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Giorgio Caproni (1912-1990) was born in Livorno and grew up in
Genoa. He became an elementary teacher in Val Trebbia, where he was also active in the Resistance; from 1945 onward he lived in Rome. His poetic development, like that of other mid-century Italian poets (for example, Luzi, Sereni, and Bertolucci) can be traced in terms of reactions to individuals and movements; his poetics, initially pre-hermetic, looking back to Carducci and borrowing from Saba and Betocchi, eventually became indebted to hermeticism and linked particularly to the impressionistic melodiousness of Gatta.

   But after his influences and reactions have been accounted for, we
discover in Caproni a singular voice and a distinctive poetry, whose
appearances can be deceiving. Like Montale’s, his is a poetry of the earth – notably the soil and rocks, as well as the light and air of Liguria – which is also ironic, dryly intellectual, and metaphysical. The surfaces of his poems can look simple, thanks to sharply etched imagery and a spare treatment of line and stanza that combine, at moments, to create an effect of sheer clarity. Yet the poems are often notable for their dense compression and their use of an intricate syntax, creating elliptical effects such as this:

             Scherzano battendo l’ale
     Candide sui tetti a fiore
     Giunti, le colombelle
     Nuove.

             On the peaked roofs
     Folded like petals
     Young turtle-doves are playing,
     Beating white wings.

For all its natural and imagistic immediacy, Caproni’s poetry calls
attention to its artfulness: patterns of rhythm and sound, startling
enjambments, and isolations of words which draw out a subtle play of image and sense, music and meaning:

             S’illuminano come esclamate,
     Ad ogni scoppio di razzo,
     Le chiare donne sbracciate
     Ai balconi.

             The women are dazzling, as they cry out
     At each rocket’s burst,
     Waving their bare white arms
     From the balconies.

A poet of robust passion and cool intellection, Caproni thrives on ambivalence, contradiction, and counterpoint. While his work records a direct, intimate connection with life and its pungent actualities (apparent in the sensuous, sensual aspects of the poems translated here), it also assumes and foregrounds – with technical sleights and feints, with rhythmic and aural play – its nature as artifice. At the heart of Caproni’s technique we find what Mengaldo calls a “synthesis (often acerbic and dissonant) of melody and narrative, of song and speech,” yielding a “delicate harmony of the elegant and the ordinary.” Finally – again like Montale – Giorgio Caproni is a poet steeped in the weathers and landscapes of a region: Livorno, Genoa, and above all, the slopes and fields and stony shores of Liguria, so redolently evoked in this sequence of lyrics.

   (For perspectives on Caproni and his place in the history of 20th
century Italian poetry I am indebted to comments by Pier Vincenzo
Mengaldo in Poeti italiani del Novecento, Mondadori, Oscar Grandi Classici, 1990. Translations are mine.)