It is appropriate that this poem ends Paolo Volponi’s 1986 collection Con testo a fronte (With Parallel Text), a title that signifies that it complements some other text (testo). Vista sull’anno parallelo is thus a fitting conclusion because the “parallel year” of which this poem speaks (i.e., the industrial, urban, mechanized year) runs parallel to—and always distant from—the time frames of nature and the natural world.

As a manager in major Italian corporations (Olivetti and Fiat), Volponi had a long and varied experience of the industrial world. This poem originates in part from those memories.

The poem is an example of Volponi’s later poemetti (long poems). It is rhymed, and, like Dante, whom he cites, Volponi uses harsh rhyme endings (like -arco), which explain in part his eccentric and inventive diction (“plutarco” Plutarch, “stearco” stearic). Many words are chosen for their free association with others, like “vello” and “Arco” (“fleece” and “Argus”). Other words are archaic or industrial terms or neologisms. There is an overwhelming abundance of nouns, of objects, a teeming of substantives. That conjunctions are missing and verbs are few renders the poem ponderous and rather static, rumbling and sonorous but going nowhere.

The poem’s opening lines begin to explain the title: “the parallel year does not lead or select, it dispenses.” It is not human, divine, or intelligent. It appears in “soot” and “burning milk.” The parallel is not the unconscious, but “blacker and less alive.” It is that which “is impregnated with the odor and stain of presidential brilliantine,” that which is part of “capitalistic occidental civilization.”

The parallel year is the year of the factory, industry, politics, and angst. Anxiety reveals the parallel. Volponi believes in recuperating the lost relationship, in the modern world, between humanity and nature as well as the relationships still possible among humans. Both of these fundamental sorts of associations appear irreparably harmed and fatally wounded by the course of modern society. Even the Moon here is a mere “machine.” In some ways, this poem participates in a type of field poetics.

In Vista sull’anno parallelo, Volponi has become gloomy and almost entirely withdrawn. But how else to represent such a nonrelational subject—other than through the lack of vital discourse? This poem signals the end of a long stage in Volponi’s poetics. His poems in the following six years before his death are more contained, generally shorter, less knotty, and more communicative.

Bibliography
Ballerini, L., B. E. Coda Cavatorta, and P. Vangelisti, eds.
The Promised Land: Italian Poetry after 1975. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 2000.

Categories: Italian Literature, Literature, World Literature

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