|
From
Simulazione di reato to Round Trip:
The Poetry of Luigi Fontanella[1] Incendio non vero è quello ch’io scrivo, non vero seppure è per
dolo. Àn tutte le cose la
polizia, anche la poesia. Aldo Palazzeschi,
“L’incendiario” When
dealing with Italian-language poetry written in the United States, I would
suggest an alternative perspective on defining an Italian/American
literature.[2] That is, I believe we
should expand our own reading strategy of Italian/American art forms, whether
they be—due to content, form, and/or national language—explicitly Italian/ American or not, in order to accommodate
other possible, successful reading strategies. Indeed, recent (re)writings of
Italian/American literary history and criticism have transcended a limited
concept of Italian/American literature. New publications (literary and
critical) have created a need for new definitions and new critical readings,
not only of contemporary work, but of the works of the past. In addition,
these new publications have originated, for the most part, from within an
intellectual community of Italian Americans. Therefore, I would propose that
we consider Italian/American literature to be a series of on-going written
enterprises which establish a repertoire of signs, at times, sui generis, and therefore create
verbal variations (visual, in the case of film, painting, sculpture, drama,
etc.) that represent different versions—dependent, of course, on one’s
generation, gender, socio-economic condition. To this working defintion, I
would now also add language—i.e., Italian, English, or some conscious
maccheronic combination thereof—of what can be perceived as the Italian/American
signified.[3] That is, the
Italian/American experience may indeed be manifested in any art form in a
number of ways and at varying degrees, for which one may readily speak of the
variegated representations of the Italian/American ethos in literature, for
example, in the same fashion in which Daniel Aaron spoke of the “hyphenate
writer,”[4] be that literature
written in English, standard Italian, Italian dialect, or some combination
thereof. Language
in its many manifestations—Italian, English, on rare occasions French, and
experimentation especially in the first—lies at the base of Fontanella’s
poetry. If one were to speak of an Italian influence, names such as
Palazzeschi and Gozzano or Montale and Zanzotto are a few that come to mind.
Further still, one might also think of the historical avant-gardes as other
possible intertexts to Fontanella’s sign-producing repertoire.[5] Whoever these writers
may be, the one common denominator is one of language manipulation, the
poet’s desire to deviate from the norm and re-invest his/her language with a
valence that is not always in concert with that of the dominant culture.
Luigi Fontanella engages in such activity; and, in so doing, he has his fun, as one of his
predecessors, Palazzeschi, would happily say. Fontanella, to express it in
his national language, si diverte—and,
I would hasten to add, he also diverte! Fontanella’s
morphic experimentation constitutes a good part of his poetic diversion (divertimento). In this regard, he
constantly creates new words through combination, contamination, and pure
invention. Indeed, a significant part of his experimentation is both
Gozzano-like and Palazzeschian in tone. If he emulates and/or apes others (or
borrows from other languages), as did Gozzano, he does so in a totally
inventive way. If he creates a playful tone, it recalls the early poetry of
Palazzeschi. And if he creates ex
nihilo (if this is still possible for any artist today), he reminds us
more of the morphic and semantic machinations of Zanzotto. In Simulazione di reato (1979) we find a
variety of noun-adjective/ noun-noun combinations (some plausible others
not), a type of language contamination/borrowings from English especially
(e.g., titles of poems), and some inventions of other words created at (?)
and for (!) the moment: quantocaldo
qui vicino . . . il treno che
gira che fischia suonicoriandoli (“Play-ground”) Bleeker
street quantacarne di macello (“Bleeker street”) carcinomaverbosologizzazione
(“A certa ‘avanguardia’ italiana”) To be sure, the first
two examples demonstrate the expected and playful—yes, pun intended
vis-à-vis “Play-ground”—word-play Fontanella’s poetry readily offers. But
Fontanella goes further. His “suonicoriandoli,” two nouns each one easily
functional also as adjectives, signal both the tactile and audible qualities
of language. Fontanella’s poetry, as this poem may surely imply, is a
“play-ground” in its own sense, in a serious sense indeed. But it is a sense
that is based on opposites coming together (e.g., English titles of Italian
poetry at times peppered with English words), yet not always attracting. As
he says in “Bleeker street”: Bleeker street
quantacarne di macello urla di colori notte
sinestetica che da sola può racchiudere ere da
manuali Like the
“notte sinestetica che da sola / può racchiudere,” so too is Fontanella’s
poetry chock full of elements pertaining to different sensorial spheres
which his reader must now process in his/her act of signification. Indeed,
Fontanella’s reader, similar to the one Calvino had proposed decades earlier,
relies on a form of semiosis which places him/her in an interpretive position
of superiority vis-à-vis the
author.[6] In “Whom Do We Write
For” Calvino tells us that the writer . . . be ready “to assume a
reader who does not yet exist, or a change in the reader” (82), a reader who
would be “more cultured than the writer
himself” (85; Calvino’s emphasis).[7] In fact, on certain
occasions, Fontanella actually leaves space for his reader to fill. When his
poetry ends with punctuation, a good number do not end with the ex-pected
period. Rather, the final point of punctuation is at times a colon, an
obvious signal of continuation which thus creates the proverbial,
constitutive blank, concrete and/or imaginary, for the reader to fill.[8] Fontanella’s
divertimento (diversion/fun)
becomes more prevalent as his reader progresses through this and most other
volumes he has published thus far. Indeed, “A certa ‘avanguardia’ italiana”
serves as a plausible manifesto in verse of Fontanella’s diversionary ars poetica: L’osservazione non basta
la critica l’analisi il giudizio
non basta non basta l’applicazione
lo studio la citazione opportuna
(perfino qui il bisogno dei padri)
non basta la brava frase metafrase intellettuale cerebrale
paranale finale di partita
metafora girochiuso segmenti virgolette
strapuntini di parole sema rema battuta a
vuoto carcinomaverbosologizzazione. Fontanella’s
disenchantment, to say the least, with the academic and non-academic
establishments (in the latter case, more precisely, the empowered,
non-canonical canon-makers) is clearly manifested in this poem and those
immediately following in this same section. For it becomes quite clear that
the “certa ‘avanguardia’” is by no means, for Fontanella, an avant-garde.
Throughout the poem, Fontanella, in what is clearly an “angry” period, tells
his reader what the “certi professors” “senzamore” (“A certi professors”)
cannot obtain (“buoniversi”) through their various formulae, as listed in the
above-cited poem, or their “linguistica” aggressivity, as he states in
“Postilla ultima,” directed to Adriano Spatola. Indeed, Fontanella’s disdain
for the so-called avant-garde manifests itself in the series of “paranale”
what-nots that culminate in the final verse/word of the poem,
“carcinomaverbosologizzazione”—an underscoring of what the poet perceives as
the unnecessarily wordy (“verboso”) cancer (“carcinoma”) that has overwhelmed
the act of verse writing (“logizzazione”). Indeed,
the title itself (“A certa ‘avanguardia’ italiana”) provokes uneasiness for a
number of reasons. First, the lack of an indefinite article may signal a
shift in meaning of the initial adjective, “certa,” from that of a specific
avant-garde to, instead, any—i.e., unspecific and therefore
insignificant—avant-garde, as he states in “A certi professors”: imbecilli di fine accademia tentativi di persistenza nel
vostromondo ovattato e senzamore . . . quanto marcio fraudolento panegirici copiosi tra voi pellivecchie al neon eppure morti vi muovete (emphasis added) Second, in 1979, after
the end of the second Italian avant-garde and on the threshold of what we
have come to know as the post-modern condition, what kind of “avanguardia”
can we expect? Third, we are forced to ask what kind of Italian avant-garde?
Indeed, we may not receive a clear-cut, precise answer. Yet, we do know it is
a “certa . . . italiana,” which, given the general circumstances
that contributed to Fontanella’s poetry—his own migration to the United
States and his decision to live in two different countries while constantly
travelling between the two—we may be so inclined also to substitute the
nebulous “certa” with a more precise adjective: perhaps, American. In his own
way, then, in a manner similar to what Paolo Valesio describes in his essay,
“The Writer Between Two Worlds: The Italian Writer in the United States,”[9] Fontanella sets the
stage for what we may now consider a sui
generis, Italian/American ars
poetica. Lest we forget that the first section of this collection,
though short, is entitled “Quale America,” and the poem currently under
analysis opens the second section entitled “Lettere nuove”—“nuove,” to be
sure, in every sense of the word. Divided
into five sections—“Quale America,” “Lettere nuove,” “Sleeplessness,”
“Simulazione di reato,” and “Frammenti”—Simulazione
di reato traces a two-year poetic journey in which Fontanella’s double
existence—both poetic and personal—of Italy and the United States indeed
dialogues with its other half with the hope of being “heard a little better,”
as “la seconda realtà [statunitense] ha la funzione di gigantografare la
prima [italiana], di mettere in luce i contorni.”[10] What is important to keep in mind is that
Fontanella can make his trip precisely because “non [si] pon[e] programmi, . . .
proced[e] per reazioni” (“Postilla ultima”) with his “parola / infingarda
matrice d’una storia”—this his “simulazione (“infingarda” = simulatrice malizioza [?] aimed at the
empowered anti/canon-makers) di reato (“reazione” = azione anti “Stanza e
distanza,” “Victoria Station,” “Lettere e dediche,” “Nedelia,” “Frammenti,”
“da ‘Round Trip’,” “Tre poemetti,” and “Stella saturnina” are the sections
that comprise Fontanella’s next collection, Stella saturnina (1989). This volume covers a trajectory of seven
years (1979-1986) of poetry written mainly in Italy and the United States, a
lyrical documentation of an errant existence. Not as prevalent nor as intense
as in Simulazione di reato,
word-play and language manipulation (e.g., word combinations such as
“Cosaparola” [50], “chiusovetro” [65], and “falsodistratto” [110]) are also
present here. One also finds Fontanella’s penchant for the astructured sentence, seemingly
illogical connections, and sporadic punctuation, not to speak of his admitted
“sporadici segni” (27). Yet, Stella saturnina is also a volume of a
much more admittedly self-reflexive poet who opens his collection with an
immediate reference to his poetare:
“ovattato è tutto e io metto parole / ai gesti lenti di ciò che appare e
scompare / tutto è meraviglia e passaggio.” And as the poet starts out on his
personal, poetic voyage of “meraviglia e passaggio,” the anger of his
previous collection is mollified. Here, he now demonstrates a certain
maturity as artist and individual in his calm acceptance of the uncertainty
(“ciò che appare e scompare”; emphasis added) of his dual
existence: “Di questo breve sogno / ritrovo, precisi, due momenti / d’un
identico / e diverso divenire.” Whereas in
his previous volume Fontanella was less direct in speaking of his poetry,
here he candidly describes his writing as an on-going, slow and, at times,
difficult process of verse writing with its occasional stalls: “Progressione
e coagulo istantaneo della mia poesia / . . . / che il testo matura lento e
placido / verso la nuova figura, / brano a brano dissolvendo / l’edificio
del suo mondo precedente” (27). And while the anger is gone, his awareness of
an aesthetic disaccord, as evident both above and below, with the
establishment is present. Diversion is still the desired procedure—“Prodigio
del gioco la mia faziosa poesia / forma dissacarata asimmetria” (28; emphasis added)—and meaning
remains ever so unsure, still in
potentia, as he states in the poem, “Diversificazione”—a most telling
title, given the poet’s penchant for word-play:[11] Il posto s’affolla
ripete all’approccio un significato plurimo mentre scrivi la centunesima lettera in questa sala d’attesa
i segni gli avvisisul tavolo già pieno del resto di carte di libri d’insetti sfuggenti e
prendi a leggere quello che scaraventi
subito via. (emphasis added) Indeed,
there is more tension than calm in Fontanella’s poetic voyage. But there are
occasional moments of ripose. The most touching moment of calm appears in the
section “Nedelia,” “microelegie” for his deceased mother.[12] In seven brief poetic
compositions that Manacorda, in his “Prefazione,” defines as “gentili haiku trapiantati con grande grazia al
di qua di un altro oceano” (66), the poet finds his most serene moment of
nostalgia: Da questa finestra
socchiusa, un po’ mesta, ti rivedo, madre, come quando mi chiamavi: mi volto ti rispondo
grido volo tra le mille corolle
corone. E’ bello il dormire in quest’illusione. Once
Fontanella continues his trip, the collection’s penultimate section, “Tre
poemetti,” reminds his reader of the volume’s central theme, a solitary
(“Navigazione in solitario”), spiritual and physical (“Interno/Esterno”)
“viaggio” between two geographical and cultural worlds (“Amerika America
Amen”)—Italy and the United States. Fontanella’s “Congedo, ovvero
autobiologia letteraria” closes this volume, but it does not necessarily end
his trip. In 1991,
Fontanella returned to his early poetry in the publication of Round Trip, diario in versi, a
recuperation of earlier verses written entirely “in viaggio” during the
period of September 1982 to June 1983. As in Simulazione di reato and Stella
saturnina, here too Fontanella engages in an ars poetica based on a “forma dissacarata [and an] asimmetria,”
as he stated in the latter collection. And while it is true that one may
discern a Montalian influence in the format of a “diario in versi,” as
Manacorda stated in his preface to Stella
saturnina, there is also the influence of the historical avant-gardes,
both Italian and French, as well as, perhaps, the more recently proclaimed,
by some, great Italian living poet, Zanzotto.[13] And as this volume
comes to an end, so does, at least for the moment, Fontanella’s poetry come
to a pause. Indeed, the following verses, the closing lines of Round Trip, diario in versi, also seem
appropriate for this review’s closure: Finisce
oggi ( almeno per quest’anno) un commuting che mi ha commutato (&
consumato) alquanto accompagnatomi
alla Station per l’ultimo treno della
stagione una girl del corso (probabilmente
preoccupata del voto finale) mentre attorno a
me tutto spappolava in un vano e insano chiacchiericcio altrimenti
chiamato il prurito dei vecchi. Just as the regional
“commuting” has changed and overwhelmed him (“un commuting che mi ha commutato [& consumato] alquanto”), so
has the existential and intercontinental “commuting” changed and overwhelmed
him. The phonemic similarities of “un commuting
che mi ha commutato [& consumato] alquanto” underscores the conflagration
of the different cultural voices that resonate throughout Fontanella’s
poetry. In like fashion, the local commute becomes symbolic of the
geo-cultural commute which, here, is efficaciously rendered by the “vano e
insano chiacchiericcio”—a most apt description of the agglutination of the
varied and diverse voices that now constitute Fontanella’s generative
intertextual reservoir. In
conclusion, then, per modo di dire,
one may speak of a poetics that is much more expressive than descriptive.
Fontanella’s word imagery is not to elicit simply pleasant and/or unpleasant
memories and imagery in his reader’s mind. Rather, the poet attempts to
render his reader complicit in an emotional and/or sensorial state as
expressed through his poetry. Indeed, then, it is expression, not description,
that defines Fontanella’s poetry. And his reader, in his/her complicity in
this polysensorial state, becomes a co-participant in Fontanella’s sign
production and signification. Anthony Julian Tamburri Purdue
University Aldo
Palazzeschi’s Man of
Smoke (Il codice di Perelà) Translated from
the Italian with an
introduction by Nicolas J. Perella
and Ruggero Stefanini. $14.95 Italica Press, INC 595 Main Street,
605 New York, New York
10044 212/935-4230 “Professors
Nicolas Perella, American born, and Ruggero Stefanini, fiorentino di nascita, have combined their linguistic and
cultural sensitivities and succeed magnificently in offering the
English-reading world an indisputably keen translation of one of Italy’s most
intriguing prose pieces of the early 20th century.” Anthony
Julian Tamburri Purdue University |
[1]In this essay, I deal with three
volumes of Luigi Fontanella’s poetry: Simulazione
di reato (Manduria: Lacaita, 1979), Stella
Saturnina (Rome: Il ventaglio, 1989), and Round Trip (Udine: Campanotto Editore, 1991).
For more on the use of the slash in
place of the hyphen, see my To Hyphenate
Or Not To Hyphenate? The Italian/American Writer: An Other American (Montréal: Guernica, 1991).
With regard to the Italian/American writer, see 20-27, 33-42.
[2]I deal further with the notion of the
Italian writer in the United States in my essay, “Italian/American Writer or
Poet Abroad?: Luigi Fontanella’s Poetic Voyage” (forthcoming).
[3]The basic tenets of this definition
came out of a collaborative brain-racking ses-sion, in the office of City Stoop
Press, with Fred Gardaphè, with the specific intent of defining Italian/American literature. Therefore, the I may better be read as We.
[4]See his “The Hyphenate Writer and
American Letters,” Smith Alumnae
Quarterly (July 1964): 213-17; later revised in Rivista di Studi Anglo-Americani 3.4-5 (1984-85): 11-28.
I have dealt with Aaron’s notion of
the “hyphenate writer” in my To Hyphenate
Or Not To Hyphenate and, most recently, as a springboard for new
categories, in “In (Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer: Definitions
and Categories,” Differentia (forthcoming
1993).
[5]Lest we forget that Fontanella’s
interest in these writers and movements have occupied an integral part of his
intellectual career. Among his anthologies and book-length studies we find, “I campi magnetici” di Andre Breton e
Philippe Soupault (Rome: Newton Compton, 1979), Il surrealismo italiano (Rome: Bulzoni, 1983), and La parola aleatoria (Firenze: Le
Lettere, 1992).
For a cogent reading of Fontanella’s
poetry through 1989, see Manuela Bertone’s essay, “La ricerca poetica di Luigi
Fontanella: da Simulazione di reato
(1979) a Stella saturnina (1989),” Otto/novecento Jan-Feb, 15.1 (1991):
143-52.
[6]See his “Cybernetics and Ghosts” and
“Whom Do We Write For” in The Uses of
Literature, tr. Patrick Creagh (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986).
These essays were originally published in 1966.
In “Cybernetics and Ghosts” Calvino
considers “the decisive moment of literary life [to be] reading” (15), by which
“literature will continue to be a ‘place’ of privilege within the human
consciousness, a way of exercising the potentialities within the system of
signs belonging to all societies at all times. The work will continue to be
born, to be judged, to be distorted or constantly renewed on contact with the
eye of the reader” (16).
[7]That is, Calvino foresaw a reader
with “epistemological, semantic, practical, and methodological requirements he
[would] want to compare [as] examples of symbolic procedures and the
construction of logical patterns” (84-85).
[8]Wolfgang Iser deals with the notion
of constitutive blanks in his The Act of
Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978).
[9]Differentia
3/4 (Spring/Autumn 1989): 259-76. This writer, according to Valesio,
“dialogue[s] with the English-and-language culture that surrounds [him] . . .
[with the hopes of being] heard a little better” (272). Valesio goes on to
specify that this “writer is, rather than nationally base, community based. His
or her word always takes off from a community (even if the community may be
alive only in memory) and always addresses a community (even if it is only ‘a
universal audience,’ as some scholars of rhetoric call it, referring to
possible future readership)” (272). In addition, Valesio continues, the works
of the “writer between two worlds in the United States . . . rarely thematize and describe either
the Italo-American community or American society in general” (273).
[10]Fabio Doplicher, “Prefazione,” Simulazione di reato 9.
With regard to Fontanella’s personal
experience with Italy and the United States in his works, see Teresa Maria
Lazzaro, “L’essere doppio al di qua e al di là dell’Atlantico: l’esperienza di
Luigi Fontanella,” La letteratura
dell’emigrazione: gli scrittori di lingua italiana nel mondo, ed.,
Jean-Jacques Marchand (Turin: Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli,
1991): 449-58.
[11]The ambiguity of this title surely
fits well Fontanella’s polyvalent word-play. Shall we re-read the title,
modified, as “Di versificazione” or “Diversi/ficazione”?
[12]An equally touching tone often
occupies another collection of Fontanella’s recent poetry, Parole per Emma (Salerno: Edisud, 1991), poems written for his
daughter.
Other reviews of Simulazione di reato are: Giovanna Wedel De Stasio in L’Anello che non tiene 1.3 (1989);
Ernestina Pellegrini in Il Ponte 46.6
(June 1990); Claudio Toscani in Si scrive
5-6 (December 1990); Roberto Deidier in Rivista
di Studi Italiani 9.1-2 (June-December 1991); and Gaetana Marrone Puglia in
Forum Italicum 26.1 (Spring 1992).
[13]Zanzotto as possible intertext has
already been pointed out by G. Singh in his review of Round Trip in World
Literature Today 65.4 (1991): 689-90; see also Alessandro Carrera’s review
in Canadian Journal of Italian Studies
14.42-43 (1991): 77-79 and Nino Fausti’s review of Round Trip and Parole per
Emma in Misure critiche 21.78-79
(January-June 1991): 137-40.