Italian Poetry Review
Department of Italian
xii, 2017
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
SocietĂ
Editrice Fiorentina
italian poetry review Flaming in the phoenix’ sight William Shakespeare
This issue of «Italian Poetry Review» is dedicated to Francesco Leonetti (1924-2017) and Mario Lunetta (1934-2017): two distinguished intellectuals – poets, essayists and narrators – passionate about writing and ideology.
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italian poetry review ISSN: 1557-5012 / ISSN (Online): 2035-4657
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Columbia University Department of Italian
The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America
Centro Studi Sara Valesio Fordham University Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
Italian Poetry Review
Plurilingual Journal of Creativity and Criticism
volume xii, 2017
SocietĂ
Editrice Fiorentina
Editor in Chief / direttore responsabile Paolo Valesio, Professor Emeritus, Columbia University Associate Editor / condirettore Alessandro Polcri, Fordham University chief Managing Editor / caporedattore Steve Baker, Columbia University Managing Editors / comitato di redazione Patrizio Ceccagnoli, University of Kansas Amelia Moser, Italian Poetry Review Graziella Sidoli, Advisory Board, Centro Studi Sara Valesio
For contributors / per i collaboratori
Italian Poetry Review is an international doubleblind peer-reviewed journal and is a ‘Class A’ Journal for Contemporary Italian Literature, according to the ANVUR classification (Agenzia Nazionale di Valutazione del Sistema Universitario e della Ricerca). Those who are interested in proposing material for publication in «Italian Poetry Review» should send their texts to the following address: «Italian Poetry Review» è una rivista internazionale double-blind peer-reviewed ed è una rivista di classe A per l’Area 10 settore F2 - Letteratura italiana contemporanea - classificazione ANVUR (Agenzia Nazionale di Valutazione del Sistema Universitario e della Ricerca). Tutti coloro che sono interessati a collaborare con «Italian Poetry Review» possono inviare i loro contributi a: Italian Poetry Review c/o The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America Columbia University - 1161 Amsterdam Avenue New York, NY 10027 - USA email: italianpoetry@columbia.edu
Advisory Board / comitato scientifico Teodolinda Barolini, Columbia University Susanna Barsella, Fordham University Francesco Bausi, Università della Calabria Alberto Bertoni, Università di Bologna Luigi Bonaffini, Brooklyn College, City University of New York Francesca Cadel, University of Calgary Peter Carravetta, State University of New York at Stony Brook Alessandro Carrera, University of Houston Nicola Crocetti, Editor of «Poesia», Milan Alfredo De Palchi, Publisher of Chelsea Editions, New York Giuseppe Episcopo, University of Edinburgh Amerigo Fabbri, Yale University Fabio Finotti, University of Pennsylvania David Freedberg, Director, The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America Giuseppe Gazzola, State University of New York at Stony Brook Paolo Lagazzi, Literary Critic and Essayist, Milan Giuseppe Leporace, University of Washington Ernesto Livorni, University of Wisconsin Simone Magherini, Università di Firenze Raffaele Milani, Università di Bologna Mario Moroni, Binghamton University Francesca Parmeggiani, Fordham University Joseph Perricone, Fordham University Davide Rondoni, Vice-President, Centro di Poesia Contemporanea, Università di Bologna Massimo Scalabrini, Indiana University Victoria Surliuga, Texas Tech University Jane Tylus, Yale University Alessandro Vettori, Rutgers University
Columbia University department of Italian & The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America 1161 Amsterdam Avenue New York, NY 10027 usa tel. (212) 854-7396 / fax (212) 854-5306
Italian Poetry Review Vol. xII 2017
Contents / Indice
crestomazia minima 9 testimonianze / Testimonials Adam Vaccaro, Mario Lunetta e le sue ricchezze 23 Adam Vaccaro, Brevi memorie di Francesco Leonetti 27 poems / poesie Cristina Annino, Poesie 33 Alessandra Paganardi, Poems from the unpublished collection «Il resto della vita» 43 Franca Mancinelli, Alla polvere dell’aria 49 Bernardo Pacini, Decamerone americano 55 Daniele Gigli, Di odore e di generazione 61 Giorgio Linguaglossa, da «Il tedio di Dio» 67 Guglielmo Aprile, Poesie 79 «La fatica di esporsi al mondo». Venanzio Agostino Reali’s “American” poems and letters (1969-1972) / «La fatica di esporsi al mondo». Poesie e lettere “Americane” (1969-1972) di Venanzio Agostino Reali Le quattro poesie ritrovate su «Mundus Artium», 1971 translated by Dora Pettinella 88 Laura Rita Feola, Su «Mundus Artium», una nota sulle traduzioni di Dora Pettinella 93 Anna Maria Tamburini, Le poesie di Agostino Venanzio Reali per «Mundus Artium» 97 Venanzio Agostino Reali, Le lettere (1961-1972) a cura di Flavio Gianessi 107
TRanslations / Traduzioni Dante Alighieri, Inferno, canti xviii, xix, xxvi translated by José María Micó 127 Graziella Olga Sidoli, Nota a De “erratica” 139 Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, De “errática” 10 poemas translated by Graziella Olga Sidoli 142 Todd Portnowitz, Poems translated by Todd Portnowitz and Simone Burratti 156 Tobias Roth, Poesie translated by Antonello Borra 166 Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband. A fictional essay in 29 tangos translated by Patrizio Ceccagnoli 182 Silvio Bolaño Robledo, Al paso de Vanni Bianconi 193 Vanni Bianconi, Poesie translated by Silvio Bolaño Robledo 198 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Madrigali a Dio translated by Steven Baker 208 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Forza del Passato translated by Steven Baker 214 Between Prose and Poetry / Tra prosa e poesia Alberto Giordani, Trait d’union 219 Francesco Acquabona, La follia di Giovanni 233 Piero Sanavio, Il tempo e il luogo (Terre lontane) 255 Roberto Morpurgo, Filo a torcere. Una voce per il pensiero 267 Poetology and Criticism / Poetologia e Critica Alberto Comparini, Clizia in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Montale, «Satura» and «L’angelo nero» 281 Caterina Verbaro, Il tempo che duole. La poesia di Renato Nisticò 301 Giuseppe Andrea Liberti, «La ragazza Carla» di Elio Pagliarani tra esecuzione e metrica 317 Nicolò Massucco, «Ti presterò una voce per il buio»: «Bocksten» e il colloquio con i morti 333 Francesco Diaco, Le venature del verbo. Teoria della letteratura e poetica in Valerio Magrelli 351 the “terminal realism” dossier / dossier realismo terminale Guido Oldani, La frattura del Realismo Terminale 397 Giuseppe Langella, Gli specchi ustorii delle metropoli 399 Paolo Lagazzi, Gli oggetti e l’anima. In dialogo con Guido Oldani 405 Massimo Silvotti, Per un Manifesto di Pittura del Realismo Terminale 409
review-articles / recensioni-saggi Alessandra Paganardi, Paolo Valesio, Il servo rosso. Poesie scelte 1979-2002 / The Red Servant. Selected Poems 1979-2002 413 Alessandro Ramberti, Il verso del servo (di Dio) 419 reviews/recensioni A Companion to Vittoria Colonna, edited by Abigail Brundin, Tatiana Crivelli, and Maria Serena Sapegno (Cristina Iannarino) Poeti cristiani latini dei primi secoli, a cura di Vincenzo Guarracino (Serena Scionti) Giampiero Neri, Via Provinciale (Donatella Bisutti) Francesca Serragnoli, Aprile di là (Elio Grasso) Alberto Pellegatta, Ipotesi di felicità (Elio Grasso) Giovanna Frene, Tecnica di sopravvivenza per l’Occidente che affonda (Anna Maria Curci) Angela Barnaba, Sospesi tra infiniti (Massimo Colella) Silvia Rizzo, Orchidee dell’Amiata (Franca Alaimo)
425 431 433 438 440 441 445 449
Books Received / Libri Ricevuti 451 Note Cards / Schede 455
Crestomazia minima passages selected by Paolo Valesio
• Non ho letto neanche un quarto di quello che vorrei riuscire a leggere prima di morire. Questo, suppongo, mi porterà a considerare la possibilità di non aver vissuto che un terzo di quanto avrei sperato. C’è poco da rilassarsi From an interview by Emanuela D’Alessio to the young novelist Luciano Funetta, in the blog «Via dei serpenti», February 3, 2016 • I didn’t want to get into an argument about it and tell her all I could’ve done and didn’t do. Because it wouldn’t have done any good. When you get to the point of arguing, you’re past the point of changing anybody’s mind, even though it’s supposed to be the other way, and maybe for some classes of people it is, just never mine The main character in the short story Rock Springs, by Richard Ford, is speaking • I think I’m a good joke writer. I’m also very scared that the last joke I write is the last joke I’ll ever write [...] You don’t want to say what people want you to say. You want to say what people didn’t know they wanted to say The stand-up comedian Michelle Wolf, in an interview appearing in «The New York Times», April 26, 2018 • I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could
be sure of going on the next day [...] It was a very simple story called “Out of Season” and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood [...] They say that the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure [...] For a long time, when he [Francis Scott Fitzgerald] would ask me to tell him something absolutely truly, which is very difficult to do, and I would try it, the thing that I would say would make him angry; often not when I said it but afterwards, and sometimes long afterwards when he had brooded on it and it would be something that would have to be destroyed and sometimes, if possible, me with it [...] The blue-baked notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful), the marbletopped tables, the smell of cafés crèmes, the smell of early morning sweeping out and mopping and luck were all you needed. For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit’s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit’s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew that your luck was still there [...] The good, the attractive, the charming, the soon-beloved, the generous, the understanding rich who have no bad qualities and who give each day the quality of a festival and who, when they have passed
10 crestomazia minima and taken the nourishment they needed, leave anything deader than the roots of any grass Attila’s horses’ hooves have ever scoured [...] Nothing is ever lost no matter how it seems at the time and what is left out will always show and make the strength of what is left in. Some say that in writing you can never possess anything until you have given it away or, if you are in a hurry, you may have to throw it away. In much later time than these stories of Paris you may not have it ever until you state it in fiction and then you may have to throw it away or it will be stolen again [...] But there are remises or storage places where you may leave or store certain things such as a locker trunk or a duffel bag containing personal effects or the unpublished poems of Evan Shipman or marked maps or even weapons there was no time to turn over to the proper authorities and this book contains material from the remises of my memory and my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist [...] This book is fiction and many things have been changed in fact to try to make it a picture of a true time. There is no formula to explain why this book is fiction nor will it be effective [...] If, in your time, you have ever heard four honest people disagree about what happened at a certain place at a certain time, or you have ever torn up and returned orders that you requested when a situation had reached such a point that it seemed necessary to have something in writing, or testified before an inspector general when allegations have been made, presenting new statements by others that replaced your written orders and your verbal orders, you, remembering certain things and how they were to you and who had fought and where, you prefer to write about any time as fiction From the “novel” A Moveable Feast [The Restored Edition], by Ernest Hemingway. [In certain bookstores, A Moveable Feast is found in the shelves dedicated to “Literary Non-Fiction”; this explains the quotes around the word “novel” – PV] • Straight ahead, through large casement windows, came that expansive view of downtown Manhattan, what the real-estate
agent had called the money shot: building upon building, in stacks and layers, die-cut against blue. It was like living in a life-sized diorama. Everything vanished toward that nasty piece of negative space known as the Freedom Tower, with its harem of fresh construction, which Michael would always regard as brand new and ridiculous – the ridiculous name, the ridiculous height, the ridiculous symbolism. So paranoid, so desperate for meaning The view from the apartment of the protagonist of the short story Underground by David Gilbert, in «The New Yorker», February 6, 2017 • I attended the poet Monica Hand’s homegoing service recently and was grateful and humbled by how fully she lived her life and her dream of becoming a poet. Every time I attend a service and say goodbye to someone, I contemplate what living a life amounts to, especially if that person departed suddenly. I’m overwhelmed by the thought of billions of people caught up in a moment, and I obsess over how many people stay caught up in life instead of truly living their dream – I question that Commentary by Roberto Carlos García on his own poem, This Moment / Right Now (sent by the «Poem-a-Day» program), which begins: “There’s a whispered prayer blowing / the crumbs of a season’s harvest / off a girl’s plate” • [...] l’escluso, introdotto nella poesia come la dissonanza nella musica di Schönberg [Arnold Schönberg, Austrian composer (1874-1951)] o il rumore in quella di Edgar Varèse [French composer (1883-1965)]. L’escluso è insieme il ‘più basso’ e il ‘più alto’, ma non nel senso della qualità poetica, o almeno non direttamente, come non lo è, per un compositore, nel senso della qualità musicale: l’esigenza è quella etica – in un senso gnostico per Villa [Emilio Villa, Italian poet (1916-2003)], mistico per Schönberg (che dal suo dio personale diceva di ricevere, come Abramo, l’ordine di fare il brutto perché ne
Crestomazia minima
crestomazia minima 11 derivasse il divino) – di riscattare il diabolico, al quale il poeta non può rinunciare per fedeltà alla pratica della disarmonia e della dissacrazione in progress. I corpo a corpo con il linguaggio di Heidegger e del poeta hanno luogo su due piani che, solidali nel proporsi di uscire dal labirinto del linguaggio simbolico, si intersecano più volte restando diversi, perché il primo tende a pensare la poesia, mentre il secondo, che la vuole fare, non può sottrarsi al compito di misurarsi con quanto viene considerato indegno di espressione artistica (come certe espressioni dialettali, le filastrocche infantili e i deliri ecolalici), con il risultato che tra i due si instaura lo stesso rapporto di conflittualità, sotterranea ma riaffiorante, che aveva opposto Pound, e poi lo stesso Villa, a Croce Aldo Tagliaferri, in his postface to Emilio Villa, L’opera poetica • As if any man really knew aught my life, why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life, only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections I seek for my own use to trace out here Walt Whitman, from the poem When I Read the Book • I got up the courage to ask her why her face always looked so blank. She told me that she didn’t know what expression to use, because she didn’t understand other people. I asked her why not, and she said that she always had this feeling of living someone else’s life, and that people seemed way outside her somehow. Apart. I asked her who the other person might be, the one living her life for her, and she explained that she didn’t know how she knew, but it was someone her same age and female, but she didn’t know her name From the short story Tiny Man by Sam Shepard, in «The New Yorker», December 5, 2016 •
Italian Poetry Review, xii, 2017
And the balancing of opposites, the rhythm of assertion and counter-assertion, the sudden questioning turns [.] the springy, self-surprised beat [.] the turn-on-a-dime movement, the interjections, the tone of a man talking to himself and being startled by what his self says back [...] present now in the things he feels and the way he sounds, and that is like a complete human being. He’s funny, he’s touching, he’s strange, he’s inconclusive. Ironic self-mockery, muted egotism, a knowledge of one’s own absurdity that doesn’t diminish the importance of one’s witness, a determinedly antiheroic stance that remains clearly ethical – all these effects and sounds of the essayist are first heard here. We imitate the sound without even knowing its source. Good critics and scholars can teach us how to listen. Only writers show us how to speak – even when they tell us that it is best to whisper Adam Gopnik on the Essays by Michel De Montaigne, from a book review in «The New Yorker», January 16, 2017 • «Happiness» may be understood in prosaic and philosophic senses: as referring to a moment of experience or the entirety of a life; as referring to a psychological state of mind, relating to pleasurable emotions, as well as referring to a life regarded as going well, flourishing, for the individual leading it, and as such, a prudential value judgement of ultimate goods. Is one’s contentedness with one’s life the sole measure of a life going well? Is the pleasure one gets good or is one’s getting it the thing that makes it good (in other words, is it good for oneself because it seems good to oneself )? How does one’s happiness comport with the welfare of others? Are some pleasures more valuable than others? Is happiness necessary for a good life? From the description of a roundtable on September 24, 2016 at The Helix Center for Interdiscplinary Investigation in New York City • La disgrazia delle persone solitarie e timide – timide per eccesso di amor proprio – consiste proprio nel fatto che, pur dotate di occhi
12 crestomazia minima e pur sgranandoli, non vedono nulla oppure vedono tutto sotto una falsa luce, come attraverso lenti colorate. Sono i loro stessi pensieri e le loro stesse osservazioni a fungere da ostacolo a ogni passo [...] Quando le sofferenze arrivano a un punto tale che tutto il vostro essere, dentro, cigola e scricchia come un carretto stracarico, esse dovrebbero smettere di apparire ridicole – E invece no! Il riso non soltanto accompagna le lacrime fino all’ultimo, fino alla consunzione, fino all’impossibilità di versarne ancora: macché! Esso risuona ed echeggia là dove la lingua ammutolisce e muore il lamento [...] Volevo scrivere un diario e, invece, cosa ho fatto? Ho raccontato una cosa che mi è successa. Ho straparlato e i ricordi sopiti, risvegliatisi, mi hanno portato via con sé. Ho scritto senza fretta, scendendo nei dettagli, come se avessi anni davanti; ma ecco che adesso non c’è più tempo per continuare [...] Ah, se il mio pensiero potesse posarsi su ogni ricordo, così come i miei occhi si posano su ogni oggetto della mia stanza! So che questi ricordi non sono allegri né importanti, ma altri non ne ho! From the short story Diario di un uomo superfluo by Ivan Turgenev (trans. Alessandro Niero) • I thought a great deal about my future as a writer – the fact that I’m so much out of touch with «average American life». Does this matter? When one sees Carson [McCullers], or even Tennessee [Williams], one wonders, «How far out of touch can you be?». And yet they function triumphantly. No. Every body has something to write about. The problem is: Find it From the March 10, 1955 entry of the Diaries, 1939-1960 by Christopher Isherwood • Domanda: Lo spettacolo è fatto a sketch o c’è un filo unitario? Risposta: Non sono sketch ma frammenti. Secondo Cioran nel frammento è più difficile mentire. La menzogna là attecchisce meno che nelle narrazioni distese o nel teatro civile: c’è meno tempo di imbrogliare la matassa
[...] Domanda: Mirate a provocare? Risposta: No. Quello che facciamo è legato al gioco. Cerchiamo di divertirci fino alla libidine, in modo rigoroso, monacale The comedian Antonio Rezza on his latest show, in an interview with Massimo Marino in «Corriere di Bologna», January 25, 2017. [Emil Cioran (1911-1995): Rumanian philosophical essayist and aphorist, who wrote mostly in French] • Mark [a poet who has received an e-mail inviting him to sign a «poetition»] tried to organize his thoughts. His first point, of course, was that the very idea of a poem as petition was misconceived. A poem was first and last a Ding an sich. It definitely wasn’t a message that boiled down to a single political-humanitarian demand. It made no sense for an agreeing multitude, or mob, to undersign a poem: you could no more agree with a poem than with a tree, not even if you’d written it. Of course, the signers of the petition would argue that they were associating themselves with the text’s petitionary substance and not with its formal properties; and that in any case poetry is a sword of lightning that consumes its scabbard. But, accepting all that, Mark mentally counterclaimed, why not just have a petition in the form of a petition? Why drag the poem into the muck? Well, the undersigned might reply, a versified petition was likely to attract more attention and be more consequential than the alternative. To which Mark would answer, The good of poetry resides not in the – He began to feel a familiar dialectical dizziness From the short story Pardon Edward Snowden, by Joseph O’neill, in «The New Yorker», December 12, 2016 • Charlotte Et voici ces vers d’Ossian que vous aviez commencé de traduire Werther (prenant le manuscrit) Traduire – Ah! bien souvent mon rêve s’envola [...]
Crestomazia minima
crestomazia minima 13 Toute mon âme est là! From the libretto (by E. Blau, P. Milliet and G. Hartmann) of the opera Werther by Jules Massenet • One morning, in a strange city for a conference, I went out for a walk to get coffee and a man followed me and threatened to kill me. Back at the hotel, shaken and trying to catch my breath, I saw a stranger who I had met the night before who had been very kind and I went to sit beside him, drawn to some kind of shelter. We developed a friendship and correspondence, which led to many of the poems in Thrust about how we encounter others authentically, how we long to know one another and be known, and how we find the courage to remain open in spite of the danger and risk Self-commentary by Heather Derr-Smith to her poem «American Ready Cut System Houses» from her book Thrust • A Bologna continua a esserci una qualità della vita molto alta e c’è una dimensione in cui tutto è a portata di mano, cosa che a volte può essere anche un limite. Dico spesso che è la più grossa delle città di provincia d’Italia
Quando, nel cinema, si monta un’immagine insieme a un’altra, nella mente si ottiene una terza immagine diversa: una sensazione, un’idea. Io penso che l’ambiente che si crea è una cosa, e che questo riguardi la fotografia. Ma è nel congiungersi delle immagini che il film ci cattura e ci parla. È l’editing, ed è l’azione del fare cinema Martin Scorsese on his film Silence, from an abstract (published in «Corriere della Sera», 12/9/16) of the long interview with Antonio Spadaro in the journal «Civiltà Cattolica» • One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine-trees crusted with snow; and have been cold a long time to behold the junipers shagged with ice, the spruces rough in the distant glitter. From «The Snow Man» by Wallace Stevens, as printed in an old postcard with «Season’s Greetings» by the Academy of American Poets •
•
– Alla mia età è facile trasformare un sospetto in un’ipotesi fondata, un’ipotesi fondata in una certezza assoluta, una certezza assoluta in un’ossessione [...] Appena ti sforzi di dire con chiarezza una cosa, ti accorgi che è chiara solo perché l’hai semplificata [...] “Ti ricordi, almeno, di quando gli hai detto dei lacci?” [says the brother] “Lacci?” [the sister is thinking]
I don’t want realism. I want magic. Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!
Mio fratello è fatto così, gli piace prendere un dettaglio qualsiasi e ricamarci sopra. Per questa sua chiacchiera è molto amato dalle donne, prima le diverte e poi trasforma tutto in melodramma
Blanche DuBois, in the play A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (emphasis in the original)
Statements by some characters (the first belongs to a man in his seventies) in the novel by Domenico Starnone, Lacci
Daniele Rielli, journalist and narrator, on the eve of his moving from Bologna to Rome, in an interview with the «Corriere di Bologna», December 6, 2016
•
•
Ci sono certe cose intangibili che le parole, semplicemente, non possono esprimere.
Violenza, e violenza fisica, non è soltanto colpire nel corpo l’essere umano, ma nello
Italian Poetry Review, xii, 2017
14 crestomazia minima spirito, privandolo dei suoi diritti, bersagliandolo con notizie false e tendenziose, pian piano toglierli la facoltà di pensare, dunque modificando la sua stessa natura Marco Pannella in a 1975 «Playboy» interview reprinted in «Il Foglio», May 23, 2016 • Nella tradizione ebraica, il dybbuk è lo spirito di una persona morta prematuramente che ci abita, per portare a termine la propria missione. Penso che il dybbuk sia una metafora della poesia The poet Ewa Chrusciel, in an interview for «ilsussidiario.net», June 9, 2016 • When I compose it’s an inner discipline that controls me. No concerts, rehearsals, interviews! It’s another way of living and I prefer it in a way. If you want to skip dinner and work all night, sleep all day, you just do it... it’s another person that emerges, more absorbed in an interior world. But it’s hard to make the transition between the two lives [conducting and composing], and to clear everybody else’s music out of your head to make room for your own. Leonard Bernstein (interview with Judith Karp, September, 1979) • Or, comme il n’était entré personne ce jour-là, j’en conclus que M. O’Donovan parlait tout seul, et je l’écoutai. Il parlait trop bas pour que je pusse saisir tout ce qu’il disait, mas à en juger d’après le ton dont il prononçait certaines phrases, je compris qu’il se reprochait avec beaucoup d’amertume quelque faute qu’il avait commise. Je remarquai qu’il ne bougeait pas de l’endroit où il était, ce qui n’est pas l’ordinaire des personnes qui parlent seules. N’est-il pas vrai qu’elles aiment à se promener de long en large, tout en monologuant? From the fantastic tale by Julien Green, Le voyageur sur la terre
• Certains hommes ont la faculté de pouvoir s’installer partout et de telle sorte qu’ils semblent s’y être établis pour toujours. Comment s’y prennent-ils? C’est leur secret. Il leur suffit de déplacer quelques objets, de changer la position d’un meuble pour que, d’une manière inexplicable, la chambre d’hôtel où ils ne passeront qu’une nuit ait l’air de leur appartenir depuis longtemps et d’être pour eux une demeure qu’ils ne quitteront jamais. Sans doute y a–t-il en eux quelque chose qui s’oppose à l’idée de changement et qui tend à donner à ce qui les entoure un aspect en quelque sorte définitif [...] ses yeux avaient l’expression hardie des myopes qui ne doutent pas que tout le monde soit au courant de leur infirmité et de l’obligation où ils se trouvent de fixer les gens pour bien les voir. Quelquefois, cependant, il passait quelque chose sur son visage, mais cela état trop rapide pour que le capitaine songeât à le remarquer. É tait-ce l’effet d’un malaise subit? Tout à coup, les sourcils s’abaissaient et les prunelles s’embuaient, semblaient s’agrandir. Un horrible désespoir se répandait sur ses traits, hésitait un instant, puis disparaissait presque aussitôt dans une crispation From the fantastic tale by Julien Green, Leviathan ou la traversée inutile • Style can be moved away from problems of introspection and self-awareness by redirecting the age-old discussion into a more public arena where the contrast with custom allows insight into the ontology of human activity in general. This can be accomplished when style as a phenomenon that cuts across disciplinary boundaries is viewed tropologically as a fundamentally cognitive category. A global theory of style entails arguing more closely for the concept of style as a trope of meaning; and demonstrating how stylistic analysis can reveal itself not just as a compendium of traditionally taxonomized information but as the means whereby individual manifestations of style, their structural coherences, and their mirroring of signification can be identified and evaluated From the abstract of a lecture by Michael Shapiro at Columbia University, January 27, 2016
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crestomazia minima 15 • Di colpo le venne in mente che anche lei – come tutto ciò che la circondava – era prigioniera del suo proprio essere e viveva legata sempre a un dato posto, in una data città, in un appartamento e nella stessa coscienza di sé, anno per anno in quel luogo minuscolo, e allora le sembrò che anche la sua felicità, se si fermava ad attendere per un attimo solo, potesse fuggir via come quel mucchio di cose schiamazzanti [...] Ma gradualmente, sotto il peso di quell’immane mistero, il suo spirito cominciò a vergognarsi delle sue proteste e delle sue prepotenze e le sembrò che si fermasse a riflettere; lo invase pian piano quella finissima, estrema, passiva forza della debolezza e lo ridusse più sottile e più esile di un bambino e più morbido di un foglio di seta ingiallita From the short story Il compimento dell’amore, by Robert Musil, translated from the German by Anita Rho • Ma mère a dit: «Bon», et elles sont revenue l’une vers l’autre, elles ont replié le drap. Je vois tout cela de l’endroit où je me tiens, comme je le vois depuis mon enfance, tous les jeudis, et cette scène m’est si familière que je ne sais comment dire l’effet qu’elle produit sur moi aujourd’hui. Il en est ainsi de certaines choses que l’on a observées avec attention bien de fois. Après avoir paru simples et naturelles pendant des années, il arrive un jour, un moment entre tous, où ces mêmes choses prennent un aspect extraordinaire, sans doute parce qu’elles se sont produites si souvent. Elles ne sont plus naturelles, mais brusquement deviennent étranges et presque fantastiques From the fantastic tale by Julien Green, Les clefs de la mort • He [Jim Jarmusch, with the movie Paterson] is making the effort, which few movies have even attempted, to dramatize the act of poetic composition, to suggest what manner of struggle, or reverie, or self-surrender, is entailed. I don’t think his plan succeeds (nor
Italian Poetry Review, xii, 2017
can I really imagine what success would look like), but he boosts his cause [...] this movie has almost no bite but plenty of moseying charm, and what it does get right is the idea of poets as perpetual magpies. They pick up scraps of talk and offcuts of sensation, with which to feather the nests of their lyrical work. Nothing goes to waste [...] Neruda [the film by Pablo Larrain], with its jumpy shifts of scene, its doses of casual surrealism, and its mashing of high politics against low farce, struck me as more of a poem. It reminds us that movies, by their very nature, owe far more to poetry than they ever will to the novel. The story is only the start Anthony Lane, in his film review for «The New Yorker», January 2, 2017 • Je me souviens que toutes les pièces paraissaient vides, tant elles étaient spacieuses, et que la voix y avait un son qu’elle n’avait pas à la ville, dans l’appartement que nous habitions à Boston. É tait-ce un écho? Elle semblait frapper les murs et l’on avait l’impression que quelqu’un à côté reprenait la fin des phrases. Je m’en amusai d’abord, puis j’en fis la remarque à ma mère qui me conseilla de ne pas y faire attention, mais j’eus l’occasion d’observer qu’elle-même parlait, ici, moins qu’elle en avait l’habitude et plus doucement [...] La beauté, même à l’âge que j’avais alors, m’a toujours ému des sentiments les plus forts et le plus divers et il en résulte une sort de combat intérieur qui fait que je passe, dans le même instant, de la joie au désir et du désir au désespoir. Ainsi je souhaite et redoute à la fois de découvrir cette beauté qui doit me tourmenter et me ravir; et je la cherche, mais c’est avec une inquiétude douloureuse et l’envie secrète de ne pas la trouver From the fantastic tale by Julien Green, Christine • Tutta la sua vita era stata una crescita equipollente di fortuna e minaccia. Non capiva se fosse un aspetto legato alla natura dei singoli uomini o a quella degli affari in generale, la cui anima sarebbe allora davvero so-
16 crestomazia minima migliata al piccolo demone che si scorge ogni tanto sulla facciata delle banche nei giorni di sole accecante [...] Bisogna ricevere del bene per separarlo da ciò che non lo è. Se nessuno te ne vuole, non saprai mai da dove cominciare. Da lì parte ogni cosa, persino l’odio [...] Era convinta che il demone lucente di Michele – la traccia che sentiamo dopo aver frequentato una persona a sufficienza perché i suoi caratteri primari si ricombinino verso noi in modo via via più complesso, fino ad avere vita propria – scintillasse in coloro che lo avevano conosciuto da ragazzo [...] Basta sapere che c’è un motivo per farlo. Dimenticare il motivo. Per un attimo lo sa. Poi non lo sa più, come se non l’avesse mai saputo. Nessuno ha più coscienza delle proprie azioni peggiori. Ci riuscivamo un tempo. Non ci riusciamo più. Soffriamo. Diamo la colpa al meccanismo. Come darla alla natura. Se non c’è scelta, non c’è nemmeno colpa. Fare una cosa in luogo di non farla. Farla From the novel Ferocia, by Nicola Lagioia • Quale può essere il metro della grandezza artistica? L’eternità della produzione? L’assoluta capacità di anticipare? La immensa potenza della sintesi? Il rendere visibili le forze segrete dell’universo? La fastidiosa testimonianza delle verità suggerite nel fondo dell’io? La famelica voracità del tutto amalgamare? O forse tutto questo insieme? O forse tutt’altro? E queste domande valgono anche per un musicista rock, scampolo culturale di un occidente a rischio di «sottomissione» (dice Houellebecq) per mancanza di interessi? From an article by Walter Gatti on the death of David Bowie, in «ilsussidiario. net», December 1, 2016 • The unknown can be aesthetic, even when it is accompanied by dire facts Brenda Hillman, commenting on her poem «Some Kinds of Forever Visit You» •
Jelly closed her eyes and leaned back again. She called this body-listening. It was when you surrendered to a piece of music or a story. By reclining and closing your eyes, you could respond without tracking your response. Some people started to speak the second the other person stopped talking or playing or singing. They were so excited to render their thoughts into speech that they practically overlapped the person. They spent the whole experience formulating their response, because their response was the only thing they valued. Jelly had a different purpose in listening to anything or anyone. It had something to do with submission, and it had something to do with sympathy From the short story Jelly and Jack by Dana Spiotta, in «The New Yorker», December 14, 2015 • Quanto v’è di male nella felicità Title of a drawing (with ink on paper, dated 1908) by Umberto Boccioni • Puldron was alive, he hadn’t choked, not completely. And, even if he had, the choking was just another corporeal encounter, the body articulating itself around the obstacle of that which choked it. It didn’t mean anything more than that. The word «express» derived from the medieval Latin «expressare», meaning to «press out» or «obtain by squeezing». The word had once been used as a term for extortion. It was possible that to cough, to choke, was the root of all speech: the urgent need to evacuate something whose internality threatened to kill you. To express yourself or be expressed by extruding words From the short story Choking Victim by Alexandra Kleeman, in «The New Yorker», May 2, 2016 • To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness, but life without meaning is the torture
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crestomazia minima 17 of restlessness and vague desire – it is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid From the poem George Gray in Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters • Well, I don’t know if I went in [to read a controversial poem] with the intention to provoke, but I understood that it would be a provocative gesture. It had a lot of power, the kind of thing that happens all the time in the art world. People behave very badly in the art world, but it’s what pushes boundaries and makes discussion [...] If all I can do is speak about what I do and what I am, all I can do is white and Jewish. I’m not willing to go down that road to restrict what I write about to what I am. That’s the end of fiction. That means a black person can’t have a white character [...] I’m still interested in strong material that may provoke. I don’t want to shy away from it. I tried. I’m an experimental artist, and I failed [in the poetry reading referred to] on a very big stage. I wanted to work with hotter material, and this was so hot it blew up in my face. I’m an avant-gardist. I want to cause trouble, but I don’t want to cause too much trouble. I want it to be playful. When this happened, I realized I had hurt people. But an artist’s right to make a mistake is much more sacred than anyone’s feelings (see the poet Kenneth Goldsmith) [...] It was a terrible mistake, and certainly in bad taste [still apropos of Goldsmith’s poem]. The larger fault, however, lay with the obsession in the poetry community with political correctness. It began with, You’re not allowed to criticize a poem by a woman. Then it was poets of color. Now a poet is an activist who writes in lines. That has nothing to do with poetry. It’s just provocation and proclamation (see the critic Marjorie Perloff ) [...] My main beef is with this idea that if I am Mexican-American I can express only that particular community. The idea that there’s this one-to-one correspondence is very dangerous (see the poet Mónica De La Torre) From the article Something Borrowed by Alec Wilkinson in «The New Yorker», October 5, 2015
Italian Poetry Review, xii, 2017
• «What could be duller than past history!» Therese said, smiling. «Maybe futures that won’t have any history» From the novel Carol (previously titled The Price of Salt), by Patricia Highsmith • For his first stand-up show in New York City, the Scottish comedian Daniel Sloss plans to begin his set with a joke that didn’t go over well in Indianapolis. The bit, touching on his atheism and aversion to religion, actually caused almost half of his audience to walk out. Yet he’s hoping to «try it again and explain what I was trying to say the first time» [...] He found himself bored and unhappy with his TV-safe material. He was drawn to darker, more nuanced standup and to the idea of «saying something I clearly don’t believe and then trying to justify it onstage», he said From an interview with Daniel Sloss in «The New York Times», February 9, 2016 • Poetry has a special way – a brilliant way – of doing anthropology. It takes the social world by the senses and processes it through the emotions. Add passing time to the mix, and you have the peculiar elegiac immediacy [...] We routinely ascribe to poets an innate capacity for insight and imaginative transport, best but not exclusively expressed by the actual poems they write From a review by Dan Chiasson on the poetry of John Wieners and John Updike, in «The New Yorker», November 2, 2015 • And how about starting a laundromat? With a community center, maybe, and nurses to help people with medical problems? There are almost no inexpensive places for people to do their wash in Manhattan anymore. Starting a laundromat is my dream Father Paul Lostritto, a Franciscan friar,
18 crestomazia minima executive director of the daily breadline program at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi in Manhattan, as quoted in «The New Yorker», January 20, 2014 • I’ve been in meetings where I can feel it slipping away, where I can feel that the ideas I’m tossing out, they’re too scary or too weird, and I can feel the thing. I can tell: It’s not going to happen, I’m not going to be able to convince them to do this the way I think it should be done. I want to jump up on the table and scream, «Do you know how lucky we are to be doing this? Do you understand that the only way to repay that karmic debt is to make something good, is to make something ambitious, something beautiful, something memorable?» But I didn’t do that. I just sat there, and I smiled From Steven Soderbergh’s keynote address at the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival • Non sempre ella leggeva riviste di moda, ma talvolta anche romanzi o vecchi o nuovi; e li leggeva, a così dire, «nel bianco», cioè in quello che lo scrittore non ci aveva messo. Facendo l’esempio (assurdo nel fatto) che leggesse I Promessi Sposi, ella disfaceva le infinite pieghe dell’episodio di Gertrude per guardarvi dentro; e, chiuso il libro, si sarebbe posta a fantasticare intorno al ménage Renzo-Lucia, alla condizione di Agnese, alla sorte dei figliuoli e a tutto quello che sarebbe potuto seguire. Oppure, leggendo il Don Chisciotte, che pur finisce col punto fermo della morte, si sarebbe tutta trasportata sui genitori e sull’infanzia e adolescenza e giovinezza del protagonista; i quali veramente sono un mistero. Il suo interesse non era quasi mai al racconto, ma sempre ai verisimili che se ne potevano congetturare From the essayistic novel Perdicca, by Leo Pestelli • Antonio: Love has an intellect that runs though all the scrutinous sciences;
and, like a cunning poet, catches a quantity of every knowledge, yet brings all home into one mystery, into one secret that he proceeds in From The Changeling, a play by Thomas Middleton • Poetic writing can be understood and misunderstood in many ways. In most cases the author is not the right authority to decide on where the reader ceases to understand and the misunderstanding begins. Many an author has found readers to whom his work seemed more lucid than it was to himself. Moreover, misunderstandings may be fruitful under certain circumstances From the «Author’s Note» by Hermann Hesse to the novel Steppenwolf • Mette su un tono ironico, accompagnato da quell’inflessione napoletana che lui è capace di modulare, di accendere e di spegnere all’occorrenza, come se pensasse che in talune occasioni non si debbano sfuggire le reminiscenze regionali poiché farlo equivarrebbe a dare alle parole un che di neutro, d’inconsistente. Così quando è ironico, lui è anche napoletano The novelist Raffaele La Capria, interviewed by Salvatore Merlo in «Il Foglio», March 11, 2016 • «Guardalo», disse Svevo, «È splendido. Lo scrivi tu un racconto su come attraversa col verde?» «Scrivilo tu», risposi, «che provi nostalgia di tutte le cose che vedi» From the short story, Sotto il sole ai Campi Elisi, by Sandro Veronesi • All that I could hope to make you understand is only events: not what has happened. And people to whom nothing has ever happened
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crestomazia minima 19 cannot understand the unimportance of events. [...] And partial observation of one’s own automatism while the slow stain sinks deeper through the skin tainting the flesh and discolouring the bones – this is what matters, but it is unspeakable, untranslatable: I talk in general terms because the particular has no language [...] And the past is about to happen, and the future has long since settled and the wings of the future darken the past, the beak and claws have desecrated history. [...] To rest in our own suffering is evasion of suffering. We must learn to suffer more
compaiono più da quando essi si sono staccati dalle gonne materne, ecco che i due lati, dove si compiono ancora volontari sforzi morali, oggi sono davvero riservati a questi cattivi Buoni e buoni Cattivi, di cui gli uni non hanno mai visto il Bene volare e cantare e perciò pretendono che tutti i loro simili s’entusiasmino con loro per un regno di natura della morale dove uccelli impagliati stanno su alberi senza vita; mentre gli altri, i buoni Cattivi, stimolati dai loro concorrenti, mettono zelantemente in mostra, almeno nei pensieri, una tendenza al male, come se fossero convinti che solo nelle cattive azioni, non ancora così logore come le buone, palpiti ancora un po’ di vitalità morale
From the verse play, The Family Reunion, by T. S. Eliot
Le mal imaginaire est romantique, varié, le mal réel morne, monotone, désertique, ennuyeux. Le bien imaginaire est ennuyeux; le bien réel est toujours nouveau, merveilleux, enivrant
• Che l’America sia un Paese tuttora in gran parte inconscio a se stesso, l’ho ripetuto molte volte; vorrei aggiungere che anche il resto del mondo è di fronte all’America in situazione non diversa da quella degli americani. Il mondo contiene l’America, ma la «sa» poco o male The writer Guido Piovene, in a 1952 statement, as quoted in an article by Stefano Ferrio in «La Repubblica», July 8, 2016 and reprinted in «Il Foglio», July 11, 2016 • Negli avvenimenti che pongono in contrasto con il proprio ambiente, ognuno spiega tutte le sue forze, mentre là dove fa soltanto quello che deve si comporta semplicemente come quando paga le tasse; ne consegue che il male viene compiuto con maggiore o minore fantasia e passione, mentre il bene si distingue per un’innegabile grettezza e povertà d’affetti [...] Fatta astrazione dal vasto centro della vita, occupato di diritto da uomini nei cui pensieri le comuni parole “bene” e “male” non
Italian Poetry Review, xii, 2017
From the novel L’uomo senza qualità by Robert Musil, (d. 1942), translated by Anita Rho •
From the collection of meditations La pesanteur et la grâce by Simone Weil (d. 1943) [It is interesting to contrast this with the immediately preceding quote - PV] • Imitation [one of her short stories] gave me a chance to use a monotonous tone that satisfies me very much: repetition pleases me, and repetition happening in the same place ends up digging down bit by bit, the same old song ad nauseam says something Clarice Lispector, from «Appendix: The Useless Explanation», in The Complete Stories, trans. Katrina Dodson • Se il «mondo migliore» (di questo maledetto domani) è una promessa dell’opposizione, è anche un’assicurazione del potere Pier Paolo Pasolini, in a 1971 review of Eugenio Montale in the journal «Nuovi Argomenti»
20 crestomazia minima • The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe. Conflict with time seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression [...] There will always be a small percentage of persons who feel a burning curiosity about outer space, and a burning de-
sire to escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers and flaming sunsets momentarily suggest From Notes on Writing Weird Fiction, by H. P. Lovecraft
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Note Cards Schede
Francesco Acquabona was born in Ancona in 1954. In 1979 he graduated from the University of Bologna with a degree in Law. In 1979 he entered the Franciscan order of the Frati Minori Conventuali. He completed his theological training at the Pontificia Facoltà Teologica S. Bonaventura in Rome. In 1993 he became an ordained priest. He is particularly interested in recounting the concerns of childhood and adolescence, a world into which his work as a pastor has afforded him great insight. Franca Alaimo was born in 1947 in Palermo where she lives. She debuted as a poet in 1989 with Impossibile luna (Antigruppo siciliano). Since then she has published numerous collections, including most recently Sempre di te amorosa (LietoColle, 2013), Come ninfee with S. Strapazzini (Girovaghe dell’anima/4, 2015), the anthology Fil rouge (Ed. CFR, 2015) and Sorsi (2015, e-book La Recherche). L’uovo dell’incoronazione (Serarcangeli) is her maiden voyage into the world of the novel. She has translated two of Peter Russell’s collections of poetry: Le lunghe ombre della sera (Il foglio letterario) and Vivere la morte (Paideia), and is the author of numerous poetological essays. Cristina Annino was born in Arezzo. Her recent publications include
Céline (Edb Edizioni, 2014), Anatomie in fuga (Donzelli Edizioni, 2016) and Le perle del Loch Ness (Archipelago itaca, 2019). She plies her trade in Rome. Guglielmo Aprile was born in Naples in 1978. His poetry collections include Il dio che vaga col vento (Puntoacapo Editrice), Nessun mattino sarà mai l’ultimo (Zone), L’assedio di Famagosta (Lietocolle) and Calypso (Oedipus). He has also authored essays on D’Annunzio, Luzi, Boccaccio and Marino. He lives and works in Verona. Steven Baker earned a PhD from the Department of Italian and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS) at Columbia University in 2013. He has translated poetic works by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Carlo Porta, and is currently working on Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s last novel, Venezianella and Studentaccio. He has also published translations of scholarly works on Walter Benjamin, Anna Maria Ortese, Italian Fascism, and Phenomenology. For Centro Primo Levi he has translated Gianna Pontecorboli’s Americordo: The Italian Jewish Exiles in America (CPL Editions, 2015) and Giorgio Bassani’s New York Lectures and Interviews (CPL Editions, 2016). Steve is currently adjunct professor in the Department of Italian at Columbia
458 note cards University and in the Division of Applied Undergraduate Studies at NYU. Vanni Bianconi (Locarno, 1977) is a poet and translator. He studied Foreign Languages and Literatures at the Università Statale di Milano, and Literature and Creative Writing with Michael Donaghy at Birbeck College in London. His first collection of poetry, Ora prima: Sei poesie lunghe (Casagrande, 2008), won the «Premio Schiller» for poetry in 2009. His verses have been translated into English, Russian, Polish, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Hungarian, Malaysian and Croatian. He is the artistic director of Babel, a festival of literature and translation, and is one of the minds behind «Specimen», a journal dedicated to translation. Donatella Bisutti is a poet, writer, translator and journalist. She has published award-winning collections of poetry including Inganno Ottico (Guanda, Premio Montale Inedito), Colui che viene (Interlinea, Premio Camposampiero), Un amore con due braccia (Lietocolle, Premio Alda Merini), the novel Voglio avere gli occhi azzurri (Bompiani) and the essay La poesia salva la vita (Feltrinelli), as well as books to introducing children to poetry, L’Albero delle Parole, Le parole Magiche and La Poesia è un orecchio (Feltrinelli Kids). She is the founder of the journal Poesia e Spiritualità, director of Poesia e Conoscenza and editor of the column La poesia italiana all’estero for «Poesia» magazine. Antonello Borra is a poet, translator and professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Linguistics at the University of Vermont. He has published books and articles in the fields of medieval and contemporary Italian poetry and language pedagogy. His most recent book is
Guittone d’Arezzo. Selected Poems and Prose (University of Toronto Press, 2017). He regularly contributes poems, translations, and critical articles to several journals and magazines both in Italy and the United States, including Nuovi Argomenti, L’immaginazione, and Poesia. His poems have been translated into English, Catalan, and German. Simone Burratti (1990) lives and studies in Padova. He founded the Italian poetry website «Formavera». His writing, essays and translations from English have appeared in many blogs and journals, including «Le parole e le cose», «L’Ulisse» and «Atelier». He participated in the 2017 edition of RicercaBO. His Progetto per S. (NEM, 2017) was awarded the Premio Castello di Villalta Giovani, the Premio Camaiore Proposta and was a finalist for the Premio MauroMaconi (sez. B.) and the Premio Cetonaverde Giovani. Patrizio Ceccagnoli is Assistant Professor of Italian at The University of Kansas. In collaboration with Susan Stewart, he translated two books of poetry by Milo De Angelis collected in a single volume entitled Theme of Farewell and After-Poems (Chicago University Press, 2013), which was a finalist for the National Award of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in 2014. Massimo Colella is a graduate of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in Modern Philology and Linguistics with a thesis entitled «Ma uno si specchi in quel ch’ebbe a seguire». La riscrittura della fabula ovidiana di Narciso nelle Trasformationi di Lodovico Dolce. He also earned a degree in Italian language and literature from the University of Pisa with a thesis entitled «Trasmutarmi in ogni forma insolita mi giova». Metamorfosi e memorie ovidiane nella Gerusalemme Liberata. He went on to
Note Cards / Schede
schede 459 pursue a PhD in Italianistica and is currently on a post-doctoral fellowship. Alberto Comparini is a PhD candidate in Italian Studies at Stanford University. He works on twentieth-century Italian literature with an interdisciplinary focus on the interplay between philosophy and literature. He has published a book on the poetry of Eugenio Montale (Iride. L’Alcesti di Montale, 2014) and many articles in Italian and international journals. Before moving to Stanford, he studied in Italy at the Università degli Studi di Genova and in the United Kingdom at Durham University. Anna Maria Curci was born in Rome, where she lives and teaches Germanic Languages and Literatures. Her writing and research have appeared in journals, anthologies and lit-blogs. With Fabio Michieli she co-edits the literary blog «Poetarum Silva». She is also on the editorial boards of the journal «Periferie» and the site «Ticonzero». In addition to her work as a translator of mostly contemporary German poetry and prose, she has published poetry collections of her own, including Inciampi e marcapiano (LietoColle, 2011) and Nuove nomenclature e altre poesie (L’arcolaio 2015). Francesco Diaco (PhD, University of Siena and University of Lausanne) is premier assistant at the University of Lausanne. His research focuses on contemporary Italian literature and in particular on Franco Fortini’s poetry and criticism. He is the author of Dialettica e speranza. Sulla poesia di Franco Fortini (Quodlibet, 2017). His reviews and articles have appeared in «Allegoria», «Años diez», «Giornale storico della letteratura italiana», «Italian Studies», «Le parole e le cose», «L’immaginazione», «Mosaici», «Mosaico italiano», «Nuovi
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Argomenti», «Transpostcross», «Ticontre», «Rivista di Studi Italiani», and «Versants». Laura Rita Feola earned her PhD in Comparative Literature with a concentration on Italian literature at CUNY Graduate Center in New York. Her reviews of Maria Famà’s poetry collection Mystics in the Family and Monica Bisi’s Poetica della metamorfosi e poetica della conversione: scelte formali e modelli del divenire nella letteratura appeared in «Forum Italicum». Flavio Gianessi (Cave del Predil Tarvisio, 1952) resides in Reggio Emilia. Previously the director of Messaggero Cappuccino (1988-1991), he is now an independent scholar. Daniele Gigli (Torino, 1978) is an archivist, documentation specialist and communications consultant. His publications include three books of verse, Fisiognomica (2003), Presenze (2008, winner of the «Diego Valeri» prize) and Fuoco unanime (Joker, 2016), as well as translations of T.S. Eliot (Ariel Poems, 2007; Gli uomini svuotati, 2010; Mercoledì delle Ceneri, 2013). His comparative work on Eliot and Mario Luzi earned him a PhD in Comparative Literature. He regularly publishes poetic and philosophic texts online in «ilsussidiario.net», «Studi Cattolici» and «Biblioteca di via Senato». Alberto Giordani is a writer, director, actor and musician. He has published poetry and essays in Italian Poetry Review, Anfione Zeto. Rivista di architettura e arti, and Oscillations, a French arts and humanities magazine. He has collaborated with the Università IUAV, the Politecnico di Milano and the Università della Svizzera Italiana. In 2015, Mimesis published his first story collection, Passaggi. He lives and works in Paris.
460 note cards Elio Grasso was born in Genoa in 1951. He is a critic for «Pulp Libri», «Poesia», «Capoverso», «Gradiva», «La dimora del tempo sospeso», among others. His most recent poetry collections include E giorno si ostina (puntoacapo, 2012), Varco di respiro (Campanotto, 2014) and Il cibo dei venti (Effigie, 2015). He has translated T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (Raffaelli, 2017), the Sonetti of William Shakespeare (Barbès, 2012) and the poetry of Emanuel Carnevali (via del Vento, 2012) and Pablo Neruda (Crocetti). He also edited a new anthology of selections from Leopardi’s Zibaldone (Ibis Edizioni, 2018). Cristina Iannarino is pursuing a PhD in Italian and History at Brown University. Paolo Lagazzi was born in Parma in 1949 but has resided in Milan for many years. His research interests span ancient and modern literature, the cultures of the East and the West, Buddhism, magic, music, film and painting. He has published twelve collections of essays, two books of fables, one volume of short stories, an imaginary interview and a novel. He assembled five anthologies of Japanese poetry and edited for the “Meridiani” Mondadori editions the works of Attilio Bertolucci (1997), Pietro Citati (2005) and Maria Luisa Spaziani (2012). Giuseppe Langella was born in Loreto (Ancona) in 1952 and lives in Milan. He teaches modern and contemporary Italian literature at the Università Cattolica and directs the «Letteratura e cultura dell’Italia unita» Center for Research. His most recent works of poetry include Il moto perpetuo (Aragno, 2008), which won the Premio Metauro, La bottega dei cammei. 39 profili di donna dalla A alla Z (Interlinea, 2013), winner of the Premio Casentino,
and Reliquiario della grande tribolazione. Via crucis in tempo di guerra (ivi, 2015). Giuseppe Andrea Liberti (Napoli, 1992) graduated in 2015 with a degree in Modern Philology from the Università degli Studi di Napoli «Federico II», with a thesis entitled ‘La ragazza Carla’ di Elio Pagliarani. Studio delle edizioni a stampa e commento. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the same university and is working on dissertation on Michele Sovente’s poetry collection, Cumae. His research interests lean toward the literature of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, he has worked on Vittorio Alfieri, Nanni Balestrini, Pagliarani and Sovente. Giorgio Linguaglossa was born in Istanbul in 1949 and lives in Rome. His most recent publications include a volume of poetry, Blumenbilder. Natura morta con fiori (Passigli, 2013) and a work of criticism, Dopo il Novecento. Monitoraggio della poesia italiana contemporanea (2000-2013) (Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2013). In 2015, he published La filosofia del tè. Istruzioni sull’uso dell’autenticità (Ensemble) and Three Stills in the Frame: Selected Poems (1986-2014) (Chelsea Editions). In 2017 he authored a critical study on the poet Alfredo de Palchi, Quando la biografia diventa mito and a collection of essays, Critica della ragione sufficiente (verso una nuova ontologia estetica), both with Progetto Cultura. Franca Mancinelli was born in Fano in 1981. Her first two books of poetry, Mala kruna (Manni, 2007) and Pasta madre (Nino Aragno, 2013, with a note by Milo De Angelis), were awarded several prizes in Italy. In 2018, she published a collection of prose poems, Libretto di transito (Amos edizioni), which was issued in translation by the The Bitter Oleander Press under the tit-
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schede 461 le, The Little Book of Passage. She has also been translated into Spanish, Arabic, and Slovene. Her poems have been anthologized in Nuovi poeti italiani 6, edited by Giovanna Rosadini (Einaudi, 2012) and, with an introduction by Antonella Anedda, in the XIII Quaderno italiano di poesia contemporanea, edited by Franco Buffoni (Marcos y Marcos, 2017). Her first two books have been recently reprinted as A un’ora di sonno da qui (Italic & Pequod, 2018). Niccolò Massucco (Turin, 1990) earned a degree in literature from the University of Turin with a thesis on Giorgio Bassani’s The Heron. He went on to pursue graduate work on the poetry of Fabio Pusterla and on Cesare Pavese’s Feria d’agosto. Though his research interests gravitate toward comtemporary Italian literature, both in poetry and prose, he has also written on Dante. He collaborates with the «Rivista di Studi Danteschi» and the «Indice dei Libri del Mese». José María Micó (Barcellona, 1961) is a poet, translator and professor of Spanish literature at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcellona. His most recent poetry collections include Verdades y milongas (2002), La sangre de los fósiles (2005) and Caleidoscopio (2013, Premio Generación del 27). He has edited editions of the classics of sixteenthand seventeenth-century Spanish literature. He has authored many scholarly articles, most recently Clásicos vividos and Para entender a Góngora, both of which were published by Acantilado, in 2013 and 2015 respectively. He has also translated Catalan poetry from medieval to contemporay authors. From the Italian, he has translated Ariosto’s Satire and the Orlando furioso, which earned him the National Prize for Translation in Spain and the Premio Internazionale Diego Valeri in Italy. He is currently
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working on a translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia. Roberto Morpurgo (Milano, 1959) holds a degree in philosophy and writes poetry, aphorisms, short stories and essays, when he is not cultivating his interest in psychoanalysis, cinema and theater. In the area of film, he collaborates regularly with the Provincia di Milano, the Arci Cinema and the Obraz Cinestudio. For the theater, he has worked with Richard Gordon’s Teatro Universitario and authored dramatic texts for the RSI (Radio Svizzera Italiana). He has also composed music and lyrics for dozens of songs and worked for Ricordi. He has worked for various publishing houses and encyclopedias. By profession he is a business consultant. Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (La Habana, Cuba, 1955) is a poet, journalist, critic, translator and professor of Spanish Literature at Kenyon College in the United States. He has published fifteen award-winning volumes of poetry, including desde un granero rojo (Premio Internacional de Poesía Alfons el Magnànin, 2013), despegue (Premio Internacional de Poesía Fundación Loewe, 2016) and el cuaderno de la rata almizclera (2017). Anthologies of his work have appeared in eight Spanishspeaking countries and his verses have been translated into German, Mandarin, French, Hebrew, English, Macedonian, Serbian and Swedish. His collections L’ultimo alla fiera/El último a la feria: Antologia poetica, 1975-2000, translated by Emilio Coco (Sentieri Meridiani, 2011) and decollo/despegue, translated by Gianni Darconza (Raffaelli Editore, 2017) have also appeared in Italy. Guido Oldani was born in 1947 in Melegnano, where he still lives. He is the founder of the “Realismo Terminale” movement. He publications include
462 note cards the collections Stilnostro (CENS, 1985), Sapone (Kamen, 2001), La betoniera (LietoColle, 2005) and Il cielo di lardo (Mursia, 2008) as well as the essay Il Realismo Terminale (2010). Bernardo Pacini (Florence, 1987) is a poet. He published Cos’è il rosso (Edizioni della Meridiana, 2013), which was awarded the «De Palchi-Raiziss», «Sertoli Salis», «Beppe Manfredi», «Antica Badia di San Savino» and «Libero de Libero» literary prizes. His other publications include La drammatica evoluzione (Oèdipus, 2016) and the artbook Per favore rimanete nell’ombra (Origini, 2015) with photographs by Valentino Barachini. His work has also been anthologized in Voci di oggi (Istos, 2017), Come sei bella (Aliberti, 2017), Abitare il deserto (Osservatorio Fotografico Fusignano) and La consolazione della poesia (Ianieri, 2015). Alessandra Paganardi was born in Milan where she lives, teaches and writes. Her output as poet and critic include the poetry collections, La pazienza dell’inverno (Puntoacapo, 2013), which won the «Operauno» prize, and Tempo reale (Joker, 2008), winner of the 2009 «San Domenichino» prize, and the work of criticism, Lo sguardo dello stupore. Lettura di cinque poeti contemporanei (Viennepierre, 2005), a finalist for the 2008 «Nabokov» prize. Her writing appears regularly in a variety of blogs and journals, and she serves on the editorial board of the international literary magazine «Gradiva». Dora Marcarelli Pettinella (Boston, 1901- Oakland, Bergen, New Jersey, 1991) was a prolific Italian-American translator and poet. She translated poetry from Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and English. In addition to her translations of Agostino Venanzio Reali, she worked on Giuseppe Unga-
retti, Manuel Bandiera and William Stanford among others. The correspondence between Pettinella and Reali that led to the translation into English of the four poems published in Mundus Artium in 1971 is preserved in the Archivio Provinciale dei Frati Minori Cappuccini dell’Emilia Romagna in Bologna. Todd Portnowitz (1986) is the translator of Midnight in Spoleto by Paolo Valesio (Fomite, 2018) and of Long Live Latin by Nicola Gardini, forthcoming in October 2019 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and the co-translator, with Graziella Sidoli, of Cinzia Demi’s I Was Magdalene. A book of his translations of Pierluigi Cappello, Go Tell It to the Emperor, will be published later this year by Spuyten Duyvil. He is the recipient of a Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and his own poetry has appeared widely in English and Italian journals. An Assistant Editor at Alfred A. Knopf, he is the co-founder of the Italian poetry journal «Formavera» and of the reading series for writertranslators, Us&Them. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Alessandro Ramberti (Santarcangelo di Romagna, 1960) studied Oriental languages in Venice and was awarded a fellowship to pursued those studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. In 1988 he earned a Masters degree in Linguistics from UCLA and in 1993 he completed a PhD at the Università Roma Tre. He has published essays, Racconti su un chicco di riso (Tacchi, 1991), La simmetria imperfetta under the pseudonym Johan Thor Johansson (1996) and several poetry collections, including In cerca (2004), which won the Premio Alfonso Gatto, Pietrisco (2006), winner of the Poesi@&Rete and Cluvium prizes, Sotto il sole (sopra il
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schede 463 cielo) (2012), winner of the Premio speciale Firenze Capitale d’Europa, Orme intangibili (2015) and Al largo (2017). With Arca Felice in Salerno he published the plaquette Inoltramenti and translated four Du Fu poems. Agostino Venanzio Reali (Montetiffi, 1931- Bologna, 1994) was a capuchin priest, poet, painter, sculptor and translator. For thirty years he taught at various religious institutions in addition to his work administering spiritual care to the sick. A prolific poet and artist, he published several collections of poetry, including Cantico dei Cantici (1983), Musica, Anima, Silenzio. Velleità di un omaggio a Emily Dickinson (1986), Vetrate d’alabastro (confessioni e preghiere) (1987), Bozzetti per Creature (1988), Primaneve (2002) and the posthumous Nóstoi. Il sentiero dei ritorni (1995). His paintings and sculptures were exhibited in a variety of exhibitions from the 1960s until 2015. Today many of them can been seen in the Museo Agostino Venanzio Reali in Montetiffi, Italy. Silvio Bolaño Robledo (Medellín, 1981) studied Dante and James Joyce at the University of Bologna. He earned a PhD in French Literature from the Université de Haute-Alsace, Mulhouse, with a thesis on Fabio Pusterla and Vanni Bianconi, whose work he has translated into Spanish. He teaches at the Universidad de Medellín and writes for the journal «Universo Centro». He has contributed translations, poetry, short stories and essays to publications in Argentina, Colombia, Spain, Italy and Mexico. Tobias Roth (Munich, 1985) lives and works as an author, translator and philologist in Berlin and Munich. He has been the editor of Berliner Renaissancemitteilungen since 2011 and
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served on the board of the Internationale Wilhelm-Müller-Gesellschaft e.V. Berlin since 2012. His debut Aus Waben, a collection of poetry, came out in 2013 (Verlagshaus Berlin), followed in the same year by the essay Tradition. Gänge um das Füllhorn (Verlagshaus Berlin). In 2015, he published his first translation, Ein Mittagessen im Vatikan am 17. Januar 1567 by Bartolomeo Scappi (SuKuLTuR Berlin). He has also translated works by Angelo Poliziano and Giovanni Pontano that appeared in 2016. Roth’s work has earned him many prizes, including the Bayerischer Kunstförderpreis (2015). Piero Sanavio (1930-2009) was a novelist, playwright and critic. His seventh novel, Amina, and his most recent collection of essays, Americana, were published in 2016. He authored a short film about the painter Carlo Guarienti. Serena Scionti is a teacher who is passionate about foreign languages. She collaborates with many literary journals and participates in a variety of cultural events in her community. Graziella Sidoli completed her scholarly work in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at N.Y.U. As the founder and editor of PolyText, while teaching Spanish at a Prep School in New York City, she translated an extensive number of contemporary Italian poets. She selected and translated into English Paolo Valesio’s one hundred poems, Dardi, for a special publication titled Volano in cento (i quaderni del circolo degli artisti, 2002) which included a Spanish translation that she co-curated, and paintings by Pier Giovanni Bubani. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Centro Studi Sara Valesio and serves on the Editorial Board of Italian Poetry Review. The an-
464 note cards thology of Paolo Valesio’s poetry that she conceived, curated and co-translated from Italian into English, Il servo rosso/The Red Servant (puntoacapo 2016) received the Camaiore Special Award in 2017. Most recently she published Un soffio di infinito/Infinity Whispers (Danilo Montanari Editore, 2017), a selection and translation of Carla Muzzioli Cocchi’s poems. She regularly writes for the online daily Il Sussidiario, for whose articles she received an award at the Concorso Faraexcelsior 2017. This collection of essays, titled Saggiminimi, is her latest publication (Faraeditore, 2018). Massimo Silvotti (Bruxelles, 1963) is a poet, artist and curator of exhibitions in his capacities as director of the Museo della Poesia in Piacenza. His writing has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies. He published La mezza luna (Vicolo del Pavone, 2001), Liberi intrecci (V. del Pavone, 2012) and l’Acrobata sull’acqua (Zona Franca, 2015). He has mounted exhibitions of his own artistic output at the Palazzo Farnese (Piacenza, 2012) and the Museo della Musica (Bologna, 2013). Highlights from his tenure as artistic director include Ungaretti e la Grande Guerra at the Palazzo Ducale in Lucca (2015). Anna Maria Tamburini earned a degree in Italian Literature from the University of Bologna with a thesis entitled Nóstoi: la poesia di Agostino Reali, which was published with the support of the IBC of the Regione Emilia Romagna («Il Ponte Vecchio», 2000). As one of the founding members of the Associazione Culturale «Agostino Venanzio Reali» and of the eponymous poetry prize, she has drawn critical attention to a poet who was largely over-
looked during his lifetime. She has promoted conferences and symposia and edited collections of scholarly articles on his work, including Dipingere la parola. La teologia della bellezza nell’opera di Agostino Venanzio Reali (Edizioni Messaggero, 2006), Per analogia. Agostino Venanzio Reali (Studium, 2012); Nei viali dell’anima. Per Agostino Venanzio Reali Atti 2011-2015) (Aracne, 2016). Adam Vaccaro (Molise, 1940) is a poet and critic who has lived in Milan for more than fifty years. His most recent publications include the poetry collections La casa sospesa (Novi Ligure, 2003), La piuma e l’artiglio (Editoria&Spettacolo, 2006), and Seeds (Chelsea Editions, 2014), as well as a series of collaborations with artists working in a variety of media: Spazi e tempi del fare (Studio Karon, 2002) features acrylic paintings by Romolo Calciati, Sontuosi accessi – superbo sole (Signum edizioni d’arte, 2003), drawings by Ibrahim Kodra, and Questo vento (Edizioni PulcinoElefante, 2009), works by Salvatore Carbone. With Giuliano Zosi and other musicians, he has produced concert pairings of music and poetry. He is also the founder and director of Milanocosa, an association that oversees various events and publications. Caterina Verbaro teaches contemporary Italian literature at the Università Lumsa in Rome. Her most recent publications include Pasolini. Nel recinto del sacro (2017) and Lorenzo Calogero’s Avaro nel tuo pensiero (2014), which she co-edited. She is on the board of «Oblio» and is a member of the Consiglio Direttivo of MOD (Society for the study of Literary Modernity).
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ungarettiana collana di poesia, traduzioni e saggi diretta da Paolo Valesio e Alessandro Polcri
• Emma Pretti I giorni chiamati nemici pp. 84, 2010
Vera Lucia de Oliveira La carne quando è sola pp. 72, 2011
Leopoldo María Panero, Ianus Pravo
Patrizia Santi
Senz’arma che dia carne all’«imperium»
pp. 56, 2013
Frammenti, periferici
pp. 92, 2011 Alberto Bertoni
Marco Sonzogni
Traversate
Ci vuole un fiore
pp. 152, 2014
pp. 72, 2014
Mario Moroni
Antonio Barolini. Cronistoria di un’anima
Recitare le ceneri pp. 96, 2015
a cura di Teodolinda Barolini pp. xxx+342, 2015
Antonio Bux
Mauro Roversi Monaco
Kevlar pp. 144, 2016
Mauritania
Attrevarsare le parole. La poesia nella Svizzera italiana
Michele Marullo Tarcaniota
a cura di Tania Collani e Martina Della Casa
a cura di Pietro Rapezzi
pp. 108, 2016
Poesie d’amore
pp. 148, 2017
pp. xx+156, 2017
Corrado Paina
Mallarmé. Versi e prose. Traduzione italiana di F.T. Marinetti
Largo Italia pp. 92, 2018
a cura di Giuseppe Gazzola pp. 164, 2018
per informazioni e ordini www.sefeditrice.it
❧ ordini@sefeditrice.it
«Italian Poetry Review» Iscritta al tribunale di Firenze al Registro Stampa Periodica al numero 5595 in data 19 luglio 2007
Finito di stampare nel mese di settembre 2019 da Tipografia Monteserra (Vicopisano - Pisa)
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