|
|
The Broken Mirror:
Reflections on Italian Poets
Pasquale Verdicchio
Introduction
Where does a book such as this begin? Nowhere, actually. It has no beginning, because it is a book that slowly emerges over the years. Most of these pieces were written as introductions to books that I translated, others emerged as papers presented at conferences. One is the result of my doctoral thesis. All of them were written with a double interest in mind. As a poet and as a critic these pieces represent my own interests in poetics. In as sense I am giving away the farm by proposing here some of the writers that have in one way or another influenced my own work or way of thinking about poetry. But this is more than a revelation of sources, it is a marking of parallel routes that find approximate ground along the tangents of poetic language. And so, these pieces did not develop with the idea of a collection in mind, since the search and acquisition of these points of reference was discontinuous, tentative, unpredictable. Therefore, the direction of such a collection cannot be an a priori decision. As such, the progression of the poets and the poets themselves might be somewhat surprising at times, but this is the result of an unspecified and unprogrammed pre-position. This is also the case for the type of essays that these pieces represent. They are not an exhaustive consideration of each poet's poetic works. They are not meant to be. Each piece concentrates on a particular book or series of compositions that were important for me at the time of the writing of the works herein. Some poets I have remained with, following their progress and work, others I have not. And still others, who are mentioned within the contexts of these essays, I have not written about at length but have nevertheless caught and maintained my interest. For example, writers such as Zanzotto and Pasolini ...
In closing, having been very lucky and priviledged to be able to translate and publish poets that have interested me personally, rather than work at the behest or request of a publisher, I would like to thank those who have supported my choices by enabling the publication of the translations. In particular, Guernica Editions has demonstrated the conviction and courage that goes into publishing works in translation and in supporting those that like myself turn to publishers for this.
The word in the desert: the poetry of Piero Bigongiari
I met Piero Bigongiari during a year's residence in Florence during 1983-84. I spent some time with him discussing poetry and poetics at irregular intervals during that year. At his invitation, I also participated at intervals in the meetings that he and other writers held at the Caffe Doney, which closed that year. I have a few photographs that I took of him in the study of his home, decorated with art and books and I hold some good memories of a very approachable and friendly man, large and soft-spoken, thoughtful and generous. Though I had known his work from anthologies, I only came to read more of him from the books he gave me as gifts at the same time that we conversed aboout poetry and translation. As a result I translated and published some of his poems and wrote the piece below about the poem "Col dito in terra." This poem interested me for the way it brought together a consideration of the graphic elements of words and the mystery of the resulting signs with the secret/sacred nature of meaning. The meaning assigned to graphic signs is mysterious, as if hidden by the very act of making them; but are these signs any less mysterious when uncovered? And so this paper, which I presented at the MLA conference in New York in 1985, took form more or less as you find it below.
* * *
In a general article on Bigongiari's poetic production Luigi Tassoni mentions the poem "Col dito in terra" and draws a parallel between "dito" and "dire. " Speculating on the allusion intended. Tassoni points to the phrase coi piedi in terra," from another poem, and suggests how this may serve as a means of "situating [the poet] among things and also [of signifying] his walking and pointing, in a discursive manner, to the traces and the plot of the voyage."' Indeed, with "Col dito in terra" Bigongiari does point to the traces and plot of a voyage but, rather than these being ones readily felt through his "suola consumata [che] calpesta la terra, ,2 he seems to indicate (or better: attempts to indicate) something from a previous voyage, something other than his travels across the page. As such, in his endeavor at uncovering the traces and following their path, the plot too necessarily becomes a pre-existing one.
According to Bigongiari, one of the functions of poetry is to search for "la parola assente;" while constantly being aware that "la parola e' tutta intorno a se." That "la parola assente" might be the focus of all poetry is not such a far reaching statement, since poetry seeks to say not what has been said but what has not. Other poets have expressed this view: Montale mentions in his first "Mottetto" that he is searching for "il segno smarrito" and Luciano De Giovanni, in a composition central to his poetics, writes: flun umile cercare attraverso parole / di poco conto quell'unica parola che ricordiamo / quando non ricordiamo nulla" 4
"La Parola e' tutta intorno a se" is an acknowledgment that writing always begins in medias res; and the search for "la parola assente" appears then to point to a matrix from which all other words arise. This is nothing more than a reference to the Orphic experience. Orpheus must not look back on Euridice, since doing so would mean losing her. Yet, not to look back, not to cause her absence, would mean a betrayal of the very object that gives rise to poetry. The gaze of Orpheus is thereby directed at the origin of his lyric, an absence, the result of the very act that pretends to appropriate it. Such is the trajectory of Bigongiari's poetry.
II
The poem "Col dito in terra" concentrates, in its brief structure, the whole of Bigongiari's poetic strategy and, within that context, holds a pivotal position. As with all poetry, the reader has at his disposition those same signs the poet followed when structuring his search. Of particular importance in Bigongiari's poetry is the fact that for him the process of discovery is one of adding to, and not deducting from, the object under investigation.
The first stanza introduces the reader to the process of writing and its temporal position. Its opening line is a declaration that seeks to establish a function for "le unghie:" "they grow in order to grasp something." The something they reach out for is not readily available, sinc-e it lies beyond the "index f inger , or any other clue or direction; and it appears that the world of the beyond is of little help, since the "fingernails continue to grow for the dead." The scratching away of the nails at night designates them as instruments with which clarity might be achieved, a clarity relatable to a search for an origin. Furthermore, as pen-like appendages, their function as graphic tools is an important one.
The second stanza takes us deeper into Scriptural allusions. What are the ways available to clarity and truth if not through these attempts at scratching away at night and day, life and death?
The passage
Forse una traccia e' rimasta di quel Dio che ha scritto in terra dinanzi all'adultera da non lapidare, forse la pietra da non raccattare porta quella scritta / che nessuno ha letto, ma nessuno anche / ha raccattato quel sasso, 1'ha scagliato"
makes reference to the parable of the adultress (John 8; 6-8) during which Christ writes "col dito in terra" and urges that he who is without sin cast the first stone. Of course, the stone remains uncast and the word remains unseen; the poet will inherit precisely such an unresolved situation. The importance of this parable lies in the fact that the word or words that remained unread were the earthly or graphic manifestations of the Word, extentions of God, Jesus Christ, the word made flesh: a concrete manifestation representing the only possibility of knowing it first-hand. In fact, the Word-made-flesh-made-word is the word par excellence against which all others are to be measured; its parameters, however, remain unknown.
The "absent word? makes its energy felt, and by its absence gives rise to the question that opens the last stanza. ?A fianco di quella scrittura quale scrittura � da porsi,/i polsi quale stanchezza della traccia sentono come energia?? It is evident that even though no-one read the word its importance is sustained, and if the "terra... � incancellabile" then so is the word that was written upon it. Christ's actions and words saved the adultress, removed the tears from her eyes ("le lacrime che ti tolsi dal cavo degli occhi"), and those tears are remembered in the poem as being equal to the stone that veiled the word: "sono pietre trasparenti - o forse parole impronunciate." It appears in fact that the acceptance of the adultress and her tears, represented here as transparent stones, indicates for the reader the possibility of seeing through the parable some type of resolution of, or absolution from, the problem. This also provides the possibility of either augmenting or completing God's creative process: "per aiutare quel Dio che
ha scritto e riscritto, verso il suo ultimo non senso." God's ?ultimo non sense? is his disappearance, the Nietzschean declaration of his death that not only helped him toward that goal but also engendered new horizons for poetry as for all other means of expression. "Poetry is [in fact] a type of knowledge that carries with it a sense of misery and a dream of power, a lack of utility and the hope of transformation, a non sense and the hopeful waiting for a new sense. ii5 Franco Rella, in his book Il silenzio e le parole states that "the disappearance of God and [the ensuing] silence tell of the possibility of language to regenerate itself.?6 The silence of the unread and un-uttered words isparole non lette [e] impronunciate") gives language the possibility of regeneration.
The parable of the adultress serves to answer the question posed of which writing is to be placed beside Christ?s. Poetry, can be considered an adulteration of conventional language. This is further supported by the presence of the unknown original word, which necessarily makes of all writing that follows it an adulteration of that origin. The answer to the question is obvious in Bigongiari's incorporation of the parable in his poem.
It is then rather significant that "the poet [describes himself as being] isolated on the traces of an inaccessible ratio that could unify in one coherent line the sign-clues sseminated along the topical desert he walks." What makes e ratio inaccessible is in part the inability to accept as fully original and accurate the Scriptures themselves. Here we find a certain resemblance to Augustine's Confessions, wherein he speaks of his inability to accept as gospel what is stated in the Scriptures. Bigongiari reveals his Augustinian skepticism by having his own Moses re-enact a voyage through the desert to receive the Laws and ends by questioning what actually appeared on the tablets, since, as with the word(s) Christ wrote, no-one saw them.
III
Obviously then, the background upon which Bigongiari chooses to set his poetry is one that makes consistent reference to the New and Old Testaments, and to the Apocryphal writings which separate them. By travelling over the steps of diverse biblical characters Bigongiari searches for the lost word. His search is somewhat akin to the Hassidic repetition of the known names for God in varying combinations in the hope of uttering the unknown name that will give unlimited power and knowledge. The similarity lies in the fact that the poet, by retracing the journeys of the Scriptures is bound to repeat the original Word. And though he will never know if the word has been repeated, since there is no clue as to what it might have been, it is the course itself , the itinerary, not the final destination, which is the more important. The accumulation of knowledge is a result of the search and reaching the original word becomes a pretext. Edward Said, in his Beginnings describes this self-defeating search f o r origins and beginnings: Ilan interest in beginnings is often the corollary result of not believing that any beginning can be found. ,7 Such a situation, far from undermining the development of poetic discourse, helps generate it in order to fill the empty space. The desert of this paper's title is to be taken as a landscape full of words and excess that makes the work of the poet that much more selective, for he must search out THE word among the preponderance.
IV
Bigongiari's continuing voyage is manifested as an accumulation of information, terminating in what the poet himself has defined a "romanzo." Such continuity is evident throughout his volumes of poetry. However, rather than constituting merely an autobiographical firomanzo," it is one that goes well beyond the "historical-individualistic" perspective. 8 Its wider embrace is acknowledged by Bigongiari's statement that the earth is a text upon which man, ?who has left behind the desolate earth because he has given up his resistance, [walks] a ground marked by strange rings.9
This provides the "romanzo" with its "historian" one which though not explicitly chosen, by its very presence provokes and necessitates a writing. The continuity within this special "romanzo" though should not be regarded as returns to favourite themes but, rather, as accidental meetings with recurring signs. Themes tend "toward typical images that are imposed from outside forces;" freedom from them provides poetry with the abilty to constantly prove itself against "a waiting, a continuous approach, without end."
It should be clear then how "Col dito in terra" is central to Bigongiari's poetics. This title is also the title of poet's latest volume and as such makes of the homonimous poem a matrix for further expansion of his poetic corpus. Just as the Scriptural writing5that contains the Word (of God or God himself) is no guarantee of an original word, the poem that gives the collection its title is not a guarantee of origins for the poems that might have grown out of it. Part of the proof for this lies in the absence of the poem from the book, which further accentuates the parable it carries within. Bigongiari is concerned with the ways to and from a beginning and it is his Orphic duty to simultaneously acknowledge its presence and cause its absence. The expressed tendency toward a graphic manifestation (the poems themselves) is a denial of other graphic manifestations and, consequently, a denial of the Word made flesh (inscribed on the ground or written on paper). It is this twist that establishes each word written as its own beginning and leaves the poet in what is essentially a desert of words where the poem is an oasis reflects the surrounding sands.
----------
Notes
1. "Bigongiari dal cicio della memoria ai frammenti del poema," Paragone n. V. 1982, p. 107.
2. Ibid., quote from "L'uccello-pescet" P. 107.
3. Eugenio Montalet Mottetti (Milano: Mondadori, 197)
4. Luciano De Giovannis Sonnet #10 of Dieci sonetti per stare insieme. (Dissertation, UCLA, 1989)
5. Antonio Pretep "Considerazioni sopra la poesia 'nel tempo della poverta@'.lt in ' Movimento delta poesia italiana degli anni settanta.
6. Franco Rella, Il silenzio e le parolee (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1981), p. 47-48.
7. Edward Said, Beginnings,
8. Stefano Agosti, "Didattica di un esperimento: Antimateria di Bigongiari," in Paragone n. V. 9 1972, p. 101.
9. Piero Bigongiari, Poesie (Milano: Mondadori, 1982), P. xix.
Giorgio Caproni's The Wall of the Earth:
Writing in the Shadow of Empty Signs
This is one of the first books that I decided to translate. Caproni remained for a long time under-valued as a writer, a condition that lasted well until after his death. I worked for a while at this book, on and off. It presented some difficulties, mostly in the handling of the rhyme schemes and some of the interior repetitions, iterations and asides generated by complimentary voices within the body of certain poems. I finally decided not to struggle with the rhymes, which began to detract from the poems as I progressed in their transfer into English, but to attempt to find a way to maintain a similar musicality without the rhymes. I believe that I was mostly successful in this, but it remains with the reader to decide.
During my work on this translation I corresponded off and on with Caproni and he sent me materials and books. I spoke to him the last time in Rome, just as the book was about to be prepared, from a phone near my pensione in Campo dei Fiori. He looked forward to the publication of The Wall of the Earth, his first book in English. He was ill, I remember, but he still travelled for various reasons related to his writing. Unfortunately, the book came out shortly after his death in 1990. I received notice of this, I believe, from his son Maurizio, who also kindly sent me a copy of the posthumous book Res amissa upon publication.
Caproni's work caught my eye for the musicality and voices that I mentioned above. A seemingly traditional compositional form, it is in fact a poetry of experiment that cuts across most convention to find expression for the substratum of voices that dwell within our experience, our histories. Caproni does this brilliantly in all his works, but particularly well in The Wall of the Earth. As with most books that have little context in a foreign culture, this collection moves slowly but steadily as it finds new readers. I was pleased to hear from Robin Blaser about his having read it as the result of Giorgio Agamben's visit to various parts of North America a few years back. Agamben has mentioned Caproni often in his own work and wrote the introduction to Res amissa. As a result, I was invited to a conference in Vancouver, Canada, celebrating Robin Blaser on which occasion I wrote the piece that follows this, '"Translatio amissa: Misplacing the Poetic Texts of Giorgio Caproni".
This piece was published as the introduction to The Wall of the Earth published by Guernica Editions in 1992. The next piece on Caproni was published in the volume __________________.
* * *
Giorgio Caproni's writing, honoured with two Viareggio Prizes, has been translated into French, German, and Chinese, among others. The present collection is, however, his first book-length English publication. The choice to translate this particular volume, Il muro della terra, rather than a "selected poems," was partially due to Il muro's central image (the wall) establishing a sort of topographical mark from which a reader could begin to approach Caproni's work.
Prior to encountering The Wall of the Earth (Il muro della terra, Garzanti, 1978), my readings of Giorgio Caproni had been incomplete, restricted to pieces and fragments. After The Wall, however, I was left with the impression of having stumbled upon what could be considered both a point of origin and/or an end product of all pieces previously gathered. Presented with the surface of the "wall" as both an end and a beginning, its depths soon began to call for attention. The attempt to achieve a better understanding of both sides of this wall, its length and breadth, as well as the ground that serves as its supporting culture and intellect, called for something that would go beyond a mere reading of The Wall, but not reach the absolutist character of a critical analysis. Translation was my answer, since its processes involve a recreation of the primary event of writing through a handling of the materials, and a moulding of these into a form similar to the original, yet lightly touched by the spirit of interpretation.
Due to the weight of the Hermetic label that Caproni's early work acquired, his writing in general, while read and applauded, has been taken to represent merely an honourable voice of the past. Consequently, the complexities of this poet's work have not been wholly appreciated. In the eighties, however, the evolution of two main tendencies in Italian poetry, the restauration and/or recuperation of genres and the structuring of books not merely as collections of unrelated poems but as "projects," as well as the publication of Caproni's collected poems (Tutte le poesie, Garzanti, 1984), caused many to reassess his ouvre.
Until recently, Caproni was still regarded by some as a "dispersed and wandering poet." (Alfabeta, no. , pg. ) It seems that with the poet's latest collection, Il Conte di Kevenhuller (Garzanti, 1986), readers have come to identify in his work a "very precise structure [...] brought together [in Il Conte] under the frame-form of the 'operetta'," and have begun to recognize that it is through this structure, which "is his message, the operetta, [that] Caproni shifts the problems of contemporary metaphysics to a playful and singable ambiance." (ALFABETA, NO) In other words, his project represents an action to counter the external forces (political, social, cultural) that exert their power on contemporary man.
Just as the operetta is the message of Il Conte, dispersion and wandering (in their positive sense) are the messages of some of Caproni's other collections, namely, Il passaggio d'Enea (1943-1955), Il franco cacciatore (1973-1982), and the present Il muro della terra (1964-1975). These collections, too, are carefully constructed events that, though removed from a time reference frame, play within a larger self-referenced poetic project. Such works are finely tuned to modern man's preoccupations with existence in a world deprived of certainties (e.g. the existence or inexistence of God). Most are touched by experiences such as the Second World War and its atrocities, the Resistance Movement, or the death of loved ones, events that represent the conviction of a subject that will do its best to survive, uncompromised, all adversity, a subject that will continue to act, rather than be acted upon.
Furthermore, while Caproni's appears to be a quotidian and familial poetry, it may be said to be epic rather than lyric in character. While the lyric uses objects to catalize an objectuality reached through personal experience, in the epic the discourse takes objects as its starting point. In this manner, Caproni's use of objects goes beyond the Montalian objective correlative (evident in poems such as "Dora Markus" and "Meriggiare") and expands, out of the frame of its seemingly common scenes, to create an inter and intratextuality that takes the single poems into the realm of the long (epic) poem, or the novel in verse. As such it moves to involve more than just the author. This epic nature of Caproni's poetry also serves to establish his work as an ongoing project.
The voices of these poems are many, and their assigned roles or actions populate the compositions to such an extent that often the lyrical first-person is relegated to a secondary or narrative role. The part that the various other subjects play in the voyage of Caproni's verse not only reduces the subjective "I" in function, but also confronts it with its own identity. The lyrical "I" finds itself to be composed of the "other" but that nevertheless their mutual proximity increases the effect of differentiation. As "things" and the "other" fluctuate, the "I" too changes, and finds in the process of transformation the only possibility of knowing itself. The position of the subject is of course closely tied to Caproni's metaphysical meditations, which have been rendered successful by the directness of his language, touched as it is by humour and paradox.
The continuously shifting relationships render objective reference impossible. The instances of questioning evident in the poems, and the differentiation that occurs at various points of adjacency, represent the places where Caproni's project takes form. This is also aided by imagery that is particularly Capronian: a cold wind blowing across the desolate scape of a memory; a water-strider gliding across a pond; a death-scream from an icy field. These images offer the world as surfaces in close proximity, as touching edges of experience that transfer their character in an almost tactile relationship with the reader. The recurrence of those places provides a non-conventional "rhyme" scheme that sets all of Caproni's work, but this collection in particular, in a special atemporal relationship with history. The shifting subject/object adjacencies are yet another means by which historic events themselves (personal or global) may be reassessed, and they represent one of the possible contributions that poetry may make to history.
Concerning the language used by Caproni, it soon becomes obvious to the reader that this has acquired a musicality all its own, one that defines the perimeter of the poetic corpus. Rhyme, alliteration, and the like represent the need for extended semanticism in poems so sparse in body. While in other collections rhyme functions as a technique through which particular words are made to stand their ground, or to give the composition renewed energy at each turn, such as in "Sono donne che sanno" (Finzioni), in The Wall its function is different. The wall has broken down all organic forms of the texts and tends, as will be obvious by the word arrangement of the poems themselves, toward a fragmented scape. This poetically atopic representation uses rhymes as signposts along the sparse verses. Thus Caproni's rhymes are simple in nature, their function being to reduce the language to the intimacy of a moment, an event.2
Caproni's work contains particular "signs" that render it original and identifiable in its images, its language, its music. All these signs are relatable to traditional forms; yet they are not representative of a residual past but of a renewed relationship with the past. Such signs, however, are not necessarily aids to the traveller who ventures into Caproni's texts but may in fact serve as warnings against the dangers of the literal. An example of this is the very first short series of verses in the collection:
False indication
"Border," the sign read.
I looked for the Customs house.
Not there. I saw, behind the sign,
no trace of a foreign land.
Here we are told, from the outset of our journey along the wall, that in fact signs can be deceiving, and that their message is more often self-referential than representational.
The 1984 publication of Giorgio Caproni's Tutte le poesie affords a fine opportunity to view the poet's project in the whole, in a sense providing hindsight into the unity. There is a certain repetitive quality to the project, in that he has, over the years, travelled as an erratic voyageur through linguistic and existential scapes toward "a final non-sense." Repetition in Caproni means a continuity of dialogue, not only a recognition but also a living of the precariousness presented by the wall.
As for The Wall of the Earth, it represents a culmination of acts. However, while all the dimensions of the poet's life in verse converge upon the wall they also diverge away from it. The title is taken from Dante's Inferno, Canto X, verse 2: "Ora sen va per un secreto calle, / tra 'l muro della terra e li martiri, / lo mio maestro, e io dopo le spalle." ("And now they go along a secret way, / between the wall of the earth and the martyrs, / my master and I following.") The wall is that of the city of Dite, where Dante the traveller follows behind his supposed master, Virgil. It also finds another parallel in Montale's "Meriggiare." In both examples, the protagonists walk along the wall, fully aware of its double - inclusionary and exclusionary - function and look out onto a dreamlike scape. This wall is much like a black hole: a place of accumulation and the entrance to another dimensionality; there the poet recounts his life among men. War, God, friendship, love, death, and so on, make up this recounting which Caproni has arranged to appear at times like a musical score. Thus, a symphony, or perhaps better, an opera of life is portrayed in The Wall, where each of Caproni's books has an important function, serving either as stone or as mortar.
TRANSLATIO AMISSA:
MISPLACING THE POETIC TEXTS OF GIORGIO CAPRONI
to ?use? language means to ?perpetually oscillate
between a homeland and exile: to inhabit? (G. Agamben)
?Nulla cosa per legame musaico armonizzata si pu� de la sua loquela in altra transmutare senza rompere tutta sua dolcezza e armonia? (No thing, which is harmonized in a musaic tapestry, can be transmuted from what it says without undoing all of its beauty and harmony) writes Dante of translation in his treatise Convivio. I don?t intend to argue about whether translation is possible or impossible. Or, whether we should or should not undertake translation. These issues don?t really interest me. I am a translator because I want to manipulate the material of languages, any language I can get my hands on. And, though this might sound frightening to some, faithfulness to the original is not of primary importance to me in my engagement of texts toward translation. But I do intend to turn Dante?s sentence on its head to have the words ?nulla cosa? be the qualifiers of the ?thing? in question, that is words and language, and to read it as the possibility of retaining the ?legame musaico? for the non-thing, the void-thing the ?nulla cosa.?
My experience, experiments, and interests in translation are related to the relationship I have with English as an acquired language, as the open possibility of a clean circuitry board to be configured, rather than a matrix from which to extrapolate. As such, it may render my work in translation slightly off-kilter in the initial terms of reference, since the process of translatio, the carrying over from one language to another, begin with the fact of my wanting to make English Italian, rather than express into English something Italian. This position also defines the linguistic research within my own writing, which is not to use English as a given but test its limist by imposing Italian structure upon it.
The essence, or the being-sense, of a poetic text is in my view the threshold of linguistic proliferation, of thought that takes place in both the writing and reading of poetry. It is at the edge of writing and reading that the gamble of communication takes place, where we sense the community of language, illusiory or otherwise, come into being, and it is there that the pre-conditions of culture are outlined. Essence / es-sense / ex-sense - res things - instance of being - res instance - resistance to things.
The choice of whom to translate is of course guided by these preconditions, and the authors I prefer are those who challenge the basis of culture and language, of truth and certainty, in other words of communication itself and, by extention, that challenge assigned modes of community. Antonio Porta, Andrea Zanzotto, Cesare Viviani, Emilio Villa, and Giorgio Caproni are writers who define Italian poetry by a poetic activity that questions the cultural and linguistic basis of it, the work they carry out to undermine both national linguistic and cultural standardizations. They offer, by their propositions of an absence of direct referents in terms of conventionalized linguistic systems, the suspension of a cultural proximity that denies the singularity of each expressive moment. As such, they initiate discourse as exploration and research.
All of the poets mentioned above, though involved in intellectual activities that might be called avant-garde, have at some time defined themselves as in disagreement with, or in opposition to, avant-garde movements. Most, if not all, have spoken of their work in terms of ?experimentalism,? which differs from accepted definitions of avant-gardes in that it is considered a ?constructivist? rather than ?destructive? term.
Antonio Porta?s stance during the last years of his life took an obsessive turn for ?communication as the ultimate gamble? which led his writing to be more conventionally narrative. His sense of providing a threshold for communing apparently required individual stories and experience to be explicitly recounted in the avoidance of ambiguity.
Cesare Viviani?s poetics of objects works by speculating on the associations emerging from the psychological relationships we construct with them and the tangentiality of their becoming.
Emilio Villa?s experiments in inter and intra linguistic expressions have led to his abandonment of conventional languages and the almost exclusive adoption of dead languages in his writing.
Andrea Zanzotto research into the recyclability of language as a physiological process of injestion and regurgitation and vomiting is translatability through repetead manipulation of the materia prima. And his logos/log threshold defines not simply his relationship with language, but with the very specific region and town in which he lives. Therefore, it is a poetics of translation that mediated and subsists between the local and the national.
But the connection that brings me to this conference is Giorgio Caproni. Somewhere along the way Robin Blaser came upon Giorgio Caproni and Giorgio Agamben. Somewhere along the way a door cracked open and the threshold was presented. Caproni passed away as my translation of The Wall of the Earth (Guernica, 1992) was in press. He passed away just as writers like Antonio Porta started to recognize his importance. Caproni?s early work, labelled Hermetic, probably contributed to his almost total dismissal as an important poet when I Novissimi and the Gruppo ?63 began to leave their mark in the early 1960s with their challenges to Italian cultural tradition.
Giorgio Caproni?s writing has always worked within a network of correspondences that have constituted an index of collective correlativity through an atemporal relationship with history, or what Antonio Porta has described as a poetics that ?shifts the problem of contemporary metaphysics to a playful and singable ambiance, the operetta.? In The Wall of the Earth, for one, the shifting subject/object adjacencies are a means by which historic events (personal or global) may be reassessed, and they represent one of the possible contributions that poetry might make to history. Within this history, Caproni?s poetry provides warning signs:
False Indication
?Border,? the sign read.
I looked for the Customs house.
Not there. I saw, behind the sign,
no trace of a foreign land.
(Wall, 18)
It is through this admission of the inability of signs to provide direction that Giorgio Caproni?s texts supposedly resist translation. Giorgio Agamben has expressed his own view in this regard in his introduction to Caproni?s posthumous book Res amissa (1993), but it must be said that these works are able to resist translation in that they themselves incorporate the process of translation. Translating the singularity of language as it develops intellectually, as an instrument for the expression of thought, is that process. Translation of the resulting text in a sense retraces the steps of the ?original? composition. It is, as with the parable recounted by Agamben in his The Coming Community, ?the same, but different.? Res amissa means misplaced things, and what is a poetic text but part of the misplaced possibility of the text, the inappropriable part and dimension that it offers but cannot release. By displacing and distancing the text?s essence through the use of another language, the translation reasserts its nature as res amissa..
Generalizing
We all receive a gift.
Then we forget
from whom or what it may be.
We only beget
- stinging and without condonement -
the thorn of its nostalgia.
Twentieth century Italian poetry has retained its metrics like no other European poetry. But, it is also true that, while this is what renders any attempt to translate the poetry of someone like Caproni difficult, since his work is rooted in metrical sense, it requires an additional attempt on the part of the translator, which is to ?transport? the metrical sense of the work into another language that on the surface resists it. The singularity of a work, of a work that provides for its writer and readers the possibility of community, is one for which the ?movement that transports the object not toward another thing or another place, but toward its own taking place? (Coming Community 2,2).
Caproni?s most explicit work in this realm is a short series within his posthumous book Res amissa by that same title. The misplaced series within the book is made up of five compositions, ?Res amissa,? ?Reasons,? ?Unaware,? ?The Agreement,? and ?Inventions.? These pieces form the fulcrum of the collection and define its direction. By outlining the poet?s relationship to the texts that form the collection they help translate readers into the work.
?Res amissa? declares outright the presence of misplaced things. The poem?s first line initiates the poetic/translation process by a simple statement: ?I can find no trace of it.? This is followed by the suspension of both language and presence through the use of a series of periods which will become a common device throughout. As the poem proposes the certainty of what was once ?had? but the uncertainty of its being, the past contact points of res amissa and the suspension of proximity offer metonymity as a way to approach translation.
?Reasons? is exactly that, the possible reasons for the misplacement of the things. Metaphysical and natural phenomena qualify as questionable categories as well as the most intimate phenomena that include our very bodies; physical res in/with which we live our lives, those that can be explained biologically, are puzzling. Reason is not lost, and that is what defines the struggle for reason. The need to be able to explain the nature and place of res amissa leads to madness; reason is the only thing not lost and the only thing whose drive is to search out what is approximate to itself.
?Unaware? represents the movement between not having and having, misplacement and discovery, the continuous act of community. Finding, that remote possibility, but a possibility nevertheless, is however the loss of essence, the loss of the ?rather? of absence and presence, the loss of ?the power not to be.? (Res amissa, 103)
?Agreement? - community is the response to un-physical things, the mere essence (being ?rather?) of agreement; while ?Inventions? is the instigation of thought as a result of absence or displaced presence. Aphoria. Aporia. Incorporeal. Dissipated. Language expressing its own distance and namelessness.
II
TRANSLATIO AMISSA
Starts with an indifference to and extention of the lines between.
Olson: ?diet precedes language.? My italian diet precedes my now language english.
Between distance of things known (past) and know (present); a matter of differentiated speech. In which language numbers. But I?m not going
say
for a while
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- traductio
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- traducere
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- translatio
?Nulla cosa per legame musaico armonizzata si pu� de la sua loquela in altra transmutare senza rompere tutta sua dolcezza e armonia? (No thing, which is harmonized in a musaic tapestry, can be transmuted from what it says without undoing all of its beauty and harmony) writes Dante of translation in his treatise Convivio.
The question of text and text. Limited to the economic ex/change (transmutation) of literalness sound and con/text. The pro(duction) and con(di[c]tion) of each word. The con game of textual transport. Transfiction of thought and form where memory works. That of which we grow fainter. Repeat it. Is it something to be done? Turn Dante?s sentence on its head to have ?nulla cosa? - the void-thing, the non-thing.
My English bought and bartered for day to day. The open possibility of a clean circuitry board to be configured, not a matrix of extrapolation. Off-kilter in the initial terms. Translatio, the carrying over from one language to another, the carrying over of one language to another. Begin with the fact of my Italian English. The position is not to english as verb.
The essence, or the being-sense, of a poetic text. Threshold of linguistic proliferation. Of thought that takes place in both the writing and reading of poetry. The edge of writing and reading. We sense the community of language. The pre-conditions of culture are outlined. Essence / es-sense / ex-sense - res things - instance of being - res instance - resistance to things.
What enters and exits ----------------> a parenthetical excision relegated to deferment.
The choice of texts precondition and challenge community.
An absence of referents the suspension of a cultural proximity
Antonio Porta an obsessive turn for ?communication as the ultimate gamble.?
A threshold for communing and experience recounted in the avoidance of ambiguity.
Cesare Viviani of object works the associations emerging the tangentiality of their becoming.
Emilio Villa dead languages experiment inter and intra linguistic abandonment
?variatons for a purely phonetic ideology?
Andrea Zanzotto?s mastication of language
a process of injestion and regurgitation and vomiting
a physiological translatability of the materia prima.
And his logos/log threshold the very specific region and town of his culture.
Translation a step toward unconditioned. Verum/factum. Is only writing the real made to refer to, and appropriation. Paradoxical in the unconditioned, a way to designate and limit.
Then, a momentary lack of words
In-between-ness
an open ended series of associations that begins with itself
and
returns
muted mutated to begin again
translates to silence out of tongue:
writing that has run out of (or beyond) speech
the condition of expatriates who must write mutely
out of step constant readjustment intrinsic
and extrinsic to the act of writing
to fall in step out of step
tangential provocation of linguistic expression
an eye off to the side
keeping acculturation under watch
translation is not becoming
but (di)versification
?to use language means to perpetually oscillate between a homeland and exhile: to inhabit? (Giorgio on Giorgio/Agamben on Caproni, Res amissa, 22)
Somewhere along the way R B came upon G C and G A. We came to inhabit the same spaces through you. R B inhabits a space of domicile which I also previously inhabited. I translated my translation of Giorgio Caproni from Vancouver to San Diego and Robin Blaser translated it back to Vancouver.
Somewhere along the way a door cracked open and the threshold was presented.
Caproni? s Wall of the Earth (Guernica, 1992)
a network of correspondences
an index of collective correlativity through
an atemporal relationship with history
a poetics that ?shifts the problem of contemporary metaphysics to a playful and singable ambiance, the operetta? (Antonio Porta)
historical events reassessed
poetry provides signposts:
" ...behind the sign,
no trace of a foreign land."
A block to the process of continuous interpretation. An instigation. Atopic condition given to the illusion of topos. Memory wanders reflects on a language and refers to another.
Remainders of rewording tangentially breaking. The disruption of the circle. Ready-made compositions. Reminders of nows and thens as writing slides into writing. By itself a betrayal if from one into another rather than one by another.
The inability of signs to provide direction resists translation.
Caproni?s Res amissa resist translation by incorporating the process.
The singularity of language as it develops process.
A sense retraces the steps of the ?original? composition.
In the Coming Community, everything is ?the same, but different.?
Halt where language travels. Spell it out and out; grasping the taking leave of:
The difference between external and internal language uttered/outered
Res amissa, misplaced things, the misplaced possibility of the text
the inappropriable part and dimension that it offers but cannot release.
Another language, translation reasserts its nature as res amissa.
Generalizing
We all receive a gift.
Then we forget
from whom or what it may be.
We only beget
- stinging and without condonement -
the thorn of its nostalgia.
The singularity of a work provides writers and readers the possibility of community
?movement that transports the object not toward another thing or another place, but toward its own taking place? (Community 2,2).
And what is lacking is familiarity: from a foreign language
into another foreign language
reading repetition the infinity
I am the foreign within the familiar
historically what determines choice is a translation of survival
first to produce one?s own textuality
then its text the product of my text is another
mutual mutuality translating the words move
onto new terrain sowing the surroundings
and an induced state of narrative
the work of memory
what remains to be done
The misplaced series within the book
?Res amissa,? ?Reasons,? ?Unaware,? ?The Agreement,? and ?Inventions?
a fulcrum of direction
Res amissa
I can find no trace of it.
......
He came to me expressly
(of this I am certain)
to make a gift of it to me.
.......
I can no longer find trace of it.
.......
I see again in the leaving
day the thin face
whitefluted ...
The sleeve
in lace ...
The grace,
so gentle and Germanic
in its offering ...
suspension of both language and presence
the past contact points of res amissa and the suspension of proximity
an approaching translation
Reasons
The reasons for light...
For shadow...
I know them.
I know the cretaceous doors
that lead to the sea. The woods.
But the reasons for birth?
The reasons for death? ...
So, straining,
shouted, shut in, the madman.
(Was, his ruined reason,
the only Thing not lost?)
Questionable categories and intimate phenomena
our very bodies physical res in/with our lives
those that can be explained biologically, are puzzling.
Reason defines the struggle for reason.
Whose drive is to search out what is approximate to itself.
Unaware
He was under the illusion,
having found the accurately lost object again,
of having gained something.
[...]
the continuous act of community
Finding that remote possibility
the loss of the ?rather? of absence and presence
the loss of ?the power not to be.?
Agreement
...............a shadow
that binds the hand of shadow
to another shadow ...
(In shadow...)
Two shadows that without leaving shadow
of a shadow, in the shadows
come to an agreement ...
(Of shadow...)
Community is the response to un-physical things
the mere essence (being ?rather?) of agreement
Inventions
Those impalpable voices
almost transparent ...
The instigation of thought as a result of absence or displaced presence.
Aphoric. Aporia. Incorporeal. Dissipated.
Language expressing its own distance and namelessness.
translation as a process of writing has no source or target but rather tends to
with multiple language transposition one nears the elimination of language re-institution or de-institution(alize)
ungrounding in language grammar syntax
condition of migration the possibility of giving place to and propagating heterogeneity permanence disturbed: not in place but out of place
the text whose topos calls a translation
the recognition of displacement
this is the entrance
to my house of language no walls
threshold to narrative dispersion
in the accent of transposition
behind it the uneasiness of shadows
unresolved residues of meaning
The Generation of False Form:
Luciano De Giovanni's "Dieci sonetti per stare insieme".
This piece finds its beginnings in my doctoral dissertation. Luciano DeGiovanni was mostly unknown at the time of its writing. And though he remains somewhat isolated and unrecognized, his work has found outlets over the last few years through publication by Scheiwiller and others. De Giovanni is an interesting example of what takes place in the poetic corners of every country and language, the unseen elements that go into making culture without being evidenced by, or coming to the attention of, those who define culture through academic scholarship. It is a work that leaves its mark nevertheless. A series of poems, such as the "Dieci sonetti" considered below, are indicative of a cultural participation that goes beyond regionalisms and nationalisms. The experimental nature of some of De Giovanni's poetry is quite revelatory if considered in the light of the isolation in which he works. It is evidence that the experimental mode is at work in most situations, and that it works in dialogue with other similar and more official situations of its time at what we might refer to as an "unconscious" level. This is of course rendered possible by a portion of shared history and basic culture that at times almost requires challenges to its structures.
I met De Giovanni in 1985 or 1986 when I went to visit him in San Remo. We spent a delightful day together talking about poetry and landscape, poetry and life, and we strolled along the sea-walk in San Remo to a small book shop where he mostly makes his book purchases. We corresponded for a few years after that but we eventually lost touch. Last summer, Paolo
Valesio, poet and professor at Yale, asked me for a copy of the piece below. He was interested in using an excerpt in a journal publication of De Giovanni's poems. More recently, a friend, the artist Giovanni d'Agostino, showed me a book by De Giovanni that had been edited by another friend of his, --------------------. ..................... had recognized my name when Giovanni mentioned it to him. ----------------------- mentioned that he had read my things about De Giovanni and it was a pleasure to meet him and see this new book. The concentric movement comes around. This piece was published in the journal Il lettore di provincia, Ravenna, in 1992.
* * *
Luciano De Giovanni is the author of a large body of poetry that spans the years 1948 to the present. From this, two smallish books have been extracted, Viaggio che non finisce (Rebellato, 1957) and Cautamente presente (Manag�, 1987). The long years between publications have been broken by the dispersed appearance of compositions, in reviews such as "Resine," "Il lettore di provincia," and "Letteratura." His work has also attracted the attention of many who have written favourably in its behalf, Giorgio Caproni, Carlo Betocchi, Oscar Navarro, Pablo Neruda, and most recently Stefano Verdino.
Verdino, who has been instrumental in introducing De Giovanni to a wider audience by inclusion in the anthologies La poesia in Liguria and La letteratura ligure - il Novecento , has written that
Un fondo di religiosita` e` alla base della poesia di Luciano De Giovanni dove continuamente c'e` la ricerca e la certezza di spazi successivi a quello che e` dato immediatamente scorgere; [il discorso tende] al di l� delle evenienze.
While its basic premise of "a search and certainty for spaces beyond what is immediately received" is in fact central to De Giovanni's work, I would argue that the foregrounding of a religious dimension does little else than overlook its overall dominant tendencies. De Giovanni's anthology Tentativo di cantare una nuvola clearly displays religious allusions and references, but, rather than being representative of the poet's overiding religiosity, they are indicative of the authoritative stance of cultural givens such as the Scriptures. This stance is what the poet sets out to explore; the religious instants recounted in the poems are merely the occasions beyond which modern humankind must move.
In a section of the anthology entitled "Nemmeno mio dio," De Giovanni undertakes a process by which he moves to diminish the importance of God (Dio, representative of The Word) in the written word. In his inability to accept "insieme agli altri una verita` catalogata" ("together with others a catalogued truth"), in other words, the Scriptures, he begins reducing God to a thing like any other, beginning with his name:
L'ansia per il mio dio segreto
per colui che mi ascolta e mi giudica
non fatto a mia immagine, non a me somigliante,
anzi, nemmeno mio dio, nemmeno mio creatore.
As is clear, God has been transformed to god (Dio -> dio). However, this is merely the first step in De Giovanni's project. Throughout the anthology he denounces other "catalogued truths," among which are also poetic conventions. The critical stance taken against poetic conventions is one of the most interesting aspects to be found in Tentativo, and is the topic to be discussed in this paper.
One important characteristic of Tentativo di cantare una nuvola is its being comprised in large part of vestigial representations of conventional poetic forms. Kenneth Burke, in his "Lexicon Rhetoricae," describes form in literature as "an arousing and fulfillment of desires. A work has form in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence." While it is this very gratification that De Giovanni's poems offend, the reader nevertheless finds it important to go on with a new sense of anticipation. The presence of vestigials must be devined by the reader; the uncertainty of this process in itself is enough to cast doubt on the whole project, until the author himself calls attention to them in the series entitled "Dieci sonetti per stare insieme." It must be pointed out here that "Dieci sonetti," as well as most of Tentativo, either address, or go toward the structuring of, the figure of Andromeda. This figure of mythical extraction is De Giovanni's alternative representation to all accepted "truths." Having little to do with the Andromeda of Perseus' myth, it is rather a figure of many faces whose significatory net stretches across many disciplines, from mythology, to botany, to astronomy. The diversity, collected under one form, tends toward diversification and fracture. It is this very nature that the whole of Tentativo projects and that the "Dieci sonetti" represent in their paradoxical manifestation.
"Dieci sonetti per stare insieme" is made up of ten "sonnets" but, aside from the title under which they are gathered, the compositions' most direct connection to what we have come to know as a sonnet is their number of verses, fourteen. Of the various rhyme and line schemes that have developed within the sonnet form over the roughly seven hundred years since its accepted invention by Lentini, none are evident in the poems of the series concerned.
In receiving a sense of identity as explicit as the title "Dieci sonetti," a reader must first of all consider that the poet, while consciously avoiding conventional sonnets, is nevertheless structuring a context for his work within the code of the sonnet. The semantic importance of this choice implies not only a resistance to the historical and contextual background specific to sonnets, but an interpretation of the form in its conventional tradition and, possibly, a correction of it in the eyes of the innovative writer/reader. Afterall, the adoption of a particular form is a way of speaking through and to other texts linked to it by that specificity.
Uses of conventional form
In Il testo poetico: teoria e pratiche d'analisi, Stefano Agosti undertakes the examination of compositions by various poets. The pieces, representing work ranging from Petrarca, to Ungaretti, to Pascoli, to Rimbaud, to Montale, to Leopardi are meant to demonstrate that
al messaggio razionale normalmente emesso si sovrappone un altro messaggio, di natura formale (o informale), recepibile ma non razionalizzabile, che costituisce l'Altro Discorso. Praticamente il Discorso proibito, il Discorso che scivola verso l'abisso: quell'abisso su cui la ragione ha intessuto la sua trama rassicurante, perentoria e diversiva, che solo la Forma, non il concetto, riesce a lacerare, recuperando proprio dal fondo la forma interna dell'uomo ... Il vero contenuto e` quel contenuto alienato che vive in perfetta simbiosi con le forme entro le quali si manifesta.
Often, what is made intelligible by conventional form are developments, concerns and considerations specific to the period and/or writer in which the form (re)finds expression. Maria Corti has noted that, "in the relationship between artistic message and literary codes, what is evident is a process by which, on one hand there are the codes that tend toward canonization and, on the other, the messages of the individual writers that can either transform the codes from the inside, or corrode and subvert them until they are destroyed." For this reason, though forms like the sonnet and madrigal, if only for their intricacies, still hold our interest and fascination, much of their inherent formal meaning is altered in the variable context in which they are appropriated. One need only think back to the use of the sonnet by such disparate authors as Petrarch and Shakespeare, where even Shakespeare's use of Petrarcan conceits is antithetical to Petrarcan codes.
While it would seem preposterous for a contemporary poet to use forms whose set of intelligible characteristics lay locked in another era, it would however not be unfeasable to use forms which originated centuries earlier if these are directed toward contemporary usage. There must therefore be a process of de-codification, by which a partial characteristic of the form is retained (maybe its content/form designations), and then one of re-codification into a segnaletic capacity that is more relevant in its historico-temporal context. Barbara Herstein Smith, in Poetic Closure, speaks of such usage as "repetitive form [that functions as] the restatement of a theme by new details." The sonnet has an established grammaticality that cannot be overlooked when dealing with compositions that in some way resemble it.
It is therefore important to note that, while De Giovanni conserves various traditional mechanisms, he cannot use a standardized mold. His poetics require a form of expression that reflects its concerns, also as a way in which to establish its presence as a participatory element in the society in which it is manifested. Consequently, one could say that the way in which a poem escapes generic designations has the effect of infusing it with a renewed relevance. Poetic forms, though closely tied to their content, are themselves semantically significant; generic expectations are, in a case such as ours, undermined by a misleading resemblance which in actuality presents the reader with a whole new set of circumstances.
To better illustrate these points, and to situate De Giovanni's use of the sonnet within a contemporary context, the next section will briefly concern itself with the use of the sonnetistic form by two other contemporary poets: Andrea Zanzotto and Francesco Mangone.
Zanzotto and Mangone: Beyond Form
The use of traditional forms such as the sestina, canzone, and the sonnet is finding new ground in the hands of contemporary poets. These forms provide a prime foundation for the work of poetry. Giuseppe Conte states:
Piu` la forma e` codificata, rigida, inflessibile, piu` vasto e modulato e` il repertorio di lavori che la investono: essa se ne sostanzia e ne mantiene viva la processualita`. Si pensi alle due quartine e alle due terzine del sonetto: investite dall'allegorismo concettuale degli stilnovisti, dal procedere metonimico-psicologistico di Petrarca e dei petrarchisti, dall'inaugurazione dell'enjambement protratto in Della Casa, dal metaforismo plastico-drammatico in Michelangelo, da quello lirico-sensuoso in Tasso e da quello lirico-combinatorio in Marino e nei marinisti, investite infine dalla conativita` del sublime di Alfieri e Foscolo, esse hanno resistito. ... E oggi, anche oggi, piegano la loro antica dignita` alla boschivita` di Zanzotto ...
After the dismantling of layers of language and composition that has taken place since the time of I Novissimi and the Gruppo 63, conventional poetic constructions seem to provide islands upon which the flotsam and jetsam of the naufrage can collect. Among the younger generation of writers making use of such forms are Patrizia Valduga, whose La tentazione (Milano: Crocetti, 1985), consists of ten canzoni in terzine, and Francesco Mangone, author of a series of sonnets collected under the title of Iposonetto (Cosenza: Edizioni UH, 1988).
The use of such forms is not, however, restricted to their appropriation by this younger generation of writers. In 1978, Andrea Zanzotto, also cited by Conte, an established poet with roots in Hermeticism, published a book entitled Il galateo in bosco (Milano: Mondadori, 1978). The significance of that volume of poetry lay in its adoption of a classical referent for its semantic value. The collection worked not only as a way of paying homage to Giovanni Della Casa, author of the Galateo, and entrenching itself within an historical syntagm, but also as a tool for criticism and reflection. In fact, Zanzotto was at work against the very elements that he appeared to be praising.
The choice of Galateo, representing as it does a code of behaviour within a certain social context, coupled with the use of the sonnet in the section entitled "Ipersonetto," give an indication as to the particular use of the form. While a poet like Petrarch represents a singularly successful example of the adaptation of the sonnet to the "volgare," his work within the form goes to a much deeper level within the structure/content frame. Zanzotto's use of his own Venetian dialect and contemporary idiom, while taking Petrarch's linguistic example as a point of departure, adds to the set and represents a move away from even that tradition. Furthermore, by bringing his sonnets together under the title of "Ipersonetto," Zanzotto extends the form beyond its accepted realm, as would be delineated in a dictionary of prosody. To this end the "ipersonetto" is made up of fourteen compositions, each repesenting one of the fourteen verses that go into making a conventional sonnet. In addition, Zanzotto adds a further poem as a "postilla." This goes further beyond the conventional sonnet structure into a hypersonnet. We could also take Zanzotto's use of the Galateo as a construction that points to the inadequacy of such a text in an environment such as the "bosco" (the woods), in other words, the world of nature. Survival in the social context may involve the ability to conform to a set of pre-established rules, but in a "bosco" survival becomes something quite different; where pre-constructed formal codes become insignificant.
Another clue as to the poet's mode of action is given by the title and the choice of preposition. The use of "in," instead of "nel," creates an image of the Galateo "imboscato," caught in a quagmire, an inescapable sand pit. Rather than as a conscious lingering among the trees, the image is thus one of a Galateo unable to exercise its rules in order to escape the woods for its more conventional, courtly environment. Moreover, we cannot overlook the allusion to the beginning of Dante's Commedia: where the classic work begins "in una selva oscura," Zanzotto's work begins "in bosco." Nor is the parallelism only linguistic, since in both cases, the poets use their work against the tradition that precedes them, and as a personal rendering of the society in which they function.
Certainly some quotations from Il Galateo in bosco will serve to clarify Zanzotto's tendencies in his research. In a note to the text, Zanzotto comments:
Galateo in bosco (se poi esistono galatei e boschi): le esilissime regole che mantengono simbiosi e convivenze, e i reticoli del simbolico, dalla lingua ai gesti e forse alla stessa percezione: librati come ragnatele o sepolit, velati come filigrane sopra/dentro quel bollore di prepotenze che e` la realta`. Specialmente i sonetti si rapportano a queste improbabili formulazioni di codici e sottocodici entro cio` che non e` in alcun modo codificabile.
The excerpt speaks to the use of the sonnet as a codified form and to the poet's disagreement with such an adaptation. In this collection, as he has done in others, Zanzotto stresses the uncodifiable character of reality. "Se poi esistono galatei e boschi" is translatable not only in its literal sense as, "if books of manners and woods in fact exist," but also as, if structures and paradigms in fact exist. It appears, in fact, that any form which pretends to circumscribe a set of codes is necessarily doomed to failure. The most important option any form offers is a potential for movement: toward or away from its legislature.
Zanzotto ties his use of the sonnet to the landscape of the "bosco" by recounting the diverse occurrences that have taken place in this specific "bosco." And with all that has happened there, the ground saturated with "tradition, work, blood, creativity" ("il suolo pregno di tradizione, lavoro, sangue, creativit�") "everything is still possible, on this hypersedimented soil" ("tutto e` ancora possibile, su questo terreno ipersedimentato"). In contrast to the static nature commonly ascribed to formal poetic forms, and to history, the hypersonnet and the "hypersedimented soil" represent the accumulated ground upon which writing has to work and from which it can extract.
The inability of a tightly codified, static form to express a reality "that is not in any sense codifiable," whether it be subject or objective, leaves no room for the advancement of either knowledge or simple empirical description. Harold Bloom, in "The Breaking of Form," states that "what is called 'form' in poetry is itself a trope, a figurative substitution of the as-it-were 'outside' of a poem for what the poem is supposed to represent or be 'about'" (pg. 1) and that "... form, in poetry, ceases to be trope only when it becomes topos, [in other words] only when it is revealed as a place of invention" (pg. 2). It is precisely the ability to use forms such as the sonnet as a place of invention that distinguishes writers like Zanzotto, Mangone, and De Giovanni.
The series "Iposonetto" , by Francesco Mangone, is subtitled: "ricerca d'un sistema 'certo' fondato sull'ombra e sul fogliame tale che mostri il senso della poesia (tra) Letteratura e Pensiero." The certainty alluded to in the subtitle, and that is at the base of the search, is however contradicted by the poems themselves. More than a certainty, they represent a suspension between their form, rhythm and content. The reader is caught between the written and the uncertain sounds that result from the reading. Mangone asks that "verso" be understood in its Latin sense of "return": "come un evento ciclico lungo il verso [la parola] ci parla della morte dell'Iposonetto: il suo nascondimento."
This return to the sonnetistic form, via the precursive, or the "ipo," stage implies both the traditional poetic form and the death of the iposonetto that ceases to exist, or exists only as a stage. Its death is further announced by its highly phonic nature; the sound produced by its reading (let us remember here Petrarch accompanying himself on the lyre) dissipates toward the achievement of form. The form in "Iposonetto" is paradoxically caught in its various attempts at hindering progress toward a definitive exhibition of the sonnet (which means its undoing) while continuing to attract attention to, and revealing, itself. It is both a false certainty and a shadow, manifesting a literary fogliame that is new to the season but born of ancient roots.
VII
(nascere ed intrecciare sono il versante sinistro della parola
- il fogliame -, morire e sciogliere sono il suo lato destro
- l'ombra -; la loro simmetria: il sonetto.)
il cheto narrar de
i rami n'avrai ch'anco ne re
stai ludibrio e nudo sere
ne percorse l'Esilio verde!
un folto dei sorti(legi)
di rosa-repulsa geometria garbo`
nel seguir i node arbo`
rei flessi del febeo Apollo fregi
d'acque si chiamate nei ronfi
che l'arco custode di fora
n'avea l'Erranza di spezie gonfi
umana presa ch'avvinchiaro l'ora
ne li secreti-flussi ... tonfi
di parola ... l'Omai de la flora
The few introductory lines to the above poem tell of the sonnet as a symmetric system in which the words produced are balanced by their dying dimension. Simply, the word as it moves from one side to the other, and then back, in its spectrum of significance. The word that uses every facet of its nature, the phonic as well as the semantic. It is in this manner, with a mechanism that may recall for some Ungaretti's "illuminazioni," that Mangone hopes to capture, by means of the sonnet, the nascent and primitive word.
De Giovanni's formless form
In following with the designations of form as trope or topos, De Giovanni's sonnets show that the author of Tentativo shares with Zanzotto and Mangone the ability to mould poetic form into his own specific topos. De Giovanni's "Dieci sonetti per stare insieme," like the above iposonetti, alert the reader to an ungrammaticality in the appearance of the composition and, therefore, to the need for an investigation as to reasons for such a manifestation. The sonnets are similarly conscious of their form and tradition. They are love poems, as were Petrarch's, but whereas the latter sang of an impossible love, the former are an attempt "at staying together." In other words, the poet, in agreement with the thematics of the traditional sonnet, feels a disrupting tension that threatens the "togetherness" of what we can assume on one level to be lovers.
In the context of Tentativo di cantare una nuvola this "staying together" takes on added significance. Here, the presence of sonnets appears to be incidental. Again, Burke on the nature of form: the effect of "incidental form"
partially depends upon their function in the whole, yet they manifest sufficient evidences of episodic distinctness to bear consideration apart from their context. Thus a paradox, by carrying an argument one step forward, may have its use as progressive form; and by its continuation of a certain theme may have its use as repetitive form - yet it may be so formally complete in itself that the reader will memorize it as an event valid from its setting.
Burke offers Euripides as an example in the use of "incidental form." The latter, "when bringing a messenger upon the stage, would write him a speech which, in its obedience to the rhetorical laws of the times, was a separate miniature form." De Giovanni's poetry is a multilayered mechanism of themes and images that tend toward apparent dissipation and abstraction. The multidirectionality that seems to threaten the very existence of poetry itself is in fact the subject of these sonnets. To this end, the sonnet as a specific poetic form, the direct or allusive mention of the Scriptures, and the recounted myths within the poems function as incidentals that point to the forms to be subverted. In this manner, De Giovanni also moves to upset the gratificatory effect of accepted conventional forms (and their inherent systems of belief) and to cancel their priority. The poet, through the use of this particular paradigm (the sonnet), and by directly invoking formal structures, hopes to break such an "expectant tendency." He quotes form in order to overturn it; to entrench it in the reader's mind by mentioning it and then promptly upsetting any expectations. Thus, by alerting the reader to the other dimensions of poetic composition, he questions the undiscussed acceptance that familiar forms tend to bring with them and asserts the possibility for poetry to exist in its rare state.
Similarly to Mangone's series of sonnets, the "Dieci sonetti" make direct reference to the process of poetry: the Orphic descent into the darkness of the underworld, instituting a lack of claritiy and definite direction (but not purpose).
1
Per questo poco che vediamo il sole
noi che dal regno buio
ascendiamo (o scendiamo?)
a quello della luce
per questo frammento di pensiero
per questa briciola di meraviglia
quanta notte ci attende
e quanta notte
gia` nella vita!
Si`, amore, e` cosi`.
Ci sei anche tu, pero`.
E quello che m'hai dato
e` tanto in questo poco,
amore. E t'ho dato cosi` poco!
The uncertainty of direction ("ascendiamo o scendiamo?"), the purpose of such a departure from form while still within it, can only be resolved by jumping ahead, to see where the series culminates, to sonnet number ten.
10
Tu lo vedi, non sono poesie,
non vogliono essere
poesie, vogliono essere,
amore,
un umile cercare
attraverso parole
di poco conto
quell'unica parola
che ricordiamo
quando non ricordiamo
nulla
e liberi sostiamo
al margine del dire
nell'estasi che ci culla.
At the "margine del dire," which is to say at the entrance/exit of the underworld, poetic form is undefined as is the song. In effect, form must be denied by the poet here, since it would distract from "quell'unica parola" that subsists when "nothing else is remembered." And yet, De Giovanni insists on naming these compositions "sonnets." The last composition of the series, number ten supports the sentiment of uncertain direction. A closed form would give the text too definite an authority over its content; here, on the contrary, there is a reduction of the effect of entrapment that such a form would convey. This is important when we consider that the sonnets are addressed to the figure of Andromeda developed throughout Tentativo. These poems do not want to be poems, but love, which may account for the unfinished feeling many of them convey; the half-hearted attempt at constructing sonnets. To construct fully realized forms would mean to bring the writer/reader's relationship with them to a close. This cannot be, since it all comes to be part of the search for that all important "unica parola." And its nature as unknown makes it so that no closure can be attained or expressed by the poems, which are themselves vehicles to such an end.
In Limina, Franco Rella, by reference to Novalis, speaks of love as the supreme "glue." "L'amore preme insieme. Tiene insieme l'inunificabile, ma non lo concilia. [Non] esiste amore che non sia anche divisione, che non sia polemos." The polemo is to be found in the poetic form itself (love), which is of equal status to topos. There is a distinct division between the subject and object of the poems. And while the poems "do not want to be / poems, but love" ("non vogliono essere / poesie, vogliono essere, / amore"), they are nevertheless poems through which love is vicariously acquired. Love means to want to return, over and over, to the loved one. As such, the transition is easily made from sonnet 1 to sonnet 10, or viceversa. It matters little whether one moves in an ascending or descending pattern. In constant darkness it is best to keep moving in any direction. Any resulting form is a product of groping around in the dark. That the object of love "nemmeno [ha] un volto / e nemmeno [ha] un corpo" (sonnet 3, v. 7,8) is unimportant; it finds expression in the sonnets, which in turn reflect the form of the object they sing, their own imperfect form.
Recounting the interchange between the subject and object of poetry in this Orphic context assures the existence of poetry and simultaneously describes its impossibility. For example, while the poet writes "E nemmeno ti posso parlare!" he also recognizes the fact that, in order not to lose the struggle, what must be done is exactly what cannot be done: "E allora parlo parlo."
2
E nemmeno ti posso parlare!
E allora parlo parlo,
anche se non ci sei
parlo parlo con te.
Oh, sappilo! Parlo con te
dal mio al tuo silenzio
e nulla nulla traspare
del nostro ansioso parlare.
Nel mio viso imbronciato
o semplicemente svagato
nessuno vede che ti parlo.
Ma nemmeno tu lo puoi.
Oppure lo puoi? Oppure
m'ascolti quando ti parlo?
The questioning of communication that closes sonnet 2, and that therefore touches on the validity or efficiency of the poems, is countered by rooting them with what can basically be stated as: "I could not say you, therefore I write you." And so, there is a flactuation between formlessness and form, inability to speak and speaking, resulting from poems that long to be not poems but love. It is the polemos itself, generated by the division, that constructs a bridge, through the recognizable conjured sonnet, by which the attempt to "stare insieme" takes place. The impossibility of telling something [saying something] is continued in the third sonnet:
3
Se ti potessi raccontare,
cio�, se lo sapessi spiegare,
quello che mi succede
- in quella parte di me
che penso sia l'anima -
quando ti sogno, amore,
e nemmeno hai un volto
e nemmeno hai un corpo
in questo mondo strano
inumano
che non mi fa stare con te
saresti felice, sai.
O forse infelice.
Forse � meglio se non lo sai.
Again, part of the inability to tell of something may be a direct result of its formlessness, the lack of face and body. Nevertheless, "quello che mi succede" must be articulated; that "necessit� di dire [che] mi cresceva nel cuore," even if its impossibility is intuited.
4
S�, � vero, ho tentato
un canto troppo vasto.
Non ne ho colpa o forse ne ho.
Mi cresceva nel cuore
questa necessit�
di dire, di provare
alture inaccessibili
al mio volare
e penso che dovrei
starmene un p� in silenzio
ora, tanto lo sai
che in favole affermavo
quanto di vero celavo
nel cantare di te.
In the final analysis, poetry is what the poet/reader is left with. The ability to view what we have in front of us in different ways opens up the world. The form of poetry is a reflection not only of its apparent content but also its invisible constituents. The overall problems of representation, form, and conventionality are once again recognized as being enormous, but the need to challenge them nevertheless triumphs.
Poetry is the necessity to say what has not been said/read or what cannot be said; what needs to be said but lack tangible form. Throughout time, fables and myths provided man with a way in which to come to terms with various phenomena; their results are by no means to be accepted as the "Truth" but rather as fables and parables spun as reassurance by the poets: "in favole affermavo / quanto di vero celavo / nel cantare di te." In De Giovanni's anthology there is a constant structuring of a fable-like or mythical scape. The dominant character of this particular scape being Andromeda, a love hidden among words and verses, and therefore only attainable on the page:
5
Di questo nascosto amore
com'� nascosta la perla
fra le valve dell'ostrica
nell'abisso piu` fondo
dove non si pu� sperare
di giungere, di coglierla,
dove c'� troppo mare
a proteggerla
di questo amore dunque
nulla diremo
che non sia continua
preghiera, da riprovare
come un rito, un auspicio,
ogni mattina, ogni sera.
All the poems of Tentativo are in fact one continuous prayer that contains, and sings of, the "amore nascosto." It is the poet's duty to continue this ritual chant. However, this is a trying process against the "troppo mare" of tradition, which the sonnets attack directly, and it must proceed with caution so as not to disrupt the scape upon which itself is spun:
6
Sommessamente
con estrema cautela
per tema d'incrinare
la tremolante
esile ragnatela
tesa fra la mia anima
e la tua
e dondolante al vento
da noi creato
nella fantasia,
fra ramo e ramo
oso ripetere
e n'ho paura:
t'amo.
"La tremolante / esile ragnatela" moving in the wind "da noi creato," the accumulation of beliefs that must be questioned and upon which man must shed light takes place through work such as this. And though the attempt is necessary, and is in addition carried out through something like the sonnet, which seemingly provides grounding in tradition, it can be a tiring and sometimes discouraging process:
7
Scusami, sono stanco.
Oggi non ho il sorriso
che vorresti da me,
oggi mi sento infelice.
E` cosi` in superficie,
m'oppongo all'ore incerte
che ci vengono incontro
immusonendo un po`.
Ma se penso ai tuoi rami
fragili, cosi` forti
da sostenere frutti
dolcissimi, nostri (pure
se non possiamo coglierli),
se mi dico che m'ami...
Here the poet gives voice to the nature of his search. It is discouraging, so much so that at times he cannot maintain his "sorriso." His "opposition," his work, loses some of its attraction and appears to be only a "surface" belief that can never be realized. What dissolves these short periods of feelings of inefficiency is the recurring thought of the "fragile, but strong branches" of the tree. This tree, which functions as the bridge between earth and sky, is poetry, is Andromeda, is the tying metaphor of the collection, and even though it is a construction of the poet, and has its roots within the poems. The insecurity of language, and the vastness of the task, require that the poet reassure himself that he is loved: "se mi dico che m'ami ..."
The need to feel loved by, to feel at home in, his work is expressed by the eigth sonnet:
8
Se mi lascio sognare,
se seguito a parlare
di te, con te,
in quell'isola bruna
deserta, oltre noi due,
da ogni vita,
(e quindi non la dobbiamo
lasciare immiserita
ma sempre riempire
della nostra essenza)
se mi lascio tentare
dall'impazienza
della tua presenza,
non vorrei piu` tornare.
The security felt when in the proximity of poetry, or when immersed in it, is so strong that to escape into it is an overwhelming desire, one that, if successful in its seduction, could terminate the intended search inherent in its very writing. The excursion through language and poetry continues for the protagonist, too intelligent to be defeated by a medusa of his own construction.
9
Pero` noi lo sappiamo
che il miracolo esiste,
che il dio degli amanti
c'e`, resiste
al destino inclemente,
alle barriere,
alle fumose schiere
delle improvvise paure
che oscure forze
nemiche
prendano il sopravvento.
Noi lo sappiamo:
non e` lontano
questo interminabile lontano.
The miracle of unveiling the truth, the "lontano," is felt to be close and yet unreachable. As in Cavafy's poem, "Ithaca," it is again the voyage that is important and not the destination. And we return again and again to retrace our steps in these poems. The tendency we have as readers to want to construct a closed system out of what we have gathered from the page is frustrated by poems such as these. We walk in darkness, and on each return we touch the poems and are touched by them. In this mutual touching and constant toeing the edge, we also find some security, while we "sostiamo / al margine del dire / nell'estasi che ci culla."
Valerio Magrelli's Clecsografie: klecks, image, projection.
Valerio Magrelli is one of a younger generation of poets, though now there is at least one more younger generation, that comes after the Novissimi. He is a friendly, bespectacled individual, with a large friendly frame and pleasant features. I hadn't see him for a few years until I went to view Nanni Moretti's Diario, in which he plays one of the doctors. I must have met him in 1983 or so, during my year in Florence. During that time I made a real effort to meet as many poets, yound and old, as possible. I corresponded with Valerio for a few years and we traded books. One of the books that he sent me was his little volume Clecsografie. I have always found some parallel directions in our poetries (more in my work in Italian that what I produce in English) and I had translated a bit of his work for journals, so I decided to write about this little publication which later found its way into the larger volume Nature e svenature. A little later Valerio asked me for the piece to publish in a special issue of "Il battello ebbro" dedicated to his work. I recently saw him in Bologna, he was being awarded the 1998 Bolognapoesia Prize for his most recent book, _______________, which I had bought and started to translate a couple of weeks earlier. This piece was published 1991 in English in the review Quaderni d'Italianistica, Toronto, and in Italian in I quaderni del Battello Ebbro, Bologna.
* * *
During the erratic and uncertain season that ran from the historic date of 1968 on into the 70s, Italian poetry, particularly in light of the example of the avantgarde group I Novissimi, followed a path of linguistic dismantling, fragmentation and dispersal, of distortion and destructuring. These actions, taken in opposition to "given" norms, opened texts to such an extent as to negate any comunicative dimension of the work, and to enact an almost complete dispersal and distancing from tradition. While resulting in a transitional period of indecisive movement, this also created a condition as close to tabula rasa as is possible in an environment charged with political slogans, advertising jingles, etc. This left the field wide open for the successive generation of poets, who, as a result, had acquired new freedoms in their choices for structuring their own precursors.
Contemporary poetry, which here should be taken to mean post-Novissimi, sought the traces of a new communicability. Such is not necessarily to be found in the reconstruction of a linguistic paradigm, but through the renewed availability of forms, including the most basic of forms, words and letters:
Forme che si vanno iva via spogliando dagli elementi superflui. Forme che si fanno indicatrici sensibili di un avanzamento nella pratica della ricerca creativa. Forme che offrono grande resistenza alla dispersione della luce. Forme che sembrano lentamente ruotare intorno al proprio asse, di volta in volta mostrando le facce della seduzione, della verita`, del mistero, del mito...
The anthology La parola innamorata (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1978), one of the first post- Novissimi collections that sought to bring together new voices in Italian poetry, did so under somewhat loose parameters. As strict adherence to a particular poetics was not the intention behind La parola, association with this publication did not pre-program the development of its participants, all of whom subsequently moved in disparate directions. Valerio Magrelli is one of the poets whose poetic research has consistently held its course to produce some of the most original contemporary writing in Italy.
Magrelli's first collection, Ora serrata retinae (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1980), was published two years after his contribution to the above anthology. The "ora", "rima", and "aequator," originating from the book's title, and from the sections "Rima palpebralis," and "Aequator lentis" respectively, present the reader with a lexicon of images tied to the body's visual apparatus, the eye. The eye, however, need not only act as a receptor of exterior phenomena, it may, in fact, visualize what the mind/body desires. What, then, is one to make of such images? And what is their nature?
In his introduction to the book, Enzo Siciliano describes Magrelli's work as:
a poetry that discovers ... an unevasive and amorous presence of the body: - he offers it up to the light of those who read with the sentiment to communicate a partial truth, but nevertheless an undeniable truth.
Further, Siciliano goes on to observe that Magrelli's poetry "takes place in a Morandian light that results from the capillarily exact use of the dry point, of the silver engraving tool." It is important here to reflect upon the source of light. By considering the acts of engraving and writing similar, then the scratching/writing of words on a page is the act that allows part of the "light" of language to escape. It is this light that then stimulates the eye to acknowledge its presence. As a result of the scratching, there is a play between form and light by which the form must give resistance to the dispersion of light in order to maintain itself. If one views the lines etched by an engraving tool close up, the edges of the "presence of the body" are not as well defined and clear as one might expect. At the edge of their lines, engraved images seem to escape their form, to diffuse their presence. The "Morandian light" that surrounds the objects is a result of this diffusion that both defines their form and announces their potential undoing.
It is in this precarious balance of form that Magrelli's poetry situates itself. In fact, while Ora serrata retinae begins with an initial expression of clarity and truthfulness achieved through the mechanism of the eye, it tends toward a moment in which its organic interdependency with the rest of the body, in all its physiological and psychological uncertainties, takes reign. Writing, like drawing or etching, can only be an attempt toward definition, the poet's desire to "cut a figure well":
A poetry that would recompose
the images that precede it
is a figure par excellence.
It is man's behaviour
in front of his fantasy.
To cut a good figure
means to cut
a figure well,
the design that would return
to the object its lines,
to thought its features.
The subjective "I" subsists in a Morandian light of "perpetual crisis ... that can resolve itself only through writing's limited certainty." This persistent light continues its presence in Magrelli's second publication, Clecsografie (Roma: L'Attico Editore, 1986). The rest of this writing, by exploring Magrelli's communicative project as expressed through a poetry that investigates the nature of physical forms as perceived and projected manifestations, will concentrate on this small publication that infuses itself into the larger collection Nature e Venature (Milano: Mondadori, 1988) just as subdued light might. Further, I hope to be able to show that the less than well-defined forms or stains ("Clecs" being from the German for stain, Klecks), that the light defines, are for Magrelli artisanal constructs whose images communicate the essence of their makers. Both Ora and Clecsografie Magrelli return to Plato's 'cave' as an analogical reference: in Ora, via physical perception/representation, and in Clecsografie through the projection/reception metaphor of the film screening-room.
Since I intend to address the perception and projection of forms, it seems apt to project Magrelli's work on a specific background. The curtain I would like to drop behind our consideration of Clecsografie is a patchwork of some of Henri Bergson's propositions on the nature of images. Given Magrelli's conjuring of the film screening-room and the assignment to "cut a figure well," and Gilles Deleuze's recent appropriation of Bergson in his cinematographical discussions, the chosen background seems more apropos. I will limit myself to citing the following: "My body, an object destined to move other objects, is, then, a center of action; it cannot give birth to a representation;" "The objects which surround my body reflect its possible action upon them;" "The recognition of a present object is effected by movements when it proceeds from the object, by representations when it issues from the subject." These propositions find fertile ground in the poems we are about to consider. The "movement" of recognition presented in the last proposition gives a primary illusion of shared movement. However, since movement for Bergson is not only indivisible but also discontinuous between bodies, any possible representation of such movement can only be an uncertain representation.
This sense of the world dominates the pages of Clecsografie from its first composition. The images of the poems are reminiscent of the stains that reveal themselves as patterns on a tablecloth, or of the clutter of objects on a dinner table:
At times from the floral design
of a table cloth there rises
an animated Europe.
During the meal
among the brimming bottles,
filiform and shadowy rises
slowly the profile of Greece,
the swan.
While some writers have expressed their view of Magrelli's poetry as a return to the "ancient idea of poetry as a source of knowledge," they could only have done so by overlooking the inherent uncertainty of poetry. Giulio Di Fonzo, in his "Magrelli e la pagina bianca," describes the condition of the modern writer as "fluctuating between aphasia and anxiety [...] between suicide and apotheosis." Subsequently, however, he too falls into the old trap of regarding poetry as a truthful representation when he states that "Magrelli [achieves a point where] the entire universe is transformed into a hand that writes." Undoubtedly, Magrelli achieves the projection of a universe upon the "white page," but it is a projection of his own hand writing its particular universe. Further, since the hand keeps writing, and does not halt its progress at a "truth," Magrelli writes an active field of images that runs counter to the ideology that regards poetry as a point of confluence for the universe and therefore as a source of knowledge.
The transition from Ora to Clecsografie is from the house of the body to an external habitation, situated in contemporary technological culture. In the latter, though the dominant theme is one of projection, the house of the body is by no means abandoned. The apparatus of the eye projects the world on the "screen" of the mind, while the technological mechanisms of Clecsografie are a further extension of the eye. Technology becomes a phenomenological tool that appears to dissolve the divisions between subject and object, categories that are by their very nature uncertain. A writer cannot possess what s/he writes, it is but a shadow that covers the whiteness of the page. Possession implies the appropriation of the object, not merely of the shadow it casts. This, of course, is an impossibility, since we base our knowledge on the mere shadows of things that remain in themselves unknown. It is even impossible to know and possess one's own thoughts, since they too are a product of that shadow state that is the body.
Images, whether extrapolations of klecks or designs, or of cracks or photos, are received stimuli. The table presented in "At times the floral design" subsequently becomes surrounded by a "flying city," which contains the house, the tables, the stains and the ideas that all these elments engender. Presenting the city as:
A flying city, self-propelling,
poised over a forest
of pile work, mobile
in the enchantment of weight,
in the grace of distribution,
tilting,
quivering in a light tremor, an attrition
that consumes it. Along its canals
full with fruit, loaded down with fruit salad,
pass boats with twisted keels
like vertebrae, twisted
by the water, oblique,
barely in balance.
Magrelli defines it as the place in which humankind, and the world it creates, exists in fragile equilibrium. In keeping with other imagery from this series of poems, the city formed by these convergences takes on the semblance of a stain that gives up its details only to a careful and persistent eye. Taking on a life of its own, the city becomes the place where all images originate as perception, the center that emits all information as a technological representation. It receives information from outside the body "along its canals," and transports this along all the available senses, loaded as in "boats with twisted keels". The whole system of physiological function, including of course visual perception, is a network created between the world, the body, and the brain. The following poem recalls similar preoccupations in Ora:
For each line a number,
as according to logismographic norms.
Thought calculates its appendages
and calls them by name.
I transfer the stone figures
being covered by water
to the distant heights,
so that their submerged lineaments
will not be dispersed.
While in Ora the sources of the stimuli seem to be restricted to the processes and instruments of writing/etching/scratching, in Clecsografie they are more varied in provenance. First of all, since the eye is no longer the dominant organ of perception, we find verses such as: "I receive from you this cup / red to drink to my days / one by one" (pg. 7) which point to the internalization of elements metonymically tied to the cup. The crack that eventually appears in the cup becomes apparent only after the liquid that hides it has been drunk. The act of drinking recalls the liquid movement of the "canals" of the city, and is further to be regarded as a mode of communication that reveals, or delivers, its message when everything has been unloaded from the "boat". The images presented offer not only byways for the movement of messages, communication, but they in fact are themselves almost iconographic in nature, representing themselves as modes of communication. This also expresses a desire of linkage with the outside world by alluding to the possibility of a flowing together.
Further, the revealed sign, the crack in the cup, offers a new "sonorous" landscape, such as the intertextuality reflected by the Auden epigraph that accompanies the composition: "And the crack in the cup opens / a path to the land of the dead." Again, we are dealing with communication, albeit a silent communication, in which a present but invisible crack not only alters our perception of all cups, but gives infinite resonance to the poetry that mentions it and the poem from which it is quoted. The cup of "I receive from you this cup" is an object that possesses the power of transference. It is itself transfered from one person to another, and, in its use, it transfers its contents to whomever drinks from it. Almost as if it were a chalice of communion, the events and circumstances surrounding the cup's users, the attributes of one person can be imagined to be transfered to others. This, of course, can only be done by projection in relation to the crack, the epigraph, or the verses. The images of cracks, canals and patterns function as pieces of a puzzle for the (re)construction or acquisition of a life and its experiences, a complex of patterns that appears as nothing more than a stain.
For Magrelli, writing is a process by which the covering up of the page by the writer traces a movement, both present and invisible, whose "partial certainty" is revealed by the act of concealment. In other words, the placement of words on a page represent a wounding of the blank page as well as a concealment of the resulting scar by the presence of the word. What initially presents itself as a stain, as something that is not readily discernible as writing, calls into play all of the reader's interpretative and observational skills; a fine movement on the page, a trace that forms itself after the careful invocation of the writer/reader. These seemingly amorphous marks initiate the process of communication by building up tension fields between the surface of the page and that of the eye that reflects it, as well as the hand and the intellect, which act upon the visualized.
Communicative designs wind their way through the poems of Clecsografie: the movement of the Earth in its orbit (pg. 9) ("In the silence, in the shadows, / I imagine the earth that spins / beneath me patient / producing only / this rustling wind / upon its surface."); the migraine, recalling the sutures of the skull and, by association, the cracks of the cup (pg. 10) ("The migraine closes in, the drums / roll from below, / from the nocturnal hemisphere."); and "the features of a loved one" (pg. 11) ("Every day is a fragment of that body / familiar but unknown, / maybe a cheek, maybe / only an eyelash."); thereby giving relevance to the senses and the creativity of intuition. These perceptions of physiological origin are contrasted, in the second part of the book, with stimuli received with the help of technology.
Beginning with "At the movies ..." (pg. 11), the body lets itself be seduced and carried by the reflected light of the silver screen. In fact, the body becomes somewhat passive: "I am the screen of the screen, I surrender / the vast copresence of my body / to a lunar work. Bystander, absent, / I am the patient of my passion." (pg. 14). Human thought is characterized by visualization, rather than linguistic signs. The written word is unstable as a visual representation because of its inherent signifier/signified discrepancies. The poem below represents just such instability, as it relates to the written word, to poetry, and finally to the being that has become the expressive medium, whether it be as word or as "screen of the screen":
At the movies, convalescing, given
to a quiet physiotherapy,
the exposure to a reflected clarity.
Fervent exchange,
in search of healing,
I am the screen of the screen, give up
the vast copresence of my body
to a lunar work. Bystander, absent,
I am the patient of my passion.
Still in the divided dark
I observe the lights descend,
its catabasis.
I stop in a forest,
watch the film of snow
fall on the landscape, on the creche
of this artificial night, curved upon
the mute hall in the current of the story.
I stare at that illuminated window
and catch someone who walking behind
the window glass makes a sign,
gesturing to these people,
invalids, ill, posing
for a group photo.
The relationship of the observer to the film screen annuls any possibility of constructing a passive narrative, and further undermines a subject/object relationship by making the observer/observed positions reverseable. The "current of the story," the pure energy it projects, is similar to the energy of the being and the poetry it populates. While projection is also an element found in Magrelli's earlier work, here the identification of the being with the machinery of communication, and their mutual calibration to a zero level by which the security of a linear narrative is lost, sets its roots in the verses below.
Mail, horrendous invention,
transmute into writing the cough,
the impatience, a sudden move, spiteful.
It is strange that technology
could take us closer to nature,
to the sighs, to the smiles of the telephone.
In this piece, and the one that follows, the zeroing of the being traversed by technology becomes complete; all that remains is communication. The being is codified into the field of technology, becoming but a numeral:
If in order to call you I dial a number
you become a number,
carry the features
of the combination to which you answer.
The repeating three,
the nine in third place,
reveal something of your face.
When I need you
I have to draw your figure,
I have to give birth to the seven figures
analogous with your name
in order to open the safebox
of the living voice.
In technology, only the instruments of communication, in other words, that which expands and extends the message along its wires, rays, and radio waves, are important. A microchip or circuit board communicate only their design and the possibilities of altering the processes of communication; they have nothing to do with the nature of the messages that they receive or emit. The possible interferences that "alter the dialogue, multiply it," that form a "horrendous trail of words, phrases, / the multicephalous and deformed monster / that calls to me from the depths" (pg. 19) are disturbing because they deny the possibility of knowing through direct contact. And in turn, poetic language produces a sort of static that hovers over the literal, that renders communication less direct. The technology that represents communication without actually being communication confirms the fragile equilibrium in which the being subsists. The artist is faced with two harsh realities: first, s/he is not necessarily able to conform the medium to the intended message, and second, each statement is always a re-statement that contains no possible linearity that would lead it to an original source, since in each re-statement a new (original) dimension is added.
The last verses of Clecsografie support this tendency of restatement. It is impossible to distract Magrelli from his poetic path; the "monster" is adopted and demonst(e)rated without fear in a non-narrative series of verses. These, free from the tyranny of the being, are organized in a sort of Duchampian listing that declares both their independence from, and their interconnectedness with, things in the world:
What will be of me?
To become a traitor
To become one of the judges
To become my own master
Conceive hope
Be alone
Road turning upward so
As to vanish from sight.
In the process of writing/reading one must indeed be a "traitor, judge, and master." All of these are traits that prevent dominion, and that contribute to the process of becoming for which poetry stands. The chameleonic writer/reader has to be ready to meet language at every level of its treacherous paths.
Finally, Magrelli's poetry has found singularly favourable some of the parameters set out by the "Innamorati" poets. While Ora serrata retinae seems to have limited itself to the relationship between the being and the "enamoured" and "coloured" word, Clecsografie comes much closer to a "rapturing" word. While the equation thought/mind=lie/shadow may seem rather pessimistic, Magrelli's work rescues poetry from the "suicide and aphasia" extremes of Di Fonzo's scale. It achieves this through its continual references to shadow areas that are components of artisanal expression: a floral pattern, a cup, an excerpt from a poem, or even a microchip. All of these find referentiality outside the system that holds them, they in fact open a world of new possibilities in their acquisition.
The artisan provides a way of working within the matter of the world. His products, among which we may also include things technological in nature, emerge onto the landscape as conditioned extentions of unconditioned elements of the world. The things we take for granted, the things we no longer see in their presence, are exposed to a new light, are scrutinized from a new angle. In other words, the word/stain gains ground by recalling images and reconstituting fragments of experience. As such, Clecsografie summons up the staining power of words to illustrate various artisanal effects (the city, the cup, writing, projection) that take us further toward the factum of "language."
La nave del mondo: la poesia di Francesco Mangone
Published as preface to Mangone's Catabasis (Napoli, Terra del fuoco 1992)
Con questa raccolta, Mangone continua la sua ricerca poetica con l'aggiunta di una nuova dimensione: dove le sue precedenti raccolte, Poema onto-lustrale e Meccanica dell'apparenza, si fondavano sulla materialit� del testo poetico, come dislocamento e come sceneggiatura, in questa serie poetica il testo si rivela come sutura.
Catabasis: effetto di discesa ampiamente rappresentato nella raccolta dalla figura dell'angelo.
Sulla levit� e caduta
degli Angeli
nel giubiloso rispecchiar
dei contrari
questa � la prefazione inserita nella prima sezione, un incipit che, nonostante l'identificazione alfabetica (Angelo = A), e cio� l'identificazione dell'angelo con gli elementi base del linguaggio, apre possibilit� non condizionate di movimento. Il "rispecchiar / dei contrari" � anche punto di convergenza e attraversamento, punto di trasmissione da una dimensione ad un'altra.
Francesco Mangone scrive in disparte, in una regione d'Italia ricca di antica memoria. Il filo dell'orizzonte sul quale guarda la sua riva � la cicatrice del mondo dove diverse superfici, a volte indistinguibili, s'intrecciano. Dalla sutura cielo/mare, in svariate direzioni, la poesia di Mangone sfila una comunicabilit�, che dipende solamente sulla capacit� trasmissiva delle due materie (aria e acqua).
In pi�, i titoli delle tre sezioni della raccolta (Della voce, Del naufragio, Dei nomi) rappresentano una seguenza significativa di particolare ordine, partecipi a un'ambiguit� direzionale che cancella la differenza discesa / ascesa.
Catabasion: luogo per la distesa di reliqui sotto l'altare della chiesa Greca. La poesia � in essenza un luogo simile, dove si conservano invisibilmente degli oggetti attorno ai quali si costruiscono culti, apparizioni, e miracoli: la rappresentazione di un ulteriore esistenza, o di una superfice diversa da quella visibile.
La poesia di Mangone � la ricerca di una soggettivit� di superficie; dell'espressivit� del luogo abbandonato o ignorato. Queste preoccupazioni si riflettono nel linguaggio stesso; nella comunicazione convenzionale lo spessore poetico delle parole e solitamente ignorato, perci� la superfice del linguaggio acquista un falso valore che infatti non � altro che un invito al consumo placante della superfice. Nelle composizioni di CATABASIS, il gioco di superfici propone la polivalenza della parola. Come metafore delle potenzialit� espressive del linguaggio, Mangone ha scelto l'aria e il mare. Gli angeli sono gli agenti poetici che passano attraverso le superfici linguistiche, le medesime superfici che il poeta, lavorando la sua materia, per/fora e meta/fora. Nella sua oralit�, e cio� "della voce", la parola � rappresentativa di un mondo invisibile. E, in quanto la sua storia non � fissata graficamente, rimane "vagabonda":
sicch� per l'aria novo ti specchi
in vertigine d'angelici...
lo sguardo
confuso
rimane li vagabondo in
eterno s'enz'altro Apparire? ...
(pg. 10)
Quando invece il linguaggio arriva al punto di materia visiva, grafia, segno materiale, quello � il momento del naufragio. Mangone lo definisce, nel "sistema verticale" di "Chiavi di tessitura" che introducono la seconda sezione come "il pensiero che vacilla, non sa dire". Da quanto si potr� dedurre dalle composizioni stesse, questo naufragio � un vero paradosso. Se il pensiero "vacilla, non sa dire" pu� darsi che vacilli perch� � infatti legato al recinto del corpo. Essendo talmente legato, trova quasi impossibile ritornare ad uno stato di assoluta oralit�. Il movimento delle parole, in questa non fissata libert�, verso la poesia e la grafia (cio� sistematizzazione) � il movimento attraverso il cielo (attra)verso il mare. Sia nel volo celeste che nel tuffo acquatico, nulla rimane del passaggio degli angeli, come nulla di scritto rimane della parola orale. Ed � qui che inizia il lavoro del poeta, nel conciliare i due stati. Mangone, non solo in questa raccolta ma anche nelle sue precedenti come Poema onto-lustrale e Meccanica dell'apparenza, conduce una ricerca poetica che si muove nello spazio tra oralit� e grafia. Infine, ecco alcuni versi da Poema onto-lustrale che dimostrano ancora che il passaggio da una materia ad un'altra propone metamorfosi non solo di stato fisico ma anche espressivo:
da sistemi volge a volte
continue
da presso le di-STANZE d'acqua
ove (... s'ardono
d'ondosit� d'onda
i mitici sileni?!)
cosit� di cosa le
avanza
trans/muta il corpo in cause
... o lasciale le perire! ... (pg. 18)
Ci� che "trans/muta il corpo" lo traversa, lo trasferisce, lo cambia, e lo rende muto. Rimane quindi il corpo come segno comunicativo, e la traiettoria di un corpo angelico che traccia un solco poetico attraverso i cieli del linguaggio.
Alda Merini: Orphism and Folly, Profane and Holy
Published along with three poems in Poetry international's premier issue, fall 1997.
Alda Merini was born with spring on March 21, 1931, in Milano. From a very young age (1947) she began to participate in the gathering of the local literary community, which included Giorgio Manganelli, Maria Corti, Luciano Erba, and Giacinto Spagnoletti among others. And it was with the encouragement of these and other writers that Merini began and continued to write. Eugenio Montale and Maria Luisa Spaziani, for example, were instrumental in convincing Scheiwiller to publish a plaquette (chapbook) of some of her works in 1951. 1953, the year of her marriage, also marks the publication of her first book, The Presence of Orpheus, which is followed by the books Fear of God and Roman Honeymoon and the birth of her first daughter. The publication of You are Peter (1961) marks the beginning of a twenty year silence in her writing.
The approach to the writings of Alda Merini is fraught with obstacles and byways that, more than inherent to the texts themselves, are the preconceived notions that readers will bring to any text written by a person who suffers from ?psychological disorder.? As Maria Corti has warned, we must ?resist the temptation to propagate legends that have blossomed around insanity ... and their concomitant myths of the imaginary.? (Vuoto d?amore, v) But, while it may be true that Merini projects her poetic art during periods of lucidity, it is also important that much of her writing functions to maintain or sustain those periods between bouts and that, therefore, the writing represents a truly functional aspect and context for both ?disorder? and what I shall call here ?order.? Not to take away from Merini?s literary activity by assigning her to a particular class of writer circumscribed by their afflictions rather than by the value of their literary output, it is also most important not to diminish the role of her ?disorder.? Though I do not intend by any means present here a full-fledged critique or reading of Alda Merini?s works, I would like to offer a few signpost along the way of our consideration of her writing that may serve us in future forays along the interstitial linings that join order and disorder.
The foremost temptation in approaching someone like Alda Merini is the apparently obvious parallel that we might make between her and other well-known writers afflicted by mental maladies, such as Antonin Artaud and Dino Campana. And, though there may be some very definite likeness that links them all, Merini defines her own ground as a writer whose activity is well defined and articulated before any episode of ?disorder? makes itself apparent. In addition, as a writer who through insanity projects a view of herself and the world that is not divided by the distinction made between sanity and insanity, but rather by a gathering in of discordant or dissonant elements toward the layering of a perception, Merini?s body of work represents a holistic proposition for survival. I don?t know if this is an element brought into play by her particular character or if it is a result of her view of the world as a woman. For, in fact, it is this last element that plays quite heavily in much of Merini?s poetics.
I am well aware of the dangers of proposing the following observation, nevertheless, there is in Alda Merini a continuous sense that insanity in some way provides the possibility for a woman to live out a potential that would otherwise not be afforded her. ?To be a woman of letters did not mean that I should be unwomanly, I even wanted to be a good mother? (RoL, 8) yet this is not always a reciprocal view allowed a woman who dares to invade a territory staked out by men. And Merini defines ?woman? in much of her book A Rage of Love as someone who must make a choice between the controlling madness of the prison of everyday convention, and the self-imposed ?disorder? as a respite from the control of others and a way of keeping that other madness at bay. Merini?s woman is someone who
wants neither to die nor to be suppressed after intercourse is the new woman of our times. Rather than give birth to the word she pronounces it. The woman Poet who does justice in the name of her own voice and who figuratively represents the language has her own figure: she has centralized and given life to these cultural signs. (11)
This birthing/genesis of the word, a way to bring into play both the mystical/spiritual sphere and the mythical/poetic, gives woman not only a position differentiated from the one assigned her by conventional society and biological function, but also a directly more essential one as the origin of ?the word.? The birth of the word of course signifies the birth of the universe, the birth of the Christ and by extension the birth of godliness itself. In a direct reference to the Orphean myth (maybe even extending to its initial use and reference in Merini?s first collection) is similarly an adoption and adaptation of the myth and its association to poetics that swerves it away from its use as ordinarily associated with Dino Campana in Italian letters toward a revised reading that values the feminine presence and aspect of it, not merely as inspiration but source. The pronunciation of Orpheus in Merini is an indirect way to impress upon us readers the invisible presence of Euridice. The female body, the body of poetry, is the one that remains in the darkness. The female body, the body that generates the word, is the body that contains the darkness that contains the word: ?Culturally content, I wrote The Presence of Orpheus. The Presence of Orpheus is the lament of the soul that finds itself in the hydric hell of the body. It is unable to leave the darkness.? (9) Knowing or believing that it is that darkness that provides her, a woman, with the possibility of generating and giving word, also leads Merini to thoughroughly distrust the insane who participate/collaborate with ?the good people? who take their time to care for them. (11) Merini?s distrust resides in her apparent thought that ?psychological disorder? is manipulated as an artificial manner in which to remain or keep others in a position of un-speaking, of silence and submission.
The distance Merini marks between herself and Campana for example, and his brand of Orphism is all-important. Orphism regards poetics as a form of magic, the testimony of a voyage into the nether regions of the unconscious and, importantly, it is so both in life and writing. As such, however inspirational and romanticized this view of the poet may be it is also a manner by which to marginalize certain individuals through loose definitions and the invocation of magical or otherworldly powers. It is at this level that one might find a holy connection in the works of ?insane? writers, for it is assumed that through just such a transcendental state of mind that a closer contact with the spirit world is possible. Merini?s god is quite another. And, while the physicality she attributes to her god may resemble similar invocations by Artaud or Campana, Merini?s god is personal, intimate, androgynous, and often frightening even in its more loving guise as Christ: ?The Christ emerges, yes, but Christ is maternal, and that scares me: His wide open arms and His chest without breasts ...? (15)
The birth of the word, the birth of Christ, the emergence of voice, are indeed all circular processes from darkness to darkness, and as such reflective of Euridice?s position rather the that of Orpheus. And the nature of both Christ and the word as expressions is both maternal and threatening for its ambiguous nature. There is none of the certainty that some critics have assigned to the poetic products of ?insane? writers such as Campana, who is regarded as the ?first and only poet in the Italian language to have assigned to the depth of an apparently uncontrollable word a psychic zone of hallucination and ruin.? If there is a certainty of ruin in Campana there is the uncertainty of pardon in Merini. The function of poetry in its association with the possibility of salvation is a mere possibility that heads neither toward salvation nor ruin, but hovers in the interzone of promise in recitation and ritual.
My schizophrenia, so acclaimed by the critics, was nothing more that the epilogue of a funereal story, an evil shadow of a childhood tragedy. A memory not visible, and then expressed as a prayer of liberation, in long poetic lamentations. Analysis was helpful in focusing in on this atmosphere of desire and guilt and finally it gave me a semblance of an existence. (18)
Merini?s understanding of schizophrenia provides a reading of the symbiotic relationship she establishes between eroticism and mysticism, between the holy and the profane through ?disorder.? There are numerous instance throughout her work that lead the reader to make a connection between Orpheus and Christ, Christ and the word, writing and pain, pain and memory, memory and knowledge, and knowledge and truth. However, the progression is not one founded on the search for truth or the assumption that answers are forthcoming from poetic questioning. Rather, the beauty and seductiveness of the Christ, and therefore all the other elements in the chain, is acknowledged as frightening and threatening: ?And then there he was: beautiful, tall, austere, silent, and threatening.? (21) This quote takes us back to one of my previous quotes regarding Christ in much the same vocabulary. In both instances, the passages are associated with the birthing process, pain, the acquisition of knowledge, and memory: ?we should talk about pain as an initiation, because the pain is an extraordinary initiation to all types of knowledge.? (33)
This is far from declaring poetry as a process of osmotic or inspirational rendering. Merini is quite clear in her description of poetry as labour. ?Poetry is not only a mission: it is also, and above all, manual labour.? (22) The implications that this declaration raises are extensive and could possibly form part of our discussion afterward, suffice it to say here that this declaration of the value of labour is collateral to woman?s labour in the home and in child-rearing. In the Orphean myth itself we are hardly witness to Euridice?s struggle, her laborious ordeal; all we are to absorb and value is Orpheus? pain and skill. Euridice?s effacement is also a neutralization of her position and the primary source of labour that has provided Orpheus with the materials and the means by which he may create.
Finally, creation itself is suspect in Merini. The very nature of the book A Rage of Love is put into question by Merini?s own explanation of it:
I publish this book because of hunger, not because I wanted to write it. I publish it because someone bluffed. Because I need money. Because great works have been dictated by a deep psychological and moral appetite. And corporeal too. (70)
The closing of the book may be disruptive for the reader, it initiates us into ?disorder? by putting into question every word that we have read. ?I did not tell you the truth because there is no truth [...]? (71) states Merini. And so, what are we to think of her ?disorder,? what are we to think of the intrinsic value of poetry and writing? Is it all a gesture, an act of consolation toward the inevitable truth that there is not truth? Or are these merely the words of a mad woman?
The approach to the writings of Alda Merini is fraught with obstacles that, more than inherent to the texts themselves, are the preconceived notions that readers will bring to any text written by a person who suffers from ?psychological disorder.? Merini?s understanding of schizophrenia provides a reading of the symbiotic relationship she establishes between eroticism and mysticism, between the holy and the profane through ?disorder.?
In A Rage of Love (Guernica, 1995) Merini defines ?woman? as an entity who must make a choice between the controlling madness of the prison of everyday convention, and self-imposed ?disorder? as a respite from the control of others and a way of keeping that other madness at bay. The woman poet must do justice to her own voice and figuratively represent language through her own figure: she gives life to cultural signs and makes them central to her cosmogony. She stresses that ?to be a woman of letters [does] not mean [being] unwomanly? (R oL, 8), and her instinct for childbearing becomes closely associated with her work as a poet.
The birthing of the word, its pronounciation, is a way to bring together the mystical/spiritual and the mythical/poetic spheres. This gives woman not only a position differentiated from the one assigned her by conventional society and biological function, but also a directly more essential one regarding the origin of ?the word.? Merini?s frequent and direct references to the Orphean myth is similarly an adoption and adaptation of that myth and its association to a poetics that swerves away from its usual association in Italian letters with Dino Campana. Merini moves toward a revised reading that values the myth?s feminine presence in the form of Eurydice, not merely as inspiration but as source.
PASSENGER TRAVELS COMMUNICATION: Antonio Porta
Introduction to the yet unpublished second editions of Passenger (Guernica, 1986). Version published as "Antonio Porta: il nomade rosa" in a special issue of TESTUALE, no. 12, 1991, dedicated to the poet.
In 1961, an anthology entitled I novissimi (Milano: Rusconi-Paolazzi) collected the work of five poets whose poetics represented a clean break from a weighty Italian literary tradition, and thereby marked a major transition in Italian Literature. The volume, edited by Alfredo Giuliani, brought together the compositions of Elio Pagliarani, Edoardo Sanguineti, Nanni Balestrini, Antonio Porta, and Giuliani, along with writings on poetics by the poets themselves.
Antonio Porta's essay contribution to the volume, "Poetry and Poetics," highlights one of the group's primary concerns, a renewed relationship of poetry to reality as a reaction to the "inability of [any previous poetics] to immerse itself in reality; [the inability to activate] a penetrating language..." (159). First and foremost within the context of such a problematic is the position of the subjective I. The Novissimi sought to reduce the I's centrality "by developing a poetics of objects, a poetry in re, not ante rem. Objects and events composed in a rhythmic unicum, [so as to] enable us to lower ourselves into reality." (160) In this context, Porta presents the reader with the image of a poet free of gravity, which suggests an unprejudiced observer, able to reach out to the objects with which he cohabits the world, and to inspect them from a closer and less conventional perspective. But having cast a critical eye on tradition, and having exercized upon language a deconstructive activity that offers up a potentially chaotic scenario, devoid of communicative qualities, conjures up a stereotypic sense of avantgarde activity as destructive, one that Porta was bent on dispelling:
An artist can be arduous and difficult, can have a disorienting impact, but can remain communicative. It depends on how the work of art is constructed. And this necessity of communication is precisely what has brought the temptation to return to the classical or neo-classical. The classical is the communicative bridge par excellence. It is the simplest, the best known, the easiest to understand. However, what we really need today is not a return to the classical or neo-classical, but a way to render classical the forms of the avant-garde. In other words, we need to make those forms communicate.[...] Art which takes refuge in non-communication serves nothing and nobody. Only an art which communicates can serve, an art which communicates critically according to a precise project for the renewal of art and society. (Scommessa, pg. )
This belief in communication, that Porta was careful to emphasize in many of his last interviews, may in fact seem to directly contradict the form of his own poetry. But it was the search for a new communicability that led Porta to set himself against traditional linguistic and literary conventions. To a reader first approaching the poetry of Antonio Porta, the question of communication may be a foremost preoccupation. Indeed, one reviewer to the first edition of Passenger lamented the fact that the Preface offered no guidance in reading the work. While experimental writing can at times be disorienting and alienating, such a complaint is merely a result of our need to cling onto known conventions while being asked to take a leap into the void. There are no lifeboats, except what we ourselves can construct as we make our way through the material. Communication, as an element associated with a project generated by an avantgarde movement, requires a renewed attitude toward language on the part of the reader. Given the fact that "the reader is, by definition of the aesthetics of the last 150 years, co-author," (Scommessa, pg.) a redemensioned subject must necessarily "gamble" on the communicative viability of his work. This is what distinguishes Porta's work from the general operation of the avantgarde.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, a contemporary of the Novissimi, detected a potentially regressive dimension in the activity of the neo-avantgarde on language, one that could result in bringing about a "nostalgia [for the] code [they had sought to destroy]." The project of the Novissimi, mostly based on standardized Italian, hoped for an ideological transformation of Italian society. But, despite the shocking activism of their verses, the ideological change barely, if ever, manifested itself, thus again leaving destruction as the most apparent characteristic of the avantgarde. Both in his activity as a member of the Novissimi, and before their formation, Porta had enacted his destructuring of language in order to undo the pseudo-demonstrative corrispondence of singnifier/signified. In the 1985 Nel Fare Poesia (Making Poetry), a book that leads its readers through the process of writing for many of his major pieces, Porta makes clear his position within the parameters of the avantgarde by recalling a group reading in 1968. The readings, during which the poet read his "As if it were a rhythm," were followed by a debate. Porta explains:
P.P.Pasolini read his "A desperate vitality" right after me. A public colloquim followed, during which Pasolini said that my poem had nothing to do with the work of the avantgarde. I answered that in my opinion that and only that was the type of work that the avantgarde had to undertake. I didn't care about the so-called pars destruens of the avantgarde. I was interested, and still am, in the pars construens, the search for a form rooted in what I have been, what I am, and what I will be, in and through poetry, in the making of poetry, being transformed in total into my work, the only thing that counts. (44)
This comment reveals a proximity of situations between Porta and Pasolini that has always been taken to be oppositional. Both poets were involved in their own projects of experimental/constructive poetics, and Pasolini had in fact caught the singularity of Porta's poetics, and its pars construens as a contradiction of the stereotypical position of the avantgarde.
It is by its very rootedness in an altered language of images and connotations that Porta's constructions must be considered. In order to do this, we must follow the tracks of his search and the attempted construction of a new subject within his poetry. Only after the appearance of a new "I," able to subsist in a post-industrial (postmodern?) world, will its language find expressive possibilities. The events and themes that provide the signs we will follow are centered around the two key images of the nomad and the rose.
Nomadism
Porta's poetry finds an active figure in the image of the nomad, which comes to represent the inherent movement of his linguistic operation, and whose precepts coincide with the Trait� de nomadologie by Deleuze and Guattari. Both instances reveal a parallel investigation on the possibility of an acentric subject which, even lacking an expressive instant through which it could define itself as subject, reveals the possibility of maintaining, or establishing, pluridimensional relationships to other similar subjects. As such, every subject participates in a wide number of varied events in which "diversity" prevails. The points of approach and confluence of the "diverse" subjects become important by dissipating the destructive potential of a "strong" subject.
Everything partakes of a world in constant flux, where inter-subjective communication dominates. What Giuliano Manacorda identified, in Porta's collection Rapporti, as "an uninterrupted parataxis between delirium and utopia," is in fact this type of communication. The semantic temblor that disturbs conventional language transmits its effect to the subject. But the activity of such disturbances desires the liberation of the subject from conventional structures, so as to provide it with a wider territory where to let the imagination play. Poetry is the form that can enact a deterritorialization of the preconditioned linguistic system, and provide a continuous movement of reterritorialization. The new subject founds itself on new linguistic indexes, free from the intrinsic subordination and coordination of imposed traditions and linguistic paradigms.
Porta's poetry develops tangentially toward the formation of a poetics of a new subject, of a communicability conditioned by no particular subject, which requires a wider and more extensive participation that touches all other subjects, and through which meaningful "human relations" can be established. A widely quoted section from Porta's collectionRapporti umani (Human relations) demonstrates the convergence of subjects, where the reduction of the I reaches the point in which no position is previleged and the subject of poetry retains its value only as long as it interacts in the total communication of the elements of the composition:
Of my life one day,
I knew nothing more, only that
which the barber revealed by asking of
my sons and I noticed that I had never know
of them, looking carefully into my own eyes
above the shaving foam and the reflecting razor.
(XI)
La Rose
The rose (including the rose of the winds, a semantically active compass) represents another cardinal point in the work of Antonio Porta that has provided a way marker for readers through the years. La Rose emerges in almost all the compositions that mark a transitive period in the poetry, its transformative capacities belonging to the voyage toward the construction of a communicative corpus. The essence of this poetic project depends on a net of levels much like the organization of the petals of a rose on the stem that presents its totality as flower: a synnedochal complex that is communicated by each and every petal. The scent transmits the image even when the flower is absent; and its image cannot but remind one of its scent. Porta's project resides in this region of invisibility and transmission.
In Nel fare poesia, Porta suggests an origin for the Rose which directly ties it to the other already mentioned fundamental image of the nomad:
Maybe the woman passenger of "As if it were a rhythm" has transformed into the Rose that dominates the long poem ["La rose"] ... in that poem a passenger appears, a traveller, ... and the traveller will be transfromed into the nomad. (51)
The Rose, aside from being the source of the nomad and his wandering, is simoultaneously offered as object or amulet with metamorphic qualities, and as a destination toward which the traveller/nomad moves in search of its origins. Porta suggests that four of the sections of "Passenger" (II, III, VIII, IX) in fact make up a story of love "that crosses the days of the passenger, as if he had seen the rose incarnate." (69) And the Rose is metonymically recalled by various images of objects, plants, and animals that lose their petals, shells, beaks, and that come to represent the absence of that to which they belong. All such elements associated with the traveller are found in many of the present volume's compositions, in "Meridians and Parallels," "Dialogue with Herz," "The Nomad's Utopia," "Passenger," and even in "For Montale's Eightieth Birthday."
The transformations and changes in position of the travelling subject function toward the establishment of a connection between the Rose and a reproductive body, representative of language as a female figure associated, within the poems, with the writer. Regarding the series entitled "The Selection of a Voice," Porta asks: "Rose is the [usual] Rose. Have I become Ophelia? This too is one of the themes: the dream of my transformation into a woman for my love of woman." (NFP, 87) The desire to be transformed into "woman" reveals a dimension, within this modified avantgarde poetics, that Porta designates as an alternative to the absence of communication.
The nomadic voyage of Porta's poetic corpus is to be read as a trajectory inextricably tied to the de-situated [subjective] I and its search for a modality that will communicate its state. This methodological key opens a series of intralinguistic experiments that have the positional exchange of reader and writer as a focal point. The nomad, traveller par excellence for its full participation within the landscape through which it continually moves, carries with it the rose, sign of the relative rapport of its petals and representative of the flowering of poetry.
Through this transmutative process, the non-narcisistic nomadic subject finds options of movement in the significatory net marked by other, similar, subjects. These nets offer the opportunity to evade any discourse that might menace with dogmatism, and help to establish an environment where the absent encounters the present, where nomads meet through the residues of their trajectories.
The smiling Rose
The title ("Smiling Rose") of a section in one of Porta's last books, Melusina (1987), reintroduces the rose in diaristic form:
that wants to abolish the narcisistic I so as to reconstitute those "resonances" thatn concern everyone's life, making evident moments full of sense. The diary form distinguishes itself from the "lyric" because it does not share with it the ambition of reaching an illusory expressive verticality; instead, [the diary] accepts the horizontal challenge of communication.
Here, we find ourselves at the crossroads of the constructive tensions of Porta's poetics: the reintegration of the subject is based on the recognition of other subjective presences. The I can survive as subject only through others, a process that establishes and strengthens "human relationships," such is the horizontal challenge of communication. For those who still take communication in its absolute and restricted sense of sign correspondences, and thereby find Porta's reorganizational poetry lacking, it is time to reasses the imposed contexts and limits of such a definition. It is not a case of strictly linguistic signs, systematically proposed and imposed, but of signs ultralinguistically represented by the world.
The unmarked crossroads of nomadic movement, with its multiple lines of approach and departure, is the most useful image with which to close this discussion. Graphically, it may recall the petals of a rose that find community in a single point, or the co-ordinates of a compass, or the paths that cross a topographical point. Antonio Porta, in tracing his paths in poetic language, lends himself as crossroads, as guide, and as "weak" subject. When the position of the dogmatic and authoritative subject came under fire, many (out of fear of the accusations that might have involved them) preferred the total and complete negation of the subject, destroying this important expressive pole and plunging into non-communication. Porta, on the other hand, recognizing the diversity of the subject as an indespensable element, set route across the fragments of that destruction in search of a shipwrecked "weak" subject thought to be no longer in existence. To this end, his poetry offers approaches to signs of lives crossed by other lives, ones that we ourselves cross as readers, and by which we are crossed in turn. The resulting intersubjective network that grows from these points not only rescues the subject, but also restores poetry its communicative power.
Silence said: the poetry of Emilio Villa
Published as introduction to translation of Seventeen Variations on Proposed Themes for a Pure Phonetic Ideology (Parentheses, 1991).
Emilio Villa was born in Milano in 1914, and has lived in Rome for many years. His first published work is Adolescenza (Bologna, 1934), a rather traditional collection which was followed by many limited edition publications such as Oramai (Roma, 1947), Villadrome (Roma, 1964), Trait�e de p�d�rasthie c�leste (Napoli, 1969), and Le m�ra di t;�b;� (Brescia, 1981). He represents one of the first post-futurist exponents of the experimental tendencies later to be picked up by various partecipants in avantgarde movements, including members of the Gruppo 63. Many have emulated his work, and many have neglected to cite his influence, all of which has contributed to Villa's prominent position among important but overlooked poets in contemporary Italy, among which are the likes of Franco Cavallo and Edoardo Cacciatore.
Aside from the ephemeral nature of his publications, perhaps part of the lack of recognition by some of those who most owe Villa results from political differences. Villa's experimentation placed him in what could be construed as an antithetical position in respects to the actions of groups such as the Novissimi. For the latter, every-day Italian as a standardized language was a tool of communication through which they could deny tradition and convention, while Villa reached a point of denial of language that might have seemed too extreme and removed from the political activism of the 60s. While the work of the Novissimi, and other parallel groups and individuals, culminated in the shouts of protest and political action that characterized the sixties and early seventies, Villa maintained a political position of silent denial of "origin" and nationalism that could very well have been mistaken for "qualunquismo" (political agnosticism).
And yet, Villa represents a most radical position that carries with it a mistrust of any and all languages for their potential to centralize and constrict culture. This causes him to continually change from Italian to French to English to Latin and Greek; to mix and alter them, and eventually leave them behind. Paradoxically, this translates into a trust of the linguistic sign and in its capacity to retain some shread of meaning even under the most extreme of circumstances and contexts, which come to represent a liberation of words from their conventionality. Villa's writing points to the future with an eye on the past. His is an interest for the origins of language and culture, of a "primitive" that history itself has cancelled from memory: "We search for a balance that aesthetical culture has spoiled if not altogether ruined" ("That which is primitive").
Villa's distance from Italian grows more than linguistically when, for a period in the early 50s, he transfers to Brazil. There, he is credited with having taken part in the formation of the concrete poetry movement, and the foundation of associated literary journals. It was while in contact with the Noigandres group that Villa came again to consider the works of Pound, Joyce, and cummings, and their relationship with the experiments he himself and the Brazilians were undertaking (Tagliaferri, ). In 1937, he had however already found objection to Eliot and Pound's "poetics of vision" as too limiting. In the journal Il Frontespizio Villa writes, through Dante: "non solo il 'visibile parlare' ma anche 'vision ch'a me si spiega' " (Tagliaferri, ). The 'vision ch'a me si spiega' expresses the move in Villa's work toward the expansion (spiegarsi) of empty space as a significant semantic component. Words are displaced from their central position on the page by the encroachment of space, thereby increasing the dimensions of silence inherent in the written word. Further, the problematic relationship between signifier and signified is exalted as linguistic signs begin to form in this poetry associations out of the norm at both the phonetic and semantic levels. In the resulting absence of ordinary linguistic logic the texts become dense, and apparently impenetrable.
The increased expansion of Villa's poetic language to include foreign languages, dialects, neologisms, and dead languages extends the poet's search for the "pure" and agrammatical phoneme, one distant from the legislating logos. The poet's interests are in language both as beginning and end, and he is well aware of the strangling hold of conceptualization and conventional language use; this keeps him ever alert to apparent truths and historical dictation. Villa's search for an origin is not for a point of revelation and comprehension or recognition, but rather toward what Aldo Tagliaferri has termed "a pathos of distance and infinite metonymy" (Tagliaferri, ). In fact, his eventual abandonment of Italian as a poetic language for French, Latin, Greek, and so on constitutes an attempt to totally distance himself from Italian literary institutions and his own "historic origins". The texts that I will consider herein are parallel texts of linguistic deracination that follow similar lines of development, they are Seventeen Variations on Proposed Themes for a Pure Phonetic Ideology (Roma: 1955), and 17 Eschatological Madrigals Captured by a Sweetromantic Cybernetogamig Vampire (Roma: 1968).
* * * *
Seventeen Variations on Proposed Themes for a Pure Phonetic Ideology (Roma: Origine,1955) is a particularly significant text for its full participation in the search for the silent phoneme and in its illustration of many of Villa's poetic interests and directions. First published as a limited edition booklet with graphics by Burri, Diciassette variazioni was only recently republished in Italy, in the first volume of Villa's collected works from the publisher Coliseum, under the editorial care of Aldo Tagliaferri. Diciassette variazioni, a composition in seventeen parts, is in fact made up of seventeen variations in form and language on a thematic that, as the title suggests, moves toward ideology. The type of inter and trans linguistic poetics displayed in Seventeen variations is not by any means rare in this century, and indeed finds among its subscribers T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
Though parts of Villa's poetics can be taken to have evolved from a certain Poundian influence, his composition only resembles Pound in form, the use of erudite citations, and the juxtaposition of culturally distant languages and semantic formulae. Pound's poetry is an act that suggests the need to possess those elements that he incorporates in his work; an appropriation that functions as an act of rooting western culture, a scheme to provide a cohesive and systematic genesis and evolution. All of this is well apparent in works such as his The ABC of Reading, which testify to Pound's tendency to move toward a centralization of culture. Emilio Villa moves in an antithetical direction, toward what may best be described as eccentrism. Not acentrism, since he cannot deny the cultural baggage that forms his intellectual activity; but rather eccentric, oscillating around the cultural center that the poet himself represents as a participant in the construction of contemporary culture.
The alternating movement of attraction and repulsion that defines Villa's poetry also reflects in the constitution of the poetic text as ideology. The officiality of the Italian language, which tempers and orchestrates a particular kind of linguistic oppression, is that which Villa attacks. His distancing from the Italian "logos" is also an attempt to approximate a more ideally heterogeneous Italian culture. Because of this one could hazard the statement that Villa is the most Italian contemporary poet that there is. His adoption of foreign languages during various periods of his artistic activity, serves to underline the remove that any Italian may feel toward the Italian language (which for Villa is merely one language among many). Babel becomes a viable reality in this work that orchestrates a diversity of idioms into a coherent whole of poetic expression. The agglomeration of languages acquires a choric function that accompanies or glosses the silence said by the tension resulting from their juxaposition. Sections such as 11, 13, 16, and 17 of Seventeen Variations represent instances in which the linguistic tension and therefore the ideological stance of the work peeks through, and we readers are given a hint of "purely phonetic" silence.
As the multilingual context distances both poet and text from a concept of original language, their co-existence creates a new environment in which their reading leaves behind it a jet stream of empty passage that resolves itself as the silent utterance of the past. Each linguistic turn alters the writer's (and reader's) relationship with the world and installs an infinite moment of reassessment and initiation. The tongue of initiation is the silence whose presence extends throughout the text in a multiple fashion as beginning, end, and mediating vehicle of phonetic expression.
* * * *
Phonetics, as an elemental factor in communication is again the theme in 17 Eschatological Madrigals. In this work, which Villa signs "Villadrome," eschatological and phonetic come to form an equation of extremes which are pitted against both the past and the future, against tradition and innovation. Such becomes the function of the madrigal, representative of a traditional form, and the "cybernetogamig vampire" that alludes to a futuristic process that is in fact present and contemporary. The "cybernetogamig vampire" is a system of communication control whose vampiristic nature is, as a gametic state, dependent on the human component that activates the system by the introduction and use of language. The computer system with which Villa interacted in the composition of the work is the vampire and Villa, the active initiator and participant, is its complement.
But if we were to somehow be led into regarding the computer as the controlling element by the qualifying term "vampire," it would be an error on our part. Villa supplants the position of the computer by designating himself as "Villadrome," itself a cybernetic construct with a futuristic flair, which we can well imagine with hands as extentions of a computer keypad. And the nature of the text itself is such that the phonetic gaming by Villadrome is reflected by the responses in coded language of the computer, responses as representative of phonetics as the poet's declinations of English words (his primary language of choice for these madrigals):
echo of untimely V I E W Viewkit
near Mountain View you
near San Mateo samatio
near Santa Rosa downtown
sanarosa, down big sur
surely town!
when then we want the wowf
wraith who wrap
Wit of woldheart of wAfrika, ah! Kitkit
(Madrigals, 8)
Even though nothing can be said to be exclusive for Emilio Villa, his latest poetic production is almost exclusively in Latin, thereby unveiling the expressive capacity of what is deemed a dead language. By upsetting the accepted conventions of what is a dead language and what is a living tongue, the poet revitalizes Latin and tends to question the status of standardized Italian as a living language. So-called dead languages by their nature afford the possibility of a break with history; and it is not by any means to be overlooked that they also offer a link with history. Again, however, it must be remembered that Villa's view of history must be non-linear, non causal, only creatively available in its communication of culture.
In both Seventeen Variations and 17 madrigals, key words in their titles (phonetics and cybernetic) refer to the classification of communicative systems. As such, these indications appear to contradict Villa's need to remove, or at least distance, himself from the classification that comes to be associated with the choice of any linguistic system as a vehicle of expression. Appearances are in fact deceptive, since even a cursory reading of either of these two sets of compositions will not easily offer a closely followed "variations on a theme," let alone a madrigal of any conventional sort. Villa categorizes all such constructs among the more conventionally thought of languages to be avoided. Anything that smacks of "logogrammatic" heirarchy is to be circumscribed and undermined.
This leaves one rather perplexed, since the ideology purportedly searched for would also represent a contradiction in terms of Villa's poetic or textual production. Let's not forget however that what is proposed is a phonetic ideology, and therefore a building block that leaves any range of possibilities at the disposal of its user(s), what we might refer to as a non-ideological ideology. It is worth pointing out, no matter how obvious it might be, that these works are in fact a critique of ideology, a term which becomes in Villa's work a studied illustration of "arte allusiva:" the metonimical rhetoric of statement contradicts the actual trajectory of the art. Ideology alludes to itself and only itself and is, in the context of art, only an illusionary and empty critique of itself.
The type of linguistic openness that Villa proposes, addresses specific linguistic problems as they relate to us in the contemporary world. The way language has become a consumer product, the way language has lost a sense of the phonetic element that forms its peculiar expressive capabilities and variations, these are questions that emerge when one consider's Villa's poetic production. It is obvious that the age old "questione della lingua" has for Emilio Villa implications quite different from the usual ones. For him the choice is not between a standardized language (Italian) and regional linguistic systems, commonly referred to as dialects, but rather a choice between any language that can oppose centrality.
In his introduction to Villa's Opere poetiche, vol. I, Aldo Tagliaferri makes mention of dialect in the following manner:
Even the linguistic infraction, the recourse to the gergal or the dialect, or the preference given to the dialect in some of the texts, more than an anti-institutional challenge, they declare an adherence to a reality lived in "milanese" in years when this dialect was much more spoken than it is now (4).
While I find myself in agreement with the foregoing statement, it must however be said that any expression, in a language other than what has been instituted as the official language, constitutes, even if unconsciously, a direct threat and challenge to the posited national language.
This aspect of Villa's poetics reflects for me the particular experience of emigration which, for our connationals, has often revealed itself in such a way as to diminish the importance of Italian in their lives abroad and thereby provide an aperture for their own culturally active tongues, in other words their dialects. As such, ideological adherence is signalled by phonetics before any other dimension, and the imposition of a national tongue at the cost of existing modes of expression, whether it be Italian, English, or any other language, can only be represented as a vampiristic rapport which, in order to be productive and creative, must be countered and balanced as Villa provides in his 17 madrigals .
Finally, as the translator of this text into English, I will admit that it is an odd text to have "translated," since only portions of it have actually been rendered into English. The nature of the work requires that the various languages used be represented. It was my intention to place the English language reader in a position similar to that of the Italian reader. In order to do this the process of translation had to take into consideration matters other than the transposition of one language into another. In fact, the translation too seems to have picked up some of that silent quality that Villa writes toward. For these reasons I translated only what was written in Italian in the "Italian" text.
This too, however, brings about a problem. In section 11, written in Provenzal, Villa provides an Italian translation. Emilio Villa does not by habit provide explanations or translations to his work; the one included in Seventeen is an exception. Personally, I see this not as a translation, a momentary weakness by which Villa seeks to bring his readers closer to his work, but rather as an instance of linguistic linkage, an illustration of poetic descendancy. Through my decision to translate what appeared in Italian into English, that linkage has been silenced. The resulting silence should not however be regretted as an error or an unavoidable trap of the process of translation, I would rather wish to regard it as an extention of the silence of the primary text, the linkage being extant through the body of the translator, an Italian English speaker.
Feel free to check out the links below.
http://www.fortunecity.com/
|
|
|
|
