Giovanni Raboni | |
|---|---|
 Portrait of Giovanni Raboni by Paolo Steffan | |
| Born | (1932-01-22)22 January 1932 Milan, Kingdom of Italy |
| Died | 16 September 2004(2004-09-16) (aged 72) Fontanellato, Italy |
| Resting place | Monumental Cemetery of Milan |
| Occupation |
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| Language | Italian |
| Years active | 1961–2004 |
| Notable awards |
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Giovanni Raboni (22 January 1932 – 16 September 2004) was an Italian poet, translator and literary critic.
Raboni was born inMilan, Italy, the second son of Giuseppe, a clerk at Milan commune, and Matilde Sommariva. In October 1942, after the first bombings of Milan, the family moved to Sant'Ambrogio Olona, nearVarese, where Raboni concluded his primary and intermediate school. His father's love for French and Russian classics made him read and appreciateProust,Dickens,Dostoevskij and when his cousin Giandomenico Guarino, knowledgeable about contemporary literature and poetry, found shelter in Sant'Ambrogio too after8 September 1943 armistice, Raboni met the works byPiovene,Buzzati,Ungaretti,Quasimodo,Cardarelli, andMontale about whom he said: "I know I owe much to Montale, I realise this upon rereading him, even if I did not love him as much asEliot andSereni, but he affected me a lot... especially his expression of the limits, of the fact that we cannot demand too much in 20th century of poetry as a source of truth."[1]
Having completed law studies, he was a lawyer for some years, but at the end of the 1950s, he felt more attracted to literature and poetry. He met in MilanVittorio Sereni,Antonio Porta,Giovanni Testori,Giorgio Strehler and began working for periodicals and newspapers, at first in the editorial staff ofAut Aut, a magazine edited byEnzo Paci, then writing forPiergiorgio Bellocchio'sQuaderni piacentini andRoberto Longhi'sParagone and finally forCorriere della Sera for which worked several years.
Raboni became was appreciated as both a literary critic and a translator of classic works: he translated in Italian some works byGustave Flaubert, and byGuillaume Apollinaire,Les Fleurs du mal byCharles Baudelaire forEinaudi publishing house,Jean Racine andProust'sIn Search of Lost Time inMondadori's "I Meridiani" collection.
In 1961 he published two short poetry collections,Il catalogo è questo andL'insalubrità dell'aria, followed byLe case della Vetra in 1966,Cadenza d'inganno in 1975,Nel grave sogno in 1982 and, in 1988, the anthologyA tanto caro sangue. In the 1970s he began editing the poetry series "I quaderni della Fenice" forGuanda publishing house, acting as a kind of talent scout for new poets. Milan (especially the memory of the old city, before the recent town plannings) is at the heart of his matters:
...e sì, ilNaviglio è a due passi, la nebbia era più forte
prima che lo coprissero, la piazza
piena di bancarelle con le luci
a acetilene, le padelle nere
delle castagne arrosto, i mangiatori
di chiodi e di stoviglie
non era certo un posto da passarci
insieme a una ragazza.
Ma così come hanno fatto, abbattere case,
distruggere quartieri, qui e altrove
(laVetra,Fiori Chiari, il Bottonuto),
a cosa serve?[...]
...Yes,Naviglio is near, and was more mist-shrouded
before its shingle, and the square
full of acetylene-lighted stalls, black pans
for roast chestnuts, and nail
and crockery swallowers
it wasn’t good to come there
with your girlfriend.
But so as they have done,
to destroy buildings,
to destroy quarters, here and elsewhere
(Vetra, Fiori Chiari, Bottonuto)
what’s the reason?[...]
In June 1971 he was one of the 800 intellectuals who signed, inL'Espresso magazine, a manifesto againstLuigi Calabresi, a police officer falsely suspected of having killed the anarchistGiuseppe Pinelli. In October he was among those who signed a "self-denunciation", to express solidarity with some journalists ofLotta Continua newspaper, defending their strong anti-government positions.[2][3]
Among his literary critic essays arePoesia degli anni sessanta (Poetry of the 1960s) published in 1968,Quaderno in prosa in 1981.La fossa di Cherubino (1980) collects his proses.
Raboni was interested in theater too: was in the directorial committee ofPiccolo Teatro di Milano and wrote several plays, such asAlcesti o la recita dell'esilio andRappresentazione della croce (2000). His activity as a poet went on withCanzonette mortali (1987),Versi guerrieri e amorosi (1990),Ogni terzo pensiero (1993, with which he won theViareggio Prize for poetry[4]),Quare tristis (1998), andBarlumi di Storia (2002).
Giovanni Raboni died of a heart attack inFontanellato in 2004.[5] He is buried at theMonumental Cemetery of Milan.
His wife, poetPatrizia Valduga, wrote the afterword to his last poetry collectionUltimi versi, published posthumously in 2006; one of his last poems is "Canzone del danno e della beffa" ("Song of the harm and the hoax"), also published posthumously onCorriere della Sera in 2004.[6]
Andrea Cortellessa, in an article ofManifesto in the days after his death, remembers the poet's "obsessive mournful compulsion on his last poetic verses", with these significant lines fromQuare tristis:"Who dreams himself / alive with his own dead / maybe he doesn't live also there /in his dream,/ and you must let him lie – not still /wake up, not until // out, in the light, remains that squeaky / burden, that blinding plate…".[7]
Poetry
Essays
Prose
