Belluno. Andantino e grande fuga

After seven years of silence, Patrizia Valduga publishes a new book of verse: it is a poem entitled to the city where she spends her holidays and where last summer a sudden Galgenhumor(the humour of those about to be hanged, the gaiety of the desperate) sprang from, the culmination of the fifteen long years she lived without Giovanni Raboni. In the flow of the quatrains of septenaries and endecasyllables, here is Belluno, the piazza and the mountains she sees from her window, and the dialect names of the mountains form a first catalogue, a phonetic orgy (one perceives here the importance it had for the poetess to have translated Carlo Porta) that immediately becomes a nursery rhyme or litany; here is the pitiless catalogue of her boyfriends, who take the floor to accuse or defend themselves: ‘And don’t all speak at once. | You break my metrics, you imbeciles. | I have something pressing in my head… | and I can’t find any rhyme in illi’. But ‘like a voice within her voice’, in his absence Raboni is more present than ever, and he doubles in Dreyer’s Johannes and redoubles in Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni… Such a live Valduga had never been seen: these verses of humour and heartbreak are being made before our eyes, they put into verse their own making of verse, they continue to make verse of themselves, they disguise themselves as other verses, to arrive with the greatest simplicity and naturalness at making an appeal for the great poet who has passed away and to give the last word to an essay on him, the seal of a fellowship of life and poetry that cannot but continue in time.