Artikel
A Review of Ritorno a Planaval
_w336.jpg)
18 januari 2006
The poetry of Stefano Dal Bianco signals a marked change in Specchio Mondadori’s editorial choices, a change that is decidedly encouraging and that we hope will continue; it is a change that brings to the forefront both a manner of interpreting poetry and a generation of poets who have been neglected up until now in Italy. One could observe that there is a strange schizophrenia in the fact that a forty-year-old poet is considered young.
Dal Bianco was a student of Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, guru of Italian stylistic criticism. The poet took from Mengaldo, in fact, the capacity for composition and metric wisdom that often astonishes because of the way in which verses are emphasized while they accept the level language of daily life, with measure in rhymes (almost absent) and in assonance. It is verse that is made up almost solely of accents, and that has a predilection for silence. On the other hand, in the precise choice of arriving at a healthy and interference-free communicative exchange between author and reader, it says what can be said, and yet is silent or leaves behind a subliminal threshold that is all the more strong and attractive the more the text becomes depersonalised and frees itself of rhetoric, sentimentality and other literary condiments. As in the case of the poem entitled ‘Il sogno della madre’ (‘The Dream of the Mother’).
Poetry is like a breath of oxygen among the words of today’s world, words dominated by the prose of television and advertising; it’s the moment in which silence can be heard, in which a stone is still a stone, in which a word has the possibility of resounding for what it is. And this poetry cannot but live in the world of daily life, made up of familiar micro-events, of a life often seen from a window, which does not however become submerged in the exaggeratedly good or the pathetic. In this poetry life rises, as I said, by virtue of style and individual truth, to the peaks of (literary) poetry writing that constantly seeks out an opening, a possible unobstructed communication in which the miracle of dialogue still occurs. Dal Bianco’s effort transforms the great literary lesson of the 20th century, while agreeing to be without a world, without reference (not feeling any apparent nostalgia for the lack of a defined world), and from there setting off for the conquest of every tiny space in which the word may live without misunderstanding. This is a difficult conquest in which the reader is directly involved.
Another noteworthy detail that denotes the poet’s stature is that certain poems of Stefano Dal Bianco are surely already worthy of an anthology, because of their capacity to be exemplary and almost classical, despite the book’s overall freshness.
Translated by Berenice Cocciolillo, 2004
First published in La Gazzetta di Parma, 2002
In this review, which appeared one week after Dal Bianco's Ritorno a Planaval was published, the author finds poems already worthy to be anthologized, "because of their capacity to be exemplary and almost classical, despite the book’s overall freshness."
Ritorno a Planaval, by Stefano Dal Bianco, a young poet from Padua, has been in the bookstores for just over a week, in Mondadori’s ‘Lo specchio’ editions, which is to say Italian poetry’s most prestigious collection. The poetry of Stefano Dal Bianco signals a marked change in Specchio Mondadori’s editorial choices, a change that is decidedly encouraging and that we hope will continue; it is a change that brings to the forefront both a manner of interpreting poetry and a generation of poets who have been neglected up until now in Italy. One could observe that there is a strange schizophrenia in the fact that a forty-year-old poet is considered young.
Dal Bianco was a student of Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, guru of Italian stylistic criticism. The poet took from Mengaldo, in fact, the capacity for composition and metric wisdom that often astonishes because of the way in which verses are emphasized while they accept the level language of daily life, with measure in rhymes (almost absent) and in assonance. It is verse that is made up almost solely of accents, and that has a predilection for silence. On the other hand, in the precise choice of arriving at a healthy and interference-free communicative exchange between author and reader, it says what can be said, and yet is silent or leaves behind a subliminal threshold that is all the more strong and attractive the more the text becomes depersonalised and frees itself of rhetoric, sentimentality and other literary condiments. As in the case of the poem entitled ‘Il sogno della madre’ (‘The Dream of the Mother’).
Poetry is like a breath of oxygen among the words of today’s world, words dominated by the prose of television and advertising; it’s the moment in which silence can be heard, in which a stone is still a stone, in which a word has the possibility of resounding for what it is. And this poetry cannot but live in the world of daily life, made up of familiar micro-events, of a life often seen from a window, which does not however become submerged in the exaggeratedly good or the pathetic. In this poetry life rises, as I said, by virtue of style and individual truth, to the peaks of (literary) poetry writing that constantly seeks out an opening, a possible unobstructed communication in which the miracle of dialogue still occurs. Dal Bianco’s effort transforms the great literary lesson of the 20th century, while agreeing to be without a world, without reference (not feeling any apparent nostalgia for the lack of a defined world), and from there setting off for the conquest of every tiny space in which the word may live without misunderstanding. This is a difficult conquest in which the reader is directly involved.
Another noteworthy detail that denotes the poet’s stature is that certain poems of Stefano Dal Bianco are surely already worthy of an anthology, because of their capacity to be exemplary and almost classical, despite the book’s overall freshness.
Translated by Berenice Cocciolillo, 2004
First published in La Gazzetta di Parma, 2002
© Alberto Garlini
Sponsors
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère