On our mind
 

by Massimo Sannelli


1

Very little is known in the world about Italian poetry today. This little anthology will introduce many interesting writers who are as yet quite unknown abroad: unfortunately, Italian writers do not practice bilinguism, with the exception of Amelia Rosselli. But a few of new poets–they are 30 or 40 years old–write and speak more than their mothertongue, and they are working against our crise. They are also novelists, actors, photographers, or artists, and their space is made of admixture and interferences.
Firstly, modern Italian poetry is really an old one and Italian language is not a compact hardware, but a system of secret roots. It is an 800 years old body. The problem of Italian readers-speakers-writers is the impossibility to understand their literature from a syncronic point of view, like a wild and wide field is seen (not simplified, but filled with relationships and connections), or like a unique book hosting the eight centuries.
Italian people like to study and think its history–and every history–as an evolution and are grateful to the scholars able to support the historicism of our culture. And it is a real pity, because Italian poetry depends on obsessions, whose history is the true history of our literature. It could be said that there isn’t a history of Italian poetry, but a mind of it. In my opinion, a confession of this literary mind–nothing more than the first notes of a psychoanalysis–is more important than a traditional history of our literature. I think that the concept of «literary space», as Blanchot calls it in his masterwork–is more lucid and useful of a history.


2

The first obsession is a question: which language? A common one or an individual experience? We know that language is not a simple tool, but the building of our national and personal identity. The problem is that our language is a cultural construction, taught at school and broadcasted by media: Italy was a dialectal country, with social and regional peculiarities, as Alba Amoia wrote in 1977: «Culturally, Italy is handicapped by the fact that basically it is not one country. It is twenty countries The twenty Italian regions have little in common with each other; there are vast differences between the industrialized North and the undeveloped South». These words are thirty years old, but show a reality we know and see every day.
Modern poets hesitate between two possibilities: a language with the ambition to reproduce reality (simple language for a simple reality) or a language that could be indivual as a person, with its own rules and discipline. This is what Antonio Diavoli and Chiara Daino (both poet and translator) do. That is to say that Italy knows an intellectual war between comedy and tragedy, realism and dissemination, hope and sadness, and so on. We know the great exception of Emily Dickinson in our translations, and I have seen this difference as a translator of Dickinson: there is an astonishing gap getween her English, so free and incoherent, and the work of our translators. Dickinson’s translations into Italian depend on the fear to imitate the incoherence of the original: for exemple, the dashes are the most evident mark of Dickinson’s poems, but Italian translators do repudiate them, as if every dash were a horrible scar on the pure surface of paper.
Finally, Dickinson is not a poet of our times: she died in 1886. But our Nation–our literary and academic republic–does not understand her work. We read Dickinson as if she were a poor girl without the great Project she really had and did. We do not accept her scars. But new poets do.


3
The second obsession is love. Our poetry was born in 13th century, in order to praise God (with the wonderful Creatures’ Song by St. Francis) and to LODARE the woman (with the poets living at the court of the Emperor Frederick II). Our tradition is to refer ourselves to something/somebody out of us: God, the object of our love (Dante’s Beatrice, Petrarch’s Laura, Montale’s Clizia, Pasolini’s Ninetto and Callas), the Love himself. The beautiful, the true, and the Sublime is constituded by an attitude towards the Other and the highness.
Introducing Love a character is but a strong metaphor of the poet’s work, and Dante notices it in his first book (The New Life, published in 1295 when he was 30 years old). Love appears here as a real person (he - «the sphere’s centre» - laughs and talks, both in Latin and Italian, and inspires the young poet), but its body is absurd and impossible. The truth is that Love is only a figure or a mask of what inhabits in our heart. That is to say: our inspiration is self-generated, but referred to another energy. Rimbaud’s aphorism on the impossibility to be and say «I» (the self is another self’s self) was understood in the Middle Ages as the impossibility to describe the unrepresented Other. And now? We talk and write about politics, human love, history, but–like Eliot’s women «talking of Michelangelo»–we are talking and writing about our body and soul’s reality. One of the greatest poets of the 20th century, Amelia Rosselli, is a confirmation of it: «I am not what I appear». And she wrote in English and French, then in Italian: her appearance took shape in the impossibility to write in one language. Being poet in two languages defends the poet himself/herself from a trivial idea of poetry. Italy has a great literature, filled with enormous obsessions, but Italian do not accept the weight of it. They are literally orthodox, although their literature is not peaceful (Dante sees God in his Paradise, but after a horrible journey in the infernal cavern and meadows).
For better of worse, the relationship between Italian poetry and mental illness is as tragic as necessary, We are a self-evident energy that wants to be considered external: the thing called «Love» (illness, melancholy) inspires and legitimizes the most wonderful part of Italian poetry. This is THE question: Who is (and where is) the communicator in us? In my opinion, our Sublime is this verbal flowing, this tragedy, and this danger. There is a tremendous number of Italian writers and poets, in our times: but they live and write as if our language (and regional country) were compact and sure, and as if our literature were not born to put out what is too heavy (love or desperation) to stay in the mind. This is the history of a weight and of a need.