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Biobibliography
Paolo Ruffilli was born in 1949. Attended the University of
Bologna, where he studied modern
literature. After a period of teaching, he became editor with
the publisher Garzanti in Milan, and is
presently the general editor of the Edizioni del Leone in
Venice.
Beginning in 1972, he has published nine volumes of poetry.
The more recent: Piccola colazione
(1987, American Poetry Prize), Diario di Normandia (1990,
Montale Prize), Camera oscura (1992),
Nuvole (1995), La gioia e il lutto (2001, Prix Européen,
in english translation Joy and Mourning,
Dedalus Press 2004).
He published also the novel Preparativi per la partenza (2003),
essays, novels and translations
from english.
www.paoloruffilli.it
Born in 1949, Paolo
Ruffilli attended the University of Bologna, where
he studied modern literature. After a period of teaching high
school, he became editor with the Milanese publisher Garzanti,
and is presently the general editor of Le Edizioni del Leone
in Venice. As an editor, he has not only supported contemporary
poetry but also shown a scholarly interest in the Italian
literature of the nineteenth century, preparing editions of
the Operette Morali of Giacomo Leopardi, Ugo Foscolo’s
translations of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey
, and Le confessioni d’un italiano by the poet, novelist,
and patriot Ippolito Nievo. Ruffilli has also written a biography
of Nievo. He has published criticism in a number of periodicals,
and is the regular literary critic of the Bolognese daily
Il Resto del Carlino.
Beginning in 1972, he has published six volumes of poetry,
and has in preparation a further collection and a novel. His
recent collection, Piccola colazione (1987) has been a tremendous
success, selling more than five thousand copies in a nation
where a sale of one thousand copies for a book of poems is
considered quite healthy. The volume has won numerous prizes
and was the subject of both television special and a radio
broadcast. An evening devoted to Piccola colazione was also
held at the 1988 Frankfurt Book Fair, with papers read in
Italian, French, German, Spanish and English.
Piccola colazione is a thematically and stylistically linked
volume of seven poems, a brief title poem followed by six
extended ones, each prefaced by a pair of sharp epigraphs
from writers as diverse as Swift, Proust, and Mishima. The
six longer poems, of which "Malaria" is the first,
form a kind of loose progression. Composed in short lines
and irregular, mostly short stanzas, with recurring bursts
of rhyme, they combine images, memories, narrative fragments,
scraps of dialogue, and snatches of song, in what several
commentators have described as an almost operatic technique.
Ruffilli’s style has been compared to the stream-of-consciousness
method employed by Joyce and other novelists, the historical
precedent for which is, interestingly , found in the works
of Sterne. Ruffilli’s techniques of dramatic collage
also owe a great deal to Eliot and Pound. But, despite these
influences, his style is both authentically original and unmistakably
personal. Through associative and impressionistic methods,
Ruffilli’s poem build and sustain an intense atmosphere
of fear, guilt, and desire. The Frankfurter Allgemeine describes
Piccola colazione as " a coming-of-age novel in verse,"
and Le Monde calls it "one of the most important books
of the last few years, destined to endure also as an other
way of making poetry."
Michael Palma
INTERVIEW
Q. Piccola colazione has been
a real success. Could you explain how you picked out such a
title, Breakfast ?
A. There’s an unforgettable
scene in Fellini’s movie Amarcord : breakfast at Titta’s,
which perhaps explains the title of my book. There’s a
stormy atmosphere developing at and around the table, which
represents , better than anything else, the precariousness of
those people meeting together and, at the same time, the relation
between them, affecting their personal destinies.
Anxieties, worries, resentments, disappointments, hopes, feelings,
fears: everything is laid on the table. There is being performed
the daily rite of a breakfast consisting in words and things,
in which everyone finds himself pulled by opposite forces, caught
in between laughter and tears, which ultimately are the very
condition of being.
There, the dramatic intensity of thoughts, dreams and emotions
is lost; speech, action and gesture take somewhat of the light
connotation of comedy. This is what I mean by "breakfast",
a kind of daily shake made with words, in which we are at the
same time acting and subject to action, eating and , in turn,
eaten, each being one’s food to oneself, as we move back
and forth , out of the dark world of unconscious into the light
of reason and back to darkness again.
Q. Do you feel you belong in today’s
Italian poetry or do you feel rather like an outsider? And why?
A. It’s always hard to tell
where you’re going also because very often you become what
you claim to be rather than what you really are. Therefore I
can’t really tell where I’m standing. On the other
hand I’d like to say that my greatest ambition is to be
nobody’s epigone. That doesn’t mean I’m going
to cut myself off or avoid confrontation. Quite the reverse
: I’m open to any approach to writing and also to get involved
in writing even more actively and directly, yet determined to
keep going my way.
Q. Who are your models?
A. This is another difficult question,
because I don’t want to make myself indebted to any particular
author, especially when considering that, very frequently, you
owe most to someone whose influence you don’t usually regard
as significant. However, I can say that I very much like Gadda
and Savinio among prose writers, and Metastasio among poets.
I’m also particularly fond of Da Ponte and Sterbini, Mozart’s
and Rossini’s librettists, and like comical endings of
plays and Laurel & Hardy type of gags. I love comedians
because nobody can be so fully aware of the tragic sense of
life and so painfully conscious of life-defeats as they are.
I don’t know anybody who’s better than they at recounting
life in the form of drama…
Q. Then is it drama what your
poetry aims at?
A. Is there any other possibility?
If you look life full in the face, it’s drama itself that
you’re looking at. This doesn’t mean to draw away
from life, but rather to adjust yourself to a higher emotional
pitch, yet retaining the ability to bring out that humorous
vein which very often underlies things and rescues you from
falling into rhetoric.
Q. Over ten years have gone by
since you last published a collection of poems. How come you’ve
waited that long?
A. Generally speaking, the creative
process of poetry develops over long times. As far as my poetry
is concerned, times are even longer because I keep constantly
revising my work till I find the right key of expression. It
should also be noted that, since my poetry is expressive of
a particular genre which does not, in fact, belong to any literary
type, that causes additional difficulties.
Q. Since you’ve brought up
the question of genres, I’d like to talk about it. In the
foreword to your book; Giuseppe Pontiggia explicitly says that
it is by making use of a number of converging choices of expression
that you overcome the problem of genres and find an appropriate
solution.
A. I wanted to attempt a new way
of writing poetry : I had in mind this idea of mixing dialogs,
narrative and images, and I wanted it to be a type of poetry
resulting in lyricism from the viewpoint of style and sound,
through varying the tone of expression and the levels of telling.
I also wanted the lyrical effects to be different from usual,
associated with irony.
Q. Irony. That’s something
quite alien to the tradition of Italian poetry.
A. As a child, I used to look
at things through a pair of binoculars I held the wrong way
round, so that things appeared to be further away rather than
nearer. I don’t use those binoculars anymore but I still
look at things through the lens of irony. It helps me bring
down things to the size and proportions they actually have in
life. But irony does a little more : it helps me move away from
things not only in terms of space but also in terms of time,
so that I can look at my own life today as if I were centuries
and even millenniums apart. It is not a sort of optical distortion
but rather a way of seeing things perspectively different and
getting a clearer picture of them by making them look smaller.
Q. What’s your poetics?
A. From time immemorial the sublime
has been the battle-ground on which two schools of thought have
clashed: the one claiming the sublime could only be achieved
through magniloquence and grandiosity of effects, resorting
to the elevated style of tragedy and epic, the other maintaining
that the sublime was to be pursued through undertones of expression
and the choice of the little things and minor aspects of life
as subject for artistic representation. The latter view is what
I personally call " the inversely proportional law of poetry
", and that’s precisely what my poetics is based on.
This is also a view shared by the whole of sapiential tradition
and the philosophical thought of ancient times. It’s also
the foundation of great mistique : one must go into the desert
to find his way to heaven and must change himself into a child
to be great. This is especially true in today’s life, where
exaggeration seems to be the general formula to achieve impressiveness
and elevation of result. That’s why I like to speak in
an undertone : to achieve deeper and more significant effects.
Doing the opposite would result in something pathetic and even
ridiculous.
"POETRY"
"WORLD LITERATURE TODAY",
1988
Paolo Ruffilli. Piccola colazione.
Milan.Garzanti.1987. 125 pages. 16,000 l.
The semantic ambiguity implicit in the title of Paolo Ruffilli’s
latest book of poetry – literally "Light Meal/Verification"
– emblematically suggests the equivocal and transgressive
quality of his writing.
The association of a literary activity (the act of reading)
with a physiological one (the act of eating and digesting)
through a metonymic glide reveals the discrepancy between
reality and appearance inherent in all aspects of human existence.
The poetic subject projects his corporeal self into the materiality
of the text and attempts to grasp the truth, the essence of
things, by confronting writing and existence, the signifying
and the signified. Although his investigation proves to be
pointless, as words are deceiving signs which refer to an
unseizable , maybe inexistent reality, he feverishly persist
in his search in order to provide meaning to his existence.
The book, which was awarded the 1987 Tarquinia-Cardarelli
Poetry Prize, contains six short narrative poems, fragmented
into rhythmic sequences of dramatic, lyric and descriptive
nature. Phonematic effects (rhymes, alliterations, assonances,
consonances, et cetera) tend to prevail over semantic integrity
and thus metaphorically convey that life is a series of contingent
events, devoid of any logical meaning. The poetic persona
reacts against his awareness of the emptiness behind (or between)
all forms. Through erotic self-indulgence achieved in writing
with the compliance of the seductive word, he trusts sensory
perceptions as the only certain basis for knowledge. Paradoxically,
however, he knows that the senses are continually deceived
and that human history occurs beyond the corporeal reality
of the individual. Ultimately he must "yield to the evidence
/ that he is sailing / adrift" through life, unable to
identify and record in writing the object of his ontological
inquiry.
In conclusion, Piccola colazione appears to offer a sumptuous
meal even to the most demanding reader, just as it portrays
him tormented by an insatiable appetite.
Giovanna Wedel de Stasio
Indiana University
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