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NB: For further information about the life and work of Giorgio Bassani follow the link beneath the photograph.
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Giorgio Bassani: The Collected Poems edited and translated by Roberta Antognini and Peter Robinson. £22.75. Agincourt Press. ISBN: 978-1946328366. Reviewed by David Cooke
The name of Georgio Bassani will probably be most familiar to anglophone readers as the author of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini,1962). This novel, in which he explores the lives of a Jewish family in Ferrara from the rise of Benito Mussolini until the start of World War II, was also made into an award-winning film by Vittorio De Sica. Bassani, like Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence before him, felt that his poetry had been eclipsed by his success as a novelist. In fact, he always considered himself to be primarily a poet and, at the outset of his literary career, poetry was his principal focus until he started publishing short stories and novels in the fifties, only returning to poetry some twenty years later. One is grateful, therefore, to Roberta Antognini, Peter Robinson and their publisher, Agincourt Press, for this handsomely produced and scrupulously edited volume, which is now an indispensable introduction to the work of a significant Italian poet.
Alongside a bilingual text of Bassani’s poetry, there is a helpful introduction in which the editors trace the writer’s development, examining, in particular, his life as a Jew under Fascism. There is also a foreword by Paola Bassani, the poet’s daughter, a comprehensive chronology of his life, and a detailed set of notes on individual poems. Finally, the editors have reprinted a ‘Postscript’ written by Bassani himself in 1952 and a selection of photographs which throw an additional light upon the man and his times.
Turning now to the poems, one can see that they fall into two distinct groups separated by the twenty years during which Bassani devoted himself exclusively to writing prose. The two collections of poetry he published in the 1940s are written in traditional rhyming stanzas, while the later poems are written in free verse and, as if to mark the distance he has travelled, are strikingly centred on the page. Bassani’s early poems must have been particularly challenging to render into English. Here are the two opening stanzas of ‘Preludio:
Lascia ch’io ti ricordi
se ritarda l’inverno,
se ancora mi rimordi,
se mi tiene il tuo inferno.
Trascorre il fuoco crudo
della luna sul grano.
nel folto, ascoso e nudo,
il tuo riso arde piano.
No attempt to replicate the original rhyme scheme is likely to work well in English, where true rhymes are much scarcer than in Italian. Moreover, even though the form here is quite circumscribed there is an intricate patterning of sounds within the stanzas. Not wishing to labour the point, I’ll limit myself to a couple of examples: the repetition of the sonorous –or- in the first stanza: ricordi, ancora, rimordi and the fluid harmony of the l’s and u’s in the second line of the second stanza. It is clear from their introductory comments and the epigraph they have taken from Ottavio Fatica’s Lost in Translation that the editors are very aware of such challenges and have concentrated on capturing the sense of the lines as effectively as they can:
Let me remember you
if winter lingers,
if you gnaw me still,
if I’m held by your hell.
The moon’s raw fire
passes over the wheat
In the thickets, hidden, bare,
your smile burns quiet.
However, more is achieved here than mere literalness. The English version uses half rhyme and assonance to establish its own alternative harmonies.
‘Preludio’ is followed by a group of short poems consisting of pairs of rhymed quatrains. Like the opening poem, they aim for a perfection of form that has the intricate precision of Horace’s briefer odes and, before too long, the Latin poet is actually mentioned in ‘Imitation of Horace’. Another presence behind these poems is that of Eugenio Montale, who was amongst the first to recognize Bassani’s gifts as a poet: ‘… Giorgio Bassani reveals himself in perfect possession of an instrument that he hasn’t invented but which shows itself sympathetic to his possibilities …’ Moreover, in their moments of epiphany, these poems remind one of Montale’s ‘Motets’. Here is the closing stanza of ‘The Seagulls’:
And already far beyond the riverbank’s curving away,
you see them lost in the low blue mist of willows
against the current. The free memory from those
frail wings still unsettles, beating in your grey eyes.
The title of ‘The Sunflowers’ must surely also be an intended nod towards one of Montale’s most famous early poems. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, in the work of a young man finding his way in life, Bassani seems haunted by the passage of time and reminisces about past, unsuccessful love affairs, distilling that sense of exquisite boredom that one associates with the Crepuscolari, Italian poets of the late 19th and early 20th century. Here he is in ‘Pavan’:
To the slow, inexhaustible rhythm of a sad pavan
you withered. In the room there was no one but you
among the dead, blind things. You’d stop. The sun
faintly dazzled, filtering through blinds. Enough piano.
However, in ‘Poor Lovers’ Stories’, the title poem of his first collection, we see the poet moving beyond the limits of the self-contained lyric into a narrative mode that hints at the work of the novelist to be. Moreover, in ‘The Coalmen’, the reader senses an increasingly ominous political reality: ‘Everyone lives like enemies besieged / within a bastion of iron.’ This reality is dealt with more explicitly in Bassani’s second collection, Te Lucis Ante. Its opening sequence, composed during Bassani’s three-month incarceration for ‘anti-fascist activities’, describes a recurring dream that the poet had whilst in prison. Visionary in tone, its title derives from the hymn, Te lucis ante terminum in the Roman Breviary. Finally, in the single quatrain of ‘The Garden’, with its title invoking both Epicurus and Bassani’s most famous novel, one imagines that history is the nightmare from which this poet is trying to escape: ‘But here, / here, in this lost garden, here is my paradise.’
After the appearance of Te lucis ante in 1947, Bassani published no further books of verse until Epitaph in 1974. The contrast between his old and new poems is highlighted most obviously by their typography, which shows how decisively he has turned his back on ‘classical’ forms. However, this is not merely a question of formal distinctions. The difference between early and late Bassani is as far-reaching as that between the ‘Georgian’ D.H. Lawrence and the ‘Modernist’ and, as in Lawrence’s later poems, there is an astonishing variety of subject matter and tone. Freewheeling and colloquial, these poems enabled him to explore quotidian reality in a way that was not possible in the ‘timeless lyric’. Perhaps, also, these more diffuse poems should be seen as a natural consequence of the freedom he had gained by writing novels. One is reminded of the following lines in Auden’s poem, ‘The Novelist’: ‘but he / Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn / How to be plain and awkward …’
In her ‘Foreword’, Paola Bassani speaks of her father’s interest in Pop Art and the way it influenced his work. From the 1960s onwards, Bassani spent a great deal of time in the United States and taught at several universities. Steeped in American culture, he was clearly influenced, in particular, by the various currents of contemporary American poetry: the Confessional Poets, the West Coast Beats, the New York School. The open-endedness of their poems is far removed from Bassani’s early lyrics and enabled him to include just about anything that occurred to him, however momentary or seemingly trivial. It also gave him scope for satire and a much more direct and circumstantial account of his past and present experiences. Take for example ‘Ferrara’s Ex-Fascists’:
Ferrara’s ex-fascists
they grow old
some of those
who in ’39
made a point of not acknowledging me
they cross over they greet me
as with Geo arms around the neck
irrepressible blunderers
they sigh ah you …
A helpful note explains that ‘Geo’ is Geo Josz, a character in one of Bassani’s short stories, but otherwise the narrative continues for another thirty-eight lines as informally and ‘unpoetically’ as if one person were simply telling his story to another. It’s like something that might have been written by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, if he had lived through similar circumstances. Equally, ‘Rolls Royce,’ with its breathless flow and sometimes disjointed syntax is reminiscent of Frank O’Hara in the way it includes every fleeting detail observed or suddenly remembered:
Straight after closing my eyes for ever
here I am who knows how crossing Ferrara by car once more
– a huge metalized foreign-made
sedan with great
dark windows perhaps
a Rolls –
descending once more from the Este castle down
by Corso Giovecca towards
the Prospettiva’s final rose-colored squiggle which was slowly
but surely growing big in the concave
rectangle of the windscreen …
There is sometimes also a new tone of scabrous invective:
Don’t be
stupid you’re already
a bitch
isn’t that enough?
With that crazy-genius salt and pepper
mop of hair
that twisted tobacco
wink
those velvet
jeans …
(Invective)
Elsewhere, he is equally blunt as he takes aim at critics, an indiscrete journalist, or a professor of philosophy. This is not to suggest, however, that there is little more to Bassani’s later poetry than knockabout humour or a willingness to even the score. There are some excellent poems about his family history that are on quite another level. Particularly impressive is ‘I Arrive My Mother’s not Well’: ‘What the hell to tell each other after thirty years / that we don’t spend much time together?’ ‘Family History’, the poem which follows, is an engaging portrait of a certain Uncle Giacomo, the relative that Bassani’s lover, Anne-Marie Stehlin, ‘would have disliked least.’ Ultimately, whether one prefers Bassani’s early poetry, with its reliance on ‘classical’ metrics, or his later more matter-of-fact and colloquial poetry may simply be a matter of taste. However, one of the fascinations of Bassani’s work is to see its development across the full range of his output and to discover its essential unity. The Collected Poems is a substantial volume that one will be able to return to with increasing pleasure over time and which, hopefully, may well inspire more readers to discover or revisit the various volumes of The Novel of Ferrara. Moreover, the English translations presented here will serve not only the needs of those who have no Italian and simply require versions that read well, but will also, because of their fidelity to the sense of the originals, prove invaluable to those who aspire to read the poems in their original language.
David Cooke is the editor of The High Window.
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Giorgio Bassani: Four Poems from Collected Poems
SALUTE TO ROME
Goodbye limed arena, goodbye diamond,
your sky is a closed face above me.
Let me return to my hometown buried
in grass as in a warm and heavy sea.
Burning gates in the distant sky,
your sun is black, it’s black your moon.
Flesh without regret, laughter without one
memory: hopeless city, goodbye.
For I know your streets, straight swords, and sounds
of your celestial squares; but I know the gales
that hone you, the wails
from your hidden stations.
No, your brow doesn’t shine with grace.
Who’ll gather you, cry of jubilation?
The rainbow mirroring you is cloudless.
You’re alone, within your walls of space.
SALUTO A ROMA
Addio arena di calce, addio diamante,
il tuo cielo su me è un chiuso volto.
Lascia ch’io torni al mio paese sepolto
nell’erba come in un mare caldo e pesante.
Porte roventi nel cielo distante,
nero è il tuo sole, nera la tua luna.
Carne senza rimpianti, riso senza nessuna
memoria: addio città senza speranza.
Perché io so le tue vie, diritte spade, i suoni
delle tue piazze celesti; ma so il vento
che ti affila, il lamento
delle tue nascoste stazioni.
No, la tua fronte non splende di grazia.
Chi ti raccoglierà, grido di giubilo?
L’iride che ti specchia è senza nubi.
Sei sola, dentro le tue mura di spazio.
FROM PRISON
From the towers of Ferrara
by now the soft light flies,
but from a mean, black grating
who turns you, who leads you,
o caress of evening?
Who replies to a prayer,
to an abandoned keening,
with this slender fanfare?
Oh don’t let dusk fall, nor night
ever, if it doesn’t bring you
through space, through the mist,
sounds weak and distorted,
rare, anxious signals,
when hours are more of the same,
when the day is much further
and every cry is over the sea.
DAL CARCERE
Dalle torri di Ferrara
vola ormai la dolce luce,
ma a una grata nera, avara,
chi ti volge, chi ti induce
o carezza della sera?
Chi risponde a una preghiera,
ad un pianto abbandonato,
con questa esile fanfara?
Oh non cada sera, alcuna
notte mai se non vi porti
per lo spazio, per la bruma,
suoni deboli e distorti,
rari, trepidi segnali,
quando le ore son più eguali,
quando più lontano è il giorno
e ogni grido è sopra il mare.
I’VE ALREADY SAID IT
I’ve already said it in my books
in prose but indirectly
at a slant
even me like certain ceiling painters
of days gone by
– all more or less of remotest
mannerist descent –
constrained to work indoors
for months on end perhaps for
years
paid by the day like any other workmen
by the skinflint
patron
provided at set times by him too with the household
meals up on the platform
never released before it was good and
dark
and in the meantime only dreaming it
the hesitant the dazzling the unsteady
light outside
inventing it
remembering it and
that is all
L’HO GIÀ DETTO
L’ho già detto sì nei miei libri
in prosa ma indirettamente
per vie traverse
simile anch’io a certi pittori di soffitti
d’una volta
– tutti più o meno di remotissima
ascendenza manierista –
costretti a lavorare al chiuso
per mesi e mesi magari per
anni
rimunerati a giornata come operai
qualsiasi dall’avaro
committente
da lui medesimo provvisti ad ore fisse del vitto
di casa lassù sui palchi
non mai dimessi prima che fosse ben
notte
e nel frattempo soltanto a sognarsela
la trepida la cangiante l’instabile
luce di fuori
inventandosela
ricordandosene e
basta
ISOLA BISENTINA
How beautiful life is and what a pity
we have to leave it I had the gullibility
to sigh while the boat
at that particularly fawning lacustrine sunset hour
floating very lightly would approach
the enchanted isle
And immediately my acute modernist friend threatens me
raising his finger and wrinkling
his forehead
even if he’s quick to agree with a grin that yes
it’s true even though to die there’s
always time
I’d nothing to say to that throughout
the rest of the crossing and not even after
we touched the Böcklin shore and again later
on our way back
But still – I ask myself now – is there really
always time?
And if there really
always is
how much is there
now?
ISOLA BISENTINA
Come è bella la vita e che peccato
dover lasciarla ho avuto la dabbenaggine
di sospirare mentre la barca
nell’ora particolarmente ruffiana del tramonto lacustre
flottando leggerissima si approssimava
all’isola incantata
E subito l’acuto amico modernista a minacciarmi
con tanto d’indice alzato e corrugando
la fronte
pur se sollecito poi a convenire ghignando che sì
è vero benché a morire
c’è sempre tempo
Nulla a ciò ribattei durante tutto
il rimanente della traversata e nemmeno dopo
che fu toccata la riva boekliniana e dopo ancora
lungo la via del ritorno
Però – mi domando ora – c’è sul serio
sempre tempo?
E se davvero ce n’è
sempre
quanto allora ce
n’è?
The High Window 