The Poetry and Selected Prose of Camillo Sbarbaro (eBook)

Contents 8
Acknowledgements 10
Preface 12
Introduction 20
Historical Background 20
Camillo Sbarbaro 35
Chronology 42
Selected Bibliography 49
From Primizie 54
About Primizie 65
Pianissimo 72
1. Editor's Introduction 74
2. Sbarbaro's 1954 Introduction 89
3. Text and Notes 97
"Letter from a Tavern" 191
Rimanenze 196
1. Editor's Introduction: Poetry as the Art of Memory 196
2. Rimanenze 206
3. "Versi a Dina" 223
Selections from Trucioli 234
Selections from Fuochi Fatui 304
Appendix: Eugenio Montale on Camillo Sbarbaro 328

Introduction (p. 1)

The historical background

When Sbarbaro first appeared on the literary scene, in the first decades of the 20th century, the literature of the Italian avantgarde was closely related to the social and political events that shaped European history from the middle of the 19th century to that mythical year of 1914.

However the political, social and intellectual crisis experienced at the end of the 19th century in the rest of Europe failed to bring in Italy the kind of transformation of the political and social structures that had been experienced elsewhere.

While many movements paralleled similar events in France and other countries (for example the formation of the Socialist Party in 1892, the fasci dei lavoratori of 1893 in Sicily, the labor movements in Milan and Turin and other major Italian cities, etc.), the overall intellectual and social direction of Italy remained somewhat repressive and backward.

The State with its aristocratic and wealthy interests continued to oppose any populist movement that would grant even the smallest ackowledgement of the rights of workers or that would lead to universal electoral suffrage.

The State countered any movement with additional doses of taxation, growing bureaucratization of its own structures, the expansion of police powers and an ill-timed imperialistic adventurism in Africa. The ruling class, evermore defensive in the presence of such transformations, continued to promulgate a government reserved for the elected officials in an attempt to silence the masses.

All this represented a rather strong reaction to the hopes that had been expressed by "positivism," the major European current of thought which trusted in the liberating power of science and fostered ideals of progress. This movement had been responsible for the progressive and liberal attitudes of the ruling classes.

With the decline of those ideals, the hopes and the attitudes of positivism with its parallel emphasis on art solidly grounded in the real also declined. Suddenly, the narrow and restrictive canons of vraisemblance appeared to deprive the artist and the intellectual of the broadest possible universe for the imagination.

In reaction, decadent artists displayed an urgent desire to go beyond a narrowly defined reality, even if this meant a serious setback to the illuministic hopes of positivism and liberalism. The decadents sought to create new modules of expression even at the risk of exploding the semantic limits of the word, to give free rein to the previously ill-expressed world of the fantastic, the allusive and the oneiric.

However, these tendencies were part of a social revolution that had basically gone sour. Writing in 1947 on the Politecnico, precisely on the problem of literature of the "crisis," Elio Vittorini said:

It is filled with individualism and decadentism. But it is also filled with the necessity to come out of it, and it is a search for a way out . . . Its bourgeois motives are motives of shame to be bourgeois and of desperation to be bourgeois.

This literature of the crisis, a crisis of intellectual, social and spiritual dimensions, produced a breakdown of the basic structures of the poetic language. Reacting to the positivist tenets of linguistic terms grounded in the "real," the modernist poet rejected all notions of art as a description or mimesis.