Luciano Erba
Luciano Erba was born in Milan on 18 September 1922. He encountered the ‘Lombard Line’ of poetry early in the form of Vittorio Sereni, who was his teacher for the first year of high school. Though he has lived most of his life in Milan, there have been extended periods spent abroad: in Switzerland during the latter part of World War Two where he was interned, in post-war Paris where he taught and first met the poet Philippe Jaccottet, and in the USA. He studied French, graduating from the Catholic University of Milan in 1947. He has researched in the literary history of the early sixteenth century, in nineteenth-century symbolism, and twentieth-century literature. Erba taught in schools and at various universities including Bari, Bologna, Udine, Verona, and the Catholic University of Milan.
He made his literary debut with Linea K (1951) and the unique character of his poetry can already be found fully formed there. His
numerous subsequent collections include Il male minore (1960), Il prato più verde (1977), Il nastro di Moebius (1980), L’ippopotamo (1989), L’ipotesi circensi (1995), and Nella terra di mezzo (2000) – all collected in Poesie 1951-2001 (2002). He is known too for his translations of Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge, Thom Gunn, and other French and English poets. Erba has published a collection of stories, Françoise (1982), and, with Piero Chiara, edited an important anthology of new post-war Italian poets, Quarta generazione (1954).
Most of Luciano Erba’s poetry is situated, in one way or another, at points of transit between indeterminate states. These can be geographical, historical, social, political, cultural, and metaphysical. Evident examples in the pieces appearing below would be the three poems from ‘Railway Suite’, which derive from Erba’s flight to Switzerland to escape conscription in the forces of Mussolini’s Salò Republic, or ‘The Young Couples’ with their guest and different socio-economic evolutions. Among the many functions of these transitional states is the preservation of a space where the knowledge that poetry is uniquely able to deliver can be brought to life within the course of the poem.
In his editor’s introduction to Poesie 1951-2001, Stefano Prandi notes that Erba’s poems contain the Italian word for “if” 89 times. It appears in four of the poems below. This word can be used not only to project a space for imaginary possibilities, it may also help maintain an air of scepticism and uncertainty. ‘The Mirage’, for example, flourishes within the vagaries and limits of childhood memory. Such indeterminacy and fluidity of image allow the poetry to do its work independently of those fixities and definites of opinion and ideology that appear to form the unbroken surface of everyday life. The poet’s describing himself as no more than a chasseur des images also points to the apparent paradox that poetry must frequent the apparently insignificant for sources of fresh meaning. So too, it is only within the transitorily quotidian that what stays may be intuited.
Erba’s doubts about psychoanalysis, for example, can be read in his intermittent series of poems concerning Doctor K. Similarly, his portrait of himself as petit bourgeois in ‘Without Compass’ subjects various systems of thought to a quiet debunking. The poem responds to the sorts of class-based political criticism that Erba’s work had received at the hands of Franco Fortini and others. Yet, nevertheless, “petit bourgeois” is just the social experience with which Erba’s poetry might fictively identify itself, for that is a class in ambivalent transit between more securely valorized states. Something similar could be said for the attribution of essential function to such bit-part players as those from Hamlet in ‘The Circus Hypothesis’.
Vittorio Sereni cites lines from Erba’s ‘Tabula Rasa?’ in his ‘The Alibi and the Benefit’, a poem set inside a fog-bound Milanese tram whose doors open onto nothingness: “It’s any evening / crossed by half-empty trams” and “You see me advance as you know / in districts without memory?” The older poet sets the lines as two linked phrases put into italics. Then he adds “never seen a district so rich in memories / as these so-called ‘without’ in the young Erba’s lines”. Does the poem express upset or relief at the possibility that the districts may be without memory? It seems poised between the desire for a clean start and such a start’s horrifying emptiness. Erba’s poem continues with “I’ve a cream tie, an old weight / of desires”. Italian critics have dwelt upon how often these poems turn to seemingly casual details of wardrobe. They too are precisely located between the haphazard and the symbolic, neither one nor the other – as in ‘La Grande Jeanne’ whose desire to rise from poor prostitute to great lady is manifested in her having “a hat already / broad, blue, and with three turns of tulle.”
He made his literary debut with Linea K (1951) and the unique character of his poetry can already be found fully formed there. His
numerous subsequent collections include Il male minore (1960), Il prato più verde (1977), Il nastro di Moebius (1980), L’ippopotamo (1989), L’ipotesi circensi (1995), and Nella terra di mezzo (2000) – all collected in Poesie 1951-2001 (2002). He is known too for his translations of Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge, Thom Gunn, and other French and English poets. Erba has published a collection of stories, Françoise (1982), and, with Piero Chiara, edited an important anthology of new post-war Italian poets, Quarta generazione (1954).
Most of Luciano Erba’s poetry is situated, in one way or another, at points of transit between indeterminate states. These can be geographical, historical, social, political, cultural, and metaphysical. Evident examples in the pieces appearing below would be the three poems from ‘Railway Suite’, which derive from Erba’s flight to Switzerland to escape conscription in the forces of Mussolini’s Salò Republic, or ‘The Young Couples’ with their guest and different socio-economic evolutions. Among the many functions of these transitional states is the preservation of a space where the knowledge that poetry is uniquely able to deliver can be brought to life within the course of the poem.
In his editor’s introduction to Poesie 1951-2001, Stefano Prandi notes that Erba’s poems contain the Italian word for “if” 89 times. It appears in four of the poems below. This word can be used not only to project a space for imaginary possibilities, it may also help maintain an air of scepticism and uncertainty. ‘The Mirage’, for example, flourishes within the vagaries and limits of childhood memory. Such indeterminacy and fluidity of image allow the poetry to do its work independently of those fixities and definites of opinion and ideology that appear to form the unbroken surface of everyday life. The poet’s describing himself as no more than a chasseur des images also points to the apparent paradox that poetry must frequent the apparently insignificant for sources of fresh meaning. So too, it is only within the transitorily quotidian that what stays may be intuited.
Erba’s doubts about psychoanalysis, for example, can be read in his intermittent series of poems concerning Doctor K. Similarly, his portrait of himself as petit bourgeois in ‘Without Compass’ subjects various systems of thought to a quiet debunking. The poem responds to the sorts of class-based political criticism that Erba’s work had received at the hands of Franco Fortini and others. Yet, nevertheless, “petit bourgeois” is just the social experience with which Erba’s poetry might fictively identify itself, for that is a class in ambivalent transit between more securely valorized states. Something similar could be said for the attribution of essential function to such bit-part players as those from Hamlet in ‘The Circus Hypothesis’.
Vittorio Sereni cites lines from Erba’s ‘Tabula Rasa?’ in his ‘The Alibi and the Benefit’, a poem set inside a fog-bound Milanese tram whose doors open onto nothingness: “It’s any evening / crossed by half-empty trams” and “You see me advance as you know / in districts without memory?” The older poet sets the lines as two linked phrases put into italics. Then he adds “never seen a district so rich in memories / as these so-called ‘without’ in the young Erba’s lines”. Does the poem express upset or relief at the possibility that the districts may be without memory? It seems poised between the desire for a clean start and such a start’s horrifying emptiness. Erba’s poem continues with “I’ve a cream tie, an old weight / of desires”. Italian critics have dwelt upon how often these poems turn to seemingly casual details of wardrobe. They too are precisely located between the haphazard and the symbolic, neither one nor the other – as in ‘La Grande Jeanne’ whose desire to rise from poor prostitute to great lady is manifested in her having “a hat already / broad, blue, and with three turns of tulle.”
Page(s) 61-62
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