Guido Gozzano

Guido Gozzano

Guido Gustavo Gozzano (born December 19, 1883 in Agliè Canavese (Province of Turin ), † August 9, 1916 in Turin) was an Italian poet and writer , the most important exponent of crepuscolarismo .

life and work

The son of engineer Fausto Gozzano and Diodata Mautino spent his childhood between Turin and the Canavese town of Agliè, where the family owned various houses and an extensive park. Due to his poor health, he graduated from school with little diligence and, after graduation from high school, he enrolled in the law school of Turin in 1903, but never graduated. Rather, he preferred to attend the literary seminars of the poet Arturo Graf , who was greatly admired by the young writers , with a group of friends who formed with him the group of the Turin Crepuscolari .

In contrast to the decadent worldview of the Dannunzianesimo ( Gabriele D'Annunzios and his followers), which was prevalent at the time , Arturo Graf, following Leopardi , embodied a spiritualistic cultural pessimism with a socialist character. So Gozzano's orientation towards Graf went hand in hand with his turning away from a " Dannunzianesischen " spelling, which can still be found in his early poems. Since his poor health never allowed him to take up a permanent job, he fled into the world of poetry , studied Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca intensively and in this way developed his special poetic instinct.

In May 1907, severe pleurisy worsened his health and forced him to live a life of solitude, partly on the Ligurian Riviera , partly in mountain villages. In the same year, his first volume of poetry, La via del rifugio (German: Der Zufluchtsweg ), was published, and Gozzano fell in love with the writer Amalia Guglielminetti , as evidenced by the correspondence between 1907 and 1909, published in 1951. Often, however, he tried to evade this love by cultivating a rather friendly relationship with Amalia and seeing her merely as a “fellow poet”.

After the final abandonment of his law studies (1909), he devoted himself entirely to writing and in 1911 published the collection of poems I colloqui ( Conversations ), which is divided into three areas according to a precise concept: Il giovenile errore ( juvenile error ), Alle soglie ( On the threshold ) and Il reduce ( The returnee or the convalescent ). The success of this book brought Gozzano an increased demand for his articles in major daily newspapers and magazines, among others. a. in La Stampa , La Lettura and La Donna , where he published poetry and prose during 1911 .

When his disease, pulmonary tuberculosis , worsened in 1912, he decided to take a long trip to India , where he hoped a more appropriate climate would provide relief. The cruise , which lasted from the beginning of February 1912 to May 1913 , on which his friend Giacomo Garrone, who was also ill, accompanied him to Colombo and Bombay , did not bring the hoped-for improvement, but it enabled him, with the help of his own imagination and with the help of extensive, stimulating reading to write the posthumous (1917) travel descriptions under the title Verso la cuna del mondo ( Journey to the cradle of mankind ).

In March 1914 he published in La Stampa the unfinished short epic Farfalle ( Butterflies ) with the subtitle Epistole entomologiche ( Entomological Epistles ). Also in 1914 was the volume I tre talismani with six fairy tales that Gozzano had previously written for the children's newspaper Corriere dei Piccoli .

Gozzano was also keenly interested in the theater and the upcoming film and took part in the filming of some of his stories . In 1916, the year he died, he was still writing the script for a film about St. Francis of Assisi , which was never shot.

Poetics and literary subjects

Guido Gozzano never assumed the vain attitude of a self- enamored writer - rather he was ashamed of being a poet and only in this way giving meaning and content to his short life. With auto-ironic distance, his verses are all about the sad feeling of his approaching death and a romantic desire for happiness and love , which is soon thwarted by the everyday presence of illness and melancholy lovesickness. So he always gets to the point of wishing for a secluded life in the shade and fantasizing about domestic interiors in the quiet .

One of the most important themes in his poetic world is the image of his beloved hometown Turin , to which he kept returning. Turin united all his nostalgic memories , it was the physical and human environment to which he felt intimately connected - with passion and irony . But besides the Turin of his day, the Turin of earlier times was much closer to his heart: an old, slightly dusty city that awakened in him that lyrical tone full of melancholy longing that is so characteristic of his poetry .

In addition, it did not concern less the nearby countryside of Canavese to him in archetypal images into a rural, natural contemplation allowed. Out of this contemplation arose the ultimate poetic myth , which encompassed the whole natural world and, in his words, was able to give it “the only truth” that “is good to know” (“la sola verità buona a sapersi”). In addition, the observation of the landscape brought out those motifs that Gozzano understood as the last "persons" of his poetry: the thistle seed , the pebble , the blindworm , the swallowtail as well as all the other butterflies from his unfinished epic Farfalle - these "persons" left him "the to rediscover the great emotion of living things ”(“ la grande tenerezza per le cose che vivono ”), and also that boy who was once“ tender and old ”(“ tenero e antico ”).

The disease theme, d. H. Consumption , which was getting worse and worse , which led to the poet's death in 1916, left striking traces in all of his work. B. in Alle soglie , where the screen examination on his chest becomes the trigger and object of a lyrical processing.

His travel diary , which he wrote on the cruise to India in 1912 and which initially appeared under the title Lettere dall'India ( Letters from India ) in 1914 in the Turin local section of La Stampa , finally addresses the foreign and distant lands in a variety of images of expressive prose . At the same time, Gozzano's poetic world, even in the face of enchanting foreign horizons, always stayed within its fixed limits. With the help of the description of his journey into the distance, Gozzano also managed to deal with the subject of the “other journey” (“l'altro viaggio”), his journey into death .

swell

1. ↑ cf. in Petronio, G .: L'attività letteraria in Italia . Palermo 1992: p. 845: "Io mi vergogno, sì mi vergogno, d'essere un poeta."

Works

Poetry

• La via del rifugio . Genoa / Turin / Milan 1907
• I colloqui . Milan 1911
• Tutte le poesie . (Ed .: A. Rocca; introduction by M. Guglielminetti) Milan 1980

prose

• I tre talismani . Ostiglia 1914
• La principessa si sposa. Fiabe . Milan 1918
• Verso la cuna del mondo. Lettere dall'India (1912-1913) . (Foreword by GA Borgese) Milan 1917
• L'altare del passato . Milan 1917
• L'ultima traccia. Novella . Milan 1919
• Primavere romantiche . Appia Rivarolo 1924
• La moneta seminata e altri scritti . (Ed .: F. Antonicelli) Milan 1968
• Verso la Cuna del mondo - Lettere dall'India . (Ed .: Flaminio Di Biagi; afterword by Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti) Trento: La Finestra editrice, 2005

Letter issues

• Lettere d'amore di Guido Gozzano e Amalia Guglielminetti . (Ed .: S. Asciampreuner) Milan 1951
• Lettere a Carlo Vallini con altri inediti . (Ed .: Giorgio Di Rienzo) Turin 1971

German translations

• The three talismans. Magic fairy tale . Bremen: Manholt, 1999. ISBN 3-924903-20-4
• The three talismans. Magic fairy tale . Munich / Zurich: Piper, 2001, unabridged paperback edition. ISBN 3-492-23164-0
• Journey to the cradle of mankind. Letters from India . Berlin: Ivory, 2005. ISBN 978-3-932245-75-6

literature

• Flaminio Di Biagi: Sotto l'arco di Tito: le "Farfalle" by Guido Gozzano . La Finestra editrice, Trento 1999.
• Manfred Lentzen: Italian poetry of the 20th century. From the avant-garde of the first decades to a new inwardness. Analecta Romanica series, issue 53. Klostermann, Frankfurt a. M. 1994, ISBN 3-465-02654-3 , pp. 26-38.
• Antonio Piromalli: Ideologia e arte in Guido Gozzano . La Nuova Italia, Florence 1973.
• Walter Vaccari: La vita ei pallidi amori di Guido Gozzano . Omnia editrice, Milan 1958.

Web links

• Literature by and about Guido Gozzano in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry by Guido Gozzano in the Treccani encyclopedia
• liberliber.it (Italian)
• italialibri.net (Italian)
• novecentoletterario.it (Italian)