opacità della lingua è più da osservare e penetrare che non da dissipare; si scrivono poesie non nonostante la lingua, ma solo nell’orizzonte da essa dischiuso; la poesia non deve svilupparsi nonostante la riflessione, ma anzi essere riflessione condotta a un livello non discorsivo. Se le grandi opere letterarie del romanticismo italiane paiono sorte nonostante le poetiche esplicite, la poetica esplicita di Novalis dovrà attendere anni prima di vedersi dispiegata in poesia, come la vedremo attuata ad esempio nella Saison en Enfer di Rimbaud. «Il poetico è il reale, il reale veramente assoluto», sostiene Novalis. L’identità di crea-zione poetica come produzione di senso toglie la possibilità dell’inganno poetico inteso positivamente come inganno dell’immaginazione: anche le menzogne sono parte di un meccanismo che coincide con la verità messa in opera dalla poesia.

La produzione di una poetica è prerogativa non esclusiva ma tipica della poesia moderna, ma questa poetica non deve essere una descrizione esteriore o classificazione: deve rendere conto del carattere stesso della poesia. Ma se la poesia deve rappresentare l’intera realtà, allora dovrà rap-presentare in sé anche la propria poetica, dovrà «essere poesia e assieme,

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poesia di poesia», dovrà «rappresentare assieme al rappresentato anche il soggetto rappresentante». Queste, nelle parole di F. Schlegel, le formulazioni ultime e più ardue di una poesia che se deve rispecchiare tutta la realtà non potrà fare a meno di rispecchiare anche se stessa, fedele a quel mandato romantico (condiviso anche dai teorici meno smaliziati) per cui la poesia moderna deve essere più riflessione sul producente che non imitazione di un modello è già prodotto.

«La natura non ti ha composto nella mira che tu imitassi lei in quel solo modo che la intendi (ossia nel modo neoclassico); ché anche tu sei natura, e sei per di più il suo interprete, il suo rivale nell’ordine morale, sensitivo e imaginoso; e ciò in tutti i tempi del mondo […] (e se opererai secondo i modelli neoclassici) non potrai già dire che tu la imiti, e molto meno potrai dire che tu imiti, che tu traduca te stesso nelle opere tue. In vista dunque di imitarla, inalziamoci a gareggiar con lei nella stessa creazione […] tentiamo animosi le regioni dell’infinito che ci sono concedute»33. È questa tensione all’infinito che porta ogni particolare ad essere specchio del tutto, che fa sì che occorra anche «estendere la nostra poetica», «essere noi gli Aristoteli dei tempi nostri», ossia occorra definire una poetica romantica. E queste sono ancora parole del Di Breme, anche se potrebbero essere di Novalis. In Italia mancava l’elaborazione di un concetto di natura che non fosse quello di stampo illuminista che poneva una natura come dato di fatto o presenza da cui prender le distanze o a cui ritornare; mancava la possibilità di pensare la natura non come un oggetto semplicemente contrapposto alla coscienza, assoluto e concluso una volta per tutte, possibilità che è invece il tratto più caratteristico del romanticismo tedesco. Fintantoché fosse mancata una ridefinizione del carattere della sensibilità e della funzione dell’intelletto, tali propositi non avrebbero avuto séguito, come non lo ebbero di fatto nell’opera del Di Breme; quindi una poesia moderna, una poesia che pone le proprie condizioni e che rispecchia se stessa, cadeva fuori dell’orizzonte italiano. Tuttavia fu colto e individuato il problema. La necessità era chiara ed era quella verso una poesia formalmente nuova, programmaticamente irrealizzabile, quale suona nel famoso frammento 116 dell’Athenaeum di F. Schlegel: «La poesia romantica […] può divenire uno specchio di tutto il mondo circostante. […] è ancora in divenire, anzi: questa è la sua vera essenza, che può soltanto divenire, mai essere. Non può essere esaurita da nessuna teoria. […] Ogni poesia è o deve essere romantica». In questo senso l’indagine su quanto si è inteso per romantico può portare a una riflessione su quanto è rimasto ancora non risolto ed è divenuto in qualche modo segno

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della modernità.

Paolo euron

1 arthur rimbaud, Adieu, in Une Saison en Enfer.2 giacomo leoPardi, Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica, in Tutte le ope-re, Milano: Mondadori, 1973, pp. 467-549. Il testo, cui faremo ancora riferimento, fu scritto dal Leopardi nel 1818 in risposta a un articolo di Ludovico di Breme allora appena apparso sullo Spettatore italiano. Fu pubblicato postumo solo nel 1906.3 Il vocabolo tedesco Erfahrung, che traduce ‘esperienza’, si compone del prefisso er- e del verbo fahren, viaggiare. Nel termine tedesco di ‘esperienza’ è quindi insito il senso di un’azione che ci richiama a un movimento tra le cose e che come tale non ci lascia più come eravamo prima, ci modifica e arricchisce di ciò che portiamo con noi da ogni viaggio. Per una trattazione del termine in senso ermeneutico rimando a h. g. gadamer, Verità e metodo, Milano: Bonpiani, 1983, pp. 401 e ss.4 Paul de man, Critical Writings 1953-1978, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 142 (What Is Modern?).5 Considerando le opere dei romantici tedeschi non si vuole assegnare loro alcun primato, ma si vuole proporre quella formulazione in cui la riflessione sulla poesia ha trovato la sua realizzazione esemplare e il punto di non ritorno della modernità. Lo stesso idealismo, di lì a pochi anni e soprattutto per opera del sistema hegeliano, rimuoverà la propria origine poetica che resterà, almeno fino al secondo Heidegger, apparentemente ‘marginale’. Faremo riferimento soprattutto a testi scritti tra il 1798 e il 1800 da F. Schlegel e Novalis, figure di punta del primo romanticismo, e quando sarà necessario faremo cenno ai presupposti filosofici, fornendo di volta in volta le relative indicazioni bibliografiche.6 Biblioteca italiana, gennaio 1816. De l’Esprit des Traductions è il titolo originale. La traduzione dal francese fu di Pietro Giordani.7 madame de staël, De l’Allemagne, Londra: Murray, 1813 e poi Parigi, 1814. Ora cito dall’edizione Garnier Flammarion, 1968, conforme alla prima. Una brutta traduzione itali-ana già apparve nel 1814, L’Alemagna. Nel dibattito d’oltralpe, oltre a tale testo, ebbe peso soprattutto la potente sintesi che scrisse Victor Hugo come Prefazione al suo Cromwell che risale addirittura al 1827 e quindi cade ampiamente fuori del periodo da noi considerato.8 Si consideri, ad esempio, questa definizione: «La poesia lirica si esprime a nome dell’autore stesso; non si trasporta più in un personaggio. […] Bisogna, per capire la grandezza della poesia lirica, concepire […] l’intero universo come un simbolo delle emozioni dell’anima», de staël, cit., vol. I, p. 206.9 Per quanto riguarda i trattatisti romantici italiani faremo prevalentemente riferimento, oltre al già citato Discorso di Leopardi, ai testi di volta in volta indicati, ora raccolti in I manifesti romantici del 1816 e gli scritti principali del ‘Conciliatore’ sul Romanticismo, Torino: UTET, 1951, a cura di Carlo Calcaterra, da cui trarremo le citazioni, e nuova edizione ampliata e a cura di M. Scotti, ivi, 1979; si consideri anche Discussioni e polemiche sul Romanticismo, a cura di E. Bellorini, Bari: Laterza, 1975. Da tener presente per l’autorevolezza anche la Lettera a Monsieur Chauvet di A. Manzoni, del 1820 e pubblicata nel 1823, e la Lettera sul Romanticismo, ora in: manzoni, Scritti di teoria letteraria, Milano: Rizzoli, 1981.

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10 Le decisive opere critiche di Friedrich Schlegel e di Novalis, presentate sulla rivista Athe-neum tra il 1799 e il 1800 non erano note. Ludovico Di Breme nelle sue Osservazioni intorno all’ingiustizia di alcuni giudizi letterari italiani (in Manifesti, cit.) cita però i nomi di Kant e Fichte. È tuttavia da tener presente che già nel 1817 appaiono in traduzione per opera di Gerardo Gherardini le Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst (1809) di August Wilhelm Schlegel, col titolo di Corso di letteratura drammatica, peraltro già tradotto in francese nel 1814. Il testo di A. W. Schlegel, letterato, fratello dell’altro Schlegel, Friedrich, interprete più filosofico e protagonista dell’ala nichilista del movimento romantico, offre alcune decisive definizioni divenute canoniche, quale la distinzione tra poesia del nord (ro-mantica) melanconica e quella del sud (classica) espressione di una natura umana paga di sé; l’una espressione del godimento, l’altra del desiderio; l’una tematizzante il presente, l’altra inneggiante la memoria del passato e il presentimento dell’avvenire; l’una animata da un accordo armonico, l’altra da una essenziale lacerazione tra anima e sensi, pensiero e corpo.11 Ermes Visconti pubblicò su diversi numeri del Conciliatore nell’anno 1818 le Idee elemen-tari sulla poesia romantica con intento divulgativo. Oltre ad essere genericamente benevolo nei confronti della moda romantica il saggio è privo di spessore teorico e confuso dal punto di vista descrittivo e si limita a un elenco di soggetti letterari che sono senz’altro romantici, altri classici e altri ancora che cadono in una terza categoria e che non trovano collocazione. All’autore premeva maggiormente catalogare che non individuare un principio organico.12 La definizione di poesia romantica che ha fatto scuola in Italia resta quella della De Staël: «La poesia di cui i canti dei trovatori sono l’origine. […] Considero la poesia classica come quella degli antichi e la poesia romantica come quella che deriva in qualche modo dalla tradizione cavalleresca. […] L’una precede il cristianesimo e l’altra lo segue. […] Nell’una regna il destino e nell’altra la provvidenza […] e la provvidenza non giudica le azioni che in base ai sentimenti», e via di séguito, ricordando la necessità di esprimere una dimensione tutta interiore e la legittimità, per far questo, di attingere ad ogni mezzo espressivo (de staël, cit., vol. I, pp. 211-214). Ora tentare una definizione di romantico denoterebbe solo mancanza di rigore. Utilizzeremo il termine «come un’approssimazione, empirica e utile, di cui il classicismo non è che un aspetto» (mario Praz, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica, Firenze: Sansoni, 1988, pp. 13-28). Non è casuale che il romanti-cismo sia stato pensato soprattutto a partire dal classicismo e in funzione anti-classicistica proprio in Francia e in Italia, dove la tradizione era dominante, mentre in Germania abbia avuto più un carattere di riflessione operativa e non segnatamente polemica. Le realizzazioni poetiche tuttavia, se pensiamo a F. Schlegel e a Novalis, saranno di gran lunga in ritardo sull’elaborazione teorica.13 ladislao mittner, Storia della letteratura tedesca, Torino: Einaudi, 1978, vol. II, tomo III (Dal pietismo al romanticismo, 1700-1820), p. 699. Mittner tenta di compendiare questa pur importante categoria psicologica che definiamo romantica come «un fatto di sensibilità, il fatto puro e semplice della sensibilità, quando essa si traduca in uno stato di eccessiva o addirittura permanente impressionabilità, irritabilità e reattività». Di qui «l’amore dell’ir-resolutezza e delle ambivalenze». 14 giovanni berchet, Sul Cacciatore feroce e sulla Eleonora di Goffredo Augusto Bürger. Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo al suo figliuolo, ora in Manifesti, cit., pp. 261-331.15 sergio givone, Storia dell’Estetica, Bari: Laterza, 1988, p. 62.16 leoPardi, Zibaldone, 3841.17 leoPardi, Discorso, cit., p. 473.18 Ibid., p. 485.

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19 Ibid., p. 484.20 Friedrich schlegel, Gespräch über die Poesie, pubblicato su Athenaeum nel 1800. Ora in: F. Schlegel, Schriften zur Literatur, München: DTV, 1985 (da cui citiamo in trad. nostra) e in trad. it. in F. schlegel, Frammenti critici e scritti di estetica, Dialogo sulla poesia, Firenze: Sansoni, 1967.21 F. schlegel, cit., p. 305.22 leoPardi, Discorso, cit., p. 484.23 immanuel Kant, Critica della ragion pura, uscita nel 1781 e, modificata, nel 1787.24 immanuel Kant, Critica del giudizio, 1790 e, in seconda edizione, 1793.25 K. Ph. moritz, Werke, cit., p. 563.26 tzvetan todorov, Teorie del simbolo, Milano: Garzanti, 1984, p. 208. Al libro di Todorov rimandiamo per un commento sulla posizione di Moritz all’interno del romanticismo e sul carattere epocale del suo trattato.27 leoPardi, Discorso, cit., p. 470.28 ludovico di breme, Intorno all’ingiustizia di alcuni giudizi letterari italiani (1816); in: I manifesti romantici, cit., p. 105. (Il corsivo è nostro).29 Franco rella, L’estetica del romanticismo, Roma: Donzelli, 1997, p. 60.30 Friedrich schiller, Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (1795-1796), Stuttgart: Reclam, 1989. Vedi Sulla poesia ingenua e sentimentale, Milano: Editori Associati, 1993, trad. di Cristina Baseggio.31 leoPardi, Discorso, cit., p. 507.32 novalis, Monolog (1799), ora in Das philosophische Werk, I, Stuttgart,1965, trad. it. (da cui si traggono le citazioni) Opera filosofica, I, Torino: Einaudi, 1993, p. 619.33 di breme, Intorno …, in Manifesti, cit., p. 110.

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ROBERTA DE MONTICELLI

mario luzi and the PoWers oF the Word*

❄

Luzi’s Last Season

Mario luzi’s WorK is not yet accomplished: more and more poems are in progress; the last collection I have read – Sotto specie umana – appeared in 1999, yet it is already a thing of the past,

more is announced.What is definitive, however, is the structure or inner partition of the

work, established by the poet on occasion of the Meridiani (Mondadori) master edition – L’opera poetica, Milano 1998. It is something more than an overview of a book’s contents. It really seems to mirror the main stages of one of the most impressive existential and intellectual journeys of the century that has just gone by.

What is most striking about this inner partition is its apparently trin-itarian form. Not only a tripartite division, but also one which, although not mentioning the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity, is nevertheless very “Augustinian” in its vocabulary. St. Augustine has a trinity of masterpieces, respectively concerning Life or Soul (The Confessions), the World (The City of God) and God (On the Trinity) – in short, the three main chapters of what was going to become the Western Metaphysics. Now, let’s have a look at the tripartite division in Luzi’s work:

il giusto della vita (1936-1960): La barca (1936); Avvento notturno (1940); Un brindisi (1946); Quaderno gotico (1947); Primizie del deserto (1952); Onore del vero (1957). nell’oPera del mondo (1960-1980): Nel magma (1963), Dal fondo delle campagne (1965); Su fondamenti invisibili (1971); Al fuoco della controversia (1978). Frasi nella luce nascente (from 1980 on): Per il battesimo dei nostri frammenti (1985); Frasi e incisi di un canto salutare (1990); Viaggio terrestre e celeste di Simone Martini (1994); Sotto specie umana (1999).

Who could avoid recognizing in these three headings something very similar to the three chapters of a kind of Augustinian metaphysics? There is Life or Soul, there are the World and its works, and there is … the light. Light, the most classic metaphor in neo-platonic metaphysics, the very image of the Source of being. Frasi nella luce nascente. Words in the rising light.

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Light – and the rising light, more generally a living light, a light that comes and goes, that draws back and fades too, but above all a growing light. I think that the motto of this conclusive section of the work could have been a verse by John Donne, from his poem A Lecture upon the Shadow:

Love is a growing, or full constant light.

Actually, the last period of Luzi’s poetry is for a good part devoted to a study of light, the “queen light,” luce regina, of one of the most intense pieces of the poem about Simone Martini (Ti prego, non ritornino). Sim-one is indeed a master of light – not in a naturalistic sense of course, but as contrasted to Giotto, the vigorous master of forms and volumes, and as a “writer of the light,” as Luzi says, or even a goldsmith of the light. It is no accident that Simone is chosen as the poet’s alter ego, and the myth of Siena, the painter’s native town and the poet’s ideal homeland, is not yet a sufficient reason for this poetic equation. There is a real core to the poet’s knowledge in this last and happiest moment of his research, and it is like a clear heart, un cuore chiaro; as the last verse of the penultimate poem has it:

al cuore chiaro del sapere oscuro

in the clear heart of dark knowledge.

A clear heart that definitely reminds us of a non-human center or heart, as in the first verse of a preceding poem in the Viaggio:

Al centro d’una ed universa mente –là era quel chiaroe lui non l’ignorava ……Lumen de lumine …1

At the center of one and universal mind –the brightness was thereand he was aware of it ……Lumen de lumine …

An image associating the sky and a mind – a “universal mind”; it is quite impossible, for the educated Italian reader, not to recall this place of Dante’s Paradiso (XXVII, 109-111):

E questo cielo non ha altro dove

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che la mente divina, in che s’accendel’amor che ’l volge e la virtù ch’ei piove.

This heaven has no other where but this:the mind of God, in which are kindled boththe love that turns it and the force it rains.

(Mandelbaum)

If the last season of this poetry is a journey in the rising light, culmi-nating in Simone’s Viaggio terrestre e celeste, it is good to know what Luzi sees as the very end or the issue of Simone’s actual career. Luzi expresses himself very clearly on this point. Simone feels that:

There is a point art has not yet reached. He feels that art has just mirrored the world up to now, perhaps glorifying it, but without going beyond its antinomies and its contrasts. He, the great colorist, has revived and illuminated up the great Sienese painting […] and yet he feels that color, even if so bright, keeps being difference; still, there is a light unifying everything, and it is that he would like to paint, that he strives after.2

Frasi nella luce nascente, the general title of the complete works’ third section, mentions the human word beside the light. The human word, the word in the plural, the articulated and broken voice: frasi from frango, the same root as in frammenti: phrases, as it were, etched or even carved in the light, as in that other title, Frasi e incisi di un canto salutare. (The poet himself speaks of the need he felt to leave the brush for the chisel: he refers to the new rhythm of his verse, “which recalls the incisive work of a chisel, more than the diffused and somewhat exterior one of a brush.”3 )

Yet this human, broken and articulated voice must somehow participate in the very essence of the Word. This particular kind of human word, the word of poetry, can do so, has this power: this is in fact the very Augustinian discovery that announces itself from the very beginning of the third and last season of the poet’s quest. For this season is entirely under the sign of the Word – capital “W,” one of those “capitalized transcendental words” which Northrop Frye analyses in his book (1990) Words with Power. A meditation on the powers of the poetical word, the background being a theology of the Word: this seems to be the thread of Luzi’s last poetry. In any case, this is the subject of my article.

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The Three Theological Quotations

In fact, the three first collections of this last season are felt by the poet as a trilogy. Now each one of them is introduced by a quotation from the Western theological tradition, in the place of the motto (and I do not know of a similar, quite explicit reference to the theological tradition introducing any other collection of Luzi’s). Here are the quotations. The first one comes from St. John’s Prologue:

In lei [la parola] era la vita; e lavita era la luce degli uomini.

Parola: the term Logos, Verbum, is quite intentionally proposed by the poet in its Italian more current translation, which turns it into the feminine gender. The same gender of another key word in the universe of Luzi’s thought: natura. A fact that gives the indefinite personal pronoun lei – so often occurring in this season of Luzi’s poetry, and especially in this collec-tion – a further shade of meaning. We shall come back to this point. Let us now instead quote a commentary to this motto, given by the poet himself in an essay of 1989, Le parole agoniche della poesia. He writes of the verses of St. John Prologue:

People usually stop by the first one, “In the beginning was the Word.” But if we consider the connection of these phrases, we actually have the wonder (prodi-gio) of life and of the word that enlightens it; or rather of life that is in a way the concrete translation of the Word itself.4

The motto of the second collection, Frasi e incisi di un canto salutare,

is borrowed from the treatise On the Names of God, by Dyonisius (Pseudo)Areopagite, a neo-platonic writer of the sixth century who was for a long time identified as a disciple of St. Paul, and whose work was immensely influential on the whole subsequent theological and spiritual literature of Christianity. He is in fact presented by the Doctors of the Church as “the father of mystical theology.” Here is the quotation:

Perché da un solo amore ne abbiamo dedotti molti

Because from a single love we have derived many.

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It may be interesting to know that Life and Light, the two “capitalized words” occurring in the context of the Prologue’s quotation, are in fact the two first “names of God” treated in the Areopagite’s work – the third one being the one that is often associated with the Second Person of the Trinity – and hence, especially in John’s gospel, another name for Verbum: Truth. As to this second motto, the quotation is taken from the fourth chapter of the Areopagite’s treatise, whose subject is Love, constituting the fourth and fifth names of God, respectively in its passive form (supreme object of Love, or supreme Beauty) and in its active form (creation out of love, the way in which Bonum, Goodness, is diffusivum sui, spreads over, as it were, into nothing, thereby creating all the finite beings).

There is more to say about Dyonisius treatise and its place in Luzi’s thought. We cannot ignore that Dyonisius is no minor source for Italian po-etry, since his work can be proved to have inspired Dante in conceiving his Paradise more than any other theological and philosophical work – except for that of Thomas Aquinas. But of course, the important question is not whether or not Luzi has indeed deeply thought over the texts of the Platonic tradition, and of the “father of mystic theology” in particular. The important question is not about the measure of Luzi’s learning, but about the depth and coherence of Luzi’s own feeling and thought. Are there any features of it, which can indeed be enlightened through a reference to the Platonic tradition and the work of Dyonisius in particular? I shall try to argue for a positive answer, as far as Luzi’s experience of and reflection upon language is concerned. To see this point, one must know what Dyonisius’ treatise on the names of God is about.

This work is about all the possible ways to speak of God. It works out an audacious and very innovative conception of theology, starting from the very question: How is theology possible? How is speaking of God possible, given his transcendence, which makes any possible “name” or attribute essentially inadequate to describe his nature? The best known answer of Dionysius, the one by which he became “the father of mystical theology,” is that speaking of God veridically is impossible, so that the less inadequate kind of theology is a negative one, consisting in denying each finite degree of being and perfection to God, thereby ascending, by way of asceticism and intellectual renouncement, to the apex of mystical theology, which is no speech about God, but the silence of his “secret revelation” and “luminous darkness,” to quote the two most famous oxymora of Dionysius. Now this answer is far from being the only one. Insofar as theology is expressed in

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human language, its inadequacy is no objection against it – but just one more sign of the difference between the Cause of all being and its effects. Theology, the speech about God, is one of these effects, and indeed a luminous one. God himself kindles the human mind, arousing words and phrases about himself. He is in this sense the “original theologian.” Speak-ing about him is in a way speaking out of him. The only sin in this field is the uninspired word. But then this same God who is above and beyond all names, who is “anonymous” or ineffable, is indeed the ultimate bearer of all names. I quote Dionysius:

He is sun and star and fire and water, breath, dew, cloud and stone and rock, all of the existing things and none of them.5

We can see that Dionysius is not only “the father of mystical theology,” but also the father of what he called a “symbolic theology.” As such, he can still be a very serious interlocutor for a poet. Actually, there is a poem in this collection (more exactly in its section, Nominazione [Naming]) that seems to be a commentary of the quoted sentence:

Dati i nomi. Copiosala nominazione. Non detto un nome solo,il tuo che sotto altri si cela. Si celao non può, nome – non nome esserci?

(OP, 942).

The names given. Abundantthe naming. Only one name unsaid,yours hiding under others. It hidesor it can’t, name – non-name be there?

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We come now to the third and last “theological” motto of the Trilogy. It is a quotation from St. Augustine’s Confessions:

Ascolta tu pure: è il Verbo stesso che ti grida di tornare.6

A very apt quotation indeed, to introduce us to the Earthly and Heavenly Journey of Simone Martini, which is in fact a nostos, a homecoming, and which bears a dedication to the City of Siena and the poet’s adolescence. No doubt the Word is still in the focus of attention: yet the places of this quotation both in the original text and as an introduction to the Viaggio make it even more enlightening. In the Confessions, these words are addressed by Augustine to his soul, exhorting it to go back to “the place of the immutable quietness,” which is in fact the Word itself, as opposed to human words, incapable of existing and signifying without “passing into nothingness.” Now the abiding Word, the word that does not flow away in order to be understood and to fulfill its function, has a finite analogue according to Augustine: this is the enchanted word of poetry, the word that is temporal in nature, but capable of mirroring eternity in the constant recurrence of its rhythm, in the permanent measure of its verse. And in fact, a few lines above, Agustine quotes one of his favorite verses by St. Ambrose, the same one on whose example he had explained this theory in his treatise On Music:

Canta pure le tue lodi per la bellezza delle cose, anima mia - “Dio creatore di tutto.”

Singing, enjoying the music of a poem is not opposed to “coming back” from time to eternity, from the flowing words to the abiding word. On the contrary, it is opposed to the greed for things of this passing world. “Canta pure.”

But this “canto” is, once again, but the effect of a listening: “Ascolta tu pure …” We recognize the very same idea we met in Dionysius: the Word itself “calls back.” This is indeed a deeply Augustinian theme as well. Invocare est vocari, to invoke is to be called.

Now, to hear a call one must be in an attitude of listening and attention. This third motto adds an image to the theological references of the other two quotations: that of listening, of attending to something. It is the oblique, non-frontal attention, which strikes us so much in the pictures of the Annun-ciation. Luzi must have such a picture in mind when he writes in the Viaggio:

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Pregava lei, pregava ed erapregata intanto dalla sua preghiera.7

She was praying, praying, and at the same timewas being prayed by her prayer.

The almond-shaped eye of the Virgin, her listening attitude, the quiet-ness and “passivity” of her posture seem to me the very image of the poet’s attention. Attention much more than imagination is, in Luzi’s poetics, a condition, or perhaps an effect, of that state of grace in which the poetic word is conceived. There are many words to depict this state of attention, or of poetry, which seems to change ordinary perception into wonder at every existing thing:

C’è tutto, tutto.Tutto incredibilmente.8

Or again:

C’è questo, c’è prodigiosamente.9

I prefer above all the word sgomento, with its nuance of awe, describing the state that makes the passage from ordinary words to the poetic word possible. In a short text of 1941, Prosa e poesia, the young Luzi had written:

The birth of the image, during which the mind […] identifies itself with the very object of its emotion, is the necessary moment that the poet, having lived through his prose, does expect from his whole-hearted awe, not from his imagination.10

Here is a constant subject of Luzi’s reflection on his work: the passage from prose to poetry, the act of poetry, a very peculiar speech act, or rather writing act. We shall have the opportunity to comment on this text and to quote others on the same subject when reading some poems from Luzi’s last season – a few examples for each one of the “Trilogy” collections.

Some Reading. The Struggle for Poetry

We begin with the opening poem of Per il battesimo dei nostri fram-menti, whose title – Dizione – serves as a title for the first “chapter” of this

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book. Dizione is the speech act: the whole book is in fact characterised by Luzi as “a book on language.” Yet dizione reminds us both of the German Dichtung and of the Italian dittare, the verb used by Dante for the birth of the inner word, inspired by Love (which is, as it is known, one of the names of the Holy Spirit):

[…] Io mi son un che, quandoamor mi spira, noto, e a quel modoch’e’ ditta dentro vo significando

(Purgatorio XXIV, 52-54).

Dizione

C’era, sì, c’era – ma come ritrovarloquello spirito nella linguaquel fuoco nella materia.Chi elimina la melma, chi cancella la contumelia?Sepolto nelle rocce,rocce dentro montagne di buio e grevità – così quasi si estingue,così cova l’incendiol’immemorabile evangelio …11

It was there, yes, it was there - but how is one to find it,that spirit within languagethat fire within matter.Who eliminates the mire, who erases the contempt?Buried in the rocks,rocks inside mountainsof darkness and heaviness –so almost dies out,so smolders the flame,the immemorial gospel …

This “book on language” is initially, Luzi writes, a book “on the decay of the word.” This poem is about something that was there, and that is no longer there, in the language. Notice that the words for this something are absolutely biblical – they reminds us of the words of John the Baptist in Luke 3, 16: “Someone stronger than me shall come […] he will baptize you in spirit and fire.” This something is said to be on the verge of extinction, but also to smoulder, ready to flare up again. It is buried in matter, as it were – deeply in the language itself, as we shall see. Why is this something, spirit or fire of the word in the language, no longer there?

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I think that we should not interpret this decay as the result of some his-torical process or condition, such as “Modernity” and the like. It is possible to do so (Luzi’s critical essays admit this interpretation), but there is another interpretation that is more interesting, and more deeply rooted in Luzi’s thought. There is here an opposition, very similar to the one we found in Augustine, between prose and poetry, the functional and the musical registers of language. But there is more in Luzi’s opposition than in Augustine’s. In its functional register, language is used, words serve to do things – to convey information or to act upon other people. In this usage, words necessarily and daily undergo a process of wear and tear. As Luzi writes:

All in the practice of life, of history, tends to corrupt the word, to reduce it to mere sign, to steal power from it, to make it meaningless, conventional, no longer spirit but just letter.12

One might go further and say that it is of the very essence of the “word in service,” the functional word, to tend toward the neutrality of an instrument, and in particular of a mere sign, whose function is to point to a thing then to disappear – to pass into nothingness, as Augustine would have it. Let us follow this line of thought up to another formulation of this opposition between the functional and the non-functional word:

There is a word which serves the thought and a word which gives birth to it […]. The language that science uses, for example, is utilitarian language, it serves for comunicating a concept […]. The language of poetry has by no means this nature. It has no limits: it does not end, where its user’s act comes to an end, but it goes on to work, to produce other words, other emotions in the person who listens and receives it.13

We begin to see what the positive character of the non-functional word is supposed to be, what is this “something” that is missing in ordinary functional language. It is a power to give birth to the thought – in a most general sense. It is somehow a creative power, something that the human word shares in some measure with the Word (capitalized form) “by which all things have been created.”

As an instance of an opposition between the functional and the creative word, the one between prose and poetry ceases to be an academic distinction between literary styles. Being plunged in functional language is the ordinary life of the poet too – remember Luzi speaking of the “lived prose” of the

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poet; his ascent to poetry corresponds to a radical change (Luzi’s word is metamorfosi) in his existential condition, which is comparable to, and in fact lived as, a death and a new birth, or a resurrection. The word qualifying this radical change that the poet undergoes (and the language with and in him) is one of the key words in Luzi’s thought: agonico. Le parole agoniche della poesia is the title of the essay we keep quoting:

This is the subject of the whole book [Per il battesimo dei nostri frammenti]: the source of the word getting polluted, and the agony suffered in order to restore it to itself, to its dignity and integrity.14

Agony: this is a word, Luzi explains, which in Christian lexicography refers to:

that struggle by which one feels one has to redeem oneself day after day, hour by hour, from the condition upon which the use and abuse of human things nail us.15

It is almost a quotation from St. Paul (I. Cor. 9: 24-27), supplementing the three theological quotations we noticed with a direct reference to the central idea of Pauline Christianity – the life of the believer conceived of as an imitation of Christ, and of his agony.

There is no doubt about the Christian frame of Luzi’s thought. What I find much more interesting than this frame, is the way in which the very experience it harbors seems to be referred to the process of poetic creation, which is thereby presented as an event transcending human authorship, even if it involves the whole life of the poet. In short, the act of poetry is seen by analogy not just with divine creation, but with incarnation.

The following poem acquaints us with the first movement of this agone – a kind of loss of the poet’s self, coinciding with some kind of obscurity and silence.

Perché, luce, ti ritraida me nelle cose guardate e più addentro ancoranelle altre non vedute?Chiusa la storia, cancellata la persona,perso o vinto l’agone? Oppure

è l’altro che maturae splende, l’amore pieno,

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il pieno annientamentoin cosa? In che unica sostanza,in che totale inessenza – impossibile saperlo,non c’è testimonio, non c’è canto?16

Light, why do you withdrawfrom me in the things looked atand even deeperin those not seen?Is the story over, erased the person,lost or won the contest? Or maybe

it is the other that matures and shines, full love,the full annihilationinto what? into what single substance,into what total non-essence – impossible to know,is there no witness, is there no song?

Lost or won – the agone? The person – the human subject and the poet’s identity in particular – is in a way wiped out. What is this “other,” ripening and shining instead? Here is an answer by the poet:

I oppose the spoken universe to the universe ‘naturally’ acted upon by the living creatures, by animals and operating nature. Hence language does no longer pass through words: it is an “other” language. Hence it is clear that that there is an actual defeat [of language], actual up to renouncement, and to mutism […].17

Now we see the reference of those words: unica sostanza – totale in-essenza. It is nature. Natura – here is another keyword in Luzi’s thought. In-essence: because nature is in Luzi synonymous with incessant creation, hence not so much of being as of becoming, metamorphosis, death and birth: natura from nascor, being born.

The first negative movement of the human word in poetry is compa-rable to the first one of the (capitalized) Word, becoming a creature. The poet gives up Logos and personal identity, and history.18 Yet this complete surrender of the poet turns out to be no loss, on the contrary a growth of power for his word. Consider this other poem:

Lingua – Acqua dal suo primevo.

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Acqua, lei, in alto dalla rupeappena dirocciando.Luce da quel solare scintillamento?O brividi di oscurità?L’una e gli altri, certo,ancora non comprendevo …

(OP, 659)

Language – water primeval.It, water barely tumbling down from the high cliff.Light from that solar brilliance?Or shivers of darkness?Both of them, certainly,I still didn’t understand …

We remember that “spirit and fire” that was missing from language and somehow buried in its matter, according to a preceding poem. Now the word has a new image – which is of course a very old one, coming again from John’s Gospel: springing water. In alto. “Rebirth from the top” is John’s formula of the spiritual rebirth. But what is striking here is the “naturalezza,” the ease of this synthesis between the very image of birth and origin – the spring – and the very image of the primeval voice of na-ture – water. Let us quote Luzi again on this identification of poetry with “incessant creation” of nature:

The maximal creative power we can imagine accorded to poetry is to to enter into the heart of nature’s incessant creation, grasping its rhythm of destruction and origin, changing this rhythm into one’s own breath […]. In the poetic moment the forces governing the universe act in the most intensive way, and that’s why the condition distinguishing the poet is naturalness.19

The next poem addresses directly the word – the word in its “maximal power.”

Vola alta, parola, cresci in profondità,tocca Nadir e Zenith della tua significazione,giacché talvolta lo puoi – sogno che la cosa esclaminel buio della mente – però non separartida me, non arrivare,

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ti prego, a quel celestiale appuntamentoda sola, senza il caldo di meo almeno il mio ricordo, sii luce, non disabitata trasparenza …

La cosa e l’anima? o la mia e la sua sofferenza?

(OP, 591)

Fly high, word, grow in depth,touch the nadir and zenith of your signification,since you can at times – dream that exclaimthe thing in the darkness of the mind –but don’t leave me,don’t arrive alone,I beg you, at that celestialmeeting, without the warmth of meor at least my memory, belight, not uninhabited transparency … The thing and its soul? or mine and its suffering?

Height and depth: the two dimensions of the word that has reached its maximal power. We could paraphrase: both transcendence and incarna-tion qualify the true poetic word, born again from the agony of the poet’s ego. Transcendence of the spirit beyond the letter, transcendence of the impersonal, “philosophical” thought above psychology or history. Luzi tells us that philosophy and pure thought have always been a temptation for him. Just as for Dante and Leopardi, we can add. Luzi is indeed a true, coherent thinker. What retains him from professional philosophy is the lack of incarnation of most philosophical thought. This is no vague metaphor against abstraction in poetry. Incarnation of the poetic word is a notion corresponding to an inner experience that Luzi’s poems have not yet ceased to explore. This poem opens up the very last phase of Luzi’ poetry. Incarnation is the very condition of the creative power accorded to the poetic word – and refused to the technical language of philosophy. Let us first see what this creative power is, and then, by way of a conclu-sion, what some more recent verses tell us about this experience of the incarnate word.

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Incarnation and the Powers of the Word

Contrary to functional language, poetic language does not serve the thought, it gives birth to it. What does this mean? Tocca Nadir e Zenith della tua significazione. This word multiplies its meaning by intensifying the lived experience of the evoked thing. Its first power is to awaken.

Words and things awaken each other […] they exchange their powers […] such is the generation of life within sensibility, and this is the mover of poetic thought. It is a merry event when this happens, I mean, the twofold revelation of things and words: a reciprocal revelation.20

Sogno che la cosa esclami / nel buio della mente. Esclami, the expres-sion of surprise and wonder. Luzi also speaks of the sudden recognition of reality; as one says in the language of drama: “agnizione.”

Suffering is over, when this word is given. Luzi speaks of another power of this word, which has always compensated him for the sufferings involved in the poetic struggle, and which he calls a power of inner recomposition. He defines it as follows:

Poetry puts the world in order, it somehow reconstitutes the harmony of the word. Any important verse, any verse issued from a deeply meditated harmonious thought, gives you this measure of the world, or rather renews this measure in you.

The example chosen to illustrate this statement is from Dante, La gloria di colui che tutto muove:

Just the utterance of this verse seems to me lawgiving. It partakes of a norm, is in the world […] it produces a process of harmonic remoulding of the world.21

Probably without knowing this, Luzi reproduces exactly, by these words, the theory of poetry sketched by Augustine in his treatise On Music. I do not have the space to illustrate this “lawgiving power” with the example of other verses by Luzi – I shall just quote some from the Viaggio that seem to me to evoke the feeling of the world here described as a harmonious whole, as a poem:

Ma poi che importa? È minima la partedi ciascuno, e splendido il poema.22

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But then, what does it matter?everyone’s partis minimal, and marvelous the poem.

The last aspect of the power of the word according to Luzi introduces us to that meditation on the incarnate word that is still in progress, and on which I shall close my reflection, too.

This last aspect is the power of revelation that the poetic word has not only for its audience but also for its “author” – this feature makes the word transcendent, so that the writer is for Luzi nothing more than a scribe. This power of generating more and more new thoughts, of renewing its message across the ages, characterizes great poetry. Now, as expressed in Vola alta, parola, transcendence and incarnation, height and depth are correlated di-mensions of the word. The deeper it grows, the higher it flies. Now, what does it mean for the poet, this growing deep, this incarnation?

In fact, the experience animating most of Luzi’s current production seems to be that of the poet as a simple servant of incarnation. This service is not only a surrender of the ego, as we saw, but something more. Through the poet, life must descend to:

something essential lying in the depth of his mother-tongue and having got so connatural to it that it could no longer be separated from its words.23

Connatural: where the thought, the spirit, so to speak, becomes nature, flesh of one natural language, the word is “incarnate.”

What is this service of incarnation like? Just note that in the poem Vola alta, parola it is a dream that “exclaims” the thing, and it does so “in the darkness of the mind.” A whole section of the second collection, Frasi e incisi di un canto salutare, has a kind of watchful sleep in its title: Nel mare del non dormito sonno. In the long poem dedicated to him, Simone, the artist, makes his appearance in a sort of sleep:

Dorme il suo viaggio, lui, entrafasciato dal suo sonnonello spazio che lo ingoiae nel tempo che lo attende.Entra nel suo futurolui, dormiente.

(OP, 967)

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He sleeps his journey, bundledin his sleep he entersthe space that swallows himand the time that awaits him.He enters his futureasleep.

This “sleep,” this “darkness of the mind” is, as ordinary language has it, an image of death, and, for the poet, an image of this silence and “mut-ism” which is part of his struggle: but at the same time it is the very power or potentiality of life and light. Sleep – this watchful sleep – is, as it were, the subjective equivalent of the winter earth, full of seeds. Seeds are truly a core-image of the whole last season in Luzi’s poetry. Semi, incidentally reminding us of semantics, are of course a powerful metaphor for the ele-ments of the phrase, or for the speech act in its potential state. We recall the “immemorial gospel” of the first poem we read, buried “ inside mountains / of darkness and heaviness.”

Incarnation is for Luzi a descent of life – the life provisionally given to the poet – into the depth of his mother-tongue. The deeper the seeds of life-light-word go, the higher the power of revelation of the uttered word will be. The poet himself does not know:

which level of depth has emerged through the words that I served as an artist, in order that they could be made free from any service, from any subjection to my person, and that they could go beyond me.24

A long poem in the Viaggio is dedicated to the seed, which hiding itself defends:

La sua minuziae la sua incalcolabile potenza.25

Its minutenessand its incalculable power.

Other poems describe the descending movement towards the depth of the mother-tongue: the words:

entravano nelle lingue,scendevano nelle nazioni,ne risalivano il ceppo,le barbe, le radici

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fino all’indistinto limo,al non ancora pronunciato, muto fato, prima,prima del verbo.

(OP, 943)

they penetrated languages,descended into nations,went up their trunk,their spines, their roots,to the indistinct loam,the not-yet uttered,mute fate – before,before the word.

Or again:

Dentro la lingua avita, fin dove,fino a quale primo seme della balbuzie umana? –…verso le infime radici, finoall’ancora muto verbo, muto maconclamatogià, forte, della sua imminenza. Ed eccolo – oh felicità – è visibilel’altro cielo della speranon toccato dalla creazionenon abitato dal pensieroma dalla sua potenza. Ed è paradiso.

(OP, 961)

Within the ancient tongue, till where,till which first seedof human stuttering? –…toward the lowest roots,down tothe still-silent word, silent but already proclaimed,loudly, by its imminence.

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And there – oh happiness – it is visible,the other sky of the sphereuntouched by creation,inhabited not by thoughtbut by its power. And it is paradise.

We would like to close our reading with what seems to be the very issue of Luzi’s and of his Simone’s study of light. This is what is before the light, or – as the preceding poems have it – before the word.

Fermo nell’anteluce immanesopra di lui quel blocco d’attesa e di silenzio,gradinato dal suo verso,scalato dal suo canto.

(OP, 972)

Motionless in anteluce that block of expectation and silence,cut into by his verse,scaled by his song.

Fermo nell’anteluce. This almost untranslatable latinism seems to de-fine the twilight of “what is before light:” a season, a time, an atmosphere of the soul that seems to look for new words, not yet existing. The creative power of the poet multiplies these “words of transcendence,” pointing to a region of being that is before or beyond the clear light of logos and of consciousness. Some examples, from the whole trilogy: infratempo (539), anteprimavera (598), il prima della primavera (600), infrasentita (642), oltrevedere, subsquillante (793), infrapensiero (820).

And, of course, anteluce. In a way, the utmost power of the word lies before its utterance – in its pure potentiality. There is happiness in the “other sphere.” Somehow the very womb where the word is but a seed, is already paradise, pure sky. The humility of the earthly seed is the glory of heavens – and so the Viaggio terrestre e celeste seems to have come to its end. But for those who read the last poem of the Viaggio, what I would call the miracle of Plotinus seems to happen once more. Reaching to the origin, staying in the very region of Unity, before Intellect and Light, before creation and plurality means having – for an instant – access to the Whole

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and Absolute, where being and becoming, essence and appearance, identity and difference are but one.

È, l’essere. È.Intero,inconsumato,pari a sé. Come èdiviene. Senza fine, infinitamente è e diviene, divienese stessoaltro da sé. Come èappare.

Nientedi ciò che è nascosto lo nasconde. Nessunacattività di simbolo lo tiene o altra guaina lo presidia. O vampa!Tutto senza ombra flagra.E’ essenza, avvento, apparenza,tutto trasparentissima sostanza.È forse il paradisoquesto? oppure, luminosa insidiaun nostro oscuroab origine, mai vinto sorriso?

(OP, 1131)

Being is. It is.Whole,unconsumed,equal to itself. As it isit becomes. Without end,it infinitely isand becomes, it becomesitselfother than itself. As it is

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it appears. Nothingof what is hiddenhides it. Nocaptivity of symbolholds it or any other sheath garrisons it. O flame!Everything blazes without shadow. It is essence, advent, appearance,all utterly transparent substance.Is this paradiseperhaps? or luminous trap,a smile of ours never conquered, dark ab origine?

roberta de monticelli

* I wish to thank Luigi Bonaffini, translator of Mario Luzi into English, for his generous read-iness in making available, on this occasion, his not yet published translations from Viaggio terrestre e celeste di Simone Martini. Bonaffini’s translations of the other two collections of the “trilogy” – Per il battesimo dei nostri frammenti and Frasi e incisi di un canto salutare have been published by Guernica (For the Baptism of our Fragments, Montréal: Guernica, 1992; Phrases and Passages of a Salutary Song, Toronto: Guernica, 1999).1 m. luzi, L’opera poetica (= OP), a cura di S. Verdino, Milano: Mondadori 1999, p. 986.2 m. luzi, OP, 1749: “Sente che c’è un punto che l’arte non ha ancora raggiunto: sente che l’arte ha semplicemente riflesso il mondo, glorificandolo forse, ma non superandone le antinomie e i contrasti. Lui, grande colorista, con il suo cromatismo ha avvivato la grande pittura di Siena, l’ha accesa, e tuttavia sente che il colore, pur così luminoso, è sempre differenza; e invece c’è una luce che unifica tutto, che è quella che lui vorrebbe dipingere, che vorrebbe raggiungere.”3 m. luzi, OP, 1273.4 m. luzi (1989), Le parole agoniche della poesia, in Naturalezza del poeta (= NP), Milano: Garzanti, 1995, p. 292: “Generalmente ci si ferma al primo. ‘In principio era il Verbo.’ Se noi consideriamo la connessione di queste frasi abbiamo effettivamente il prodigio della vita e della parola che la illumina; anzi della vita che è come la traduzione concreta della Parola stessa.”5 thomas aQuinas, In librum Beati Dionysii De divinis nominibus expositio, Lectio III 3, Roma: Marietti, 1950, p. 26.6 augustine, Confessions, IV 11, 16.7 OP, 1090.8 OP, 597.9 OP, 645.10 NP, 30: “La nascita dell’immagine durante la quale l’animo si equipara […] all’oggetto

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stesso della sua emozione, è il momento necessario che il poeta, vissuta la sua prosa, aspetta non dalla sua immaginazione, ma dal suo plenario sgomento.”11 OP, 509.12 NP, Le parole agoniche della poesia, 295: “Tutto nella pratica della vita, nella storia, tende a corromperla, la parola, a renderla mero segno, a depotenziarla, a destituirla di senso, a renderla convenzionale, non più spirito ma lettera.”13 Ibid., 294-295: “C’è una parola dunque che serve il pensiero e c’è una parola che genera il pensiero […]. Il linguaggio che usa la scienza, per esempio, è un linguaggio utilitario, serve alla comunicazione del concetto. […] la lingua della poesia non ha affatto questa natura, non ha un limite, non finisce dove finisce l’impegno di colui che la usa, ma continua a lavorare, a suscitare altre parole, altre emozioni in colui che ascolta, in colui che riceve.”14 Ibid., 296: “il tema attraversa tutto il volume: la fonte della parola che si inquina e la sofferenza agonica per restituirla a se stessa, alla sua dignità, alla sua interezza.”15 OP, 1610: “[…] quel conflitto in cui sembra di doversi riscattare giorno per giorno, ora per ora, dalla condizione in cui l’uso e l’abuso delle cose umane ci configgono.”16 OP, 577.17 OP, 1623: “Contrappongo l’universo parlato all’universo agito ‘naturalmente’ dalle creature viventi, dagli animali, dalla natura operante. E allora il linguaggio non passa attraverso la parola, è un linguaggio altro. E quindi è chiaro che c’è veramente una sconfitta in atto, in atto fino alla rinuncia, al mutismo […].”18 A beautiful expression for this movement of surrender is the formula “essere avuti,” a sort of ripe condition of the poet beyond “having” and “being,” and an existential interpretation of the myth of Orpheus. See Verso Ragusa, NP, 306.19 NP, 138: “Il massimo di potere creativo che possiamo immaginare concesso alla poesia è, dunque, di entrare nel vivo del processo inesauribile della creazione in toto captandone il ritmo di distruzione e di origine, facendone il suo stesso respiro. Nel momento poetico agiscono allo stato di massima intensità le forze che dispongono dell’universo e per questo la condizione che distingue il poeta è la naturalezza.”20 NP, 298: “Le parole e le cose si risvegliano reciprocamente […] si scambiano la loro potenza […] così opera la generazione della vita dentro la sensibilità e questo è il motore del pensiero poetico. È un ilare evento quando questo accade, intendo la duplice rivelazione, delle cose e delle parole: una rivelazione reciproca.”21 NP, 299-300: “La poesia è ordinatrice, ricostituisce un po’ l’armonia del mondo. Qualunque verso importante, qualunque verso che sia la promanazione di un pensiero profondo meditato e armonico, vi dà questa misura o meglio rinnova in voi questa misura del mondo. […]. La sola pronunzia di questo verso mi sembra legiferante. Partecipa una norma, scandisce una musica che è nel mondo […]. La poesia vera […] opera un processo di rifusione armonica del mondo.” 22 OP, 1012.23 NP, 300.24 NP, 302-303.25 OP, 1099.

the Question oF translation

✥

la Questione della traduzione

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translations and simultaneities:the case oF marinetti’s maFarka le Futuriste,

roman aFricain

❄

In a neW YorK lecture a couple of years ago, Umberto Eco reminded us that: “Translation ages, Shakespeare does not.” On first impact, the translator bows her head in acquiescence. It is true: one must make

the text readable to contemporaries, even in the case when the secondary language allows itself leaps back into the epochal framework of the author of the primary text. As we know, Bible translations have had to struggle with this dilemma since the start, and surely today more than ever the pro-liferation of such translations indicates that the vernacular is victorious, even though the results may be contrary to the readers’ sentiments. It was very interesting for me to ascertain recently – while conducting a discus-sion with my students in a course that I have designed to be a laboratory of translation – their curious but not wholly surprising reactions when faced with various versions of a biblical citation. Everyone, without exception, found the St. James version to be not only the most beautiful but also the most worthy of the divine word. The archaic became the arcane for these young minds whose linguistic explorations are still virginal, causing their responses to be more genuine; visceral, I would say. Their relationship to language – these are teenagers I am speaking of – is indeed so profoundly unconscious that it allows them to have a truly intuitive interaction with it.

Hence their reply would appear to go against Eco’s pronouncement. A poetic translation, namely a poetic text, has the same potential duration as its original. Since, as we know, what endures is the product and not the producer.

Antedating Lyotard, D.H. Lawrence says it quite dramatically in Women in Love:

Let mankind pass away – time it did. The creative utterances will not cease, they will only be there. Humanity doesn’t embody the utterance of the incompre-hensible anymore. Humanity is a dead letter. There will be a new embodiment, in a new way.

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THE QUESTION OF TRANSLATION / LA QUESTIONE DELLA TRADUZIONE

When, for instance, we say Shakespeare we mean, of course, his works, his words, certainly not the man of flesh and bone whose identity has become in time even more enigmatic than his poetry. No doubt this is what Eco implied. But right next to this implication there also arises, in his statement, the explicit criticism of translation as a craft that remains something less than an art form, thus cursed with non-endurance, among other things.

Yet we know that the instrument of poetry is language, which is also the tool of translation. It seems deductibly simple to conclude that if the linguistic worth of the original, once turned into another language, acquires parallel linguistic heights, what we will have is an unaging Dante along with an unaging Longfellow in translation, for example. The loss in this process may be the transparent and overpowering presence of the pristine individuality of the poet-author, but the text continues on its living voy-age with its reader-ship. Thus primary and secondary texts ultimately are lover/rivals in a duel, which is not with each other but with time, as they separately strive for durability.

Turning recently to the task of translating sections of Marinetti’s 1909 novel Mafarka le futuriste into English, which I had initially read in Italian (as probably most Italian readers have), I was faced with what I will call simultaneous texts: the French one that bears only the author’s name, and the Italian one, which appeared within a year, and is signed by Decio Cinti.

Marinetti’s novel is one of the last creative works that he writes in French, his first literary language. This magnetic Italian poet is one of those elusive characters whose personal questione della lingua cannot be answered in a simple manner. To ask ourselves what is his principal language, would be more seemly than to wonder which one was his first language. As we know, he was born of Italian parents, raised until early youth in an Arab country, and first educated by French Jesuits. These circumstances can of-ten lead either to a linguistic anxiety, in the fear of not mastering any one language fully, or to a certain nonchalance, and perhaps even arrogance, in the affirmation of a trans-linguisticity. Marinetti does not seem to suffer from the former affliction.

We can observe some of the latter as we look closely at the Italian version of the work that was originally subtitled as Roman africain. Cinti’s translation appears to our eyes immediately as more polished in language – adhering more closely to conventional forms. Marinetti’s text is fluid, rush-

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ing like a stream, torrential and torrid in character. Mafarka the Futurist is a poetic tale: fantastical and outlandish in temperament, opulent and stirring in language, tactile and polychromatic in effect: heir to the Baudelairian petits poèmes en prose.

My examples will be from the first chapter of the novel, “The Rape of the African Women.” Let me begin with the following:

“L’atmosphère en était gonflée, une atmosphère incandescente et ocreuse, où la voix des sentinelles semblait creuser des trous noirs” – “L’atmosfera ne era gonfia; un’atmosfera incandescendente e color d’ocra, nella quale la voce delle sentinelle sembrava fare dei buchi neri” (The air swelled with it, an incandescent and ocherous air, from which the voices of the guards seemed to rip dark furrows).1

Cinti renders “ocreuse” with “color d’ocra,” and “creuser” with “fare”: the poetic language of the original is omitted by a faithful yet more prosaic, thus partially betraying rendition. Betraying of the poetry that flows from the original: “ocreuse” and “creuser” alliterate; the beguiling sound begins to cast its spell upon the reader-listener as she is led into the un-reality of the tale to be unravelled; a tale that invents a world of dreams and nightmares.

Discrepancies in the simultaneous texts raise various problems. For example, when Marinetti describes his war machines: “Il faut remettre à neuf par ses cordiers les ventres crevés des trois grandes Girafes de guerre,” in the Italian version we find: “Egli fa racconciare dai suoi funai la pancia schiattata della più grande Giraffa di guerra.” Why do the three giraffes now become only one in Italian? Is the allusion to the Homeric Trojan horse, one desired in the later edition by the author, or one inscribed by the translator? This seems to point not to a flaw on the part of the translator (it is after all not an easy confusion) but rather to an authorial change. We are then faced with a puzzling philological problem, which is not solvable by textual criticism only, since Cinti was working side-by-side with the author. Did Marinetti rewrite certain parts of this final version? Or did the translator take such liberties? Given the imperious personality of the author, I would suggest that in most cases it must have been the former rather than the latter.

However, what we may also have is a certain linguistic negligence, or a possible insouciance that becomes apparent in several of Marinetti’s Italian writings, whose inconsistencies have been noted by the critics. Marinetti was also the theoretician of paroliberismo and the prophet of velocity. Can

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we, therefore, surmise that certain details of chiseling the language, or the text, would have been irrelevant to him? This is a poet who recuperates and rewrites – patches together, collages (if I may introduce this verb) – many of his works, thus his eyes return to his texts over and over again. And in the structure of collage the disregard for an exact and precise form is inferred; it is in fact a formlessness or anti-formality that is sought. But the reader can also sense an impetuousness in Marinetti’s prose – his novels tend to be short, his short stories can be as brief as a page. His breath is rich, passionate, and staggering, but it comes in an explosive form, therefore it often seems truncated.

Let us look at another strong translational shift away from the original:

“Son franc visage aux mâchoires carrées avait le teint des belles terres cuites; la bouche grande et sensuelle; le nez fin et coupé un peu court, le regard prenant.” – “Il suo volto franco, dalle mascelle quadrate, aveva il colore delle terrecotte più belle; la sua bocca era grande e sensuale; e il suo naso, fine e piuttosto corto; il suo sguardo, tenace.” (His bold face, square-jawed, had the color of the finest terra-cotta; his mouth was full and sensual; his nose slender and rather short; his glance captivating) [p. 22].

Marinetti selects the term “prenant” to describe Mafarka’s glance; Cinti uses “tenace.” In the original text, there is a pervading and persistent sensuality, that rises with a crescendo as the protagonist’s physique, which begins to appear Michelangelesque, is detailingly described in these initial pages. One small word, such as “tenace” changes the character, the tone and in addition subdues the poetry of the original. The Italian variant loses the orgasmic quality poetically willed in the French of the author. This suppression occurs skillfully, everywhere, cleansing the liquid quality of the original language toward a more terse and colder form.

But, for instance, when Marinetti writes in the original, “[…] la verdure des prairies lustrée par les brosses d’une lumière bien ordonnée...” Cinti translates “la verzura dei prati, lustrata dalle spazzole di una luce precisa ...”2

In general, Cinti is faithful and careful to preserve words that are charged with nuances of meaning. For example the word “caoutchouc,” used to de-scribe the remarkable flexibility of Magamal’s body, poses traductological problems: to change it to a common term such as rubber, makes the reading flow quite smoothly. The term selected by Marinetti is instead laden with the exoticism and the technologism that are consistent with his poetology: this word that is filtered through Spanish – caucho – and French, is Quec-

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hua in origin (cáuchuc), and of course it refers to natural rubber, a fiber among the many that modern technology develops. In the same way, in the paragraph that follows, Magamal is said to be wearing a “peau d’onagre”: the “onager” is a wild ass from central Asia, but it is also an ancient and medieval stone-propelling engine employed for sieges. In such a case, the etymology reveals fabular as well as polemological qualities. Thus, these somewhat foreign and removed terms, “caoutchouc” and “onager,” must be preserved in the English version also, in order to allow for the convergence of all these significations, since they are essential to the poetical claims of the author. My critique of Cinti is mainly directed at what appears to be in general an anxiety of linguistic propriety, which, however, as we know, did not stop the Italian censors of the time from charging Marinetti with obscenity.

Let me illustrate this recurring anxiety with yet another one of Cinti’s apparent taming actions. Magamal has entered the scene at this point in the text, and after describing him as one whose “limbs vibrate with both the grace of a woman and the spasms of an animal lying in ambush,” and having “remained soft and fragile like the juicy body of young maidens” – words that betray both the seductiveness and the weakness that Mafarka perceives in his younger brother – a scene of extreme emotional delicacy follows: Mafarka is depicted as “turning, from time to time, to his brother and taking sweetly his head into his large hands, gazing deeply into his eyes, with the quenching tenderness of a mother” [p. 31]. The adjective “abreuvante”( which I have rendered as “quenching”) becomes “soave” in the Italian version, thus robbing it of the potentially erotic feature that this term evokes. The affective boundaries between the brothers are deliberately blurred. The transgressive intention informing this text is recognized as one that wants to break the frontiers that limit the expression of love as codified by bourgeois society. Even in this sensitive moment, Marinetti interjects a word that pulsates with ambiguity. Ultimately, it is not possible to render successfully this beautiful French adjective “abreuvante” in English. I chose “quenching” to elicit a powerful emotion resonating with potential innuendos.

There are also curious cutting actions on the part of the Italian translator that often leave the reader befuddled. For instance:

“Mafarka bondit en selle, et, debout sur la barre des étriers, il haussa sa taille, la main en abat-jour sur ses yeux pour explorer les sables lointains; puis il éperonna

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durement sa belle bête.” – “E Mafarka balzò in groppa a Efrit, e ritto sulle staffe, facendosi schermo agli occhi con la mano tesa, esplorò lungamente le sabbie lon-tane. Infine, spronò crudelmente la bella cavalcatura.” (Mafarka pounced on the saddle, and, erect on the bars of his stirrups, lifted his torso, and shaded his eyes with his hand to explore the distant sands; then he strongly spurred his exquisite animal) [p. 34].

Marinetti reserves the naming of the horses until the next paragraph, which begins with “Asfour suivit Efrit.” Thus the mounting on to the horses that was commanded just before by Mafarka’s cry: “A cheval! … à cheval!” is dramatically portrayed by the author’s structure, as the brothers and the horses seem to fuse into one another, all four in one bolting motion. Cinti disregards this effect. In addition, he also discards the metal bars of the spurs and the lifted torso of the rider; details that add an erotic valence, enhanced by the final “belle bête,” which in Cinti becomes “bella cavalcatura.” This is an accurate yet bland literal trans-lation. Furthermore, the displacement of the physical and direct contact with the animal, which is latent in the phrase “belle bête,” attenuates the sensuality evoked in the original linguistic choice. Moreover, “durement” need not be rendered as “crudelmente,” which implies an indifference to the pain inflicted on the horse, since “durement” connotes a different intention on the part of the rider, one that summons firmness of action and containment of passions, qualities crucial to Marinetti’s poetology and polemology.

Cinti’s grammatological transcriptions often trim paragraphs that in Marinetti’s pages are much longer. The following, which I offer in my English rendition, is not kept as a whole passage by the Italian translator:

The town of Tell-el-Kibir had become quite bizarre in appearance in the last two days: it was impossible to circulate in its overcrowded streets, where from time to time carts passed, crammed with men standing, all clutching one another, and bouncing like bundles coming undone. But the scuffling of the crowds hampered the horses at every instant, and the pitiable vehicles remained immovable under the hold of their furious drivers; they looked like unmoored islets adrift in the tide of a devastating river. Brawls continuously produced whirlwinds of arms and raised sticks, which caused a raucous entertainment for the women and the children overflowing on the interlaced balconies of the mosques [p. 24].

In Cinti the brawling occurs in a separate paragraph, neatly set apart, breaking once again the dramatic effect of the tumultuous scene. This cor-

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rective strategy occurs continuously. The impulsive nature of the original is thus missed, and with it its poetic thrust.

Omissions occur repeatedly in Cinti’s text. Some are quite significant; here is just one example:

“[…] que les murailles titaniques et les rochers environnants répercutaient

avec le rythme saccadé et la monotonie d’une vague éternelle” – “[…] che le mura titaniche ripercuotevano intorno col ritmo e la monotonia d’una ondata incessante.” ([…] which the colossal walls and the encircling rocks rebounded with the jolting rhythm and the invariability of an endless wave) [p. 37].

“The encircling rocks” and “the jolting rhythm” construct the imaginary edifice with greater detail and richness: this is the infernal ravine in which the rape of the women is taking place. The exclusion diminishes the linguistic and poetic tension. And again later, when Marinetti writes:

“Trois fois Mafarka-el-Bar essaya de vaincre la poussée giratoire de cette masse fumante et criarde, pour distinguer le centre mystérieux autour duquel elle tourbillonnait fatidiquement.” – “Tre volte Mafarka-el-Bar cercò di vincere la veemenza di quella calca roteante, per distinguerne il centro misterioso.” (Three times Mafarka-el-Bar attempted to overpower the gyrating thrust of that fuming and squalling mound, to identify the mysterious center around which it spiraled fatefully) [p. 37].

Cinti’s paragraph is brief and blunt, almost frigid, once again losing layers of the descriptive character that makes of Marinetti’s language one that is fraught with sights dense with smells and tactile perceptions. We cannot conclude that the author has desired these eradications when we consider later works, such as Gli Indomabili, or Novelle colle labbra tinte, just to name a few.

As the description of the masses of intoxicated writhing bodies takes on Dantesque proportions, the almost baroque beauty of a French phrase becomes a true challenge. Two naked men are struggling to use their knives against each other:

“The two fighters, sweating, packed-in like sausage, swayed in the midst of the tremendous scuffle; and, unable to lower their knives, bit each other’s lips raven-ously, with flaming fangs.” (The final phrasing in French is: “ils s’entre-mangèrent goulûment les lèvres, à belles dents.”)

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“A belles dents” is simply avoided by Cinti. My rendition simply admits its failure. All this reminds me of a passage in the aforementioned D.H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love, in which a minor character whom the author identifies as a little Italian woman makes the following comment to a group of friends: “There is a most beautiful thing in my book, it says the man came to the door and threw his eyes down the street.” She cites (in the English of the novel) from a French translation of the famous novel Fathers and Sons by the Russian author Turgenev: “threw his eyes down the street” is a word-by-word translation of the phrase, “il jeta les yeux dans la rue.” I find this fleeting and indirect reference to the problem of translation very suggestive.

The English versions which I offer here seek to respond primarily to the act of poetic and linguistic seduction that Marinetti attains in the first, French, Mafarka.3 But there is a second, Italian, Mafarka, infused with the author’s presence, which persuades me that the he acted as one intervening while at the same time overlooking this second and secondary text. It seems impossible to this translator not to work simultaneously with both Mafarkas while experimenting with translations from this novel – somewhat mirroring a central concept of this Afro-Italian francophone poet, that of simultaneity. But there is yet another and third Mafarka underlying these two, a more recondite and mysterious infratext. A for-gotten one, that fully deserves to be called the African Romance. The lost novel is the one of the lost language. The language that Marinetti breathed but did not speak. Capturing the shimmering presence of the concealed language, the Arabic of Alexandria of Egypt – the third phantasmagoric language dormant beneath the other two – is the challenge of unveiling a powerful absence.

Marinetti’s tripartite heart defines his trans-linguism and perhaps also his ultra-nationalism.

Mafarka, the warrior-poet, is one of the last heroes of a modernity that was still dreaming of a future world, one that promised “a new embodiment, in a new way.”

graziella sidoli

1 I am referring to the 1984 Christian Bourgois edition, from the collection “Les derniers mots” directed by Gérard-Georges Lemaire. The Italian text is the 1910 one, by “Edizioni

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Futuriste di Poesia,” Marinetti’s own publishing house in Milan at the time. In all the quoted passages, the emphases are mine.2 This D’Annunzian-sounding term, “verzura” recalls Marinetti’s writings on his rival poet: D’Annunzio intime, 1903; Les Dieux s’en vont, D’Annunzio reste, 1908. But is this a conscious homage on the part of Cinti, or just another Cintian choice for a more literary language, a language which FTM is on the verge of refuting virulently?3 Since I began to work on this novel a translation by Carol Diethe and Steve Cox has ap-peared, published in England by Middlesex University Press, 1998.

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through the lens oF modernism:20th-centurY “dolce stile”

and the translation oF bilingual intertext

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One oF the most valuable aspects of translating bilingual intertext is that it forces one out of the common tendency to conceptualize language as pure rather than mixed and static, or fixed rather than

dynamic. Even though we may think that we perceive language as being at least reasonably responsive to the world around it, every time we ask whether a translation is faithful to the original, we automatically assume that language is faithful to itself. I want to suggest it may not be.

The foundation for this claim is that language clearly adopts a rela-tional stance to the world, meaning that it is not only in a continual state of adaptation or metamorphosis but of hybridization. The good news for translators is that this process may place them in a natural position of being able to enrich or even to activate this hybridization. As support, I adduce von Humboldt’s observation in his introduction to Agamemnon of how much “the German language, to cite only one example, has profited since it began imitating Greek meter.”1 In this case, it would seem that the German language was required to do what it had never done before, and the translator “in attempting the impossible” came up at least with a new possibility or set of linguistic possibilities.

On another continent, Márquez and Fuentes both referred to the work of Borges and the myriad ways his English reading and sensibility changed the Spanish language. Just a few of those changes include: simplifying Spanish syntax; introducing new verb forms to the language, such as the present perfect tense; and reversing the traditional adjective-noun order, for example, to “black dog” from “dog black.” As a response to this observation, Borges simply states, “I don’t think I have a Spanish way of looking at the world. [And] I’ve done most of my reading in English.”2

What this would suggest is that language is not only conversant with the world, but must be in a constant dialogue, too, with that world’s other languages. This century in particular had an especially potent agent in World War II for splintering lives into pluralities, multiple identity constructs, and

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fragmented allegiances.What all this may do, then, is to leave the translator in search of ser-

endipitous “impurities,” or what I will refer to as hybridizations; that is, in search of those moments in which the foreign has already invaded the text. This could even be seen as a reaffirmation of faithfulness, since it is only through this shifting, evolutionary process that language survives at all. When we speak of a translator’s faithfulness to the original Spanish text, the misconception may be in the implicit assumption that the Spanish language is, in fact, faithful to itself. We see through the Borges example, I believe, a language ensuring its own futurity through a tacit faithlessness.

❄

While many are familiar with Amelia Rosselli’s exceptional life and background, less attention seems to have been given to her unconventional education. It is, in fact, this education that creates the foundation for the paradigm of linguistic hybridization that I believe her work becomes.

From the moment of her birth to the age of 10, Rosselli was immersed in the French language both at home and publicly. Her family intended to speak French at home during her father’s necessary exile in Paris in order to reinforce the language heard in school. According to Amelia herself, only her father remained “fedele all’italiano,”3 especially when Italian relatives visited.

Although Amelia’s family was able to stay in Paris a few years after her father’s assassination, this soon became too dangerous. After a brief interlude in her mother’s native England (which also proved too dangerous), the family left for a seven-year sojourn in America. Most of this time was spent in the states of Vermont and New York.

Only at the age of 17, then, in 1947 did she try to return to Italy. And with this return what she found was a group of authorities who refused to transfer all her educational credits. Rosselli always remembered this time as a period of great disappointment. Rather than putting her children back a year or two in school, then, Rosselli’s mother took them back to England to finish their education. For this reason, Rosselli later graduated from St. Mary’s School for Girls.

This not only establishes Rosselli as a true outsider to the educational curriculum of the language in which she is writing, but it seems clear that this would also reify her marginalization within the canon of the language she is writing in. Therefore, she seems to be a prime candidate for the type of hybridization that we find in the work not only of Borges but many others.

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Before continuing, I want also to underscore that this multilinguism has a clear socio-political context. Her continual exposure to other cultures was the imperative of unsafe political structures that robbed her of her original home, and of the necessary escape (at least in terms of England) from literal bombs falling. This century’s violence, then, may have helped to place female writers finally in a position to represent their fragmented allegiances and marginalization as the new human condition.

In relation to this, it also seems important to note how multilingual fe-male authors have often chosen not to choose a single language to write in. Annie Vivanti, for example, was described by Carducci as finding “English a medium for disciplining children and German the language of dreams,”4 suggesting that the author needed both in order to construct a complete vision of the world. In contrast, multilingual male authors such as Conrad and Beckett tended to settle into a single authoritative voice. Conrad for example was said to have very consciously chosen to write in English, his third language, because of its forceful syntax and its strong verbs.

The last point that seems important before turning to Rosselli’s work itself is the angle from which I want to approach the issue of intertextual-ity. Clearly, it can confirm an author’s membership in the canon as well as registering his or her disenchantment with it. Building on what is by now Bloom’s ubiquitous concept of anxiety in the wake of towering predecessors, I want to differentiate between two types of social members.

Barbara Johnson has claimed that intertextuality designates the mul-titude of ways that a text has “of being traversed by otherness,”5 the way in which it always fails to be its own contemporary. When she refers to Mallarmé’s despair before the fact that “all books contain the fusion of a small number of repeated sayings,”6 she is also revealing his faith in his literary inheritance and connection to that canon. This would mean that, while centralized social members might feel the castrating effect of poetic fathers whose voices threaten to usurp their texts, marginalized social members may despair instead at not hearing the bard speak for him or her, not expressing his or her world view. I think this may be where we find the serendipitous “poverty” often referred to in relation to women’s texts. The blank page is, in light of Mallarmé’s quoted claim, potentially freeing.

In terms of Rosselli’s own assertions concerning poetic priorities, she was always very clear. Those priorities were often stated as being based on: a) the rhythms of language and b) new units of meaning. Syllables and phrases in her work may, then, often displace the individual word and its

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conventional denotation. From this perspective, her “Perché non spero” from the collection Variazioni belliche would clearly owe much more to Eliot’s project than Cavalcanti’s. It reads as follows:

Perché non spero tornare giammai nella città delle bellezze eccomi di ritorno in me stessa. Perché non spero mai ritrovare me stessa, eccomi di ritorno fra delle mura. Le mura pesanti e ignare rinchiudono il prigioniero.

Even ignoring the obvious parallel to the beginning of “Ash Wednes-day,” the following passages from its sections IV and V provide clear models:

IV

Who walked between the violet and the violetWho walked betweenThe various ranks of varied green ...

and

V

If the lost world is lost, if the spent world is spentIf the unheard, unspokenWord is unspoken, unheardStill the unspoken word, the Word unheardThe world without word, the Word within.

Although Rosselli’s system of phrasal recycling is clearly a truncated version of Eliot’s, the fact remains that her repeated phrases gain their meaning more from their repetition and the context of that repetition than from any single denotation of the words themselves. That is to say: this system is consistent with Eliot’s infusion of the sacred into his texts through the use of auditory echo and resonance.

Rosselli maintains an ambiguous relation to Eliot’s work, however, by simultaneously adopting his focus on the fragmentary and rewriting his expansiveness in connecting those fragments as her own emphasis on the epigrammatic. This thereby confirms her familiarity with the English canon and its towering Modernists at the same time that it reaffirms her separation from and isolation within that canon.

A brief reference to the history of epigrammatic verse might illuminate its capacity for social critique. Since its earliest appearance in a Greek an-

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thology from 60 B.C., it has been associated with social satire, according to Princeton’s Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. That social sting was said to continue throughout this century in the work of such writers as René Char, who seems to have used the form as an assertion of self-identity and inventive authority.

Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music also adds a political bent to the potential of epigrammatic verse. When speaking of the extreme brevity of such New Music composers as Webern (which Rosselli studied in Germany following her return to Italy), Adorno states that brevity becomes not only the language of suffering through its painful truncation of time and voice but also avoids censure at the same time.

In the case of Rosselli, the focus on self-identity that the epigrammatic form provides also contrasts more sharply the division between the trapped and voiceless self emphasized by the stark repetition of “di ritorno” with the fluency and verbal permutation suggesting motion that are associated with the world outside, that is, from “tornare” to “ritrovare” and at last “rinchi-udono.” These forms present themselves, first of all, as verbal revolutions that cannot be replicated in English.

If the Italian language itself, though, is so important to the poetic state-ment, Eliot must provide only half a model for the translator. In fact, to ignore Cavalcanti would mean to miss the distant symmetry of “bellezze” with “ballatetta.” This exceptional word choice also allows the 20th-century author to cancel the original poem’s emphasis on the “dolce intelletto” of the beloved. Voice then becomes silence. Intellect becomes unconsciousness. These are the reversals that will necessarily be lost in an English version.

Nevertheless, my attempt to replicate the poem follows:

Because I do not hope to turn again toward the city’s many beauties, I find myself again within. Because I do not hope to find myself again, I find myself again within the city walls. The heavy dazed walls cage their captive.

This represents compensation for, rather than resolution of, the previ-ously stated problematics. The most obvious place to begin to compensate for the losses of the original Italian text was through the location of the hybridization provided by “Ash Wednesday.” Although the common trans-lation of “tornare” would be to “return,” I kept it simply as “turn” in order to reference the familiar line of Eliot.

Next, the sense of alienated confusion was hopefully magnified by

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repeating the word “again” when the Italian shifts from “giammai” to “di ritorno.” “Again” has the added advantage of rhyming with “within,” dou-bling the sense of emptiness through obsessive echo (as well as perhaps referencing Eliot’s previous passage from section V).

Finally, I tried to supplement the final line with what I would call au-ditory accumulation; that is, “dazed” and “caged” next to “captive” in a way that adds to the authorial insistence and certitude of the ending. This also highlights the separation between the rhymes of the third sentence with that of the first two, adding to the ending’s signature abruptness. The poem might even be imaged as a tree whose auditory trunk has grown a new branch daring to test such untried, unknown auditory and semantic regions that it breaks off under the burden of an unusable past and the lack of support or foundation that implies.

Cavalcanti, as the source of “dolce stile” aesthetics, can be seen as represented by the first “Perché” sentence of the poem. Eliot, as father of the Modernist movement, might be represented by the second “Perché” sentence. And finally, the contemporary female voice may be seen as figured in the third auditorially disobedient sentence that follows and is wedged between the other two through the imaging of walls. Only through her mastery of multilingual intertext could the author take on two such tower-ing traditions with such a cutting brevity. Only by finding a way to recycle Cavalcanti’s voice back into the Italian canon via Eliot’s Modernism, can the translator faithfully represent the entrapment and urgency of that voice.

ann snodgrass

1 schulte, rainer and biguenet, John, eds. Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 57.2 di giovanni, norman thomas et al., eds. Borges on Writing, NY: Ecco Press, 1994, p. 137.3 rosselli, amelia, Antologia Poetica, Milan: Garzanti, 1987, p. 150.4 russell, rinaldina, Italian Women Writers, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994, p. 442.5 Johnson, barbara, A World of Difference, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, p. 116.6 Ibidem, p. 121.

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bibliograPhY

budicK, sanFord & iser, WolFgang, eds., The Translatability of Cultures, Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1996.

contini, gianFranco, Poeti del Dolce Stil Novo, Milan: Mondadori, 1991.di giovanni, norman thomas et al., eds., Borges on Writing, New York: Ecco Press, 1994.Johnson, barbara, A World of Difference, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.Preminger, alex & brogan, t.v.F., eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and

Poetics, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.rosselli, amelia, Antologia Poetica, Milan: Garzanti, 1987.russell, rinaldina, Italian Women Writers, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.schulte, rainer & biguenet, John, eds., Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays

from Dryden to Derrida, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.venuti, laWrence, The Translator’s Invisibility, New York: Routledge, 1995.

the Question oF liminalitY✥

la Questione della liminalità

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italiani in america

❄

Come il Pensiero possiede la logica formale ma deve abituarsi a superarla per dare spazio alle risorse più libere e ampie dello spirito, così a un’educazione sentimentale e intellettuale davvero compiuta

occorre una Heimat, la patria del cuore, perché chi ne beneficia possa rinun-ciarvi e ammettere infine di non averne bisogno. Prodotto dalla riflessione di Jean Améry, l’autore di Intellettuale a Auschwitz, una delle più intense e più acute testimonianze derivate dall’esperienza del Lager1, anche vissuta dalla specola di chi aveva il tedesco come idioma materno ed era quindi perseguitato da individui che – parlando la sua stessa lingua – ne viola-vano con protervia irredimibile l’identità profonda, tale paradosso porta la conseguenza che, quando invece si conosca soltanto il proprio luogo d’origine, si è relegati nell’imbarbarimento e nel provincialismo. Ma allo stesso modo, se non si dispone di una Heimat, vengono smarrite tutte le coordinate esistenziali e si rimane in balia di un senso spiccato di dispersione e di spaesamento. Così, un vero internazionalismo spirituale potrà trovare radici diramate e sviluppi fruttuosi soltanto nella humus di un’esperienza locale davvero partecipata, perché in fondo non è un fattore negativo «avere connazionali nelle strade dei villaggi e delle città». Che abbia affermato ciò un intellettuale reduce da Auschwitz, poi – come Primo Levi – suicida molti anni dopo l’internamento, è garanzia sufficiente perché si evitino i facili fraintendimenti che soprattutto oggi possono riproporre – ingenuamente o no – la mitizzazione di un’etnia, secondo l’ipostasi pseudoscientifica di una nuova razza pura. Da questo punto di vista, anzi, le indagini coordinate da un Cavalli Sforza tra genetica, paleoantropologia, archeologia e linguistica indicano proprio una comune e unica origine africana dell’«uomo anatomi-camente moderno»2.

In tempi molto più vicini ai nostri, un altro contributo intelligente alla prospettiva della geografia letteraria viene da un notevole poeta martinicano contemporaneo, Édouard Glissant, che – muovendo dall’esperienza diretta della creolizzazione e del meticciato – definisce la ‘totalità-mondo’ in cui ci troviamo calati come il prodotto di una specifica ‘erranza occidentale’, che è stata via via erranza di conquiste e anche erranza di fondazione di terri-torî. Nell’individuo sensibile, però, tale movimento doppio di espansione

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THE QUESTION OF LIMINALITY / LA QUESTIONE DELLA LIMINALITÀ

verso la totalità dell’insieme cui partecipa e di ripiegamento su di sé finisce per provocare non di rado una condizione di ‘esilio interiore’: ed è allora normale che il consenso o la sofferenza per il proprio ambiente concorrano insieme (attraverso spinte simultanee e contrapposte) a conoscerlo. Anzi, è proprio nella capacità di alternare in modo imprevedibile un immaginario doppio, un paesaggio ove si sovrappongono coordinate geografico-temporali diverse, che si riproduce all’infinito la condizione costitutiva dell’erranza (delle persone nelle culture e negli spazî, oltre che nel contatto reciproco), entro la globalità consumatrice e turistica, enciclopedica e spettacolare della nostra fine di millennio. Il fondo negativo della sofferenza così come l’atteggiamento positivo che si dispone ad accettare l’esistente vengono alternativamente a riflettersi nello specchio non più compatto delle singole identità: «Per questo il Mondo-tutto non è il cosmopolitismo. che è la Relazi-one degenerata. Quello che crea il Mondo-tutto è la poetica stessa di questa Relazione che permette di sublimare, attraverso la conoscenza del sé e del tutto, sia la sofferenza che l’accettazione, il negativo e il positivo»3. E l’esilio interiore, a volte, coincide con un viaggio insieme erratico e immobile nel chiuso di una stanza o di un luogo d’origine, quando si riesce a isolare il proprio nucleo immaginativo dai rumori di fondo del relativismo inesausto e dalla babele di lingue, di modi e di mode del mondo ‘tutto’. I lessici dei tempi e dei luoghi, insieme con quelli delle identità per sempre disperse o infine reintegrate, richiedono infatti un esercizio pressoché inesausto di traduzione e di tradimento, di consapevolezza critica e di abbandono.

Chiunque abbia una minima esperienza delle feste d’isolato o di quar-tiere, a Manhattan come a Brooklyn o a Queens, feste di appartenenza a quel settore di metropoli molto prima che di differenza etnica; o anche chi abbia avuto occasione di riconoscere l’identità peculiare – architettonica e quasi antropologica più che meramente sociale – che impronta ogni ar-rondissement di Parigi, ha fatto esperienza da un punto di vista autentica-mente metropolitano della doppia identità e della molteplice disposizione interiore di cui discorre Glissant, secondo il principio di un adeguamento alla ‘totalità-mondo’ forse non troppo diverso da quello di chi invece è rel-egato in un paese qualunque della provincia profonda, ma in contatto pure istantaneo e ininterrotto con il villaggio globale, attraverso Internet, le TV e i telefoni satellitari. Con grande nonchalance, anche a rischio esplicito di plagio, il giovane Jules Laforgue aveva d’altra parte trasposto in forma quasi letterale la luna recanatese di Leopardi nel suo cielo parigino, più di cinquant’anni dopo. Detto in termini meno poetici ma forse più scientifici,

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è comunque un tratto unificante della contemporaneità che – ancora per via paradossale – «all’allargamento dello sguardo su scala planetaria» finisca per corrispondere «il ritrovamento degli orizzonti differenziali dei luoghi»4.

Ecco, allora, che – se si muove dal generale di osservazioni simili al particolare della questione che ci interessa qui – la presenza della poesia in lingua italiana entro l’orizzonte geografico e letterario dell’ultima ‘grande potenza’ sopravvissuta nell’era della globalizzazione, gli Stati Uniti d’Amer-ica, ci si trova ad affrontare una serie di problemi che si correlano a possibil-ità anche molto differenziate di punto di vista e di metodo d’indagine. A tale riguardo si saldano infatti, se si vuol giungere a qualche conclusione appros-simata per quanto non approssimativa, ragioni critico-letterarie e questioni a volta a volta linguistiche, antropologiche, sociologiche, storico-culturali. Nell’assumere a punto di riferimento il gruppo di poeti italiani e italofoni residenti e attivi per la maggior parte del loro tempo in territorio statunitense di cui ho potuto conoscere e apprezzare direttamente un lavoro di scrittura ormai dilatato nell’arco temporale di circa un quarto di secolo (mi scuso anticipatamente con coloro che, sicuramente per mia colpa, non ho avuto ancora l’opportunità di studiare adeguatamente), si deve subito prendere atto di almeno due tratti differenziali. Il primo riguarda le due generazioni che vi sono coinvolte: da una parte, infatti, i Paolo Valesio (del 1939), i Luigi Ballerini (del 1940), i Luigi Fontanella (del 1943) appartengono alla generazione nata a cavallo dello scoppio e dello svolgimento della seconda guerra mondiale, che la storia poetica (e critico-antologica) del Novecento ha non poco sacrificato. Troppo giovane per la Neoavanguardia, matura proprio quando gli esponenti di questa proclamavano la fine della poesia in nome della prassi politica, troppo anziana per partecipare ai proclami filo o antimitologici dei neo-neo e dei post-post, incline a collaborazioni di alta ambizione sperimentale con pittori e musicisti, è la generazione degli Scalise e dei Sitta, degli Spatola e delle Vicinelli, degli Zeichen e dei Krumm, dei Kemeny, degli Ortesta e dei Cappi. Ed è una generazione che non ha conosciuto glorie superflue (in certi casi nemmeno quelle dovute), ma che ha lavorato duro nelle riviste, fondandone diverse e collaborando a tenerne in vita molte altre, con una funzione decisiva di ponte offerto ai più giovani e di lavoro insieme riconnettivo e maieutico di cui YIP. Yale Italian Poetry è l’ultimo, felicissimo campione.

Dall’altra parte, un Peter Carravetta (del ’51), un Alessandro Carrera (del ’54), un Maurizio Godorecci (del ’55), un Ernesto Livorni (del ’59), un Mario Moroni (anche lui del ’55), una Eugenia Paulicelli (del ’58) sono

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invece gli esponenti della generazione giunta all’esperienza della poesia attorno al crinale del ’77, vale a dire in coincidenza con quella nuova ondata di contestazione che permetteva e favoriva il ritorno a una pratica artistica piena e diffusa, non necessariamente astrattiva e ideologica. E ciò si produceva in coincidenza anche con la riscoperta della voce, delle istanze di performance e di apertura a quei linguaggi del corpo e dell’esperienza concreta (per quanto non ricomposta) che trovavano riscontro diretto in riviste come la bolognese Cerchio di gesso (di Roversi e Scalia) e in un libro per questo rispetto davvero canonico come Passi passaggi di Antonio Porta. A testimonianza di ciò, basta chiamare in causa il lavoro poetico di un Gianni D’Elia o di un Valerio Magrelli che, con l’esordio precoce e originale di Ora serrata retinae (1980), ha sancito in anticipo la possibilità rinnovata di un meccanismo allegorico che si avvaleva di una lingua po-etica non necessariamente sconvolta ed eversiva, chiamando il lettore ad una collaborazione più viva nel definire il senso testuale. In secondo luogo, l’altra proprietà contrastiva che distingue il gruppo eminente dei poeti di lingua italiana attivi negli Stati Uniti dopo il discrimine temporale degli anni ’80 riguarda – secondo una sorta di destino condiviso dalla poesia occidentale della nostra fine di millennio – la poetica particolare, l’albero genealogico proprio, l’autonomia differenziata di gusto, lingua e stile di cui si fa portatore ogni singolo individuo.

E non sarebbe possibile leggere diversamente, cercando magari ap-parentamenti tutti esterni, opere poetiche quali le Avventure dell’Uomo e del Figlio (Caramanica, 1996) di Paolo Valesio, sintomo di una evoluzi-one dagli esiti ogni volta più alti, che non teme di affrontare a viso aperto l’intricatissimo nodo di una poesia religiosa destinata senza nostalgie alla condizione disperatamente sospesa in cui ci troviamo calati, fino al rischio assoluto (e fin qui vinto) di una nuova poesia devozionale, evidentemente ‘scandalosa’ e sottratta ad ogni canone espressivo già predisposto tanto in Italia quanto in America. Si pensi solo alla tensione di una simile clausola: «Il tremito dei fiori ci contagia; / in silenzio / ognuno tra di noi chiede soccorso / per la sua povera / anima crudele». Per ritrovare una sintonia entro il nostro secolo occorre tornare ai suoi inizî e ripercorrere l’opera di un grande autore come Clemente Rebora. Si ripensi di séguito a Il terzo gode (Marsilio, 1994) di Luigi Ballerini, un libro cronologicamente sospeso tra il dialetto milanese di Che oror l’orient (1991) e il bilinguismo angloi-taliano dei Shakespeherian Rags (1996, con la parte in inglese versificata e quella italiana in prosa). Qui, il gusto avanguardistico dell’autore viene

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confermato dall’incapacità tutta interna alla lingua profonda del libro di fingere comunicabile uno stato del mondo che non lo è più e di recuperare dunque un qualunque fondamento, fosse pure di secondo grado, così che oggetto ultimo e inimitabile della mimesi poetica può essere solo la morte: «[…] Innesto è chi approfitta / del sintomo, dell’angelo che fugge a piedi, / che pullula così così».

Ma l’elenco può continuare, a maggior ragione se si tiene conto del fatto che i testi cui sto facendo riferimento diretto sono soltanto i campioni ultimi di carriere e di storie poetiche ben altrimenti articolate. E sopraggiunge allora Ceres (Caramanica, 1996) di Luigi Fontanella, con un caleidoscopio verbale non meno che esistenziale di rara fattura, con il suo gusto tematico per i luoghi liminari e le situazioni di movimento e con la capacità correlata di riconoscere la poderosità figurale del mito entro una realtà quotidiana straordinariamente brulicante e instabile, fino all’alleggerimento tonale di canzoni e canzonette capaci di perseguire un gusto più leggero ma non meno traumatico (secondo quella leggerezza acuta, precisa e determinata che ci ha insegnato Italo Calvino) dell’esperienza: «volano le insegne i finti stili e steli / cadono lentamente ad una ad una / le belle stelle in schiera / da una lontana azzurra bandiera». Poi, sovviene di séguito l’altro bilinguismo profondo, strutturale di La sposa perfetta / The Perfect Bride (Book Edi-tore, 1997) di Alessandro Carrera, il cui impianto classico da poema post-moderno (latino più che greco, lucreziano più che omerico) è scosso sì da evidenti suggestioni che provengono da Whitman e dall’Irlanda, ma anche dal modello vivo del Pavese poeta e traduttore dei romanzieri americani, dalla tradizione del blues e da quella folk dei Guthrie e dei Dylan, da una propensione per la vita on the road e da una ricca memoria cinematografica, attiva (ciò che più conta) nel taglio delle immagini e nel loro montaggio testuale prima ancora che nelle opzioni tematiche e in quelle scenografiche: «Fossi un bravo moralista, / non sapessi la verità. // Were I a brave moralist, / had I not known the truth». Altrettanto specifica, benché condivisa con una sezione del libro di Valesio, in altra sede voltata anche in spagnolo (i Sonetti profani e sacri), è la ripresa dello schema per eccellenza lirico, appunto quello del sonetto (ben vivo anche in questo volgere di Novecento, almeno fino a eversori autentici delle forme poetiche, quali un Sanguineti e uno Zanzotto), da parte di Ernesto Livorni, in un testo di grande tensione metaforica, intitolato Nel libro che ti diedi (Campanotto, 1998). Non troppo ‘alla buona’, né ‘alla confusa’, come recitano in chiave autoironica le due sezioni in cui il libro è suddiviso, l’intonazione di Livorni trova in questa

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forma appigli sempre più certi e più felicemente contrastivi alla propria pulsione di sovrabbondanza: «Con te ho bruciato la terra bruna: / eppure giochiamo con gli occhi smunti / come se fossimo sterpi consunti».

Quanto detto vale per libri recenti e coesi: ma certo sarebbe profon-damente ingiusto non dar conto della sicura vocazione ad un surrealismo tutt’altro che arbitrario di un Peter Carravetta («[…] una gallina bazzicava / guardinga sul selciato, un giovanotto / puliva il suo gioiello – una 500 – mentre / un viso solcato dalle intemperie seduto taceva e / contemplava»); delle figurazioni ideali efficacemente intrecciate ai correlativi delle loro immagini terrene entro la poesia di Eugenia Paulicelli («Ebbrezza del tatto, vorrei posare il mio corpo / trasparente su di voi, / senza spezzarvi, sì da intenderci senza uccisioni inutili»); dell’esperto gusto narrativo teso ad una nuova dicibilità del reale, al di fuori delle involuzioni analitiche di un io biografico, di Mario Moroni («le distanze disegnate sulla costa / distanze tra costa e costa / tra le linee che traccia la mente / durante un percorso»)5.

Ma proprio il caso di Moroni, con il recentissimo volume che egli ha pubblicato sulle poetiche del Novecento italiano, dai simbolisti alla Rosselli attraverso Savinio e Montale, Zanzotto e i Novissimi6, segnala 1’affiorare del primo tratto che invece accomuna i poeti di origine e di lingua italiana attivi a tutt’oggi negli Stati Uniti: quello di una fertile attività critica e saggistica, che si dirama all’insegnamento universitario, al lavoro nelle riviste (cito solo – accanto a YIP. Yale Italian Poetry – Gradiva, Antigones, Polytext, Forum Italicum, cara quest’ultima al mio conterraneo Gian Paolo Biasin, che ricordo qui con affetto: riviste fertilmente bilingui, dove s’intrecciano spesso posizioni ed esiti di scrittura militante con interventi di compiuta indagine storico-documentaria), a un’instancabile e attenta attività di traduz-ione, fino alle propaggini della scrittura narrativa, che coinvolge in prima persona Valesio non meno di Carrera, Fontanella non meno di Cecchetti, con le adesioni limitate a questo campo espressivo di un Massimo Riva e soprattutto di un Daniele Benati.

Se la pluralità delle forme di attività letteraria è del tutto scontata e quasi incoraggiata negli Stati Uniti (come, per esempio, a Yale insegnano i casi sommi di John Hollander e di Harold Bloom), non lo è altrettanto in Italia. Nel nostro paese – infatti – è normale che un grande poeta sia anche un grande critico e un traduttore in genere almeno corretto (com’è stato o è per Montale e per Sereni, per Luzi e per Caproni, per Giudici e per Zanzotto, per Sanguineti e per Fortini, per gli stessi D’Elia e Magrelli); ma è invece molto più difficile che un professore, per una certa ipoteca idealistica non

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ancora del tutto superata oltre che per una serie di consorterie settoriali, tra accademie di vario tipo e poteri editoriali o mediatici, venga ritenuto cred-ibile anche nel campo creativo. Così, il destino delle letterature comparate nelle università italiane è ancora nebuloso, non fosse per l’impegno ancora piuttosto isolato di qualche personalità eminente come Antonio Prete o come Remo Ceserani: mentre, nella loro veste di professori, i poeti qui in causa sono tutti ottimi comparatisti. Il fatto poi che l’attività multanime di Pasolini abbia dato e continui a ‘dare scandalo’ e che le posizioni sull’Eco romanziere espresse dall’establishment culturale abbiano portato alla luce contrasti cospicui, è solo la spia di un atteggiamento diffuso, magari non teorizzato ma in larga parte condiviso. E non c’è dubbio che un condiziona-mento simile pesa sul riconoscimento che il lavoro poetico svolto in questo ultimo decennio negli Stati Uniti deve ancora ricevere nella sua forma più piena entro i confini di quella che un tempo si usava definire patria: per-plessità che invece non ha per fortuna coinvolto poeti ticinesi pure molto efficaci come Giorgio Orelli o Fabio Pusterla. Non voglio però addentrarmi in questioni di gerarchie di gusto e di valore, né tantomeno lasciarmi coin-volgere dal gusto finesecolare di riscrittura pressoché infinita (e non di rado arbitraria) dei canoni della contemporaneità. Sarà un’attenzione critica non pregiudicata e il più possibile specifica a libri che sono magari destinati a trovare il tempo esatto della propria ricezione soltanto in un futuro più o meno lontano a determinare – come pure è necessario – nuove coordinate di riferimento per la letteratura che adesso sta accadendo o che è appena accaduta.

C’è un altro dato di fatto sul quale vorrei piuttosto, in chiusura, sof-fermare la mia attenzione. Ed è che questo proliferare di attività poetica, questa affermazione della lingua italiana in partibus infidelium, avviene proprio negli Stati Uniti, vale a dire in un paese non soltanto egemone, attraverso la fiction e le tecnologie avanzate, non meno che attraverso il multiculturalismo o la potenza economica e militare, dell’Occidente avan-zato come di gran parte del Terzo e del Quarto mondo; ma egemone anche e soprattutto per la capacità di diffondere la sua lingua, quell’inglese più o meno basico che è davvero il nuovo esperanto mondiale, su un piano quantitativo contrastato soltanto dalla lingua cinese. Ed è certo giusto aver rilevato da più parti quanto – sul piano letterario – al consolidamento e alla varietà inclusiva di questa koinè possano contribuire le forme ibridate di un inglese non acquisito come lingua naturale, ma assunto a posteriori, in una forma quasi di slang che scarta notevolmente dalla tradizione acquisita,

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come lingua dell’espressione creativa da parte di scrittori che prendono le mosse da esperienze di esplicita colonizzazione: i casi di Salman Rushdie e di Derek Walcott, tra i moltissimi possibili, sono già abbastanza esemplari.

Nel caso dei nostri poeti, tuttavia, avviene il fenomeno contrario. E per quanto la diglossia di italiano e di inglese sia un fattore costitutivo della loro attività quotidiana per la e nella letteratura, sempre in una logica di ponte aperto tra culture e rivendicando proprio la necessità di un’opera incessante di traduzione da un codice all’altro (sul piano meramente linguistico oltre che su quello delle nuove voci che vengono fatte risuonare, in contem-poranea e per la prima volta, nella nostra lingua), il fatto che l’italiano mantenga qui una propria identità e una spiccata dignità sperimentale è un elemento tutt’altro che trascurabile. In primo luogo perché – a un secolo di distanza – diviene un elemento di forza la mancata capacità di espansione e di sedimentazione colonialistica del nostro paese. Se infatti la lingua inglese e quella francese devono necessariamente assumere una posizione conservativa, difensiva, nel ricevere gli attuali innesti letterarî dalle realtà linguistiche di creolizzazione che sono venute formandosi all’interno delle loro periferie imperiali, l’italiano si propone – nel caso qui in questione – in un ruolo contrastivo di lingua minoritaria ma letterariamente canonica che si confronta, a un livello assai elevato di elaborazione, con la lingua e con le istituzioni culturali che dominano l’Occidente.

E dal momento che, come avviene con la poesia espressa nei dialetti locali in rapporto a quella in italiano, l’influsso letterario del codice dom-inante è ad un tempo forza che consuma la lingua più debole e sua pal-ingenesi futura, qui tale influsso agisce a due livelli, seguendo le mappe di due tradizioni entrambe molto forti e presentandosi nella forma di una traducibilità inesausta e pure necessaria che entra a far parte dello specifico del testo. Anzi, riflettendo proprio sulla qualità e sul prestigio del lavoro critico e pedagogico svolto negli Stati Uniti dalla gran parte di questi po-eti, si deve nello stesso tempo evincere che non propriamente di esilio si possa nel loro caso parlare, quanto di una erranza (per tornare ai termini dell’inizio) a doppio senso di marcia, con un’onda di ritorno che dal centro si dirige verso le zone di confine, senza più alcuna intenzione o possibilità di conquista. Basti pensare all’interesse anche tematico rivolto da alcuni di questi nostri poeti alle culture ‘dominate’ d’America.

Altre ragioni si legano poi all’articolatissima vicenda dell’emigrazione dall’Italia negli Stati Uniti, a partire dal secolo scorso, con le sue Little Italies gremite di suggestioni folkloriche e di nostalgie piuttosto regres-

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sive, che facevano spesso sì che gli italoamericani di seconda generazione continuassero magari a comunicare con i genitori nel dialetto di origine, ma – imparando a scuola, per strada, nei luoghi di lavoro l’inglese – igno-rassero completamente l’italiano. E in effetti, se si riflette sull’estensione quantitativa del fenomeno migratorio, ci si rende conto che ad esso non corrisponde uno sviluppo altrettanto adeguato del tema in chiave letteraria, sia che si prenda in considerazione la produzione degli emigrati e dei loro discendenti più diretti, sia che si studî invece lo sviluppo tematico dell’em-igrazione7. A parte un romanzo di De Amicis, non pochi testi di Pascoli, alcuni accenni di Pirandello, bisogna attendere la passione dei Vittorini, dei Pavese, dei Soldati, dei Silone – oltre alle riflessioni di due intellettuali come Giuseppe Antonio Borgese e Giuseppe Prezzolini – per verificare la consistenza di un’attenzione non casuale alle cose americane viste da una specola letteraria italiana, prima della neoavanguardia degli anni ’60. Mentre, sullo sfondo, permangono le non infrequenti fasi antiamericane, diffuse nella nostra opinione pubblica prima dalla propaganda fascista8, poi dalla contestazione del ’68, in séguito alla protesta diffusa in tutta Europa contro la guerra del Vietnam.

Ed è solo in apparenza paradossale che dai campus di alcune delle più ricche e raffinate università che trasmettono e diffondono la cultura occidentale torni da un po’ di tempo in qua a risuonare verso l’altra parte dell’Atlantico una lingua di sì che avvertiamo per molti aspetti come più ricca e più strana, feedback distorto di un’esperienza scissa o ritorno di un rimosso collettivo prima che individuale. In realtà, viene allora da tornare alle questioni proposte all’inizio. Fuori di ogni tendenza nostalgica, o an-che solo rievocativa (ed è questo un altro tratto comune non poco rilevante delle scritture di questi poeti-critici-professori-traduttori), non è poi così improponibile riportare la Heimat, che occorre prima possedere per poterne poi fare a meno, all’esperienza che abbiamo davanti ai nostri occhi – e nelle nostre orecchie se proposta in forma di performance – di una poesia dal doppio passaporto. Essa è capace di avvalersi di un immaginario potenziato e sempre in movimento (secondo un’autentica esperienza di crinale) e di trame intertestuali che si diramano secondo una competenza moltiplicata, perché per studiosi autentici gli Stati Uniti sono alla lettera un luogo multiculturale, quindi anche una nowhere land della poesia, ove non è necessariamente la matrice anglosassone a prevalere.

E, se è vero che ci sono lingue più fragili, nel passaggio dall’oralità alla scrittura, come quelle creole, nate dalla colonizzazione, è anche vero

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che ce ne sono altre, come l’italiano, che hanno avuto i proprî monumenti letterarî all’inizio del loro processo formativo e che, incontrandosi con quel sintomo di mondializzazione che è l’inglese diffuso, possono anche ambire a radicalizzare la propria identità, a divenire il polo altro di una dinamica comunicativa, che non lascia inalterata la lingua poetica dell’inglese (tanto che i maggiori dantisti, oggi, sono proprio da questa parte dell’oceano e mi permetto di sottolineare l’italianità di cognomi come Barolini o Freccero) e che a maggior ragione dovrebbe modificare anche quella dell’italiano, secondo la logica di quel ‘legame della differenza’ che è oggi condizione necessaria per la costruzione di una identità, psicologica oltre che geogra-fica. L’ultima parola spetta ancora a quell’Édouard Glissant da cui si erano prese le mosse: «Non si può più scrivere una lingua in modo monolingue. Si è obbligati a tenere conto degli immaginari delle lingue. […] Non si potrà salvare una lingua in un paese lasciando morire le altre; esiste una solidarietà fra tutte le lingue minacciate, fra cui la lingua anglo-americana, che è colpita quanto la lingua francese dall’egemonia della convenzione internazionale dell’anglo-americano. Credo che ci sia una solidarietà di tutte le lingue del mondo e che ciò che crea la bellezza del caos-mondo è questo incontro, sono questi scoppi, queste esplosioni di cui non siamo ancora riusciti a capire né l’economia, né i princìpî»9.

Non li avevo mai visti come dinamitardi, i miei amici poeti in italia-no attivi negli Stati Uniti, ma è certo che stanno accendendo una miccia piuttosto efficace nelle stanze un po’ troppo chiuse della poesia che si fa nella loro lingua. E il vero quoziente medio del loro lavoro a un oceano di distanza comporta la manifestazione consapevole di quella solidarietà linguistica propria del caos-mondo che nasce da una serie di piccole esplo-sioni, di cortocircuiti e di provocazioni consapevoli: in definitiva, da una delle ultime possibilità concrete di cui oggi dispone la poesia, per lasciarsi ancora ascoltare.

alberto bertoni

1 Cfr. J. amérY, Intellettuale a Auschwitz, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 1987.2 Cfr. in particolare l.l. cavalli- sForza, Geni, popoli e lingue, Milano, Adelphi, 1996; e l.l. cavalli-sForza, P. menozzi, a. Piazza, Storia e geografia dei geni umani, Milano, Adelphi, 1997.

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3 é. glissant, Poetica del diverso, Roma, Meltemi, 1998, pp. 70-71. 4 Cfr. l. bonesio, Geofilosofia del paesaggio, Milano, Mimesis, 1997.5 Questi ultimi esempî poetici sono tutti tratti dall’antologia Poesaggio. Poeti italiani d’America, a cura di Peter Carravetta e Paolo Valesio, Quinto di Treviso: Pagus Edizioni, 1993. Il saggio introduttivo di Carravetta e quello conclusivo di Valesio (intitolato I fuochi della tribù, e vedine anche la versione ampliata, I fuochi incrociati delle tribù, in The Craft and the Fury: Essays in Memory of Glauco Cambon, ed. Joseph Francese, a special issue of Italiana, 2000: 305-401), rimangono sul piano critico veri e proprî punti fermi per il presente discorso, che li dà in certo modo per acquisiti.6 Cfr. m. moroni, La presenza complessa. Identità e soggettività nelle poetiche del Novecento, Ravenna, Longo, 1998.7 Sull’argomento cfr. il persuasivo e. Franzina, Dall’Arcadia in America. Attività letteraria ed emigrazione transoceanica in Italia (1850-1940), Torino, Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1996.8 Cfr. in proposito m. nacci, L’antiamericanismo in Italia negli anni Trenta, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 1989.9 é. glissant, op.cit., pp. 90-91.

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MICHAEL PALMA

the road to rome, and bacK again

❄

In the consciousness of most people who pick up a work of literature in translation, the translator exists, at best, only for a moment as a name looking somewhat out of place on the title page. Even translators, when

we manage to get our often battered egos under control, would acknowledge that this is largely as it should be. The dedicated translator desires to be a transparent medium between author and audience. I was highly gratified when a poet friend recently told me that my translations of six Italian poets in the current issue of Chelsea spoke in six individual voices. But the impersonal translator is, of course, a fiction. One does not shed one’s experiences, motives, tastes, and style, and turn into a giant, walking Cap-tain Marvel decoder ring, in the act of translation. And while translation is a much scrutinized process, translators themselves are relatively undoc-umented phenomena. In what follows, I wish to present some of my own experiences, motives, and tastes – I’ll let the style take care of itself – to try to explain how and why I got mixed up in the translation racket, such as it is, in the first place, and what, in turn, the practice of translation has done for, and perhaps to, my own practice and sense of myself as a poet.

Since at least the age of thirteen, I have known, without ever know-ing why, that poetry would be of central importance in my life. But I do not recall that I ever wanted to be a poet, in the usual sense of choosing a career. As far as I could tell, I already was a poet: all that remained to do was to write some poems. And I certainly never wanted, back then, to be a translator of poetry. Without presuming to speak for anyone else, I would guess that sixteen-year-old prospective translators are about as rare as six-year-olds who want to be accountants when they grow up. Adolescents, after all, aspire to remake poetry in their own image, not to remake themselves in the image of another poet. And there was in those days another, much greater obstacle to my ever becoming a translator: I had no competence in any language but my own.

My parents were born in New York, to parents who had been born in Italy. My mother and father were fluent in both English and Italian, but they made no effort to teach their children the language of their parents. In fact, the only times they used Italian when their parents were not present was

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when they did not want us children to know what they were saying. The notion thus conveyed, that Italian was none of my business, was reinforced by the surrounding culture. The 1950s were the high point of the melting-pot era. Unlike Europe, America was a place free from the burdens of history, a land that offered endless prospects for reinvention. To become real Amer-icans, we packed away our ethnic identities with the quaint clothing that our ancestors had worn when they came here. Thus, both in and out of the house, circumstances created a state of affairs that I later tried to capture in one stanza of a poem called “Coming of Age:”

How Italian was I then? A handful of words – Counting to ten, hello, goodbye,fangulWhat everybody knew. My grandmotherSent me to buy a jar of parmigian,I asked the man for a brand called Farmer John.

In high school and especially in college, one of the many things I re-belled against was, I am sorry to say, my own Italian heritage. Being Italian, in my experience in the Bronx and southern Westchester, meant gaudiness and coarseness and overexcitability, an unquestioning adherence to tradition, and an often active anti-intellectualism. Off school grounds, I did not know anyone who had ever read a book, let alone written one. In my experience, poetry, which was an escape from everything that comprised the rest of my experience, existed only on the campus. The poet who meant most to me then, and in many ways still does, was Eliot – then for the seeming priest-like purity of his commitment to poetry, now for the struggle with personal torment that informs his most passionate lines. The European poets who mattered to me were Apollinaire, whose originals I could parse with William Meredith’s translations on the facing pages, and Mayakovsky, whose own words are still inaccessible to me. The translations I attempted in those days, which were stiff and slavishly literal, smothering the artistry of the originals, were from the French. Then and for several years thereafter, the only modern Italian poets I had any acquaintance with – all in translation, of course – were the usual trio of Montale, Quasimodo, and Ungaretti, the last of whom appealed instantly because of his concentration and his clean phrasing. I had also discovered a volume by a more contemporary poet whose intensity struck me almost physically – Alfredo De Palchi’s.

Sessions with My Analyst

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In my late twenties, in the early 1970s, like many others at that time, I began to feel a curious internal sensation, which I came to identify as the itching of my long-buried roots. The first symptom was a surprising sense of annoyance – at Chico Marx, at the “Macaronic” verses of T. A. Daly, at the witty observations of friends regarding the degree to which I had or had not managed to escape my origins. (And while I am as amazed and disgusted as anyone by the sudden appearance of a new, extra-Constitutional guarantee that supersedes all other rights, including that of free speech – namely, the right not to be offended – I nonetheless sense the lingering acceptability of anti-Italian prejudice even in these hypersensitive times. For example, there was a cartoon series a few years ago based on the film

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

In a segment dealing with Marco Polo’s expedition, all the Chinese characters, from Kublai Khan on down, spoke perfect English, while Polo and his companions waved their arms like berserk windmills and expressed themselves in variations on “Datsa some spicy meataball!”) At that time, I drew up a short, eclectic mental list of goals for my life. These ambitions have had differing degrees of fulfillment: I have briefly owned a house, I still have not learned to play the piano, I no longer want a Rolls Royce. But the item on the list to which I turned my readiest attention was to learn the language of my ancestors, the only language, until a century ago, that anyone of my blood had ever used.

I decided that the best way to soak myself in the language was to turn up, with a view toward doing my own translations, some appealing, manageable Italian poet who hadn’t yet registered on the Anglophone radar screen. I kept my eyes skinned for some time, until, at the end of 1975, I came across a recent bilingual anthology of twentieth-century Italian poetry. Toward the front of the book I found a long poem called “La signorina Felicita,” and even in my linguistic darkness I could see that what was going on on the left-hand pages was infinitely more interesting than anything on the right. When I researched the tiny bit of information on Guido Gozzano available in English, and saw that the poet to whom he was most frequently compared was T. S. Eliot, I knew I had found my man. Within the week, I went down to Rizzoli’s in Manhattan, which was then still a real Italian bookstore,

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scooped up a volume of Gozzano and a shopping bag full of dictionaries and grammars, and never looked back.

So, in terms of my original motivation to learn the language and to connect with my origins, I became a translator in order to become more fully myself. And yet the Gozzano project served also, as have all subse-quent translations, as a means of escape from myself. I have always been particularly drawn to the literature and culture of the first few decades of this century, especially to the Modernist period. (I find it fascinating that Gozzano, on the eve of Modernism, was afflicted by the same sense of diminished ambitions that seems to enervate our culture today, the same feeling that the great ones have gone from us and that everything has already been done. May we then presume to hope that we too are on the verge of a creative explosion?) I could not literally become an early twentieth-century poet, but in the process of translation I could put on a dead man’s clothes and grope my way along the roads that he had walked. I had more than Gozzano’s thematic preoccupations in mind when I titled my translation of his poetry.

The Man I Pretend to Be

Some might argue that my pretenses are far more outrageous than any-thing I have admitted to thus far. Where do I get the face, as my ancestors might have phrased it, to translate poetry from a language that I cannot speak at all and that I still cannot read easily without a dictionary at my side? Well, for one thing, I am guided always by a respect for the original text that prevents me from using it as a mere platform for a poem of my own or even a hybrid adaptation. This respect requires me to get to know that original as thoroughly as I can, which, in light of my limitations, is an often laborious process. I have taken apart, cleaned, and reassembled many a poetic carburetor in my time. Of course I make mistakes. Every translator does. But at least I avoid the kinds of mistakes customarily produced by haste and overconfidence. And in my respect for the original poem, I re-spect it in its entirety, in its rhythms and sounds and structures, not merely the one-to-one dictionary equivalents of its component words. And just as I feel that an Italian poet with some English can better respond to a poem by, say, Wallace Stevens than can a native speaker of English who has no feeling for the imaginative and sensuous richness of language, I believe

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that I have something of my own to bring to the exchange. I may not speak Italian, but I speak poetry.

And how has my fluency in that language been affected by my work as a translator? For the most part, I would say, favorably. My encounters with Italian poems have involved a closeness of examination and study that I am compelled only rarely to give to other individual texts, and this study has enriched my own understanding of the wide range of organizational strategies and expressive possibilities available to poets in any language. On a more directly practical level, translation has seen me through many of those endless fallow periods that are the terror of almost every poet (and I expect that every poet has shared my response on a first reading of Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”: “He’s bitching because he hasn’t written a poem in six weeks?”). Thanks to Gozzano and others, I have managed to keep my poetic engine running through many a below-zero “night of the soul.” And translation has given me the opportunity to try on a wide range of disguises, from a man in his late eighties to a girl still in her teens, as well as to experiment with styles and subjects that I never would have turned to on my own. Interestingly, however, I find that it is when I am translating an avant-garde poet that my own work tends to become most formal, as if it is the function of translation not to reinforce particular poetic impulses in me, but to siphon them off so that their opposites may rise to the surface.

Translation, especially to the extent that I engage in it, presents potential risks as well. One obvious one is dependence. In those times when inspira-tion lags, I begin to worry whether I will ever be able to write another poem that someone else has not first written for me in Italian. And then there is the issue of how I am perceived, to the degree that I perceive myself to be perceived at all. Through time, I developed a mantra to console myself over not becoming more securely established as a poet (at my current rate of one chapbook every twenty-five years, I should get all my poetry into print in just under two centuries). Part of the problem, I told myself, was that I was “white in the ’60s, male in the ’70s, and straight in the ’80s.” Now I worry about an opposite and equally dangerous problem – being ethnic in the ’90s. Every poet wishes to be identified first and foremost by that one simple word. To be identified solely as a translator, or even as a translator-poet, is cause enough for concern, but even more worrisome is the idea that my involvement with Italian poetry will label me ethnically in ways that my own concerns as a poet, for the most part, do not. I no more want to be known as an “Italian-American poet” than I wish to contribute

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to an anthology devoted exclusively to the poetry of middle-aged bald men who wear glasses.

And yet, whatever the risks may be, I would not have missed it. Through translation, I have discovered, and continue to discover, a wonderful body of literature that I am eager to share with those of my country and my lan-guage. Through translation, I have made many friends and have had many opportunities that would never have come to me otherwise. Traduttore, traditore, the Italians say: “Translator, traitor.” The phrase itself presents a rare, felicitous instance of the poetry being carried over with the sense. It’s a neat phrase, but I do not believe it is true. It certainly does not have to be. But, if this be treason, I certainly have tried to make the most of it, and I have discovered, along with Delilah, Benedict Arnold, and others too numerous to mention, that it has its compensations.

michael Palma

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italian PoetrY north oF the 49th: Writing (oF) italY in canada1

❄

Canada is a countrY that is very proud of its national literary institutions. In June 1998, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto-based “national” newspaper of Canada, published on one of its editorial

pages a provocatively polemical article that questioned the function and even the usefulness to Canadian letters of the numerous literary prizes that are awarded annually to what appears to be a very close-knit circle of au-thors. As Ted Mumford, the columnist, pointed out, literary awards “were first conceived to give a hand to a literature in its infancy,” and their prolifer-ation can thus be finally interpreted as a sign of Canada’s own insecurity as to the solidity of its cultural identity. Indeed, from the Governor-General’s Awards to those sponsored by the Borders chain of bookstores, much effort goes into the cultivation of Canadian letters — yet another way by which Canadians can distinguish themselves from their southern neighbors — and Canadian public and private cultural institutions seem to be busy at work on the construction of a canon of the country’s literary culture that may make up for its relatively brief history. There is a certain validity to Mumford’s argument that “[n]ow that Canadians have won most of the world’s major book prizes […] this All Must Have Prizes echo chamber of the Canadian inferiority complex sounds awfully tinny,” and yet it seems to hold little appeal in a country which, as Alessandro Carrera has noted, “is one of the few […] in the world whose major authors […] are still alive” (p. 289).2 It is precisely because of the relative youth, of the fluidity of a canon which is in fieri not only because that is the general condition of canons, but also because it lacks an established tradition upon which to build, that the external signs of success — awards, selection for international competitions, etc. — are even more important in this context: what for an Italian poet may be the recognition of a certain achievement in his/her career, for a Canadian poet may mean, more likely, to be positioned just after the founding fathers and mothers of the national tradition. This tradition, unlike those which have consolidated in countries that either presented a fair degree of cultural and ethnic homogeneity or, more likely, did not allow groups marginalized in

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terms of gender, class, race, ethnic origins, etc. to articulate their difference, is open to experiences that come from the borders of the cultural main-stream, not least because the course of that mainstream is itself in question as a result of the profound transformations that immigration has wrought upon the pre-World War II white Anglo-Saxon population of the country. However, this project of cultural diversity, the “multicultural” society that is the official state utopia of Canada, must always be carried out in either English or French translation: few factors polarize Canadian cultural life as powerfully as language politics.

Italian culture in Canada has therefore found itself in a curiously con-tradictory situation. On the one hand, the fact that the ratio of recent immi-grants to the total population of the country is greater in Canada than in the United States means that, especially in the urban areas where immigrants have tended to settle, Italian remains a fairly current language of everyday interaction.3 On the other hand, cultural production in Italian has remained a localized matter, often practiced outside the academic circuit that, at least in the United States, has made possible the current flourishing of an “Italian literature abroad.” Although studies of Canadian periodicals in Italian in the first half of the century, and in particular during the Fascist ventennio, have shown the presence of a vibrant and lively political and cultural debate in the Canadian “little Italies” of the major urban centers of Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia, or at least among the notabili of these communities and, later, the numerous representatives of the Fascist state in Canada,4 the fact remains that, aside from Francesco Giuseppe Bressani’s 1653 Breve relatione d’alcune missioni dei Padri de la Compagnia di Gesù nella Nuova Francia, the first “free standing” work, as Joseph Pivato calls it, by an Italian writing in Canada is La ville sans femmes, Mario Duliani’s 1946 account of life in the prison camp of Petawawa during World War Two. As we will see in a moment, the fact that Italian-Canadians came relatively late to re-flect poetically upon their experience accounts for some of the significant differences between the phenomenon of Italian writing in Canada and in the United States.

To my knowledge, the first occurrence of the notion of “Italian-Canadian poetry,” however, precedes the war, and dates back to a small 1935 volume edited by the critic and translator Watson Kirkconnell entitled Canadian Overtones. The subtitle, which reads like that of an eighteenth-century Brit-ish novel, summarizes the content of the book: An Anthology of Canadian poetry written originally in Icelandic, Swedish, Norwegian, Hungarian,

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Italian, Greek, and Ukrainian, and now translated and edited with bi-ographical, historical, critical, and bibliographical notes. However, by far Kirkconnell’s most interesting contribution to the volume is his introduction, which brings out with startling clarity (if in a somewhat ingenuous fashion) the complexities entailed by any debate on “ethnic” literature. Starting with the observation that “during the past thirty years the published poetry of the ‘New Canadians’ has excelled in bulk all Canadian poetry published in French” (p. 3), Kirkconnell goes on to formulate the aims of his project in terms that look forward to certain aspects of the debate on multiculturalism and its implications. In spite of the dire forecast that English language ho-mogenization will make “this striking outburst of poetic activity” a transitory phenomenon, he writes:

I foresee a further value in this poetry. It should help to develop in succeeding generations a Canadianism nourished by pride in the individual’s racial past. [...] The “one hundred per cent” American (or Canadian) is commonly one who has deliberately suppressed an alien origin in order to reap the material benefits of a well-advertised loyalty (p. 4).

The purpose of poetry, in Kirkconnell’s view, is thus that of preserving for future generations the memory of a lost home, of a “land of origin:”

We do not think the less of the Scot in Canada because of his proud wistfulness towards the land of his origin. [...] The nostalgia of that utterance still has power to stir the Scotch-Canadian who is four generations removed from the country of his forebears. As a Canadian he is not poorer but richer because he realizes his place in a notable stream of human relationship down through the centuries. [...] He grows greater than himself by virtue of his conscious pride in the past and his determination to be worthy of it (pp. 4-5).5

Indeed, Canada is, to use Carrera’s aphoristic definition, “the tribe made of the people who once belonged to another tribe” (p. 289). How-ever, in Kirkconnell’s argument the rites of the old tribe must also inform the self-formation of Canadians. Identity is thus understood as a form of ethnic belonging, which expresses itself in two ways: on the one hand, by linking the subject backward, through memory, to a specific lineage whose unfolding crosses geographical boundaries, and on the other by translating that essential belonging as “pride” (a word central to any identity discourse), i.e., as a confirmation and perpetuation, through the acceptance and perfor-

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mance of the rituals of the tribe of origin, of the very practices that, when actualized, demonstrate the cohesion of the tribe itself. But, by identifying poetic production with the celebration of a lost homeland, Kirkconnell also constructs the experience of the “new Canadian” as that of an always already split subject, caught in the space between his cultural and tribal home (which is finally a home in language) and his geographical, “material” location in the land of exile. Kirkconnell’s humanism clearly shines through in his sincere belief that “no graver problem for educationalists exists today in this country than that of preserving for the future the full potentialities of our several people” (p. 5), and yet his discourse of integration through the celebration of difference — which, by the way, is well aware of the norma-tive role played by the dominant Anglophone community in regulating the transformation of the immigrant into a “New Canadian,” as the reference to the transitory nature of poetry in languages other than English noted above makes clear — peculiarly forces the “New Canadian” into a position of cultural and existential exile. Not surprisingly, as we will see in a moment, the theme of exile is central to Italian poetry in Canada.

The section of Kirkconnell’s anthology on Italian-Canadian poetry is slim indeed: only one author is present (compared to, for instance, fifteen Icelandic-Canadian poets, which prompts the editor to say that “Icelandic is by far the most important member of the newer group of poetries” [p. 9]), in spite of the respectable size of the community, which Kirkconnell estimates at about 40,000, mostly clustered around Montreal. The poet selected is Liborio Lattoni (1874-1958), a minister of the United Church of Canada in Montreal, and an interesting figure of “intellectual between two worlds.” Born in Urbisaglia (Macerata), Lattoni studied literature in Florence with the well-known scholar and poet Guido Mazzoni.6 After short periods in Switzerland and in New York, Lattoni settled in Canada in 1908, where, as a Protestant minister, he played a key role as a cultural and social link between the Italian immigrant community and both the Canadian and the Italian consular authorities. If his patriotism could be put to good use during World War One, when Lattoni “svolse un ruolo di primo piano nella propa-ganda patriottica tendente ad incitare tanti giovani [emigranti] ad arruolarsi ed andare a difendere la patria” (Salvatore, “Liborio Lattoni,” pp. 88-89), it also led him to lend his support to the fascist regime, of which he was, according to Principe, “uno dei maggiori propagandisti […] a Montreal” (“Liborio Lattoni,” p. 69). It is therefore certainly not by chance that for his anthology Kirkconnell selected from Lattoni’s “imposing amount of Italian

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poetry in a wide range of metres” (p. 71) three poems which, contrary to what might have been expected given the tenor of the introduction, do not in fact engage the question of the poet’s relationship with his country of origin, but rather foreground his confrontation with the exoticism of the Canadian wilderness. An example, from “Timagami”:

Where jewell’d, rocky isles in endless linesAre shining, dewy, unexplor’d and free,Veil’d in a myriad of forest pinesSleeps the rare beauty of Timagami.

Just so, amid the Aegean waves’ caress,Perhaps white Aphrodite slept one dayAll fragrant in her naked lovelinessAnd crown’d with Attic roses where she lay.7 (p. 74)

The “otherness” of the Canadian landscape, hinted at by the native name “Timagami,” the feeling of the sublime that the savage beauty of Canadian nature may inspire, are domesticated by the poet’s reading of that very same landscape through the cultural code of mythological discourse, which overlays the signs of a benign and, most importantly, familiar environment upon the wilderness of the new country. The poet contributes to the task of nation-building by symbolically re-organizing its space in terms that make it legible to the colonizers, that make it cohere with their (Western) sense of space, nature, and the role of human beings in it. Naturally, this is an empty landscape (the poem certainly does not clarify, or even question, how this supposedly void space came to have a native name, and where those who have already imposed their own system of signification upon the landscape have gone), and the “only evidence of man” is a “humble log-hewn cabin:” as the colonizers slowly make their presence felt with tangible signs (the cabin as synecdoche of human settlements), the poet constitutes a sort of avant-garde, engaged in the preliminary task of clearing the ground, quite literally, of other presences and inserting the new world in the cultural system of the old. Geographical and cultural displacement is therefore not a source of anxiety, as the poet — described as a “brief pilgrim of the centuries” who “tarr[ies] with [his] books in this fair spot” — carries within himself the very tradition from which he descends, and that is his true homeland.

The “repressed” in Kirkconnell’s selection is the kind of poetry which indeed expresses the poet’s “proud wistfulness towards the land of origins,” and that, in Lattoni’s case, is not only laced with nostalgia but also with the

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kind of chauvinistic patriotism that made the Italian poet such a staunch supporter of Fascism (see for instance the 1922 poem “All’Italia,” reprinted by Principe [“Liborio Lattoni,” p. 73], which ends with “A’ suoi comandi / Allor vide prostrato / Italia ’l suo nemico: / Esso giaceva co ’l suo artiglio antico, / Senza speranza, lacero e spezzato”). That same nostalgia, however, can also be the source for the elegiac tone of Lattoni’s later, less hyperbolic poetry, in which the Canadian landscape overlaps with the memory of the Florence of his youth, thus bringing into relief the never resolved condition of alienation of the immigrant poet. Consider the following poem, “Mentre nevica” (1954):

Si leva il sole, ed io dal mio lettuccioD’Ottantenne mi levo, e vado lietoAlla finestra della stanza mia,E miro fuori d’essa.Neve m’appare tanta e fredda: pocaGente vedo passar, ma tutta in fretta!Gennaio sta d’attorno, e ovunque sembraC’apporti noia somma.Dal sonno mi son desto veramente,Perché sentivo un canto giovanile;Esso diceami: ‘Presto, alle CascineVieni a raccoglier fiori.Firenze è bella, dolce, tutt’amore;Le sue vie, le sue piazze, le sue donne,Echeggian sempre liete i dolci cantiDall’Arno eternale’.Così il canto diceami; ed in coreMi son sentito proprio grande foco;Mi son rimesso a letto e lietamenteMi sono addormentato.

(From Salvatore, “Liborio Lattoni,” p. 100)

Here, too, the environment is transfigured in the poet’s imagination through the recourse to a series of cultural topoi or, more properly, ste-reotypes (Italy as the land of love and song, the Cascine in bloom of the Florentine stornelli, and so on), but in this case the gesture witnesses to the poet’s dislocation, his condition of exile from both his new “home-”land, from which he is separated physically and culturally by the all too obvi-ously symbolic window, and his country of origin, which exists only as a lingering cultural memory.

If Kirkconnell coined the term “Italian-Canadian poetry” to refer to

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Lattoni’s work, it would actually take over forty years for the notion to gain wide circulation, with Pier Giorgio Di Cicco’s ground-breaking anthology Roman Candles. An Anthology of Poems by Seventeen Italo-Canadian Poets (1978). Di Cicco consciously limited his selection to poets writing in English, so that it was not until even more recently, when Caroline Morgan DiGiovanni published Italian Canadian Voices in 1984 that a number of poetic experiences in Italian were brought into relation with one another. DiGiovanni’s anthology remains to this day the most ecumenical insofar as it does not make distinctions of genre (although the theatre is notably absent, prose writing and “memorialistica” are represented with excerpts) or of language, as it gathers writers of Italian origins writing in Italian, English, and/or French — it attempts, in other words, to construct a canon of Italian-Canadian literature broadly understood.8

Several of the authors included in the two volumes were born in Italy during or after World War Two. This is an important datum, as it suggests that “Italian-Canadian” literature is no less in the process of self-definition than that of the mainstream. Furthermore, it justifies the convergence of works in English/French or Italian under the same label. In the United States the emergence of a tradition of “Italian poetry” and of the structures of circula-tion and reception to foster it is a comparatively recent phenomenon, and it is intimately tied to the emigration of a generation of intellectuals who are best categorized, following Luigi Fontanella’s definition, as “emigranti poeti,” i.e., as those poets who, unlike “poeti emigrati” like Emanuel Carnevali, have not chosen to insert themselves “chi con maggior, chi con minore fortuna, nel mainstream letterario americano,” thus becoming “scrittori americani a tutti gli effetti” (p. 210). Moreover, an “Italian-American” tradition, that is, a tradition of writers of Italian origins who write in English, by choice or because that is indeed their first language, established itself relatively early (consider some of the canonical examples, from the above-mentioned Emanuel Carnevali in poetry to Pietro Di Donato in prose). The genera-tion of Italian-American writers active now is already a few generations removed from the immigrant fathers and mothers. Not by chance, the first work to attempt a systematic ordering of Italian-American literature, Olga Peragallo’s Italian-American Authors and Their Contribution to American Literature, was published as early as 1949. On the contrary, the emergence of and recognition for the work of Italian writers residing in Canada and of Italian-Canadian writers writing in French/English has proceeded along relatively parallel routes, with frequent transitions from one camp to the

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other. Whatever their language of choice, for a majority of these writers the experience of emigration is not inherited as part of their family history or their ethnic identity, but it is often a lived event, a turning point or pivotal moment that informs all of their poetic production.

At this point, I must make a brief personal detour into the genesis of this paper. I must admit that its title has troubled me. “Writing (of) Italy,” with the all-too-obviously strategic parentheses positing Italy as a referent more or less at a remove from the poetry of the authors under consideration, appeared as an acceptable compromise, but it did not solve the problem that I could not otherwise find a comprehensive category or even a suitably descriptive label to characterize the poetic experience of a series of poets reflecting, in Canada, on their relationship with Italy and Italian culture, even when the possibly very broad list of names was narrowed down to the handful that I could discuss within the brief span of a paper. What is at issue here is not so much the elaboration of a more nuanced system of classification, but rather a foregrounding of the questions asked by the systems we already have. Paolo Valesio’s essay “I fuochi della tribù” first outlined a theoretical framework that could account for the phenomenon of a poetic production that spans across borders and cultures, under the sign of what he calls the traditionis traditio, that is, “the way in which the tradition reflects upon itself, and hands itself down” (p. 261). Of the four genealogical lines whose intersections he traces, namely American poets, Italian poets, Italian American (no hyphen) poets, and poets between two worlds, the latter is certainly the most provocative, in particular insofar as it is linked to the very status of poetry, to its “aterritoriality” (p. 257). In a sense, then, the third group, that of Italian American poets, represents its opposite or its reverse, as it is profoundly linked to its local situation: Italian-American poetry, with or without hyphens or slashes or other con-nectors,9 is that branch of American poetry that deals with the experience of participating in a cultural community that defines itself in relation to a very specific historical, political, cultural, and above all geographical entity, Italy, which is, simultaneously, also a powerful rhetorical construct; and all this, from the perspective of being rooted in an other cultural and linguistic community (or, rather, range of communities), namely that (those) of the United States. Thus, while when one speaks of an “American” or an “Italian” poet, the adjective serves to locate that poet in relation to a certain canon, to a tradition that he/she may continue and expand, à la T.S. Eliot, or struggle with, following the Bloomian model, in the case of the third category that

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relationship is much more complex and much less linear. Because the very existence of an “Italian-American” canon counter to or parallel with the mainstream of American literature rests upon a fundamental uncertainty on the nature of the referent of the modifier “Italian” vis-à-vis the term that it modifies and that in this case is not so much the noun “poet” as the second adjective in the syntagm. In other words, the fruitful and provocative par-adox of Italian-American or Italian-Canadian poetry is precisely the fact that “Italian” is a site of contested meaning, a signifier whose relation with a referent is constructed in the very process of elaborating a poetic practice.

Any hyphenated identity foregrounds Foucault’s argument according to which the production of that identity is the result of a reaction to the mainstream discourse that at the same time confirms the default “normality” and normativity of the mainstream itself. The two sides of the hyphen or slash point to the workings of power and resistance: while the supplemental identity of Italian is superimposed upon the ethnic other by the mainstream, it also becomes the point at which the former can engage in a process of self-definition and articulation. In an essay that intertwines personal biogra-phy with an account of the making of the Italian-Canadian canon, poet and publisher Antonio D’Alfonso writes: “In many ways, coming to terms with one’s Italianity is very much like coming out of the closet. Nevertheless you cannot shed overnight the layers of skin you have wrapped yourself in. […] The transformation is slow and painful. You have to become your-self” (p. 211). The aporia is evident: on the one hand, the ethnic subject is defined as such by the dominant discourse; on the other, he/she has to learn to perform that very identity that he/she has been assigned. This process of self-production is thus constrained from the outside by the discourse of the dominant culture and from within by the conservative impulses implicit in the acceptance and/or recuperation of the ethnic — perhaps one might say tribal — past. For the hyphenated subject, to become oneself (one’s self) entails constructing that self as a split one, as Kirkconnell’s argument already implied. The precariousness of this process is illustrated by the identity politics and poetics that are implicitly or explicitly formulated by the Canadian poets whom I will now consider.

The first type of poetics/politics of identity, of which Lattoni’s is also an example, is that which constructs the experience of emigration as exile. This is a poetry under the sign of nostalgia, bent on either justifying the necessity of abandoning one’s homeland or of reconstructing through a process of re-memoration and of poetic production a “patria” of the imagination. In

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this context, Valesio’s observations on exile are particularly relevant:

[W]hat I have in mind is nothing as scholastic as a theme (the exiled poet writing about the topic of exile), but a subterranean presence of the experience of exile as something that informs and colors the writings of every poet who lives (in) this condition. (Introduction, p. 5)

The experience of exile informs not only the thematic choices of a number of Italian poets in Canada, but in many instances it also underlies their wariness toward any sort of linguistic experimentalism, insofar as the Italian language becomes itself a link with the original community, and what is sought from it is a way to endow the poet’s experience with the density and tangibility that is not ensured by their condition of (linguistic) exile. Through reappropriation by means of the native tongue, the lived experiences of the immigrant poet are given order and meaning. This is a poetry of testimony, which aims at documenting and bearing witness to the labors and the trials of the process of spatial, cultural, and linguistic dislocation of the Italian immigrant, and therefore requires faith in the ability of language to refer directly to reality, to be able to represent it to the reader in its essential truth. Here is for example the second stanza of Romano Perticarini’s “Uomo senza libertà:”

Sono soltanto un uomoche al mattino indossala solita tuta blucartellinato per vivere,chiodo nella ferragliache brucio che saldo,vuoto di ogni vicolo,di ogni mare, strada, confine,sazio di un pianto dentro,e mi scavo nel cuorevive memorie di paesi,di strade infinite, di vicoli,di sogni di libertà. (p. 16)

The same trust in the referential power of language underlies the counter-movement of this poetry of lived experience, namely the poetry of memory, in which the state of exile is momentarily suspended through a journey into memory back to the plenitude of the mother/country. Another example from Perticarini:

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Amici di Fermo

Memo, Corradino, Innocenzo,voi che conoscete perfinoil midollo delle vecchie muradi questa nostra cittàogni pietra della lunga Viadegli Aceti, un pò [sic] fuori manocome via Perpenti, Via Garibaldi,voi non avete conosciutolo sputo amaro sulle mani logoredalla fatica di tante forge,o carrette di altri paesiche hanno sfinito questa carne.Voi che masticate il vero panenella realtà dei giorniche nascono e che muoiono,mi domandate — come le parolenon vogliano pronunciarsi:— Romano hai mai nostalgia? (p. 52)

The poetics of exile quickly fade into the poetics of nostalgia, in which the abandoned homeland is transfigured, in memory, into the country of lost presence. Language is reduced to its essentials, a threadbare nomen-clature of verbs and nouns that signify immediately and evoke reality by simply naming it. Fermo is a city of identities, of proper names that stand out against the anonymity of the Canadian metropolis, a city in which the subject is intimately, even bodily (“conoscete perfino il midollo”) linked to the space around him; the experience of exile constitutes a reversal in which alienation from the environment translates into alienation from one’s own body, from the material foundation of the self, “worn out” by “le car-rette di altri paesi.” The invocation of religious discourse (“il vero pane”) and of an organic, cyclical vision of life that patterns the natural rhythm of daily events in the lost home (“Voi che masticate il vero pane / nella realtà dei giorni / che nascono e che muoiono”) turns memory into personal mythology, paradoxically placing the poet into a further condition of exile — into memory itself — as he, like Lattoni, is both unable to construct a new sense of self in relation to the new country, and to return physically but also symbolically to the reality of the country of origin.

The example of an Italian-Canadian poet writing in English provides an interesting counterpoint to these somewhat sentimental versions of the poetry of exile. In Antonino Mazza’s poetry, the recurrent motif of the shattering and reconstitution of the community becomes the interpretative

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framework for the experience of emigration. Mazza has widely published in journals, but he is best known as the author of The Way I Remember It, a suite of poems that was first issued as an oral recording by the poet himself, accompanied by music composed by his brother Aldo. The opening poem of The Way I Remember It is “Our House Is in a Cosmic Ear:”

In a cosmic ear of sharp peaks and stepped hills where broom and cyclamen bloom side by side with the lemon treesis the house where I was born.This house … let’s look at it from a childish point of view.A village of bells crowded in the velvet street, no sidewalk. Sunday morning, no Monday.How is it? I was running home, there were cherriesin my pocket, my mother had a nightingale between her lips? (p. 19)

Perticarini’s lamentation for the unrecoverable utopia is here replaced by the wonder of the child faced with the sights and sounds of a universe he does not quite fully understand. There is no nostalgia here because the poem does not present us with the memory of what has been lost, sharply etched in the remembering mind, but rather invites us to join the child in a project of discovery of the world and of taking possession of its mysteries. The questioning that closes the stanza points precisely to the uncertainty of the child as to his relation to this world. Thus, the role of memory is not to offer up the past to us, but to allow us to re-invent and re-discover it. As Mazza writes in “Ossobuco,” “When I arrived, what I’d remembered most died. / But the scent of it flows, invisible through ancient / windows. Inside me, it lingers for love / with longing fingers, the way a muscle smiles, for life” (p. 29). The “death” of the memories, the acknowledgment that the past is irredeemably cleft from the present is the first step in a process of self-construction which attempts to avoid the melancholic nostalgia of the immigrant by replacing it with the wholeness of the child launching upon a journey of (self)-exploration. Significantly, it is not articulated language that the poet remembers about the country of origin, but the pure sound — “the nightingale” between the mother’s lips — as the identification with the child-self pushes him back to a state that precedes language and therefore the tribal practices of the tradition. The house of being is no longer language but rather the experience of listening, of being open and receptive to the other — of dwelling in a cosmic ear, rather than in the particularities of

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human tongues.The final example that I would like to discuss briefly is that of Corrado

Paina, a poet and prose writer who has spent much of his life in Italy and comes closest, among the authors selected, to the model of the “poet be-tween two worlds.” Paina positions himself in a critical relationship to the Italian-Canadian mainstream poetic tradition and his work; in particular, the suite Honest Ed e i templi del sudore can be read as a critique of both multiculturalism and the identity politics that are so central to Italian-Cana-dian poetry. Honest Ed follows a journey, a wandering through a new Waste Land made up of the ethnic communities of Toronto. Unlike Eliot’s journey, though, there is no final salvation, no thunder to speak the liberating word. Paina’s poetry proceeds by evoking distorted views of the city scape, as the voice of the poet shifts between world-weary irony and indignation. Like Mazza, he opens his volume by foregrounding the question of language:

[…] e scema un’altra giornatareplicando il linguaggiodi schiatte più avanzate...

razze dominanti dai ghigni confusinelle zone d’ombra di Charlottownnei variety stores di Meech Lake.

Charlottown and Meech Lake, where never enacted agreements to revise the relationship between Quebec and the so-called ROC, the Anglophone “Rest of Canada” were originally drafted, are symbols of the failure of Canada to reconcile its two major ethnic groups — that is, the “schiatte più avanzate,” the mainstream. The “language” of ethnic pride simply replicates at the microlevel of local politics the fundamental opposition which structures the public debate of the country. But language is also the spy of the homologating power of the dominant discourse, as the barriers that separate the several ethnic groups are brought down by their common identity as consumers:

Sabato italiano

Il quartiere si sveglia al suono delle AlfaRomeo e delleCherokees“è sabato”sabato di primaverabisogna aprire i garages

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“wake up Nina e mettiti il vestito più bello!”Tony comprerà i cannolimentre il nonno zapperà la bakiardaper piantare fiorie non pomodori, come gli hanno insegnato ai corsi comunali.

Shards of English or of “Italiese” find their way into the frantic syntax of Paina’s poetry: “morgheggi,” “garbiccio,” “basamenti,” “tangenti ‘col-lected’ a Chinatown,” etc. The “italianity” invoked by D’Alfonso is here the empty performance of habitual actions, like dressing up on Sunday and eating cannoli, the hyper-production of signs of local difference that is only the superficial varnish of a de facto integration in a system that offers little space to alternatives:

Abbiamo vergogna della nostra ignoranzaItalia che cosa è rimasto di noi? In noi?

non abbiamo panni da lavare nel Don Mills [river in Toronto] ed il nostroimpero sopravvive nei busti del duce.Costruiremo altri ghetti per i nostri figli ele altre razze che verranno.

Dopo di noi Ceramicaland, Woodbridge on the Lake,Morgheggioville ...

Finally, then, it seems to me that Italian-Canadian poetry presents us with a very fluid and complex situation, on which one cannot immediately superimpose the categories used to map the Italian-American poetic land-scape. Like the “poets between two worlds,” the poets writing in Italian and the poets writing in one of the official languages of Canada often find themselves caught in the space between two separate universes of mean-ing, and are forced to examine the conditions of their own dis-location vis-à-vis their country of origin. On the other hand they are, like the Italian American poets, profoundly rooted in the local, even vernacular, and they are engaged in an “integrative strategy” (Valesio, “Fuochi” 264) in relation to the dominant culture. It may be precisely in this crossing of our critical borders, and in the fact that they may lead us to re-examine those borders, that their originality lies.

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1 This paper was conceived as an investigative hypothesis on Italian-Canadian poetry that might provide the basis for a broadening of the critical debate on the conditions of Italian poetry outside of Italy. While I have added the necessary critical apparatus in preparing it for publication, I have preferred to retain in the body of the essay some of the discursive and somewhat more informal features of its original oral presentation.2 Mumford’s article was published in the “Arts Argument” section of the Monday paper, specifically designed to stimulate a debate on the arts. Significantly, all the people who re-sponded to the article (or at least whose letters were printed) rejected Mumford’s argument and expressed staunch support for the current abundance of literary awards (cf. The Globe and Mail [Toronto], 22 June 1998: D1).3 For statistics on postwar Italian immigration to Canada in comparison to the United States, see Harney 177-178. Chapter Two of Harney’s study clearly summarizes the patterns of Italian immigration to Canada since the latter half of the nineteenth century. Figures for the pre-World War Two period can be found in Salvatore, “Liborio Lattoni” 80-81. 4 On the Italian-Canadian press in the first half of the century, see Principe, The Darkest Side.5 It is perhaps not coincidental that Kirkconnell was himself of Scottish descent on his father’s side. For a brief and somewhat hagiographic account of his life and career, see Beveridge.6 Further biographical information can be found in Principe, “Liborio Lattoni” and in Sal-vatore, “Liborio Lattoni.” Both articles also include generous selections of Lattoni’s poetry, which was never collected and was mostly published in Canadian and American periodicals, to which the poet was a frequent contributor. On Lattoni’s personality and his support of Fascism, see also Salvatore’s interview with his son, the Montreal lawyer Mario Lattoni, in Fascism and the Italians of Montreal (124-131).7 Kirkconnell does not give the original of the poems in his selection. The translations, as noted in the subtitle to the book, are Kirkconnell’s own.8 On the difficulties in the formation of a canon of Italian-Canadian writing, see in particular Pivato’s “Documenting Italian-Canadian Writing” and Italian-Canadian Writers, especially Part One, “The Italian-Canadian Socio-Cultural Experience.” Fulvio Caccia and Antonio D’Alfonso’s anthology Quêtes is an interesting attempt to take stock of the situation of Italian-Canadian writing in the province of Quebec.9 The ideological and cultural implications of ethnic nomenclature are discussed most co-gently and passionately by Tamburri. In using the hyphenated expression “Italian-Canadian” (and “Italian-American”) in this essay, I have followed what seems to be the convention in Italian-Canadian studies. However, as I argue later, I think we can also interpret the hyphen as a graphic — almost iconic — representation of the complex negotiations in the process of identity formation for the “ethnic” subject.

bibliograPhY

beveridge, J. M. R, “Watson Kirkconnell: A Biographical Sketch,” The Undoing of Babel.Watson Kirkconnell: The Man and His Work, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975,pp. 11-15.

caccia, Fulvio & antonio d’alFonso, Quêtes. Textes d’auteurs italo-québécois, Montréal:Guernica, 1983.

carrera, alessandro, “Frail Identities Along the Canadian Shield,” Differentia, 6-7 (1994):283-296.

d’alFonso, antonio, “The Road Between: Essentialism. For an Italian Culture in Quebecand Canada,” Contrasts: Comparative Essays on Italian Canadian Writing, edited by

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Joseph Pivato, Montréal: Guernica, 1985, pp. 207-229.Fontanella, luigi, “Poeti emigrati e emigranti poeti negli Stati Uniti,” Italica, 75, 2 (1998):

210-225.harneY, nicholas demaria, Eh, Paisan! Being an Italian in Toronto, Toronto: University

of Toronto Press, 1998.mazza, antonino, The Way I Remember It, Montréal: Guernica, 1992.mumFord, ted, “Book-prize Burnout,” Globe and Mail, [Toronto], 22 June 1998: D1.Paina, corrado, Honest Ed e i templi del sudore, unpublished manuscript.Perticarini, romano, Via Diaz, Montréal: Guernica, 1989.Pivato, JosePh, “Documenting Italian-Canadian Writing: A Bibliography,” Italian Canadiana,

1, 1 (1985): 28-37.Pivato, JosePh, Italian-Canadian Writers: a Preliminary Survey, Ottawa: Department of the

Secretary of State of Canada, 1988.PrinciPe, angelo, The Darkest Side of the Fascist Years. The Italian-Canadian Press: 1920-

1942, Toronto: Guernica, 1999.— “Liborio Lattoni: tra fascismo e misticismo,” Italian Canadiana, 4 (1988): 67-83.salvatore, FiliPPo, Fascism and the Italians of Montreal. An Oral History: 1922-1945,

translated by George Tombs, Toronto: Guernica, 1998.— “Liborio Lattoni: da missionario protestante a poeta nella Montreal del primo Novecento,”

Italian Canadiana, 13 (1997): 80-106.tamburri, anthonY Julian, To Hyphenate of Not to Hyphenate? The Italian/American Writer:

An Other American, Montréal: Guernica, 1991.valesio, Paolo, “I fuochi della tribù.” Poesaggio. Poeti italiani d’America, edited by Peter

Carravetta and Paolo Valesio, Quinto di Treviso: Pagus, 1993, pp. 255-290. (See alsothe extensively revised version of this essay, now titled “I fuochi incrociati delle tribù,”in The Craft and the Fury: Essays in Memory of Glauco Cambon, edited by JosephFrancese, a special issue of Italiana, 2000: 305-401.)

— Introduction. Gradiva. International Journal of Italian Literature, Special issue on “Ital-ian Poets in America,” 10-11 (1992-1993): 5-8.

the Question oF voice✥

la Questione della voce

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un esemPio di Poesia Femminile: bianca grazia tarozzi

❄

N el Panorama Poetico veneziano (e non solo veneziano) si profila l’autorevole presenza di B. G. Tarozzi: nativa di Bologna, essa opera tra la città lagunare, dove vive, e l’Ateneo veronese, dove

insegna Lingua e letteratura anglo-americana. E proprio nell’ambito accademico si colloca la sua attività di saggista e traduttrice: tanto per esemplificare, è del 1993 la traduzione di una trentina di liriche Dai libri di geografia di Elizabeth Bishop, dove Tarozzi dà mirabilmente voce alla timida e umbratile scrittrice americana, costantemente attratta dal viag-gio – l’Altrove – e tuttavia costantemente in bilico tra la voglia di andare e lo struggente desiderio di rivenire, anzi, di rimanere; perciò gli stessi interrogativi ritornano: questions of travels appunto; considerazioni sullo stare e sull’andare; equilibrismi di una mente instabile, solitaria, inquieta. E ritornano pure le stesse arti, assai bene evidenziate da Tarozzi: il gusto dell’understatement, la scelta di un tono colloquiale, di un vocabolario preciso nel dettaglio, dimesso e remissivo, pronto a rassegnare alla realtà ogni illusione di potenza.

Dopo Bishop un’altra straordinaria autrice americana – Emily Dick-inson – offre a Tarozzi il destro di esplicare le sue abilità di saggista e traduttrice, attingendo ancora una volta risultati invidiabili. L’opera è La bambina cattiva. Settanta poesie (Marsilio, 1998): in esse la geniale vena poetica di Dickinson instaura uno sconcertante dialogo tra un sé infantile e la Divinità, tra la sua individualità di bambina indisciplinata e un Pater severo ed esigente se pure, in fondo, comprensivo. Una bambina arrogante e perentoria, giuocosa e scettica, speranzosa e impaurita: ma pur sempre disorientata: «Andare in Cielo! / Non so quando – / Non chiedetemi come, ve ne prego! / Davvero, sono troppo sbalordita / Per pensar di rispondervi! / Andare in Cielo! / Come suona oscuro! / E accadrà tuttavia / Com’è vero che a notte le greggi / Si rifugiano nelle braccia del Pastore!» (n. 79). Ed è per conquistare una qualche sicurezza che talora Dickinson rappresenta il Cielo come un luogo vicinissimo alla Natura, tanto da identificarsi con essa:

C’è chi celebra la Festa andando in Chiesa –

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THE QUESTION OF VOICE / LA QUESTIONE DELLA VOCE

Io festeggio restando a Casa mia – Un Uccello Canterino fa il Corista – E un Orto serve da Cupola –

C’è chi celebra la Festa con la Cotta – Io metto solamente le mie Ali – E invece di suonare la Campana della Chiesa, Per noi canta – il nostro piccolo Sagrestano.

Dio predica, noto Ecclesiastico – E il sermone non è mai troppo lungo, Così invece di arrivare infine al Cielo – Ci vado, ad ogni istante (n. 324).

Ciò non ostante, a dispetto di tanta contiguità, l’ansia di Emily non riesce a placarsi davvero, anzi, riaffiora più volte: ora in forma di effimera speranza, più spesso rivestendosi di lusinghevoli certezze ovvero, ancora, manifestando nei confronti del Cielo una sorta di rassicurante scetticismo.

Tanti sentimenti contrastanti, dunque, tante perplessità interiori sono all’origine di liriche straordinarie, mirabilmente intessute di una trama linguistica spezzata ed ellittica, che va dal tono alto e latineggiante a forme di dialogo e di monologo assai vicine al colloquiale e al parlato: un sound originalissimo, che Tarozzi sa ricreare al meglio grazie all’affinata sen-sibilità, opportunamente supportata dall’indiscutibile eccellenza tecnica.

Con tutto ciò, è nella produzione poetica che Tarozzi esprime a fondo la sua ricca interiorità, andando dalla corposa raccolta di Nessuno vince il leone fino a La buranella – per arrivare da ultimo all’esile, raffinato poemetto in cinque parti dal titolo Smemorata (1998) – una canicola di ricordi remoti eppur presenti, necessari: vaghi frammenti di giovinezza felice.

Stampato su pregiata carta a mano in 200 esemplari (ciascuno con un pastello originale di Eleonora Siffredi), Tarozzi in esso rievoca le più sug-gestive immagini del passato, in particolare il paesaggio degli Appennini e i castagneti riarsi, dove giuocava alle fate e alle dame con vestiti e corone fatte di foglie: «Fu a Badi, a Badi che mi innamorai? / Dei castagni, del vento tra le foglie, / della radura all’ombra della felce? // Perché mai, altri-menti / torna, nei sogni, sempre, il castagneto / tra il sole e l’ombra, quieto / immobile e fantastico paesaggio? // Altrove il faggio / lievemente sussurra; ma il castano / albero arcano, / nodoso e cavo, trasmette una magia // un potere che resta, o che ritorna. / Via dal frastuono, muta, / la scena, vuota, / della radura, torna» (11-12).

Si tratta, evidentemente, di un viaggio lungo sviante faticoso, condotto

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per una strada sbagliata – una «falsa strada, dritta e muta / non abitata, non riconosciuta» (14). Un viaggio che si perde verso il nulla e che porta solo a ritrovarsi nella medesima stanza: «Come mai / in questa grande scatola è finita / la mia vita, e perché? // È forse qui / che tutto è cominciato? / E chi sono? / Il mio corpo dove è andato? // È sotto la coperta? / È nella macchia / del soffitto, nel suo / vasto magma slabbrato, surreale? // Sempre la stessa stanza! / A cui ritorno senza ricordare / cosa mai mi trattenga / qui, per che fare? // Sul letto l’imbottita / di colore amaranto / e di fronte la stufa / rossa, la legna accanto // in una grande cesta. / La stufa rossa: calda! / Se la tocchi t’impolveri le dita. / È accesa, amica. // Proietta sopra il muro / guizzanti fiamme grigie, / onde improvvise, / figure astratte, danze. // Come tutto trapassa e trascolora! / Allora e ora, / ora ed allora, / fiamma ininterrotta: // sì, fuori e dentro, / colorata fiamma, / felice fiamma, / ancora!» (22-23).

Versi suggestivi, dunque, fitti di risonanze, vibratamente vissuti: e ciò a ulteriore conferma della ricca creatività dell’autrice e del suo significativo contributo alla produzione poetica del nostro tempo.

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the PovertY oF Women’s PoetrY:a genealogY oF silence

Restano i fili, i filiinvisibili, tantosono sottili.

The threads are left, threadsso thin they are invisible.

bianca tarozzi, La buranella

❄

B ianca tarozzi, in a talk given as part of a seminar for the feminist Diotima philosophical community in Verona, published in the col- lective 1996 Diotima volume La sapienza del partire da sé (The

Knowledge of Starting from Oneself),1 points to the experience of silence and solitude as that from which poetry comes into being. It is not, however, a silence that allows for concentration and introspection, or a solitude lead-ing to an inner journey of self-discovery. Rather it is, for Tarozzi as for (in his book Ascoltare il silenzio) Paolo Valesio, from silence itself that poetry springs. According to Valesio, silence can become a kind of language, rooted in the experience of the edge and of the limit. For Tarozzi too, this experi-ence of solitary confrontation with the edge is that which matters for poetry, for the experience of silence produces poetry.2 In Tarozzi’s lecture one can therefore detect a gentle polemic toward the very notion of a knowledge springing from the self (“la sapienza del partire da sé”), where the self is understood as the site of a relational experience shared by a community of women. This notion of a communal female experience is central to Diotima as well as to a considerable section of contemporary feminism, although with widely different emphases.3 The knowledge of the self achieved through the experience of a female community has little to do with poetry, Tarozzi seems to imply. Poetry comes into being through silence and solitude. Or rather, Tarozzi suggests, poetry seems to dwell precariously and temporarily in moments of silence, to inhabit — for a short while — empty pockets of

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time, space, and waiting, moments when the self itself is as if suspended or bracketed. Poetry appears afterwards; that is, the self has left its usual home — wherever that may be — and become disoriented and fearful. In these liminal moments, unexpectedly, poetry appears:

Dopoche hai fatto la valigia, spento il gas,spente tutte le luci, chiuso l’uscio,chiuso il portone, quandoti appoggi al muro e temi di caderee aspetti un mezzo, un modoper andare lontano,quando il cielo è sereno,blu e sterminato sul cavalcavia,in quel momento vuotosi accampa la poesia.4

Afteryou have packed your suitcase, shut off the gas,turned off all the lights, closed the door,closed the gate, whenyou lean on the wall afraid to fallwaiting for a means, a wayto go far away,when the sky is clear,blue and endless on the overpass,in that empty momentpoetry pitches camp.

The entire poem hinges on the last line, “si accampa la poesia.” Poetry for Tarozzi does not spring forward, does not come into being, does not reveal itself and does not “dwell” in the empty moment of silence and wait-ing as if in its home. Rather, it precariously pitches its tent there. Homeless and nomadic, poetry for Tarozzi is pursued by an endlessly mendicant self, the very self that poetry should help to reveal or create. As a scholar and translator of poetry, Tarozzi is quite conscious of what I have called the poverty of women’s poetry, by which I mean the sense of emptiness, lack and dispossession many women feel to be the heritage of women’s poetry. This sense comes from the fact of a male-dominated tradition, as well as the perception some women poets have that the language they use does not belong to them, that they come to it as beggars or thieves.5 It comes from the way the feminine itself is defined over and over again as lack, deficiency, incompleteness, absence. Traditionally associated with the body, the maternal, and the corporeal, woman is the symbol of an imperfect and

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transient earthly reality that only the masculine spirit, in his heroic confron-tation with the meaning of death, can transcend and redeem, reaching for the imperishable and endlessly rewarding beauty of philosophical or poetic authenticity. A woman poet must somehow overcome the very negativity and insufficiency of her femininity and of her association with the body and the corporeal in order to gain access, perhaps, to the spiritual riches of poetry. In their search for poetry, women poets must therefore ostensibly silence femininity itself. Yet paradoxically, in disclosing to us the empty silence where poetry precariously, mysteriously, and momentarily pitches her tent (“si accampa”), Tarozzi also reveals to us her link with another woman poet of silence, Cristina Campo, whose name is encrypted within the very words “si accampa.”

Campo, whose entire life was devoted to literature written by others, and who was like Tarozzi a scholar and a translator (especially of English and American poetry), “scrisse poco” of her own and, as she herself declared, “vorrebbe aver scritto ancor meno” (“She wrote little and would have liked to have written even less”).6 She, like Tarozzi, prized silence and solitude, the pursuit of which for her became a way to approach not only poetry, but also the sacred. Like Tarozzi, she found poetry camping out in some rather banal and inauspicious places where the wanderings of her mendicant self took her during her lifetime. One was a very ugly church in Los Angeles on a dog-day afternoon: “Quei minuti … a Los Angeles non finiscono di metter rami e radici dentro di me … Partire dalla tabula rasa … dalla chie-sa nuova e brutta di Cristo Re a Los Angeles nel pomeriggio canicolare … e sia il più possibile anonima quella chiesa … come un ospedale, un planetario o una stazione, per ricordarci che veramente l’on a tout perdu – fuorché la verità che abita in quel luogo — e che mai potremo ritrovare senza esserci spogliati di ogni ornamento.” (Those few minutes … in Los Angeles continue endlessly to sprout branches and roots within me … To start from zero … from the new and ugly church of Christ the King in Los Angeles on a dog-day afternoon … and may the church be as anonymous as possible … like a hospital, a planetarium or a station, to remind us that truly l’on a tout perdu [one has lost all] — except the truth that dwells in that place — and that we could never find again except by ridding ourselves of all ornaments) [La tigre assenza, p. 286].

In her essay Tarozzi herself refers to the poem by Cristina Campo, “Ora non resta che vegliare sola,” from the slim 1956 volume of poetry Passo d’addio, where the notion of a mendicant female self (“il mendicante livido”)

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is first formulated and associated with the archetypal image of Antigone. Not, however, the defiant Antigone who challenged the laws of Creon, but the Antigone of Oedipus at Colonus, after the death of her blind father with whom she had wandered like a beggar and an outcast through the sacred wood of the Eumenides:

Ora non resta che vegliare solacol salmista, coi vecchi di Colono;il mento in mano alla tavola nudavegliare sola: come da bambinacol califfo e il visir per le vie di Bassora.

Non resta che protendere la manotutta quanta la notte; e divezzarel’attesa della sua consolazione,seno antico che non ha più latte.

Vivere finalmente quelle vie— dedalo di falò, spezie, sospirida manti di smeraldo ventilato — col mendicante livido, acquattato

tra gli orli di una ferita.

Now all that is left for meis to wait alone with the psalmist,with the old men at Colonus;chin in hand on the naked tableto wait alone: as when I was a childwith the Caliph and the Vizier through the streets of Bassora.

All that is left to me is to hold out my handall night long; and to wean myself fromwaiting for consolation,ancient breast that no longer has milk.

To live finally in those streets— labyrinth of fires, spices, sighsaired by emerald mantles — with the livid beggar, squatting

between the lips of a wound.

One of the interesting things in this poem about the absolute solitude of Antigone left alone after her father’s death to beg with others lonely beggars, is the way in which this position of seemingly utmost hopeless-

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ness and loneliness and waiting — which is implicitly all that is left to the female poet — is envisioned also as a condition of perfect happiness and the fulfillment of an exotic childhood fantasy. A condition of total loss and impoverishment, such as the condition of women poets in the patriarchal tradition, turns out ironically to be the greatest asset, a kind of paradoxical and hidden thousand-and-one-night wealth to which women did not know they had access. It is as if they — thought to be the poorest of poets, the beggars or thieves devoid of a language of their own, wandering the world in search of the places where a destitute poetry might pitch its tent with them — discovered themselves to be closest to poetry, or to the places where poetry might appear, precisely because they were far away from the chatter of conversations in which the others are engaged. This apparent bliss, however, for Campo seems to come at a terrible cost: “Non resta che protendere la mano / tutta quanta la notte; e divezzare / l’attesa della sua consolazione, / seno antico che non ha più latte.”

The beggar woman poet, the mendicant self, must give up even the hope of maternal love, the consolatory nourishment of the memory and hope of the maternal breast. The final image of “gli orli di una ferita” is perhaps an allusion to a female sexuality reduced to a condition of loss, a lack and a wound that is paradoxically also a condition of grace. The implications of this poem are thus particularly disturbing, and while the text evokes the mysticism of Simone Weil, it also contrasts implicitly with the insistent invocation of the maternal, and of the “redemptive” presence and word of the mother, which has permeated the discourse of Diotima.7

The loss of the maternal is a recurrent theme in both Tarozzi and Campo, but it is strongest perhaps in the poetry of a poet who did not even want to publish her work (cited by Tarozzi in her essay), Antonia Pozzi. Antonia Pozzi, who took her own life at the age of twenty-six in 1938, belongs to this genealogy of reticent and poverty-stricken women poets, each alone with her own solitude and her own silence. Pozzi lived among poets and philosophers and scholars, and she and the poet Vittorio Sereni cultivated a reticent, secret love, made of absences and silences and a few letters and poems, which ended with Pozzi’s suicide.8 All of Pozzi’s poems were pub-lished postumously by her father in versions that were heavily edited by him, and have only recently been restored in part to their original versions, thanks especially to the patient work of Alessandra Cenni. Pozzi’s 1933 poem “Mano ignota” (La vita sognata, p. 95) has many elements in com-mon with Tarozzi’s and Campo’s later poems, which may in fact perhaps

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originate from it.

Tu non sai come sia tristetornare per questo sentierofangosocon queste vestiimbrattate — nella sera neranella nebbia nera — brancolare tra i rododendristillanti — fiutarne l’odore amaro — per non cadere aggrapparmia questa mano che mi porgiignotacome il tuo volto immerso nel buio — come il tuo nome dimenticato — andare verso una tendache la pioggia confinain fondo al suo pianto — aver dovuto — volutoscostarenella notte più oscural’unica mano sorella — andare verso un domaniche la solitudine chiudein fondo al deserto …

You don’t know how sad it isto return to this muddypathwith this soileddress — in the black eveningin the black fog — to grope among the drippingrhododendrons — to smell their bitter scent — in order not to fall to graspthis hand you extend to meunknownlike your face in the dark — like your forgotten name — to go towards a tentconfined by the rainat the bottom of its tears — having had to — wanted topush awayin the darkest nightthe only helping hand —

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to go towards a tomorrowthat solitude closes offat the end of the desert …

The enigmatic image of the tent appears here. Here the word tenda, however, could mean both “tent” and “curtain,” and assumes even richer connotations, alluding to a mystery, something sacred that may or may not be disclosed. We also have the image of the woman beggar, the nomadic, mendicant self wandering alone, groping in the dark. In the image of the desert in the last line, there is the sense of the absolute necessity of solitude and silence for poetry. Pozzi wrote in her diary, “Adesso tornerai a scrivere poesie … Impara a vivere sola — dentro di te. Costruisciti.” (Now you will go back to writing poetry … Learn to live alone — within yourelf. Con-struct yourself).9 As a woman in a world of men — the young intellectuals trained in the existentialist school of Antonio Banfi during the gloomiest years of Fascism — Pozzi was doubly isolated. She was isolated as a wom-an writer and at the same time she deeply identified with the aesthetic cult of masculine creative solitude whose prototype for her was the character of Tonio Kröger in Mann’s novella. Even in the restless travels of her last few years, she pursued this “constructive” solitude of the self. What we have in this poem, which makes it even more desolate and strong — and almost heroic, compared to the Tarozzi and Campo poems — is a clear sense of the conscious decision to sacrifice not only the maternal, not only the home and the world of human affections, but also the body, love and erotic desire, and with them, life itself: “aver dovuto — voluto / scostare / nella notte più oscura l’unica mano sorella — andare verso un domani / che la solitudine chiude / in fondo al deserto …” Silence for Pozzi resembles death so closely that it finally becomes death. For Pozzi, as for Heidegger, one’s own death (Der eigene Tod) is the single most authentic event for the self. Indeed Pozzi identified with the philosophy and aesthetics of death to such an extent that she even envisioned the quintessentially feminine experience of giving birth from the point of view of death. In a poem in which she imagined her own funeral, she wrote that she felt no sadness because “questo non è esser morti / questo è tornare / al paese / alla culla. / Chiaro è il giorno come il sorriso di una madre/ che aspettava.” (This isn’t being dead / this is to go back / to the town / to the cradle. / The day is clear like the smile of a mother / expecting).10 Yet even as she committed herself entirely to this heroic vision of poetry, in the attempt, as she saw it, to give birth to herself in poetry, she at the same time had an anguished sense of

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her poetry’s worthlessness — for she felt, like so many other women poets, destitute and desolate.11

If at this point we were to go back to Tarozzi, whose name almost uncan-nily echoes that of her predecessor, we would find that her poetry, contrary to Antonia Pozzi’s poetry, however rooted in the sense of the necessity of silence and solitude, disclaims the association of poetry with death that Pozzi believed to be necessary and absolute. Caught in the mythology of death that permeates Western poetry and philosophy from Homer through Rilke and beyond, Pozzi eventually became its victim. On the contrary, for Tarozzi the productive silence of poetry gives birth to many voices, and many stories. Birth — la nascita — rather than death becomes the sacred moment for her, or rather re-birth, as in the poem “Lazzaro” from Nessuno vince il leone, whose last line reads: “ma io sono risorto dalla morte” (but I have come back from death). In freeing itself from the death-obsession that defines the male-dominated tradition of Western poetry, women’s poetry can, as it were, itself be resurrected from the dead, and emerge to a new life and a new voice.12 It is this emphasis on the concept of birth rather than death, and in the notion of the return, as it were, of the body from death, that Tarozzi seems to share most with the women of Diotima. In particular, she has this in common with one of Diotima’s original members, Adriana Cavarero, whose philosophical efforts, in the wake of Hannah Arendt’s opposition to the “metaphysics of death,” are aimed at dire la nascita.13 For Cavarero, to recover and conceptualize the importance of birth means to recuperate corporeality and sexual difference from the silence and oblivion to which they have been confined, and thus to undo the very foundations of Western metaphysics. The poetic productivity of silence, and the need for women to explore and listen to silence, thus takes on a new meaning, for in listening to silence women do not succumb to it but rather become able to perceive and test the limits of the metaphysics of death and of the poetic discourse that traditionally enshrines it.14

In her book Nonostante Platone (In Spite of Plato), Cavarero points to a poem by Bianca Tarozzi, “Variazioni sul tema di Penelope” (Variations on the Theme of Penelope) as the inspiration for some of her own thoughts on the role of death in western philosophical thought.15 Penelope’s silence, her confinement and stubborn refusal to acquiesce, and her seemingly senseless, solitary weaving and unweaving, are seen in Tarozzi’s poem as a way to test the limits of masculine discourse. Little by little, her silence becomes a language. In Tarozzi’s revisionist version, Penelope is in fact transformed

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into a writer — a poet and a storyteller. Her writing is in a humble, seemingly impoverished register: a “domestic” register, Tarozzi calls it ironically, for “non a tutti è dato / l’odio di un dio o un cavallo di legno; / c’è chi è degno soltanto di una tela” (Not to all is given / the hatred of a god or a wooden horse; / some deserve only a piece of cloth). Her domestic preoccupations are opposed to Ulysses’ compulsive courting of death in his adventures, a courting that — in Dante’s brilliant extension of the Homeric tale to which Tarozzi alludes in the conclusion of her poem — finds its fulfillment in the hero’s final departure as he leaves Ithaca and Penelope behind to sail towards the unknown. In Dante, as in Homer, nothing is heard of Penelope after the end of Ulysses’ story. Not so in Tarozzi, who resumes the interrupted thread. The silence that surrounds Penelope on her solitary island is mysteriously filled with voices from the past which become part of her writing even as she ponders their extraneousness to her. Women’s writing, Tarozzi seems to imply here, is precisely this precarious exercise on the edge of silence:

I fili di Penelope, ripresi,conducono alle soglie del mistero — un emisferoche non sa inventare.Ora discesasulla riva, dal mare risuonantesente voci lontane, antichi naufraghi,fantasmi che la vogliono afferrare:tutte le guerre che non ha perdutoné vinto,tutti gli amori che non ha vissutoil dolore e il furore degli eroiche non le spetta:scempio,dolce urlare del vento dentro l’anima.

Ritorna sui suoi passi.L’esperienza del limite per leiè l’acqua incollerita della riva — per Ulisse lo schiantoe la fine tremendacontro gli scogli, verso la leggenda.16

The threads of Penelope, resumed,lead to the edge of mystery — a hemisphereshe does not know how to invent.Now descendedon the shore, from the resounding sea

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she hears far-away voices, ancient shipwrecks,ghosts that want to grab her:all the wars she has neither lostnor won,all the loves she has not lived,the sorrow and wrath of the heroes,which does not belong to her:devastation,sweet screaming of the windinside the soul.

She retraces her steps.The experienceof the limit for heris the raging water against the shore — for Ulysses the crashand the awful endagainst the rocks, toward legend.

Through Tarozzi’s poem, Penelope in a sense gets a second life, a reincarnation in light of which even her first literary incarnation begins to look different, slowly coming undone, its values — first and foremost the terrible economy of death of the Homeric tale — called into question. Such is the apparently humble work of women’s writing, Tarozzi suggests. In her imaginative reading of this poem, Cavarero envisions Penelope surrounded by other women: “io la vedo ridere con le ancelle mentre insieme tessono vesti ad esse confacenti, narrando di come tennero in scacco i Proci insieme scoprendo la letizia di quello stare fra di loro lavorando e pensando. La vedo, le vedo, in quell’isola, che ora straordinariamente separa con mitica chiarezza due mondi estranei, parlare di nascita e di radicamento piuttosto che di morte e di avventura” (I see her laugh with the women attendants while together they weave clothes that suit them, narrating how together they held Penelope’s suitors at bay, discovering the joy of that being, working and thinking together. I see them, in that island that neatly separates with mythic clarity two reciprocally extraneous worlds, speaking of birth and rootedness rather than death and adventure) [Nonostante Platone, p. 23]. In Tarozzi’s poem, however, Penelope, like Cristina Campo’s Antigone, is alone, not surrounded by women. Nor is the border between Penelope’s world (and the world of her solitary writing) so clearly separated from that of Ulysses. On the contrary, as the concluding stanzas of the poem just cited indicate, the silence that surrounds Penelope is literally haunted by it. Much of Cavarero’s interpretation seems to project onto the poem her own hopes at the time for Diotima as a community of women thinking and

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working together, speaking not of death and separation but of birth and root-edness. Yet even in the lecture from which I started, Tarozzi unequivocally emphasized the need for solitude and silence if poetic thought is to come into being: “Si tratta di fare il silenzio dentro di sé. In quel silenzio, in quel vuoto, possono affiorare le parole” (One must make silence within oneself. In that silence, in that void, words may come to the surface) [ibidem, p. 122].

Since writing Nonostante Platone, Cavarero has distanced herself from the Diotima community, and her own thinking has become much more solitary and concentrated, yet the notion of a “discourse of birth” in her work — elaborated in a silent dialogue with Hannah Arendt — has be-come stronger and closer to the core of Tarozzi’s poetic vision. According to Cavarero, inherent in the “discourse of birth,” is a relational rather than individual and autonomous concept of the self. In the moment of birth one “comes to the light,” as the Italian phrase suggestively says, in the presence of and through the body of the (m)other, whereas, as the saying goes, one always dies alone. In the discourse of birth, the self and her discourse are constructed and develop always through the other, but the relationship between the two is one of creation, not alienation. Tarozzi, although she humbly shuns calling them so, has found in Antonia Pozzi, Cristina Campo and (through Campo) Simone Weil, so many (m)others — difficult, reticent and poor mothers to be sure — and through a silent, primarily agonistic dialogue with the meager, impoverished, almost starved body of their work, she has been constructing her own poetic self.

lucia re

1 Partire da in the Italian title has a double meaning that encompasses both the English “starting from” and “departing from” or “leaving behind,” thus indicating simultaneously a point of origin and a separation. (All translations in the text are mine unless otherwise noted). 2 bianca tarozzi, “Metafore del sé in poesia,” in Diotima, La sapienza del partire da sé, Naples: Liguori, 1996, pp. 119-133.3 As articulated in the essays collected in the same volume with Tarozzi’s lecture by the leader of Diotima, Luisa Muraro, and by one of its principal exponents, Diana Sartori, the experiential and relational self promoted by the community is a development of the practices of Italian femininist groups from the late 1960s on. Diotima’s feminist vision of the self is anti-individualistic and it aims to offer a critique as well as an antidote to the phallogocentric subject of Western metaphysics and to what Diotima’s members perceive to be its postmodern and postructuralist bankruptcy. American identity politics and the notion of identity entailed by it are also targets of Diotima’s critique. Diotima’s feminist practice

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of the relational self is loosely inspired by the work of Hannah Arendt and it is posited by Muraro in opposition to “alienation” that, in Muraro’s polemic refusal of the Hegelian, psychoanalytic and particularly the Lacanian visions, no longer constitutes the inevitable condition for the coming into being of the individual subject. Muraro also denounces the apologists of postmodern subjectivity, and the notion of an “errant,” multiple, fragmentary, dispersed and nomadic identity (luisa muraro, “Partire da sé,” in Diotima. La sapienza del partire da sé, pp. 20-21). In her essay, Sartori clarifies that the relational self pursued by Diotima is in opposition to all myths of the self’s autonomy and “depth” as well as to the notion of interiority, all of which in her view are false constructs of a once hegemonic and now bankrupt masculine worldview and philosophy. She postulates instead an “exteriority” of the self, where the self itself is constituted and revealed at once through language and action in the very process of “la sua relazione con gli altri” (diana sartori, in Diotima. La sapienza del partire da sé, pp. 46-47).4 The poem appears on p. 121 of Tarozzi’s essay, “Metafore del sé in poesia.” Tarozzi has published two volumes of poetry: Nessuno vince il leone, Venice: Arsenale, 1988, and La buranella, Venice: Marsilio Editore, 1996.5 On the image of women writers as thieves, see the classic essay by alicia ostriKer, “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking,” in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter, New York: Pantheon Books, 1985, pp. 314-88.6 See margherita Pieracci harWell, “Il sapore massimo di ogni parola,” in cristina camPo, La tigre assenza, Milan: Adelphi, 1997 [1991], p. 284.7 The key text to understand the origin of Diotima’s maternalist discourse is luisa muraro, L’ordine simbolico della madre, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1991. For the concept of maternal authority in Diotima, see Diotima, Il cielo stellato dentro di noi. L’ordine simbolico della madre, Milan: La Tartaruga, 1992, and especially Oltre l’uguaglianza, Naples: Liguori, 1995. Cfr. my “Feminist Thought in Italy: Sexual Difference and the Question of Authority,” in Michigan Romance Studies, XVI (1996): 61-86. 8 The relationship between Pozzi and Sereni is documented in antonia Pozzi & vittorio sereni, La giovinezza che non trova scampo. Poesie e lettere, ed. Alessandra Cenni, Milan: Libri Scheiwiller, 1995.9 Diari, eds. Onorina Dino and Alessandra Cenni, Milan: Libri Scheiwiller, 1988, p. 47 (October 17, 1935).10 “Funerale senza tristezza” in Parole, Milan: Garzanti, 1989, p. 164.11 See especially the entry in her journal dated February 4, 1935, where she talks about her own “orribili versi” and the need to pretend that they have some value in order to show them to her mentor, antonio banFi, Diari, pp. 39-40.12 For the image of resurrection in relation to women’s poetry, see Adrienne Rich’s influential “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (1971) in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978, New York: Norton, 1979.13 adriana cavarero, “Dire la nascita” in Diotima, Mettere al mondo il mondo, Milan: La Tartaruga, 1990. 14 The dead woman — from Beatrice to Eurydice to Ophelia to endless others — is in fact the most eloquent icon of this discourse that both obliterates and silences woman and all that woman “stands for,” including the deprecable fact of being born of woman and of having, of being, body.15 See my “Mythic Revisionism: Women Poets and Philosophers in Italy Today” in Italian Women Writers from the Renaissance to the Present: Revising the Canon, ed. Maria Ornella

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Marotti, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, pp. 202-206.16 Nessuno vince il leone, pp. 20-21.

note cards✥

schede

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note cards / schede ❄

alberto bertoni’s latest book of poems is Il catalogo è questo (poesie 1978-2000), San Lazzaro, Parma: Il Cavaliere Azzurro, 2000.

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Paolo euron’s books include: Nostalgia dei luoghi non vissuti (Torino: Lighea, 1994), Diario in seconda persona (Torino: Lighea, 1997), Canta i giardini, cuore, che non conosci. Paesaggio e romanticismo (Torino: Stampatori, 2000), L’artificio dell’eternità. Il primo romanticismo tedesco e la poetica della modernità (Bologna: Pendragon, 2001).

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letizia lanza’s books include: Archestrato, il cuoco degli dei, introduzi-one di C. D’Altilia, illustrazioni di M. Vulcanescu, Abano: Piovan Editore, 1988; Sofocle. Problemi di tradizione indiretta, coautore L. Fort, premessa di M. Geymonat, Padova: Editoriale Programma, 1991; Ritorno ad Omero. Con due appendici sulla poesia africana, Venezia: Supernova, 1994; Scritti di donna, Venezia: Supernova, 1995; Il gioco della parola (1987-1995), Venezia: Supernova, 1995; Eidola. Immagini dal fare poetico, Venezia: Supernova, 1996; Scripta selecta. Da oggi a oggi, Venezia: Supernova, 1997; Vipere e demòni. Stereotipi femminili dell’antica Grecia, Venezia: Supernova, 1997.

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ernesto livorni’s book of poems, L’America dei padri, is scheduled for publication by Oedipus Edizioni, Salerno.

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roberta de monticelli is professor of Modern and Contemporary Phi-losophy at the University of Genova. Her philosophical books include: Dottrine dell’intelligenza, Introduction by M. Dummett, Bari: De Donato, 1982; Il richiamo della persuasione, Genova: Marietti, 1988; L’ascesi filosofica, Milano: Feltrinelli, 1995; La conoscenza personale, Milano: Guerini, 1998, L’avenir de la phénoménologie, Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1999; La persona – apparenza e realtà, Milano: Cortina, 2000. Her literary publications include: Le preghiere di Ariele, Milano: Garzanti, 1992 ; Dal vivo, Milano: Rizzoli, 2001.

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NOTE CARDS / SCHEDE

michael Palma’s poetry publications include The Egg Shape, Antibodies, and A Fortune in Gold. He has published translations of Guido Gozzano, Diego Valeri, Sergio Corazzini, Armando Piatti, and Luigi Fontanella. Forthcoming volumes include translations of Franco Buffoni and Paolo Valesio, and a terza-rima version of Dante’s Inferno, to be published by Norton in January 2002.

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lucia re is Professor of modern Italian literature and culture at UCLA. Her books include: Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990 and Gender and the Avant-Garde in Italy, Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming.

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graziella sidoli, editor-in-chief of the cultural journal PolyText in New York, is currently working on the short stories by Filippo Tommaso Marin-tetti.

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ann snodgrass’s book Knowing Noise: The English Poems of Amelia Rosselli, is forthcoming with Peter Lang Publisher.

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luca somigli’s publications include a monograph on Wyndham Lewis (Per una satira modernista, Firenze: Cadmo, 1995). He is currently editing a volume on Italian modernism with Mario Moroni.

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bianca grazia tarozzi’s monographs include: Il nudo artificio. Una let-tura dei sonetti di Robert Lowell, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1981; La forma vincente. I romanzi di Jean Rhys, Venezia: Arsenale, 1984; Un magnanimo arrendersi alla vita. George Sand vista da Henry James, Venezia: Arsenale, 1992; Storia della letteratura americana, coautori G. Fink, M. Maffi, F. Minganti, Milano: Sansoni, 1994. She has translated: e. bishoP, Dai libri di geografia, Caltanissetta-Roma: Salvatore Sciascia, 1993; e. dicKinson, La bambina cattiva. Settanta poesie, Venezia: Marsilio, 1997. Her literary publications include: Nessuno vince il leone. Variazioni e racconti in versi, Venezia: Arsenale, 1988; La buranella, Venezia: Marsilio, 1996; Smemora-ta, Valmadrera: Flussi, 1998; Anch’io vissi in Arcadia (Storie molto brevi), Venezia: Supernova, 1996.

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Paolo valesio’s book of poems Piazza delle preghiere massacrate (1999)

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has been made into a bilingual drama performance with dance and music, directed by Paola Bellu, and presented at the “Teatro del Fontanone” on the Gianicolo hill in Rome for nine consecutive nights (June 29-July 7, 2001).

Printed by Yale University’s Reprographic Imaging Services,

New Haven, CT, U.S.A.July 2001

"quaternio: four questions on poetry". quaderni di yip (2001), edited by amerigo fabbri,...

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