Article
The Tremendousness of Dal Bianco
January 18, 2006
Thus wrote Stefano Dal Bianco in 1993. The poet, who was born in Padua in 1961, just published his Ritorno a Planaval (Specchio Mondadori), his third collection of verse after La Bella Mano and Stanze del gusto cattivo, published ten years ago. His quest, from the heroic commentator of Zanzotto’s verses, to the esoteric and absolute metric ear, has taken quite different forms but has always been characterized by a stubborn, long-suffering consistency. In the 1980s together with Giulio Mozzi and others he brought to life the journal Scarto minimo, whose title was both programmatic and extremely problematic (the crux of the matter – as Barthes taught once and for all – is to define the ‘degree zero’ on which to measure the ‘gap’ . . . ), where Dal Bianco chose to use a Petrarchan monolingualism with which “to explain our groundlessness in a world that neither loves us or hates us.”
The memory of a founding trauma that was at the same time unspeakable, however, shattered the young poet’s defensive dream of classicism. The book that reflects this disconcerted reassembly is La bella mano, a title that quotes the Petrarchist collection (constitutively, exemplarily the second, that is) of the 15th century Giusto de’ Conti. In an attempt to touch objects, they – beginning with mental ones (memories) – shatter into details until they disappear (“I do not remember and so I hold my hand as/ if it were life . . . ”) and poetry remains at the state of minimum ‘stratagem’ – as formally irreproachable as emotionally frustrating.
The poet of Ritorno a Planaval, seems to be, yet is not, another poet. The poetry-objects, like the memorial object that is always absent-present, “continually tend toward expansion”: expanding to become description, apologue, and even demonstrative theatrical ‘action’. It is not by chance (as Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo writes on the inside cover) that prose appears, in concert with elaborately wrought verses that are metrically interiorised: most of the time they simulate ‘stories’ that are in reality perception-thoughts that appear to be subdued (“and I like a wilted flower look at all these wonders,” said the writing on the country wall in Zanzotto’s Vocativo), but are in reality extremely acute. They are episodes that are already imprinted in the mind, because of their allusive concentration and formal resolution: ‘Il piano’ (‘Levels’), ‘La paura’ (‘Fear’), ‘L’imitazione’ (‘Imitation’) and above all ‘Il vetrino’ (‘The Fragment’), where the theme of shattered memory returns, as it does in ‘Lenzuola’ (‘Sheets’). The inside and the outside of the monad-dwelling (like the body in ‘Pomeriggio fuori fase’, ‘Afternoon Out of Sorts’) push each other with perceptible ‘Intrusiveness’, and the subject becomes “a dark window.”
The most risky wager, however, is found, in the last, eponymous section, which in the manner of the “interior petrarchism” of Char or Sereni, confronts itself with the ‘sacred’ trauma returning to its coordinates: to its places. Where every presence (the amulet-objects of the ‘Fragmenta’, plants, waters, mountains) swells menacingly in the mind until it becomes “absurd, as different and unsustainable as the outline of your absence becomes clearly-defined in the blue.” This is where one faces fear (the sentiment that dominated La bella mano), but it is the only way to discover that one is capable of becoming a man and to face ‘A New Life’ (or just life, surely).
It is rare today that formal inventions and life solutions, like this one, are reflected in what we call style. Perhaps it depends on the fact that while some hold onto the illusion (that is the fiction) of innocence, Dal Bianco, on the contrary, knows full well that style is something tremendous.
Translated by Berenice Cocciolillo, 2004
First published in Il Manifesto, 2002.
In this piece, which first appeared in Il Manifesto after the publication of Ritorno a Planaval, Andrea Cortellessa traces the course of the poet's career and finds that style is of paramount importance to it.
“A classicism that does not relinquish the anthropological clarity of life, that keeps up the memory of that which is tremendous in style while at the same time giving up style insofar as it represents an instrument of personal defence.” Thus wrote Stefano Dal Bianco in 1993. The poet, who was born in Padua in 1961, just published his Ritorno a Planaval (Specchio Mondadori), his third collection of verse after La Bella Mano and Stanze del gusto cattivo, published ten years ago. His quest, from the heroic commentator of Zanzotto’s verses, to the esoteric and absolute metric ear, has taken quite different forms but has always been characterized by a stubborn, long-suffering consistency. In the 1980s together with Giulio Mozzi and others he brought to life the journal Scarto minimo, whose title was both programmatic and extremely problematic (the crux of the matter – as Barthes taught once and for all – is to define the ‘degree zero’ on which to measure the ‘gap’ . . . ), where Dal Bianco chose to use a Petrarchan monolingualism with which “to explain our groundlessness in a world that neither loves us or hates us.”
The memory of a founding trauma that was at the same time unspeakable, however, shattered the young poet’s defensive dream of classicism. The book that reflects this disconcerted reassembly is La bella mano, a title that quotes the Petrarchist collection (constitutively, exemplarily the second, that is) of the 15th century Giusto de’ Conti. In an attempt to touch objects, they – beginning with mental ones (memories) – shatter into details until they disappear (“I do not remember and so I hold my hand as/ if it were life . . . ”) and poetry remains at the state of minimum ‘stratagem’ – as formally irreproachable as emotionally frustrating.
The poet of Ritorno a Planaval, seems to be, yet is not, another poet. The poetry-objects, like the memorial object that is always absent-present, “continually tend toward expansion”: expanding to become description, apologue, and even demonstrative theatrical ‘action’. It is not by chance (as Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo writes on the inside cover) that prose appears, in concert with elaborately wrought verses that are metrically interiorised: most of the time they simulate ‘stories’ that are in reality perception-thoughts that appear to be subdued (“and I like a wilted flower look at all these wonders,” said the writing on the country wall in Zanzotto’s Vocativo), but are in reality extremely acute. They are episodes that are already imprinted in the mind, because of their allusive concentration and formal resolution: ‘Il piano’ (‘Levels’), ‘La paura’ (‘Fear’), ‘L’imitazione’ (‘Imitation’) and above all ‘Il vetrino’ (‘The Fragment’), where the theme of shattered memory returns, as it does in ‘Lenzuola’ (‘Sheets’). The inside and the outside of the monad-dwelling (like the body in ‘Pomeriggio fuori fase’, ‘Afternoon Out of Sorts’) push each other with perceptible ‘Intrusiveness’, and the subject becomes “a dark window.”
The most risky wager, however, is found, in the last, eponymous section, which in the manner of the “interior petrarchism” of Char or Sereni, confronts itself with the ‘sacred’ trauma returning to its coordinates: to its places. Where every presence (the amulet-objects of the ‘Fragmenta’, plants, waters, mountains) swells menacingly in the mind until it becomes “absurd, as different and unsustainable as the outline of your absence becomes clearly-defined in the blue.” This is where one faces fear (the sentiment that dominated La bella mano), but it is the only way to discover that one is capable of becoming a man and to face ‘A New Life’ (or just life, surely).
It is rare today that formal inventions and life solutions, like this one, are reflected in what we call style. Perhaps it depends on the fact that while some hold onto the illusion (that is the fiction) of innocence, Dal Bianco, on the contrary, knows full well that style is something tremendous.
Translated by Berenice Cocciolillo, 2004
First published in Il Manifesto, 2002.
© Andrea Cortellessa
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