2023-09-25 09:48:31
Publication of unpublished and geographical texts by the Italian writer, whose centenary is being celebrated, dedicated to the region where he grew up.
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Was Italo Calvino also a poet? To this question, the volume published by Nous editions on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of the author of Le Baron perché does not exactly allow us to answer in the affirmative. Liguries, as its name indicates, brings together youth texts around the region of Calvino’s childhood and adolescence, this beginning of Italy, in the northwest of the country, shared between the mountains and the sea. Five prose texts and a set of six poems, therefore: the Ligurian etchings. If we cannot nevertheless place the brilliant Italian Oulipian in the category of poets, it is because we are dealing here more with a youthful incursion, almost a parenthesis, than with a truly new field for his feather. Because “Calvino always showed himself reserved with regard to a genre, poetry, which he placed at the highest level,” specifies the translator, Martin Rueff, in his preface. The Italian author practices poetry more as a reader than as an author.
As such, his absolute reference is Eugenio Montale, author of Cuttlebone and 1975 Nobel Prize winner. “Since my adolescence, Montale has been my poet and he has never stopped being so. I continue to be a fanatical Montalian, said Calvino in 1979. And then I am Ligurian, and so I also learned to read my landscapes through Montale’s books. Reading his landscapes is precisely what this collection of unpublished texts invites us to do. These etchings are geographical poems, written, as they say for painters, on the motif. For Calvino, Liguria is as much that of the coast and the cities (Genoa, Savona and Sanremo) as that of the hinterland with its stony paths, low vegetation, poor farmers. From a temporal point of view, it is irremediably associated with childhood and the memory of his youth marked by the war – Calvino had a very active role in the Resistance. Because, he writes in his text dedicated to the city of Savona: “The true description of a landscape must end up containing the history of this landscape.”
Note that on the occasion of this centenary, Gallimard published at the beginning of October a thick volume of Calvino’s correspondence, Le Métier d’write. We will come back to this publication very soon.
Italo Calvino, Liguries, bilingual, Nous editions, translated from Italian by Martin Rueff, 168 pages, 18 euros. The extract
Restanes
Is it to reach the steep paradises
that he rushes up the staircase which slopes
towards the slope, or to die on the cliffs
dry, where the olive tree gives way to the pine?
To worship the sun it takes ages
as big as the terraces as the vine
must garnish all around, and that on the rule
of stakes and wires fade
of sulfate the leaves.
Who among these people
would dare to sing through the fields?
Let the pickaxe here
break the earth and the silence
rhythmically with the movement of the shoulders.
And a frail fig tree
writhes at the edge of the terrace.
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