GIOVANNI BOINE – When one wants to express disillusioned despair, they mean anguish, pain, spiritual darkness, they say: «Leopardian pessimism». Now, through living, I have come to a certain distinction within myself between real despair, physical anguish without dreams, and spoken, theoretical pessimism. After all, it is clear. I said to myself: between the witty amusement in which Schopenhauer’s prose tickles me nervously, French-like, Voltairian, precisely where he tells me the bitterest and most cynical things, Lucretian-despairing things from «Ecclesiastes», there is a leap between his prose and his ideas. Similarly, in Leopardi, the bitterness and disheartenment are wrapped, softened, painted with idyllic beauty so that you essentially swallow them without noticing; it is easier for you to weep melancholically and sweetly than to clench your fists darkly and furrow your brow and lips. In other words, the pain here, in most of the «Canti», is an image, a memory more than an open wound. Now everyone knows that in memory, in imagination, even pains are sweet. — Finally, a Hegelian would say that the mediation of artistic creation has here surpassed the immediacy of raw pain.
To be completely honest, it is already known that I am a heretic, not always is it the truly artistic that uplifts and frees you in Leopardi. On the contrary, although there is often talk of his Greek simplicity, it is the artifice of expression and the antiquated-academic phrasing that cools you with difficulty. You lose the sense of a living pain, of the bleeding wound due to the overly reflective way of speaking. There are poems that require you to chew over two or three times before grasping their minute literal meaning: and even in the most immediate «The Shepherd’s Moon Song», there is at least one stanza, that of the Petrarchan old man, which I would remove entirely as unnecessarily rhetorical.
But in conclusion, I say that in Leopardi’s poetry, this compelling expressive need, often seeking the most sincere beauty, sometimes stumbles, so reflective it is, into the literature, bears witness to an abundant vitality, something akin to a surge of healing sap that contrasts with the essential sorrow with the disillusioned barrenness which, clear and reasoned, is asserted here and there. Therefore, the sorrow and despair are in Leopardi’s thought taken abstractly, more in these grey pauses of bitter philosophical verses (and in songs like those of Aspasia where the ghost almost disappears, leaving only the harsh syllogism) than in thought made poetry, becoming a living image. Even for these “Canti” that seem to embody pessimism, one could say that where poetry appears, sorrow disappears; that sorrow is the slope of death and poetry the revival of life; that poetry, and even Leopardi’s, is in some way always a song of joy: of healing, of “resurrection,” of victory over sorrow.
Now here is a poem by Sbarbaro, which seems as little as possible a song of joy and life, which never stumbles in seeking beauty in the false, in the abundance of rhetoric. Poetry of leaden despair, a succinct veil, a sparse expression of an irredeemable despondency.
I recalled Leopardi because when reading Sbarbaro, something of the Canti echoes in my mind; the less polished works, the “Ricordanze” for example, with their muted hendecasyllables and their dull pain. This muteness, this funereal ash, this mute and unadorned element has passed from Leopardi into Sbarbaro. But underneath, the soul is different: Sbarbaro does not mourn vanished dreams: — the fading of dreams, the mirage, the unfulfilled desire, the struggle against harsh reality, the lament for the sorrows of this reality, and finally, the logical acceptance, the almost philosophical assertion that this is how it is, that unfortunately, it must be so, are the themes of Leopardi’s poetry. Here, in contrast, is someone who immediately expresses an inner barren solitude: a terrible darkness and emptiness felt around him, between himself and others, a fixed pain that absorbs him, freezes him, shrinks him into himself (snake-like eyes enchanting him) almost like a spell. Here is someone who, in despair, ends up taking pleasure in this fate; almost ends up wanting its exacerbation like someone buried in prison, disdainful of life, who beats his head against the wall to end it.
Now you might say that Leopardi’s song is more humanly vast, more universal. Here, certainly, there is no logicizing, no search for the reason and cause of pain, nor are there philosophical affirmations: here is one who plainly says: I suffer like this, my pain is this. Looking at people who live, “I feel a discomfort similar to one who sees — chasing butterflies along the edge — of a precipice…”. “I seem to be a blind man, sitting — on the bank of an immense river, — The swirling waters flow beneath” — “I walk among people watching — curious about them but like a stranger. — And I have no one in whose hands — to place mine with full trust.” One night the poet along the empty streets suddenly feels his aridity of a soulless machine; “To these symmetrical deserted streets — to these mute houses I am similar — to a machine myself that obeys, — like the cart and the road NECESSARY.”
And all this, yes, may not have universal ambitions, but it certainly is; it is often true and so terribly so, that each of us internally admits to having experienced it. Now, when the honey of life has dried up in the soul, as happens, when the glue that binds us to things and people has somehow worn out, then what remains in the dark depths, in the barrenness of inner solitude, is the bitter dregs of suffering. You are then like a withered mouth that no longer has a taste for anything but vinegar and poison. Reality becomes nothing but vinegar and poison, and in contrast to the blindness of those who sing hosannas and brutally devour their morsel of life, you stand feverish with what suffers, you finally exalt yourself heroically for your own death, you, as lost, are for rebellion, for what is bare in despair. And then you understand these verses without comment; “The anxiety of dying grows within me! — without having enjoyed the enjoyable — without having suffered the sufferable. — The urge takes me to throw away — like an unnecessary burden, my name. — With Perdition as my companion — to roam the world light-heartedly.”
This is one of those poems outside of history, outside of tradition, that can be understood with the heart and having lived. There are no literary reasons that explain it, and no “confession of a child of the century” can deduce it for me. Rolla cursed Voltaire for taking away his faith, and De Musset believed that Waterloo had stripped away the reasons for every enthusiastic activity. These are the ironic games of “raison raisonnante” which adorns itself with causes and effects. But I think, if anything, there are causes that do not change, and there are attitudes of the human soul upon which history has no influence. I am struck in these fragments by Sbarbaro by the dryness, the immediate personality, the stark simplicity of his expression: it feels like standing before one of those poems on which scholars cannot and do not know how to long dissertate, but which people remember in their lives for millennia.
(effe) 2024 | **Giovanni Boine (1887-1917), review of “Sbarbaro, Pianissimo, ed. Libreria della Voce, 1914″ (n. 40). “Plausi e botte” (1914-1916) is the title of the review column that Boine published in the magazine “La Riviera Ligure”; these were first published in volume form after his death (Giovanni Boine, Frantumi – followed by Plausi e botte, Florence, Libreria de “La Voce”, 1918). Here, a descriptive title/summary has been chosen as a simple reference to Boine’s writing. (effe)
