Beyond
their differences, which are evident
and complex, European literatures
share a common concern, which has
been developed from the inside, with
the form or rather the forms of the
poetry of the second half of the 20th
Century. In this period, poets could
not help avoiding the problem of language
and its relationship with the ‘places’
inhabited by language - verses, stanzas
and poems - whether by trying to break
the norms which came to define the
poetic code or by attempting at reducing
this gap by recuperating the classic
forms.
If
the landscape of poetry can indeed
be clearly determined until the 50s,
it is not possible to do so after
then. The several anthologies published
in Europe are a tangible sign of an
attempt not only to regain an apparently
absent public, but also to discover
in the reception field, the trends
inspired by the previous poetic movements
and manifestos, which seem to resort
to the binomial form/anti-form.
We
can consider, under multiple perspectives,
the post-war period as the most fertile
period for the renewing of language
and subject matter in poetry. On the
one hand, we witness a natural prolongation
of the early avant-gardes propositions,
namely the research of a new poetic
language, which combines the literary
and artistic reflections and reconsiders
the page as a writing space and the
relationship between the formal sources
of language and the poetic expression.
Not even the poets who reject the
idea of a perfect form, which has
already been banished since the 20s,
are anti-formal, but rather counter-formal.
Thus they do not try to eliminate
the problems of the language and its
several substrata and instead try
to ‘de-structure’ the
language, rejecting any formal principle
traditionally and culturally established,
but not the form itself in absolute
terms. On the other hand, the poetic
research seems to take the opposite
way: several poets throughout Europe
refuse the anti-literary aspect of
the avant-gardes and try to restore
some of the essential aspects of the
prosodic tradition. The attempt to
renovate the language, which is central
to poetry, is combined with a search
for forms which indicates and announces,
under certain regards, the return
to formal aesthetics and a “classic”
language.
The relationship between forms and
anti-forms is also strategically discussed
within the theoretical and practical
universe of translation. It seems
that the question of an equilibrated
liaison between the translator and
the forms has not yet been solved
(and maybe never will be), if the
latter, as it has been the case in
the 20th Century, are not the simple
legacy of a tradition nor an “ornament”,
but a precise and deliberate attitude.
This brief and limited survey of the
European trends in poetry in the second
half of the 20th Century aims at presenting
a new issue of RiLUnE, devoted to
the forms and anti-forms of European
contemporary poetry.
Chiara
Elefante
tr. Ana Pano
)