Alfredo Giuliani’s unrhymed free-verse poem Compleanno (Birthday) was first published in I novissimi: poesie per gli anni ’60 (1961), the famous and influential anthology of neo-avant-garde poetry that Giuliani himself edited, containing his own poetry and that of four other poets, including the more celebrated Edoardo Sanguineti.

Birthday contains four stanzas of free verse: the first has 10 lines, the second five, the third 27, the last six. Its subject, appropriately enough, is Giuliani’s 13th birthday, and the poem addresses Giuliani himself.

Peculiar to the poem—and the anthology as a whole—are the editor’s notes (Giuliani’s) explaining allusions and authorial intentions. It is vital to know that this poem is “almost completely dreamlike,” that the birthday is a “journey,” first leading to sleep, then to the final “rising.”

Alfredo Giuliani

Giuliani glosses the passage “the holy garden was enclosed in the iron cage, the tongue [language] pressed between a wall and a coin” as referring to Ezra Pound imprisoned in the cage at the concentration camp in Pisa. But this reference, as Giuliani writes, goes beyond Pound to signify “the condition of the poet in the modern world.”

The poet must deal with the “Enemy” who forebodingly lurks behind the syllables and “lacerates” or “slashes.” The enemy is in language. For Giuliani (and other avant-garde poets), language must be purified of all the encrustations of capitalism and consumerism; the focus on the ego must be diminished; objects must be endowed with presence.

And yet, this poem rises above ideology or specific theories to become a mosaic of riddling and lovely images in which the poet recites with thunder in his veins. This poem in particular shows the influence of surrealists and of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and is quite different from the majority of Giuliani’s less imagistic poems. Here, we do not sense so much a struggle with language as a struggle with poetic inspiration and the existential course of life.

Works Cited

Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Translated by Anna Cancogni, Harvard University Press, 1989.

Giuliani, Alfredo. I Novissimi: Poetry for the Sixties. Translated by David Jacobson, Luigi Ballerini, Bradley Dick, Michael Moore, Stephen Sartarelli, and Paul Vangelisti, Sun & Moon Press, 1995.

Wagstaff, C. “The Neo-Avantgarde.” Writers and Society in Contemporary Italy, edited by M. Caesar and P. Hainsworth, Palgrave, 1984, pp. 35–62.

Categories: British Literature, European Literature, Italian Literature, Literature

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