22-12-2000

Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli

(1791 - 1863)

LINKS:

I sonetti di Giuseppe Giocchino Belli

Opere di Giuseppe Giocchino Belli

Poet's Choice By Edward Hirsch

By Edward Hirsch

Sunday, January 4, 2004; Page BW12

The 19th-century Italian poet Giuseppe Belli (1791-1863) created sonnets that are small, explosive, highly compressed dramas. He was a lifelong resident of Rome and wrote in the Romanesco dialect of Trastevere, which Miller Williams, who has brilliantly translated Belli into an earthy American idiom, calls a sister language of Italian. When I lived in Trastevere for a year in the late 1980s, I discovered that the Romani or Trasteverians still tend to call themselves Noiantri: we others. It was for these proud, irrepressible "others" that Belli wrote more than 2,000 sonnets over a 30-year period.

Belli had a strong theatrical streak and liked to tell stories. He had a tough, streetwise wit, a terrific ear for slang, and a deep sympathy for working people. His poems are cunning, ironic and robust. They are unexpected and shocking, as when one gravedigger says to another:

Williams notes that Belli all but turned the sonnet into a ballad form. He gave it raw, narrative energy. A good example is "La nottata de spavento," a chilling poem that he wrote on Jan. 22, 1835.

Belli despised cant. He worked as a petty bureaucrat and completely identified with the poor people of Trastevere. He was darkly funny and approached the world with the eye of a disabused lover. He knew how things worked. "Christ made great houses and palaces/for prince and earl, marquis, queen and duchess," he wryly declared in "The Two Human Species." "He made the earth for us, the dog-faces."

Belli developed a healthy contempt for crass wealth, for dirty politicians, and corrupt ecclesiastical authorities. His political poems are forthright, knowing and scornful. The people he writes about are instantly recognizable. Have things changed? Here is "Li padroni de Roma," which he wrote in April 1835.

(All quotations are from "Sonnets of Giuseppe Belli," translated by Miller Williams. Louisiana State University Press. Translations )

Published: 18 December 2012

From “On Christ’s Nativity” – Five sonnets

by G. G. Belli, translated by Anthony Burgess; introduced by Andrew McCulloch

In an introduction to translations of six sonnets by the Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli (1791–1863), the poet Peter Dale wrote that despite the popularity of Belli’s work in Italy it is barely known to the wider critical world partly, perhaps, because of a traditional Italian embrace of native idiom that is not always shared elsewhere. Successful dialect versions of Belli’s poems have been made. In those by the Scots poet Robert Garioch, for example, Joseph Farrell found “a sinewy toughness, a relaxed humour and an energy of spirit” that caught the tone of the originals. But their popularity has not endured. Perhaps in the interest of accessibility, then, most translators, as Dale notes, opt for “flat paraphrase in a standardized tongue, with an occasional vernacular gesture”.

He makes an exception, however, for the versions by Manchester-born Anthony Burgess, whose decision to preserve Belli’s Petrarchan rhyme scheme also reflects the fact that, although much of his poetry was anarchic, blasphemous and obscene, it was structurally highly conventional. Burgess seems to have been fascinated by this paradox. In his novel Abba Abba (1977), in which these translations appeared, he imagines Belli meeting the dying John Keats in Rome and telling him that mere nature-worship leads to “nothing but Truth and Beauty and Goodness till you fall sick”, and that the English Romantics could do with calling a spade a shovel now and again. But he also reveres the sonnet which, he thinks, “must have existed in potentia from the beginning”, to be made flesh by Petrarch: “In my eight lines X, in my six lines Y, but my total fourteen ever the unity, the ultimate statement whose meaning is itself”. ABBA ABBA is, of course, the rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan octave. But for Burgess it is no accident that it is also Christ’s cry to his Father from the Cross. What else is the sonnet, he has Belli ask, “but the true image of God?”.

From: On Christ’s Nativity – Five sonnets

G. G. Belli
Translated by Anthony Burgess (1976)

Saturday 25 January 2003

Artifice and insemination

Andrew Biswell on a spunky collection that illuminates the range of Anthony Burgess's interests, Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems

Andrew Biswell

Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems
by Anthony Burgess, edited by Kevin Jackson
112pp, Carcanet, £9.99

It should have come as no surprise that Byrne, Anthony Burgess's last novel (published posthumously in 1995), was written entirely in verse. Four of the book's five chapters are composed in ottava rima, a verse-form chosen by Burgess because it was the one that Lord Byron had used in his longer poetic narratives, such as Don Juan. Burgess's previous 31 novels, in which limericks, songs, poetic parodies, verse interludes and poet-characters abound, had done much to prepare readers for the sustained, spermatic, Byronic wit of Byrne:

Byrne's name survives among film-music-makers
Because the late-night shows subsist on trash.
His opera's buried by art's undertakers,
His paintings join his funerary ash.
He left no land. "My property's two achers,"
Stroking laborious ballocks. As for cash,
He lived on women, paying in about
Ten inches. We don't know what they paid out.

The same bawdy, libidinous qualities that are on display here may be found in Burgess's earliest surviving poems, now collected for the first time in book form by Kevin Jackson. One of Burgess's schoolboy poems, "The Music of the Spheres", written in 1934 while he was studying at Xaverian College in Manchester, offers two possible interpretations. The "spheres" of the title could well be the harmony-producing celestial bodies of mythology. Or else they are testicles, in which case the poem must be referring to a coarser, orgasmic kind of music:

I have raised and poised a fiddle
Which, will you lend it ears,
Will utter music's model:
The music of the spheres.
By God, I think not Purcell
Nor Arne could match my airs.
Perfect beyond rehearsal
The music of the spheres.

Burgess returns repeatedly in his poems to the conjoined ideas (as he sees them) of maleness and creativity. Reading through the poems gathered here, I was struck by the number of allusions to the sexual act, often communicated through images of axes, drills, swords and gushing rivers of sperm. Taken together, these amount to an implicit argument about writing itself as a masculine business, which is echoed elsewhere in Burgess's fiction and in his swaggering verse translation of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. Like Cyrano in the play, Burgess used to walk the streets and subways of New York armed with a sword-stick, and this experience fed into another long poem, "The Sword".

Some of Burgess's most inventive sonnets appear in the novella Abba Abba (1977), a book which draws its title from the rhyme-scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet. Burgess imagines a meeting in Rome between the dying John Keats and Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli (1791-1863), the blasphemous sonneteer who wrote in the Roman dialect. The second half of the book contains translations of 71 of Belli's sonnets. Reviewing the novella, Tom Paulin said that Burgess "justifies his title, which isn't an example of merely tricksy punning, but an absolutely appropriate naming of his subject". The Belli translations are consistently filthy, but they preserve much of the obscene energy that drives the Roman originals. These lines are from "The Annunciation" (the Angel Gabriel is speaking):

"Ave," he said, and after that, "Maria.
Rejoice because the Lord's eternal love
Has made you pregnant - not by orthodox
Methods, of course. The Pentecostal dove
Came silently and nested in your box."
"A hen?" she blushed. "For I know nothing of -"
The angel nodded, knowing she meant cocks.

Burgess seems to have derived his theory of poetry from Robert Graves's eccentric but (in its day) widely influential critical book, The White Goddess (1948). Graves spoke of poetry as "a wild Pentecostal speaking with tongues", and Burgess writes in one of his own poems that "the Pentecostal sperm came hissing down" at the moment of creative generation. This is how he believed poems got made: by a process of insemination from without, or (as Graves puts it) through "religious invocation of the Muse, the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites".

This theory of poetry is played out most conspicuously in the four comic novels that Burgess wrote about his alter ego, the sociopathic poet Francis Xavier Enderby, who composes most of his best work on the lavatory seat (which he likens to Shakespeare's "wooden O"). Enderby is literally inspired, in the strict sense of having words breathed into him, by a mystical white goddess, his ethereal muse. Within the fictional frame, Burgess's own early poems are reattributed to Enderby, including a sequence of five sonnets (the "Revolutionary Sonnets" of this volume's title) which won the mild approval of TS Eliot, to whom Burgess had sent them in the early 1950s:

A dream, yes, but for everyone the same.
The thought that wove it never dropped a stitch.
The absolute was everybody's pitch,
For, when a note was struck, we knew its name.
That dark aborted any wish to tame
Waters that day might prove to be a ditch
But then was endless growling ocean, rich
In fish and heroes till the dredgers came.
Wachet auf! A fretful dunghill cock
Flinted the noisy beacons through the shires.
A martin's nest clogged the cathedral clock,
But it was morning: birds could not be liars.
A key cleft rusty age in lock and lock.
Men shivered by a hundred kitchen fires.

What is revolutionary about this sonnet? Certainly not the approach to form, which is tight and metrically exact. The revolution lies in the subject matter: it is about the convulsive transition from the Middle Ages to the Reformation. As the fictional poet explains in Inside Mr Enderby (1963), the "martin's nest" in the sestet stands for Martin Luther and "the beginning of dissolution, everybody beginning to be alone, a common tradition providing no tuning-fork of reference and no way of telling the time, because the common tradition has been dredged away".

Other sonnets address other revolutions, such as the fall of man, the close of the Augustan age and the beginning of the romantic revival. Burgess's addiction to the sonnet form proclaims that the 1930s are his poetic point of origin, and the concerns of this sequence correspond closely to WH Auden's historical musings in his 1938 Chinese sonnets (first published in Journey to a War), which Burgess had read when he was an undergraduate.

Jackson's selection of Burgess's poems, including some ephemeral work culled from newspapers and magazines, is illuminatingly footnoted, and the editor has taken care to give the texts in their earliest surviving versions. Yet a surprisingly large number of Burgess's poems are simply missing from this book: the verse interludes from The Worm and the Ring, "A Long Trip to Tea-Time" and "One Hand Clapping"; the long poems and acrostics from Napoleon Symphony; the "Elegy for X" from Hockney's Alphabet; the songs from A Long Trip to Tea-Time and from the Broadway musical, Cyrano.

The most disappointing omission is "An Essay on Censorship", Burgess's long verse-letter to Salman Rushdie (written immediately after the 1989 fatwa), a spirited imitation of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man. Can Jackson be persuaded to add it to a second edition, or must we wait for a fuller, more scholarly volume of Collected Poems?

Andrew Biswell's biography of Anthony Burgess is published by Picador later this year