Luciano Bianciardi

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Luciano Bianciardi in Milan (1964)

Luciano Bianciardi (born December 14, 1922 in Grosseto , † November 14, 1971 in Milan ) was an Italian writer and translator .

Childhood and studies

Luciano grew up with a strict mother who worked as a teacher. He remembers her by saying, "I was her student, not her son." He played the cello as a child , learned several foreign languages ​​and was very well read by the age of eight. His favorite book was I Mille (The Thousand) by Giuseppe Bandi , it tells the story of the Train of Thousands under the guidance of Giuseppe Garibaldi .

He attended the Carducci Ricasoli High School in Grosseto . The war began even before he graduated from school. He finished high school in the autumn of 1940 with an early final examination and then switched to the faculty of humanities at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa . There he met free-spirited adolescents and young adults whom he joined. During this time he wrote a letter to Mussolini in which he asked him to resign. The letter went unanswered. He was drafted in early 1943. At first he took a liking to military service; this only changed when he witnessed the bombing of Foggia on July 22, 1943 .

After the armistice he was first used by the British Army as an interpreter. He worked in Forlì and did not return to his hometown Grosseto until autumn 1944. He took up his philosophy studies again and completed this with a thesis on John Dewey in 1948. In autumn 1945 he joined the Partito d'Azione (Party of Action) , but felt the gap between intellectuals and workers was too big to really feel at home there. When the party broke up in 1947 it was a grave disappointment for him; for a long time afterwards he did not join any party political organization.

In April 1948 he married. He had two sons and a daughter.

Cultural activism and the Ribolla miners

Professionally, he first worked as a teacher at a middle school and the high school where he had been a student. In 1951 he became director of the Chelliana library in Grosseto , which was badly damaged by bombing during the war and by floods in 1946. During this time he initiated the "Bibliobus", a mobile library with which educationally disadvantaged regions in the countryside could also be reached. In his responsibility, a film club was set up at the library and he organized numerous lectures and panel discussions. He had a close friendship with Carlo Cassola , both of whom were co-founders of the Unità Popolare socialist party in 1953 , which, however, disbanded in 1957 due to the low number of voters.

Together with the independent publicist , he began to support the struggles of the Grosseto miners. So they wrote a variety of martial arts and regularly sent their Bibliobus to the mining village of Ribolla . Close friendships developed with the miners' families, and when 43 miners lost their lives in a serious mine accident on May 4, 1954, the happiest time of his life ended immediately.

Translations and first own works

From 1955 he worked for various newspapers. The following year, together with Cassola, he supported the miners of Ribolla in the investigation of the mining accident and published the book with Cassola: I minatori della Maremma . For the publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinellis he translated The Scourge of the Swastika by the English author Edward Russell . This was only the second publication of the newly founded Milan publishing house. Translation attracted attention and translation soon became his main source of income. He has translated works by well-known authors such as Jack London , William Faulkner , John Steinbeck , Saul Bellow and Henry Miller . Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn attracted a lot of attention and were criticized from the start. Feltrinelli had Bianciardi translate the two tropes into Italian, but did not publish them in Italy. The publisher in prudish post-war Italy found the publication of the offensive wording of the translations too tricky, and since he did not want to censor Bianciardi, he decided on Switzerland.

In 1956, Bianciardi was fired from Feltrinelli for unsatisfactory performance. Nevertheless, in 1957 Feltrinelli published Bianciardi's first novel, Il lavoro culturale, an autobiography told with delicate irony . It tells the story of the life of a young intellectual in the province between the years of World War II and the reconstruction. In 1959 he published with Bompiani L'integrazione , an autobiographical work in which the author describes life in the big city. In 1960 he published again with Feltrinelli Da Quarto a Torino. Breve storia della spedizione dei Mille, a novel about the 19th century. His growing disappointment with the economic situation and the political climate of the post-war years in Italy reached a literary climax in 1962 with the publication of the novel La vita agra (German title: Das Saure Leben) , in which the author derived his revolutionary ideas from the triviality of the Everyday life.

Late work

In 1964 he published the book La battaglia soda with Rizzoli Verlag , a novel about the Italian Risorgimento , which is written in an experimental style. Also in 1964 he left the city and moved to Rapallo in the province of Genoa . There he began to consistently shield himself from the outside world. Only in 1969 was another book published by him at Rizzoli, Aprire il fuoco , an epic that sarcastically criticizes the spiritual world in which he himself lived. The book is written in a more mature style and ends with the vague premonition of imminent death. In the same year the Biettiverlag published Daghela avanti un passo! and the Editrice de l'Automobile publishing house Viaggio in Barberia . In 1971, Rizzoli Verlag published its translation of Thomas Berger's 1964 novel Little Big Man .

Bianciardi was an alcoholic in the last years of his life. In 1970 he returned to Milan and died on November 14, 1971 at the age of almost 49 years of complications from his liver cirrhosis . In 1972 his trustees published the novel Garibaldi , a biography of the Italian freedom leader .

Works

Novels

  • I minatori della Maremma , 1956 (in collaboration with Carlo Cassola )
  • Il lavoro culturale , 1957
  • L'integrazione , 1960
  • Da Quarto a Torino , 1960
  • La vita agra , 1962
    • The acidic life . Translation by Marlis Ingenmey. Herbig, Berlin 1967
  • La battaglia soda , 1964
  • Daghela avanti un passo! , 1969
  • Aprire il fuoco , 1969
  • Viaggio in Barberia , 1969
  • Garibaldi , 1972

Posthumous collections

  • Il peripatetico e altre storie , Rizzoli, 1976
  • La solita zuppa e altre storie , Bompiani, 1994
  • Chiese escatollo e nessuno raddoppiò , Baldini & Castoldi, 1995
  • L'alibi del progresso , ExCogita, 2000
  • Un volo e una canzone , ExCogita, 2002
  • Il fuorigioco mi sta antipatico , Stampa Alternativa, 2006
  • Il convitato di vetro - "Telebianciardi" , ExCogita, 2007
  • Non leggete i libri, fateveli raccontare. Sei lezioni per diventare un intellettuale dedicate in particolare ai giovani privi di talento , Stampa Alternativa, 2008

Film adaptations

literature

proof

  1. ^ Il lavoro culturale , 1957
  2. ↑ http://musicportals.biz/nahp/artic-de/Liste%20von%20Ungl%C3%BCcken%20im%20Bergbau
  3. ↑ Mario G. Losano: The limits of literary freedom (10): The golden tree of theory . In: The time . No. 10/1966 ( online ).
  4. ↑ http://www.bridica.com/EBchecked/topic/64323/Luciano-Bianciardi
  5. ^ Garibaldi , 1972

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bianciardi, Luciano
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian writer and translator
DATE OF BIRTH December 14, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Grosseto
DATE OF DEATH November 14, 1971
Place of death Milan