[The soul of the observing mannequin (Dublin 2015). Foto Rb]
Valerio Magrelli[1] is one of the poets who, in the 1980s, re-formulated the modern canon
of Italian poetry after the experience of both Hermeticism and the
Neo-Avant-garde. A number of paths were open for updating developments.
A revival of Romantic sentimental poetry combined with echoes of early
twentieth century Modernism was launched towards the end of the 1970s by poets
such as Giuseppe Conte and Tommaso Kemeny. Some recovery of the Avant-garde was
visible in the 1990s among the poets of the so-called “Gruppo 93”. A number of
poets turned to subjectivity, both in the 1980s and 1990s. Magrelli followed
his own direction. Since his first-published and pivotal collection, Ora
serrata retinae, he created a poetry of meditation and objectivity which, while
adopting a clear, understandable and resonant language, is at the same time
philosophically reflective. As Italian critic Stefano Giovanardi puts it, one
of the dominant features in Magrelli’s poetry is “confession and expression of
oneself – but instead of aiming at sentiments, emotions and passions, the
individual exclusively reveals his intellectual relationship with the world and
himself (as well as, naturally, with his writing activity)”.[2] In this short introduction to Magrelli’s
work, I will briefly go through some of his collections.
There are many elements that come together to compose the complex
texture of words and concepts of Ora
serrata retinae.
In Ora serrata retinae,
Magrelli portrays reality as a network rather than as a linear dimension, and he
renders it in a severe, measured and rhythmic language. There is a
specular dialogue between the writer and his brain. The brain is defined as
“the heart of image”.[3] In one of the poems in this collection,
the writing individual is metaphorically compared to a landlord who lives in
his brain in which he works to make it produce, but at the same time the brain
lives inside the poet and appears to be the landlord himself.[4] In another poem, the eye that sees is
also the inner eye of thought which fathoms water, a universal symbol for the
unconscious and perhaps also, in this particular case, for the fluid nature of
writing.[5]
What strikes most in this book is the interconnected action of the
concepts of brain, eye and body in perceiving the world of things, situations
and writing while the dimension of wake subsides a number of times into that of
sleep.
To express this through one of the images used by Magrelli a few years
later, we can turn to one of the poems in Nature
e venature, the poet purports to be “a piece of fruit hanging / from the
tree of sleep” and “lost inside the dough / of the night”.
Moving on to subsequent work, Nel
condominio di carne (2003) is a book of rhythmic prose. Some
prose in this kind of style had already been written in a number of pieces of Esercizi
di tiptologia (published in 1992).[6] Prose returns in Geologia di un padre (2013), a series of memoirs of the author’s
father after his death.[7]
The core subject matter of each of the short chapters of Nel condominio di carne is illness. We
read stories of illnesses that affected the first-person narrator, yet each of
these diseases functions as a starting point for poetic exploration along a number
of pathways. These pathways include thoughtful reflections, memories from the
past, and associations of various kinds leading both inwards to the deep psyche
and outwards to the proximity of family and acquaintances and further off to
society.
The author summarizes some of his intentions in the first line of the
book: “My past is an illness contracted during childhood. Therefore I
decided to understand how this happened. This medical report, then, intends to
be not an anatomical theatre but rather a sequel of photograms, where what
counts is the flux of images, the wriggling body which vibrates below me”.[8]
And when he describes a cyclorama in Atlanta, we might take his aversion
to continuity as a metaphor for the fragmentary structural procedure which binds
together a number of these individual texts: “For us, 20th-century creatures,
the thread of a plot cannot remain intact; we wish for variations, seams, knots and patching. The
uninterrupted band of Cyclorama is as remote to us as the ornamented spiral of
Trajan’s column”.[9]
The mental content of memory deforms the events that took place at some
point in the experience of real life. Such a warped dimension is
allegorically represented by six vinyl records deformed by heat in the
narrator’s childhood. And a visit Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris spins a chain
of associations that leads to what the author sees as a sentiment of death
which succeeds to be revealing in a panoramic mental way despite its touristic
purpose.[10]
We have indeed a modernist work that does not reject subjectivity, but
it adapts feeling to thought, and obstinately pursues a non-commercial,
zig-zagging variety of writing similar to early 20th-century prose.
I will move on briefly to Magrelli’s latest books of poetry.
In Disturbi del sistema binario
(2006) we find three main aspects that define the presence in the world of
contemporary human beings. The personal aspect is often
indicated here by the family, and in particular a son and a daughter. The
social aspect appears mainly in a section significantly called “Nella tribù”.
And the divided, yet integrated, self, figures prominently in the section
called “L’individuo anatra-lepre”.
The poems where the son and the daughter appear have moments of
consolation, they express affection, and show some dreamy projection. A
six year old girl is thought of as “a Laika orbiting around an uninhabited sky,
/ a satellite, yet a cub in the dark, the only celestial body / that throbs in
a universe devastated by / sleep”.[11]
In another poem she appears, even more clearly in terms of social significance,
as “an antidote to evil”.[12] The son, despite building his
adolescent personality by “proudly exhibiting violence”, is characterized by a
“bewildered suit of armour made of feathers”.[13]
These children would seem to be emblems of softness and emotionality
whereas the wider world is characterized by danger, precariousness and violence,
by a situation of “guace”, or “guerra/pace”, a neologism translatable as
“warce”, “war/peace”. One poem from the section “Within the tribe” is in
fact about September 11;[14] another one is entitled “Watching the
lines of refugees from home”;[15] tragedy alternates with irony on
television programmes and technology described by an individual who claims to
be “against evil”, “against nothingness” and a “hostage” of incompetent
science.[16]
Magrelli’s interest in current affairs, and his conviction that the task
of poetry is to “deal with what is near us”,[17] had already been expressed in a 1999 collection, Didascalie per la lettura di un giornale.[18] This
is a book in which one of the concerns was the “zig-zagging line / of fracture
/ between technology and nature”;[19] and scepticism was expressed about the
language used by newspapers, the position of readers as spectators of events,
the abundance of violent crime, a world where “everything has due weight”.[20] Current affairs, perhaps in an even
more disillusioned way, re-appear in a more recent collection, Il sangue amaro (2014).[21] Here the Christian turning the other
cheek is reputed easier to say than to do since evil comes in between and makes
this gesture difficult to perform; the subject is totally enslaved to the
market; youth are jobless; and injustice pervades society.[22]
Against the background of such a social context, and as a metaphor for
all of us, the inner psyche of the individual in Disturbi del sistema binario is divided into two parts, a “goose”
and a “hare”, which take up a variety of connotations as the last section of
this collection unfolds. The most emphatic of these
connotations is perhaps the ambiguous ethical position vis-à-vis what happens
around us, or, in the author’s own words, “This is the secret of the
hare-goose: / how to be guilty / while remaining innocent”,[23]
an updated version, one might say, of Eugenio Montale’s “no one is any longer
un-guilty”.[24]
It is difficult for me to come to a definitive conclusion about
Magrelli’s oeuvre. In his work, the analysis of the personal is a
starting point for an examination of the collective; ideologies are set against
unjust practices and received ideas; complexity wins over simplicity; a varied
network of references to classics exists; and the risk of imprisonment in
dogmatic truth is avoided. Structurally and philosophically, openness rather
than closeness healthily seems to prevail.
[Roberto
Bertoni]
REFERENCES
DURANTI,
Riccardo, CROWE SERRANO, Anamaría, and MOLINO, Anthony, Instructions on How to Read a Newspaper and Other Poems, New York,
Chelsea Editions, 2008.
GIOVANARDI,
Stefano, “Valerio Magrelli”, in CUCCHI, Maurizio and GIOVANARDI, Stefano, ed., Poesia italiana del secondo Novecento
1945-1995, Milan, Mondadori, 1996, pp. 985-87.
MAGRELLI,
Valerio, Poesie (1980-1992) e altre
poesie, Turin, Einaudi, 1996. This volume includes Ora serrata retinae (1980), Nature
e venature (1987), Esercizi di
tiptologia (1992), and Altre poesie
(1993-1996). Abbreviated as PAP.
MAGRELLI,
Valerio, Didascalie per la lettura di un
giornale, Turin, Einaudi, 1999. The edition used here is the Kindle
edition. Abbreviated as DLG.
MAGRELLI,
Valerio, Nel condominio di carne,
Turin, Einaudi, 2003. Abbreviated as NCC.
MAGRELLI,
Valerio, Disturbi del sistema binario,
Turin, Einaudi, 2006. Abbreviated as DSB.
MAGRELLI,
Valerio, Geologia di un padre, Turin,
Einaudi, 2013.
MAGRELLI,
Valerio, Il sangue amaro, Turin,
Einaudi, 2014.
[1] This introduction was read at the Italian Cultural Institute (Dublin) on
the occasion of Valerio Magrelli’s visit on 22 September 2015. Many thanks to
Teresa Whitington for her revision of the English text.
[2] “[…] confessione e […] espressione di sé: solo che anziché puntare su
sentimenti, emozioni e passioni, quel soggetto rivela esclusivamente il proprio
rapporto intellettuale col mondo e con se stesso (nonché, naturalmente, con la
sua specifica attività di scrittura)” - Stefano Giovanardi, p. 985 of “Valerio
Magrelli”, in Maurizio Cucchi and Stefano Giovanardi, ed., Poesia italiana del secondo Nonecento 1945-1995, Milan, Mondadori,
1996, pp. 985-87.
[3] “Il cervello è il cuore delle immagine” (PAP, p., 33).
[4] “Io abito il mio cervello / come un tranquillo possidente le sue
terre. / Per tutto il giorno il mio lavoro / è nel farle fruttare, / il mio
frutto nel farle lavorare. / E prima di dormire / mi affaccio a guardarle / con
il pudore dell’uomo / per la sua immagine. / Il mio cervello abita in me / come
un tranquillo possidente le sue terre” (PAP,
p. 24).
[5] “S’introduce a volte nel pensiero / come nell’acqua, un riflesso / che
l’attraversa e ne misura il fondale. / È un occhio che si apre / dentro le
lucide onde e vi affonda” (PAP, p.
29).
[6] See “Alle lagrime, rovi” (PAP,
pp. 221-24), “Moore bianco” (PAP, pp.
237-39), “Terranera” (PAP, pp.
253-57), “Rivelarmi al gelo” (PAP,
pp. 273-75), and “L’anti-Mazur” (PAP,
pp. 291-92).
[7] Geologia di un padre, Turin,
Einaudi, 2013.
[8] “Il mio passato è una malattia contratta nell’infanzia. Perciò ho
deciso di capire come. Questo referto, dunque, non vuole essere un teatro
anatomico, piuttosto un susseguirsi di fotogrammi, dove quello che conta è il
flusso dell’immagine, il corpo sgusciante che vibra sotto di me” (NCC, p. 3). All translations in this
paper are by R. Bertoni.
[9] “Per noi, creature del XX secolo, il filo di una trama non può correre
intatto; vogliamo variazioni, cuciture, nodi e rammendi. La fascia ininterrotta
del Cyclorama ci riesce tanto remota quanto la spirale istoriata della Colonna
Traiana”
[10] “[...] sento di attraversare un nuovo sentimento della morte,
ciclabile e turistico, ma né blasfemo né ironico, piuttosto: panoramico” (NCC, p. 52).
[11] “Ti penso come una Laika in
orbita nel cielo disabitato, / satellite ma cucciolo nel buio, solo corpo
celeste / a palpitare nell’universo devastato / dal sonno” (DSB, p. 36).
[12] “Antidoto del male” (DSB, p.
39).
[13] “Violenza che spavaldo esibisce”; “smarrita corazza di piume” (DSB, p. 47).
[14] “11 settembre 2011” (DSB, p.
15).
[15] “Guardando le colonne di profughi da casa mia” (DSB, p. 7).
[16] “[…] contro il male, contro il nulla / di una scienza affidata (mala tecnica / currunt) a incompetenti,
io scrivo!, ostaggio” (DBS, p. 21).
[17] “Io sono convinto che la poesia debba trattare di cose che ci
riguardano da vicino”, on p. 88 of an interview conducted by Tommaso Lisa, ed.,
Poetiche contemporanee: Colloqui con
dieci poeti italiani, Pieve al Toppo (Arezzo), 2006, pp. 85-91.
[18] Translated by Riccardo Duranti,
Anamaría Crowe Serrano and Anthony Molino, Instructions
on How to Read a Newspaper and Other Poems, New York, Chelsea Editions, 2008.
[19] “La zigzagante linea di / frattura / fra tecnica e natura”. From the poem entitled “Cronache” (DLG, Kindle edition).
[20] “[...] un mondo” in the first line,
and “Tutto pesa” in the last line of the poem entitled “Giochi: Rebus” (DLG, Kindle edition).
[21] Turin, Einaudi.
[22] Various quotations from the Kindle edition: “Porgere l’altra guancia /
fu una rivoluzione copernicana” […] “Facile a dirsi, ma tra il dire e il fare /
c’era di mezzo il Male”; “Totale, corporale asservimento / del soggetto al
mercato”; “I giovani senza lavoro”; “E gli altri? Sopporto le ingiustizie /
dalla nascita”.
[23] “Ecco il segreto dell’anatra-lepre: / come essere colpevoli /
rimanendo innocenti” (DSB, p. 54).
[24] “Più nessuno è incolpevole” (“Primavera hitleriana”, in La bufera e altro, Milan, Mondadori,
1956).
