Paolo Volponi
Paolo Volponi (born February 6, 1924 in Urbino , Marken , † August 23, 1994 in Ancona ) was an Italian writer .
After studying law, he received his doctorate in 1947. He was for many years head of the social department at Olivetti and a consultant at Fiat . He lived in Rome, Abruzzo, Calabria and Sicily. Volponi also appeared as a politician as a senator of the KPI.
Volponi also had a film appearance in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Roma as a priest.
Awards
He received a literary prize for his first novel “Memoriale” (German: I, the undersigned ), and the Premio Strega for the novel “La Macchina Mondiale” (German: Die Weltmaschine ) .
Il Memoriale
With his first novel "Memoriale", Paolo Volponi, previously known only as a poet, took the path of a novelist very successfully in 1962. His first work shows the complex social upheavals that the boom economico of the post-war period brought with it for the working population of Italy, from the perspective of a mentally and physically ill person from the provinces. The protagonist is a lonely person, traumatized by the war, who hopefully accepts the job of an assembly worker in a metal construction factory in Canavese, Piedmont. The individual fate of this small, naive factory worker is in a way representative of the great expectations and hopes in the Italian population, which were nourished by the economic boom of the post-war years. The fact that the radical change from a largely agrarian state to a modern industrial nation brought with it not only prosperity and prosperity, but also massive social problems, which primarily affected rural areas, is shown quite vividly in Memoriale.
Volponi shows the industrialization that was generally perceived as positive in the post-war years from a very critical perspective. Above all, the impersonal bureaucracy, the cold rationality and the hierarchies of the neo-industrial world of work, which are often opaque for the simple worker, are the focus of the novel, which examines the essence, characteristics and "logic" of the factory in minute detail and questions many of its contradicting mechanisms . The culturally strong normative power of the emerging consumer and industrial society and the social effects of the associated globalization processes are also addressed.
A constantly recurring topos in Memoriale is alienazione , alienation. This characterizes the life of people like that of the unfortunate protagonist Albino. People like him, who cannot adapt to the new living conditions due to the unnatural and impersonal environment inside the factory, are doomed to failure in such an environment. Albino records his own failure in a fictional memorandum on which the novel is based. The novel “Memoriale” was published in 1964 in a translation by Piero Rismondo by S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, under the German title: “I, the undersigned”. The Piper Verlag, Munich, published the work in 1989 in paperback format.
Web links
- Literature by and about Paolo Volponi in the catalog of the German National Library
- Works by and about Paolo Volponi at Open Library
Individual evidence
- ^ Paolo Volponi: Memorials. Garzanti, Milan 1962
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Volponi, Paolo |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Italian writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 6, 1924 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Urbino , brands |
| DATE OF DEATH | 23rd August 1994 |
| Place of death | Ancona |