[Excerpts. Full Text of print]
was born in Rome, and that fact until this moment had never seemed very remarkable. But now I am in Mexico City, participating in a symposium on "America in the poetry, and I perceive this as quite bizarre, almost embarrassing.
It occurs to me that someone, upon hearing that I was born in Rome, might absent-mindedly consider myself able to read with ease the Latin poets, the most famous Virgil, but also the most difficult, as Persio. Obviously not. More than reading, when I open the pages of a Latin poet that I have not studied before, I have to work on deciphering, translating mentally. And, overall, my familiarity with Latin literature is scarce. As I'm not a specialized scholar, it will look at this from my experience, to offer only occasional personal reflections, apologizing in advance by the very nature subjective, arbitrary perhaps, what I say.
My literary culture is in essence the twentieth century: not only because I am dedicated to teach classes in contemporary Italian literature, but also because for a while, almost a century, the literary culture of the majority of writers and critics are not says more about the classics, on the contrary, it is submitted (if possible hold onto a fluid matter and motion) on the Modern Denial of traditional models or new models proposed modernity. In Italy, the last time the Latin classics formed the bedrock of the poetic culture was with Carducci and Pascoli (and less with D'Annunzio, whose dominant culture was French) at the end of last century [XIX]. For that was, at least in relation to poetry, guiding the country in the West for about a century since Baudelarie to the Surrealists, the break with the classical models had been made before the beginning of the twentieth century and had been net. Baudelaire knew very well the Latin poetic language: I could write (from years of school) verses in Latin, and its Poetry is always observed a very strong presence of the syntactic construction, metric regularity and rhetorical effects. But in the twentieth century Latin, understood as an influence, too indirect, of the older models, disappears. The French writer Julien Gracq, in the early 60s, in an essay entitled Pourquoi la littérature breathe wrong [Why bad breath literature], it was a problem as so essential as it usually neglected by critics: the problem of what is the "basis of culture, grow and feed the works of our time":
For classical authors, we know perfectly that this base is Latin literature, is the Holy Scripture, less frequently in Greek literature. If we add, with a less important role, some playwrights English and Italian poets, we have the common base on which they feed, approximately, both Ronsard and Racine, both Montaigne and Voltaire, and Chateaubriand and Pascal ... Now nothing seems to be in the common culture of most contemporary writers ... We still live in the conviction, fostered by the university programs and rates manuals that our culture always grows from that root, very long and also very narrow, which is immersed in three thousand years of Greco-Roman tradition to reach the age of Homer ... There were at all times in France writers who did not know the Latin culture, but almost never been attempted poets now, the surrealist group, born after 1920, is undoubtedly the first school in France where most poets never learned a word of Latin. [...]
Therefore, surrealism, with his theory of "automatic writing" profoundly transformed not only the idea of \u200b\u200bpoetry, poetic text, but especially how to work of the poets: dismissed the metrical rules, rhetorical devices, the very idea of \u200b\u200bunity and "organicity" of the poetic text, which is the basis of many aesthetic theories of the twentieth century also. The permanent revolution, which moved in long waves, perhaps colder gradually, reached the mid-'60s, to the authors of Tel Quel, to Paul Celan and Allen Ginsberg (three very different cases in three different cultural areas also .) Along with some writers as Eliot, Mayakovsky and Brecht, Surrealism has been the movement and most influential literary ideology of the twentieth century poetry, especially in the area neo-Latin. The fact that, as stated by Julien Gracq, the surrealists did not know Latin is just a way to say that under the effect of its revolution, the Latin poets as models and all the classical poetic from Horace to Boileau lost value and importance in the formation of any poet or apprentice poet.
When I first thought he wanted to write, was a high school student. I still remember the first reading of Virgil in the original text in Latin. That school experience was mixed with something else. Fifteen or sixteen years we may like Virgil. There is not rich in adventures early as Homer, and passionately sincere, "tender and violent," as Catullus. It is too mature, too controlled and mysterious.
The Aeneid is an epic example of twilight and moralized (poetry reflected or sentimental, as Schiller would say) that does not focus on the boredom of the long school readings. Personally, at sixteen, he preferred The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner. L `homme revolte Camus was my bedside. However, Tolstoy had read many pages praising the divine nature and the moral simplicity of the Russian peasant who knows physically your order and tremendous strength. When the next year, I met with Eliot's Quartets, regulated according to the rhythm of the four seasons and the combination of the four elements (air, earth, fire, water) and read his famous essay, "What is a classic?, then I started to be curious and be attracted by Virgil. Eliot makes the model author "mature", which allows you to find individual talent in the most happy and useful existing tradition, and create a new one after it. Maturity and sense of time and continuity. The opposite of the surreal and the rebellion of the talking Albert Camus. All this had a moral and historical sense to the English poet. Eliot had written that essay in 1945 in the city of London was devastated by the bombing of Nazi Germany, and thought I needed to go back to the origin of good and evil in our civilization West, so the "maturity" classic maturity of Virgil, poet of the defeated and the humble, took a superlative value. [...]
Horacio is the polar opposite of the Latin poetic literature has been a model for centuries and was the voice of the most memorable epigrammatic and a moral self-defensive-writer connected to state power but very jealous of their privacy. Horacio, that is the poet of mediocritas aurea, the golden mean, the awareness of the limits that encourages us to settle for little. Horacio, the enemy of the vain, strenuous and excessive ambitions. Unheroic, he. Enemy of the excesses. Satirical poet, unable sublime tones. Est modus in rebus, and there must be a limit for everything: this will repeat the "mediocre", anxious and susceptible Horacio along a tradition that made us uncomfortable. [...]
Then Horacio seems to return to Bertolt Brecht, a Marxist dialectical maliciously, who justifies Stalinism but fear him, reciting the role of classical scholar, a Taoist and a little bit Epicurean. Horacio
is always mentioned among the English teachers Wystan H. Auden: for Horace knew how little you can modify and improve human nature (nothing is more alien than the messianic dream and almost "Marcusian" of the fourth eclogue of Virgil) and does not ignore how vulgar and blind are the ambitions, especially in trying to guide others, how foolish, finally, imposing policies that interfere with individuals sacrifice personal freedom in the name an improvement in public life. Horacio
then arrive on time for the appointment with prudence, with disappointment, with the cunning self-defense, adding an Epicurean moderation to total pessimism. He writes in the sixth satire of the first book
go where I like best, free and single: ask for the price of vegetables and wheat, passing through the Circus, where entanglements are assembled, give a tour of the Forum , towards evening, and I stop to listen to the soothsayers. After I go home, before a dish of leeks, fried chickpeas mass ... This is the day of those that are free of distressing ambitions.
This situation, which is the subject of satire, is also the premise of Odes, the cármenes. The lyric art of Horace (and moral) may seem disappointing to be so distant from modern taste. We did not find any daring in his art metaphorically. Bold is not their images, almost never, because the invention stylistic surprises entrusted all to the relationship between syntax and meter. Horace's poetry is an art of brevity, the speech concentrated in perfect rhythm.
twentieth birthday before I read the book by Hugo Friedrich about the "structure of modern poetry." It was a revelation, essentially because it represented the other side (so it seemed) of Camus's books on the rebellion and the absurd. "Fantasy authoritarian", the will of the associations and semantic and syntactic relations was the ruler or the antirregla of modern poetry. After a few years appeared in Italy on '63 Group, which sought to reintroduce the spirit of the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, Futurism, Dada, Surrealist, Pound, Joyce. Now that that attempt neovanguardista already fulfilled its cycle and had their history, we wonder to what extent the Italian poetry of the twentieth century could be truly modernized.
[...] Thus, the best of twentieth century Italian poetry is perhaps in the recovery or persistence of old forms, verse cantabile, ironic realism inspired by a true music (Gozzano, Saba). Even the best of Italian hermetic poets, the most "gothic" and vertical, has finally been found with Horacio, distancing that share of symbolism and surrealism (though modest) that existed in the poems of his first books. Speak Mario Luzi, who in 1963, posting Nel magma [in the magma] chose a significant section of Horace: nisi quod pede certo differt sermoni, sermo merus ... [if not find here a certain regularity of the lines, it would simply prose ...]
Perhaps this encounter between the hermetic prose and verse of Horace means something more than the veiled presence of a large inheritance could provide a way to go yet. Translation
Luciana
Zollo
It occurs to me that someone, upon hearing that I was born in Rome, might absent-mindedly consider myself able to read with ease the Latin poets, the most famous Virgil, but also the most difficult, as Persio. Obviously not. More than reading, when I open the pages of a Latin poet that I have not studied before, I have to work on deciphering, translating mentally. And, overall, my familiarity with Latin literature is scarce. As I'm not a specialized scholar, it will look at this from my experience, to offer only occasional personal reflections, apologizing in advance by the very nature subjective, arbitrary perhaps, what I say.
My literary culture is in essence the twentieth century: not only because I am dedicated to teach classes in contemporary Italian literature, but also because for a while, almost a century, the literary culture of the majority of writers and critics are not says more about the classics, on the contrary, it is submitted (if possible hold onto a fluid matter and motion) on the Modern Denial of traditional models or new models proposed modernity. In Italy, the last time the Latin classics formed the bedrock of the poetic culture was with Carducci and Pascoli (and less with D'Annunzio, whose dominant culture was French) at the end of last century [XIX]. For that was, at least in relation to poetry, guiding the country in the West for about a century since Baudelarie to the Surrealists, the break with the classical models had been made before the beginning of the twentieth century and had been net. Baudelaire knew very well the Latin poetic language: I could write (from years of school) verses in Latin, and its Poetry is always observed a very strong presence of the syntactic construction, metric regularity and rhetorical effects. But in the twentieth century Latin, understood as an influence, too indirect, of the older models, disappears. The French writer Julien Gracq, in the early 60s, in an essay entitled Pourquoi la littérature breathe wrong [Why bad breath literature], it was a problem as so essential as it usually neglected by critics: the problem of what is the "basis of culture, grow and feed the works of our time":
For classical authors, we know perfectly that this base is Latin literature, is the Holy Scripture, less frequently in Greek literature. If we add, with a less important role, some playwrights English and Italian poets, we have the common base on which they feed, approximately, both Ronsard and Racine, both Montaigne and Voltaire, and Chateaubriand and Pascal ... Now nothing seems to be in the common culture of most contemporary writers ... We still live in the conviction, fostered by the university programs and rates manuals that our culture always grows from that root, very long and also very narrow, which is immersed in three thousand years of Greco-Roman tradition to reach the age of Homer ... There were at all times in France writers who did not know the Latin culture, but almost never been attempted poets now, the surrealist group, born after 1920, is undoubtedly the first school in France where most poets never learned a word of Latin. [...]
Therefore, surrealism, with his theory of "automatic writing" profoundly transformed not only the idea of \u200b\u200bpoetry, poetic text, but especially how to work of the poets: dismissed the metrical rules, rhetorical devices, the very idea of \u200b\u200bunity and "organicity" of the poetic text, which is the basis of many aesthetic theories of the twentieth century also. The permanent revolution, which moved in long waves, perhaps colder gradually, reached the mid-'60s, to the authors of Tel Quel, to Paul Celan and Allen Ginsberg (three very different cases in three different cultural areas also .) Along with some writers as Eliot, Mayakovsky and Brecht, Surrealism has been the movement and most influential literary ideology of the twentieth century poetry, especially in the area neo-Latin. The fact that, as stated by Julien Gracq, the surrealists did not know Latin is just a way to say that under the effect of its revolution, the Latin poets as models and all the classical poetic from Horace to Boileau lost value and importance in the formation of any poet or apprentice poet.
When I first thought he wanted to write, was a high school student. I still remember the first reading of Virgil in the original text in Latin. That school experience was mixed with something else. Fifteen or sixteen years we may like Virgil. There is not rich in adventures early as Homer, and passionately sincere, "tender and violent," as Catullus. It is too mature, too controlled and mysterious.
The Aeneid is an epic example of twilight and moralized (poetry reflected or sentimental, as Schiller would say) that does not focus on the boredom of the long school readings. Personally, at sixteen, he preferred The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner. L `homme revolte Camus was my bedside. However, Tolstoy had read many pages praising the divine nature and the moral simplicity of the Russian peasant who knows physically your order and tremendous strength. When the next year, I met with Eliot's Quartets, regulated according to the rhythm of the four seasons and the combination of the four elements (air, earth, fire, water) and read his famous essay, "What is a classic?, then I started to be curious and be attracted by Virgil. Eliot makes the model author "mature", which allows you to find individual talent in the most happy and useful existing tradition, and create a new one after it. Maturity and sense of time and continuity. The opposite of the surreal and the rebellion of the talking Albert Camus. All this had a moral and historical sense to the English poet. Eliot had written that essay in 1945 in the city of London was devastated by the bombing of Nazi Germany, and thought I needed to go back to the origin of good and evil in our civilization West, so the "maturity" classic maturity of Virgil, poet of the defeated and the humble, took a superlative value. [...]
Horacio is the polar opposite of the Latin poetic literature has been a model for centuries and was the voice of the most memorable epigrammatic and a moral self-defensive-writer connected to state power but very jealous of their privacy. Horacio, that is the poet of mediocritas aurea, the golden mean, the awareness of the limits that encourages us to settle for little. Horacio, the enemy of the vain, strenuous and excessive ambitions. Unheroic, he. Enemy of the excesses. Satirical poet, unable sublime tones. Est modus in rebus, and there must be a limit for everything: this will repeat the "mediocre", anxious and susceptible Horacio along a tradition that made us uncomfortable. [...]
Then Horacio seems to return to Bertolt Brecht, a Marxist dialectical maliciously, who justifies Stalinism but fear him, reciting the role of classical scholar, a Taoist and a little bit Epicurean. Horacio
is always mentioned among the English teachers Wystan H. Auden: for Horace knew how little you can modify and improve human nature (nothing is more alien than the messianic dream and almost "Marcusian" of the fourth eclogue of Virgil) and does not ignore how vulgar and blind are the ambitions, especially in trying to guide others, how foolish, finally, imposing policies that interfere with individuals sacrifice personal freedom in the name an improvement in public life. Horacio
then arrive on time for the appointment with prudence, with disappointment, with the cunning self-defense, adding an Epicurean moderation to total pessimism. He writes in the sixth satire of the first book
go where I like best, free and single: ask for the price of vegetables and wheat, passing through the Circus, where entanglements are assembled, give a tour of the Forum , towards evening, and I stop to listen to the soothsayers. After I go home, before a dish of leeks, fried chickpeas mass ... This is the day of those that are free of distressing ambitions.
This situation, which is the subject of satire, is also the premise of Odes, the cármenes. The lyric art of Horace (and moral) may seem disappointing to be so distant from modern taste. We did not find any daring in his art metaphorically. Bold is not their images, almost never, because the invention stylistic surprises entrusted all to the relationship between syntax and meter. Horace's poetry is an art of brevity, the speech concentrated in perfect rhythm.
twentieth birthday before I read the book by Hugo Friedrich about the "structure of modern poetry." It was a revelation, essentially because it represented the other side (so it seemed) of Camus's books on the rebellion and the absurd. "Fantasy authoritarian", the will of the associations and semantic and syntactic relations was the ruler or the antirregla of modern poetry. After a few years appeared in Italy on '63 Group, which sought to reintroduce the spirit of the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, Futurism, Dada, Surrealist, Pound, Joyce. Now that that attempt neovanguardista already fulfilled its cycle and had their history, we wonder to what extent the Italian poetry of the twentieth century could be truly modernized.
[...] Thus, the best of twentieth century Italian poetry is perhaps in the recovery or persistence of old forms, verse cantabile, ironic realism inspired by a true music (Gozzano, Saba). Even the best of Italian hermetic poets, the most "gothic" and vertical, has finally been found with Horacio, distancing that share of symbolism and surrealism (though modest) that existed in the poems of his first books. Speak Mario Luzi, who in 1963, posting Nel magma [in the magma] chose a significant section of Horace: nisi quod pede certo differt sermoni, sermo merus ... [if not find here a certain regularity of the lines, it would simply prose ...]
Perhaps this encounter between the hermetic prose and verse of Horace means something more than the veiled presence of a large inheritance could provide a way to go yet. Translation
Luciana
Zollo
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