Italian Poetry

Today we read Gli ignavi, by Dante Alighieri.

The third book of Dante’s Comedy is filled with quotable expressions that are still frequently used in Italian. Such is the ammonition that closes the inscription on the Door of Hell: lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate (leave all hope behind, you who enter).

Dante knew that this hominous promise doesn’t apply to him: he’s just a visitor, passing through, taking notes so that he can later sing of what he’s seen for the greater glory of God.

Right after passing this terrible threshold, Dante sees and hears hosts of naked souls forced to follow a banner while being eaten alive (well, dead…) by horseflies. These are the ignavi: people so weak-willed, so undaring, so conformist, so devoid of autonomous thought and action, that, Dante says, mai non fur vivi: they really never lived. They are sanza ’nfamia e sanza lodo, without infamy and without praise. Another stock phrase, often used by teachers talking to parents about their children’s school accomplishments.

The souls are technically still outside Hell proper: they didn’t sin enough, nor did they do good – things that both require to take a side. Here Dante places also the angels that didn’t betray God, but didn’t help him either against the betrayers. So nobody wants them: they would soil Heaven, and are too bland and generic for Hell. So they are herded aimlessly for eternity, and they’d prefer anything, even the depeest pits of Hell, to this eternal irrelevance.

After explaining all this to Dante in tones dripping scorn, Virgil liquidates them with one of those one-liners for the ages: non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa, let’s not think about them, just look and move on.

The original:

Today we read In quella parte del giovanetto anno, by Dante Alighieri.

This extract from the Chant XXIV of Dante’s Comedy is likely not one you find in anthologies: no big names of the time discussing their damnation, no visions of Paradise, no memorable one-liners.

But it’s a beautiful, moving simile, that Dante employs to explain how he feels when he sees Virgil, his guide through Hell, angered and disturbed (and apparently not entirely knowledgable on the path they have to take). And how he feels when Virgil finally looks at him with the same friendly, reassuring look he had at the beginning of their journey.

You know how it is around February, when frost covers the ground, mimicking its bigger sister, snow? Imagine a poor shepherd who doesn’t have enough to eat. He wakes up, sees the white, and despairs, thinking it’s snow after all. He goes back to his hut, scared, complaining and beating his chest.

But then he goes out again, and frost has already vanished under the meek sun! And so he takes his sheep grazing, and all is well.

Yes, that’s it. He felt like that.

The original:

Today we read Tu mi vorresti come uno dei tuoi gatti, by Patrizia Cavalli.

Patrizia Cavalli writes in a register that sounds, on first reading, like overheard conversation: colloquial, quick, often bitingly funny. But underneath the chatty surface there is almost always a strict metrical scaffolding — here, mostly endecasillabi — and a network of internal rhymes that keep everything tightly stitched together (gatti/infatti, nascosto/the implied vedi echoes, parallela/intera).

The premise is a domestic argument compressed into six lines. The addressee — a lover, presumably — would prefer the poet to behave like one of their cats: castrated, parallel, sleeping in tidy rows, only being a cat (only being itself) in secret, when nobody is watching. It’s a wonderful image of the kind of partner who wants you neat and predictable, with all your inconvenient nature tucked away off-stage.

Cavalli’s refusal is delivered without raising her voice: she will not be castrated, she will not be parallel. She might leave — magari me ne vado — but she will leave tutta di traverso e tutta intera: all askew and all whole. The double tutta is the whole point: wholeness and crookedness are not opposites here, they’re the same thing. To be parallel is to have been cut down to fit; to leave sideways, awkwardly, in the wrong direction, is what it costs to leave intact.

The original:

Today we read Sole d’inverno, by Ada Negri.

We’ve met Ada Negri before, when she was sixty and writing about February’s tentative promise of spring. This poem, from Il dono, finds her six years later, still attuned to the lies that seasons tell us — but now it’s New Year’s Day, and the deception is even more brazen.

Where Presagio warned that reality might disappoint the dream, here Negri has made peace with the gap. She knows the warmth is bugiarda (mendacious), knows those buds will die before opening, and chooses to enjoy it anyway. She warms herself by the lie, come fan pruno e castagno — like the bramble and chestnut do.

Last year Montale gave us the cold view from the Moon; Negri gives us the warm view from the garden, fully aware that the warmth won’t last. If you’re looking for a cheerful New Year’s poem, this is about as good as it gets in Italian poetry unless you opt for lighthearted filastrocche (maybe next year!).

The final line lands with quiet acceptance: Non importa. È gioia: It doesn’t matter. It is joy. Not “it’s still joy” or “it’s joy anyway” — just the bare declaration, unfiltered by judgment not shadowed by foreboding.

The original:

Today we read Il presepio, by Gabriele D’Annunzio.

Gabriele D’Annunzio is not usually the author you’d associate with simple little nursery rhymes about kids reciting religious stuff and getting candy from their grandma for Christmas.

One would instead link him with aestheticism, decadentism, First World War, daring airplane manouvers, Mussolini and, yes, weird sexual legends.

And yet here we are, reading precisely a cute little nursery rhyme.

It is an early composition, and I don’t claim it to be a masterpiece, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s Chrismas, after all, and it’s time to set up the nativity scene, like D’Annunzio loved to do for all his life.

The original:

Today we read La pioggia nel pineto, by Gabriele D'Annunzio.

We are back with another staple poem that everyone my age is familiar with, and has probably had to at least partially know by heart at some point during their studies.

As a little testament of how ingrained it is in the collective Italian school unconscious, you can see it recited by the comedian Renato Pozzetto in one of his movies, as a grade teacher dealing with very rambunctious students.

The poem is set in Summer, in the titular pine grove and during the titular shower. The poet revels in the luxurious life that surrounds him, and urges his lover to listen to the sounds that envelop them.

It is the epitome of a musical poem, with free verses, rhymes, alliterations, onomatopoeia and all sorts of devices employed to convey the rich soundscape — but also the general sensoriality of the experience of being surrounded by nature and the resulting aesthetic enjoyment.

This Ermione the poem addresses is not a young wizard nerd but rather a classical nickname that hides none other than the then-stellarly-famous actress, Eleonora Duse, lover of D’Annunzio.

So… listen!

The original:

Today we read Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia, by Giacomo Leopardi.

A friend of mine once told me that (good) Literature and Philosophy are much more difficult to tell apart than one usually thinks, because the only difference lies in the sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller emphasis on the form given to the content.

This never sounded particularly right to me, but what do I know: she’s the classicist. Still, I kept thinking about it while I was preparing this poem by Leopardi.

It is probably my favourite poem ever, full stop. I have always been partial to the poetic tradition of using only simple words and plain constructs, in a restrained and controlled way, hiding the extreme refinement of the language in plain sight, drawing the reader in with subdued musicality.

But depth in simplicity works here also at the level of the content. We are in front of a philosophical treaty on meaning, happiness, the place of humanity in the cosmos, and of the cosmos itself, clothed in a plain-spoken discussion between a shepherd, his sheep, and the Moon.

The first stanza describes the placid life of the Moon herself: she raises at night, travels the same paths, sees the same scenery, sets. Every day. Isn’t she bored yet? And then compares her life to that of the shepherd: similarly repetitive, similarly boring, though on completely different time scales.

As if to highlight this incommensurability, the second stanza hits us with a dramatic shift in tone: Leopardi relates the hurried life of an old man that runs here and there, carrying along a heavy burden, tired, bloodied, only to end by falling into an abyss. The last two verses return to the previous quiet calm, saying “Moon: this is the life of man”.

In the third stanza Leopardi returns to describing mortal life to the Moon, explaining that being born is ironically at high risk of death; how the first thing we do when born is to cry; that the first thing parents do with their offspring is to console them, as if of being born. But maybe the moon doesn’t care, because she isn’t mortal.

The fourth stanza, by far the longest, is all centered on the assumption that he, a mere shepherd, doesn’t know what the point of a life of suffering is, but surely she, the Moon, knows everything, including the reason for the seasons, the stars. Perhaps she even know to whom, if anyone, the shepherd’s life counts as something good. But he knows that, to him, his life is a burden.

In the fifth stanza the shepherd talks to his sheep: he is envious of them, because they forget every pain, every fear soon after they experience it. But most of all because, when they just lie in the grass, they are happy. He, on the other hand, always has this feeling of noia, that something is always gnawing away at him, that something is missing, even though there’s nothing specific he desires.

In the final stanza, the shepherd wonders. Maybe if I also had, like the Moon, perfect knowledge, and I could fly and count the stars: maybe then I’d be happy. But no, probably not. Probably life, under whatever form, animal human or even celestial, is a source of pain.

The original:

Today we read Un’ape esser vorrei, by Torquato Tasso.

I should perhaps feel a bit bad inflicting on you minor poems from major poets, but this madrigale from Torquato Tasso is just too delightful in its effortless lightness and perfection.

I will console myself by pointing out that these few verses can be seen as an antecedent for the Baroque sonnet by Materdona that we previously presented. There the stand-in for the poet was a noisy, dirty fly; here it is a nobler and industrious bee.

Tasso would love to be a bee, sucking his love’s nectar. Given the impossibility of stinging her heart, he would settle on piercing her breasts, which would be totally worth it, even if, in doing so, he would be giving up his life.

This madrigal was put to music at least by Pietro Vinci, but I was unfortunately unable to find a recording.

The original:

Today we read Alla sera, by Ugo Foscolo.

I will admit to a snobbish tendency to avoid presenting here the most widely known Italian poems, let alone those learned by heart by most students.

And I do believe it is a good thing to widen the horizon to lesser-studied gems. Still, it won’t do to present a too-biased lay of the land.

So, here is a beautiful classic that I hardly can stand anymore, having been force fed it innumerable times in school and in all sorts of anthologies.

Evening is descending, and the poet welcomes it, because it brings peace and quiet from the turmoils of the day — and Foscolo’s days were pretty hectic. He’s been on the run all life, fighting wars, travelling all around Europe, feeling exiled.

But more than that, the evening is the image of death, the eternal quiet and nothingness that promises peace.

The sonnet is replete with pleasant images (happy winds, light clouds) and soft-sounding words, that contrast with the semantic content (like the insistence on death and darkness). It is only in the very last verse that the sounds themselves manifest the rebellious streak Foscolo is trying to quiet down: six r’s crowd into four aggressive and combative words, as if to say that not even death will be able to take the edge off this soul.

(Since I can’t roll my r’s, here is an alternative reading by Vittorio Gassman, to let you appreciate that grating last verse in all its glory.)

The original:

Today we read Avvertimento a un giovane scrittore, by Giuseppe Giusti.

Many of Giusti’s most famous poems are political and satirical in nature, and thus require some knowledge of Italy’s and Europe’s complicated and depressing history in order to be fully enjoyed.

Which is why I chose instead this short epigram, in the form of an ottava. Giusti has a warning for young writers, which in contemporary terms we could translate into the kiss principle: “Keep it simple, stupid!”

First, don’t take difficult concepts and distort them and make them even more difficult by inventing strange conceptual contraptions of mismatched ideas (like sphinxes and chimeras). Reading this, it’s hard for me not to think that Giusti was born only two years after the publication of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit…

Secondly, avoid clunky language and a style that needs to be continually kicked in the ass to feel like it actually goes anywhere.

Just write things as they are, thoughtfully but naturally.

The original: