Article
Critics’ notes on Villalta
January 18, 2006
Andrea Zanzotto
“Villalta’s poetry has as its starting point an existential situation of suffering and intolerance in the relation with the world. The world appears as a narrative continuum to which the author opposes a vertical and synthetic refusal but without ever ceasing to evoke the dimension of the ‘prose of the world’ . . . ; it is a sequence that on the other hand refers intermittently to a Circus and its animals but develops itself through apparitions and hallucinations of visions and dream, which do imply, certainly, the theme (typical of modernity) of the voice and the world (“language my dark lump in the throat/ no longer not yet word”) but also the delineation of coercive environments (boarding school, school, military service) experienced through an allegorical ‘circus’. The poetic force lies in the sudden falls, in the changes of point-of-view and speaker. He seems to me to embody the best of Sereni and Zanzotto, with a sense of ‘legato’ for assonances and half-rhymes.”
Franco Fortini
“It is pleasing to note how Villalta, when he writes in Italian, does not renounce any of the restlessness that prods him – subjecting not only the gaze on the landscape and the objects that populate it, but also the work of memory to a diffused state of agitation . . . But one thing is certain: Villalta does not look for “nice images” or “deep thoughts”. The fulcrum of the book is a theory of memory – a patient questioning of what ever could be the meaning of the word forever, because every instant is an irradiation, the content of an instant impregnates the fibers of the past and the future, branching out from the empty center of the present moment. And thus, the light of this day, which shall never come back, which also follows the obligatory path of mortality, this done for light that only a compassionate and useless lie could make ‘eternal’, or in some way ‘salvable’, in the moment of explicating its being, has saved itself on its own, has become the light of all possible days, the body of thought, the secret truth of the visible finally exposed in evidence.”
Emanuele Trevi
Translated by Gabriele Poole
These critics’ notes on Gian Mario Villalta shed new light on his attitude towards language and the act of self-translation.
“A situation in some regards similar to my own happens with the dialect used by Gian Mario Villalta, which I would define as a weird extrapolation of a language calibrated between the dialect of Veneto and Friuli, but marked by a strong local originality, which appears bent without being forced to the need of addressing the present, with a particularly knowledgeable use of the resources and powers that still exist even in these situations, in their contrast with the monstrous ‘global’ of today.”Andrea Zanzotto
“Villalta’s poetry has as its starting point an existential situation of suffering and intolerance in the relation with the world. The world appears as a narrative continuum to which the author opposes a vertical and synthetic refusal but without ever ceasing to evoke the dimension of the ‘prose of the world’ . . . ; it is a sequence that on the other hand refers intermittently to a Circus and its animals but develops itself through apparitions and hallucinations of visions and dream, which do imply, certainly, the theme (typical of modernity) of the voice and the world (“language my dark lump in the throat/ no longer not yet word”) but also the delineation of coercive environments (boarding school, school, military service) experienced through an allegorical ‘circus’. The poetic force lies in the sudden falls, in the changes of point-of-view and speaker. He seems to me to embody the best of Sereni and Zanzotto, with a sense of ‘legato’ for assonances and half-rhymes.”
Franco Fortini
“It is pleasing to note how Villalta, when he writes in Italian, does not renounce any of the restlessness that prods him – subjecting not only the gaze on the landscape and the objects that populate it, but also the work of memory to a diffused state of agitation . . . But one thing is certain: Villalta does not look for “nice images” or “deep thoughts”. The fulcrum of the book is a theory of memory – a patient questioning of what ever could be the meaning of the word forever, because every instant is an irradiation, the content of an instant impregnates the fibers of the past and the future, branching out from the empty center of the present moment. And thus, the light of this day, which shall never come back, which also follows the obligatory path of mortality, this done for light that only a compassionate and useless lie could make ‘eternal’, or in some way ‘salvable’, in the moment of explicating its being, has saved itself on its own, has become the light of all possible days, the body of thought, the secret truth of the visible finally exposed in evidence.”
Emanuele Trevi
Translated by Gabriele Poole
© Roberto Baronti Marchiò
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