Paolo Chirumbolo and John Picchione (eds),Edoardo Sanguineti,Literature,Ideology and the Avant-Garde

Reviewed by: Mary Migliozzi, Indiana University, USA

Chirumbolo and Picchione have assembled a valuable work for scholars interested in Sanguineti, the neo-avant-garde and late 20th-century Marxism. The volume consists of 13 critical essays followed by a shorter collection of ‘Testimonials’ by people who knew the poet. The essays included represent an impressive breadth of subjects related to the late Genoese intellectual, no small task when dealing with a figure as prolific and multifaceted as Sanguineti. Yet the contributions remain cohesive through their shared theme of language and ideology in Sanguineti’s work, both scholarly and artistic.

John Picchione’s introduction places Sanguineti’s thought and poetry into the context of the writer’s Marxism and dialogue with other Marxist thinkers of the past century, and into a myriad of literary and philosophical influences. In ‘Between words and things: Intellectuals, avant-garde, and social class in Edoardo Sanguineti,’ Marco Codebò convincingly ties together what he considers the two foundational principles of Sanguineti’s critical and poetic work: ‘philosophy of praxis’ and ‘ideology of language.’ For Sanguineti, he argues, the writer intervenes in the bourgeois hegemony by detecting it in language and text and by producing his own texts with their own ideology. Codebò affirms that Sanguineti assigned an ethical value to realism. Corrado Federici examines Sanguineti’s anthology of 20th-century poetry as an expression of the critic’s views on poetic language and ideology. In ‘Edoardo Sanguineti’s critical orientation on poetry’ Federici uses Sanguineti’s criticism of D’Annunzio and Pascoli to demonstrate the poet-critic’s belief that literature should reconstruct the representation of cultural reality offered by hegemonic forces. Sanguineti’s discussion and even redefinition of the crepuscular poets further reinforce his focus on ideology within poetic language. Federici also shows how his discussion of Pasolini’s poetry fits within his critical polemic with the latter writer, strengthening Sanguineti’s position that all language and, by extension, all poetry is ideological. In ‘Edoardo Sanguineti’s new Dante’ David Lummus analyzes Sanguineti’s engagement with Dante, whom Sanguineti positioned as a model and as a ‘counterpoint’ to his own 21st-century poetics. His anti-Crocean reading of the Divine Comedy underlines the ideological context of its author by emphasizing the historical and temporal specificity of the poem. Ernesto Livorni in ‘Edoardo Sanguineti’s early poetry: Between language and ideology’ explores the tension between Marxism and Jungian psychoanalysis in Sanguineti’s triptych Triperuno. He links Marxist social roles with dimensions of the psyche in Laborintus and then follows these themes through the birth and sexual imagery of Erotopaegnia and the relationship between nature and history in Purgatorio de l’Inferno. According to Thomas E Peterson in ‘The midlife poetry of Edoardo Sanguineti,’ this phase in the poet’s work shifts away from the historical Marxist perspective of his early poetry towards a spontaneous language that represents the ‘organic’ patterns of life, from birth to sexuality to family life to death. Cristina Caracchini in ‘The Poetry of unease: Edoardo Sanguineti’s later poetry’ describes the unease generated especially by the meta-artistic elements of Sanguineti’s Il gatto lupesco: Poesie (1982–2001). Caracchini also describes the intertextual playfulness of many of the writer’s later poems as both engaging and alienating as Sanguineti interrupts the flow of communication in his own poetry with stylistic extremes. Finally, she examines the relationship between the reader and the narrative ‘I’ of a singular but seemingly multiple interlocutor. Gian Maria Annovi in ‘“The man who needs to leave”: A reading of Edoardo Sanguineti’s final poetry collection’ reflects upon the themes of beginnings and endings in Varie ed eventuali. He examines both structural and intertextual components to demonstrate that the work proposes a circular rather than linear reading that connects life and death. In ‘How experimental are Edoardo Sanguineti’s narrative devices?’ Wladimir Krysinski analyzes Capriccio italiano through the lens of the ‘novel as provocation,’ underlining its language and formal elements as a tool for deconstruction. Norma Bouchard in ‘In the Palus Putredinis of Italy’s bourgeois domesticity: Edoardo Sanguineti’s Capriccio italiano from textual representation to critical practice’ examines the relationship between the dream and historical moment in this same novel. This relationship shows, she argues, layers of individual realities as well as the tension between the psychic self and bourgeois culture. Jacob Blakesley turns his attention to the ideology and methodology of Sanguineti’s translations in ‘Edoardo Sanguineti: A unique translator.’ The poet characterized translation as travestimento of the original text. According to Blakesley, this ideology is influenced by both the Brechtian concept of theatrical alienation and by Benjamin’s ideas of interlinear translation. He demonstrates that this foreignized travestimento is achieved through grammatical and lexical calquing, the use of colloquial language, the alteration of traditional poetic meter, and other linguistic strategies. Blakesley’s ideas of estrangement and foreignization in translation find an extension to theatre in Moroni’s essay ‘The linguistic gesture: Edoardo Sanguineti’s theatre,’ in which the author analyzes Sanguineti’s early plays K and Traumdeutung in comparison with the later Storie naturali. He underlines the linguistic fragmentation of K and the unique staging of Traumdeutung, both of which express the communicative limitations of language. This linguistic exploration reaches a new level in Storie naturali, where the playwright uses darkness on stage to dramatize and manipulate the connection between words and the body. John Welle in ‘Edoardo Sanguineti: A profile of the poet as a cinephile’ investigates Sanguineti’s relationship with the cinema using both his participation in post-war cine-clubs and references to film in his poetic works. Noting the syntactic fragmentation central to both Blakesley’s and Moroni’s ideas of estrangement in Sanguineti’s work, Welle revealingly likens this phenomenon to cinematic montage. He furthermore analyzes Sanguineti’s poetic references both to specific films, actors and directors, and to his own experience as a viewer of cinema. Welle concludes that this intricate relationship between film and poetry is central to the poet’s work and revealing as to the cultural role of cinema more broadly in Italy in the second half of the Novecento. Paolo Chirumbolo in ‘Edoardo Sanguineti and the visual arts: An interdisciplinary dialogue’ similarly argues that Sanguineti’s personal and artistic relationships with visual artists helped to shape him as a writer. He describes the poet’s encounters with Enrico Baj, Guido Biasi, Mario Persico, Lucio Del Pezzo and Antonio Bueno, demonstrating that the influence of these friendships can be seen in his poetry.

The book’s second part, ‘Testimonials,’ provides personal perspectives of those who knew the writer, on Sanguineti as an intellectual, an artist, a teacher and a friend. Nadia Cavalera in ‘Sanguineti, founder and editor of Bollettario,’ describes primarily her professional relationship with the author, whereas Giuseppe Caliceti’s moving ‘Postcard,’ written as a brief message to Sanguineti, informal in style and reflective in content, emphasizes the poet’s loyalty to his convictions. Others of these ‘Testimonials,’ such as Francesco Muzzioli’s ‘My ten most important debts’ and Fausto Curi’s ‘A brief introductory guide to Sanguineti’s poetry’ reflect more broadly on the same themes discussed in the critical essays: ideology, Sanguineti’s particular breed of Marxism and materialism, and the role of poetry.

This dense but lucid collection makes a timely and valuable contribution to studies of Sanguineti’s works and influence. The combination of critical and personal essays will make this volume particularly compelling to scholars interested in Sanguineti’s legacy.