Nella Nobili: new editions

Nella Nobili, born in Bologna on 6th January 1926, divided her life between France and Italy. A writer and poet, she is considered a representative of working-class literature, although she disliked the label ‘working-class poet’, which she felt was limiting, as she wrote in her diary: “This straitjacket that has been imposed on me once and for all: “proletarian poetess”.” In Rome, where she settled in 1949, she came into contact with groups of anti-fascist artists and intellectuals. Her first readers and admirers included Renata Viganò, Enrico Berlinguer, Sibilla Aleramo, Giorgio Morandi, Elsa Morante and Michel Ragon.

Nella began working at the age of 12, delivering milk and doing other odd jobs. Then, at 14, she worked as a glassblower in a factory that manufactured pharmaceutical ampoules, an experience that would leave a deep mark on her and which she would put into poetry thirty years later in Le Jeune fille à l’usine (The Girl in the Factory). Passionate about art, in the early 1960s she set up her own arts and crafts business in Paris, where she had arrived a few years earlier. She took her own life in Cachan on 14 July 1985, at the age of 59.

A first edition of her Italian poems was published in Rome in 1949: Poesie (1949, Tosi & Danzi). In the early 1950s, she began writing her first diary; the second, Bloc-notes, began when she arrived in Paris in 1953. In the 1960s, she wrote her first poems in French and went on to publish Le Sommeil de la raison engendre des monstres (1970), La Jeune Fille à l’usine (1978), Les Femmes et l’amour homosexuel (with Edith Zha, 1979, Hachette), and Histoire d’amour (1980). Finally, Douze poèmes de deuil (Twelve Poems of Mourning) was published by Nane Stern in 1980.

In 2017, her poetic work was published in France by Cahiers de l’Hôtel de Galliffet, a collection of Italian literature directed by Paolo Grossi and published by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Paris and the volume Poèmes, Édition bilingue, edited by Marie-José Tramuta, offers an anthology of her Italian period with a selection from her first booklet Poésie (1949), a series of unpublished works (Hanna, 1946-48, La Vittoria di Samotracia, 1950 and its French version La Victoire de Samothrace, 1964) and Jeune fille à l’usine (1978). In 2025, a new edition of this volume was published.

Furthermore, in Italy, the French edition was followed in 2018 by the publication of a collection of her poems, introduced by a presentation by the poet Maria-Grazia Calandrone, entitled Ho camminato nel mondo con l’anima aperta (Solferino).

Other works were published in 2023 by Cambourakis in the Letteratura collection: La jeune fille à l’usine (The Girl in the Factory), first published by Éditions Caractères in 1978, and Histoire d’amour (Love Story), a long prose poem dedicated to her mother.

In 2012, her partner Edith Zha entrusted her works, unpublished manuscripts and notebooks to the IMEC (Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine). The collection contains manuscripts of her work (Italian and French periods), press articles, correspondence (with Giorgio Morandi, Michel Ragon, Bernard Noël, Simone de Beauvoir, Claire Etcherelli, Henry Thomas, etc.), and iconography. Other publications, notably of her notebooks, are planned for the coming years.