Lorenzo Calogero

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Lorenzo Calogero (born May 28, 1910 in Melicuccà , Italy , † March 25, 1961 in Melicuccà) was an Italian poet and doctor.

Life

Calogero was born as the third son of an academic family in the Calabrian town of Melicuccà. His family belonged to the upper class of society in the then backward and illiterate region. After attending high school and moving to Naples (1929), he studied engineering and later medicine . This is where the first poems were written. Despite completing his medical degree, he did not feel like a doctor. Calogero only pursued this profession for a short period of time. From then on, literature was at the center of his life, which was increasingly overshadowed by psychological crises. Contributing to this was her unhappy love for a literature student in the 1940s and a nurse in later years. But what hit him hardest, who wrote far away from the literary centers of his time, was the continuing failure as an author. Apart from a private print in 1936 and smaller publications in literary magazines , he was only able to publish one volume thanks to the mediation of the poet Leonardo Sinisgalli . The publisher Giulio Einaudi contacted then showed no interest. In recent years, his physical and mental health has deteriorated. After staying in psychiatric clinics, he lived in his parents' house again - highly productive in literary terms and derided by the village population as a loser. Two suicide attempts failed. On March 25, 1961, Calogero was found dead in his apartment.

perception

Only after his death did Calogero's work gain recognition. As early as April 1961, the respected literary magazine Europa Letteraria published a selection of his poems. In 1962 a lavishly furnished volume was published by Lerici Verlag, which was preparing a complete edition. Numerous positive reviews were printed. From the mid-1960s, literature became politicized; Calogero's poems, mostly love poems, which are characterized by “radical inwardness”, gradually fell into oblivion. A complete edition was not made due to the dissolution of the Lerici Verlag (1966).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Stefanie Golisch: Memory of an Ungeschehen - translation of the poem XXVII and biographical sketch , fixpoetry.com, accessed on May 29, 2012.
  2. Stefanie Golisch: Engel und Ungeheuer (2008), p. 35.