Dario Bellezza | |
|---|---|
 Dario Bellezza in 1971, reading from his Invettive e licenze | |
| Born | 5 September 1944 Rome, Kingdom of Italy |
| Died | 31 March 1996 (aged 51) Rome, Italy |
| Occupation |
|
| Notable works | Invettive e licenze, L'avversario, Morte segreta, Ordalia della croce |
| Notable awards | Viareggio, Gatto Prize, Montale Prize, Fondi la Postora |
Dario Bellezza (5 September 1944 – 31 March 1996) was an Italian poet, author and playwright. He won the Viareggio, Gatto, and Montale prizes.
Dario Bellezza was born in Rome on 5 September 1944. After his studies at a liceo classico in his native city, from which he graduated in 1962, he worked for several Italian literary and poetry magazines: Paragone, Carte segrete, Bimestre, Periferia, and Il Policordo. [1]
Bellezza entered the Roman intellectual world in the mid-1960s when, thanks to literary critic and writer Enzo Siciliano, he became increasingly close to Sandro Penna, Aldo Palazzeschi, Attilio Bertolucci, Alberto Moravia, and Elsa Morante, who eventually became a confidant.
The decade from 1950–1960 was a period in which the working class, the Italian Communist Party, the trade unions, and all their hopes for radical cultural change were dramatically defeated. The political and economic growth of the Christian Democrat middle class and the new, changed Freemasonries prevailed.
Bellezza, thus, lived in a political-cultural era convulsed by the ideological confrontations of the 1960s and the subversive ideological line of the aggressive neoavant-garde that struggled against conventional linguistic codes. [2]
From the early 1960s on, Bellezza collaborated with the magazine Nuovi argomenti, becoming associate director shortly before his death.
When Invettive e licenze (Invectives and Licenses) appeared in 1971, it was hailed by Pier Paolo Pasolini in his introduction: "Here is the best poet of the new generation". Invettive e licenze, notable for its technical rigor, depicts people overwhelmed by bitterness, shame, feelings of guilt, alienation, scandal, and sexual perversions. The poems also express a constant, thinly veiled desire for death. [3]
Since 1978 has begun a productive collaboration with Pellicanolibri, with the series "Inediti rari e diversi", publishing texts by Alberto Moravia, Renzo Paris, Gianfranco Rossi, Goliarda Sapienza and Anna Maria Ortese, for her with Beppe Costa and Adele Cambria he will manage to enforce for the first time the Bacchelli’s law, an annuity which is intended to poets and writers in need.
Bellezza was a bourgeois, as were many other intellectuals, but differed from them, according to Pasolini, in being "the first poet bourgeois to judge himself".
Pasolini had a profound affection for Bellezza's work and his artistic experience. The young poet reciprocated this feeling, and also was deeply grateful to Elsa Morante for what he called his poetic apprenticeship. [4]
In 1981, enraged by the publication of the "obscene" photographs of the dead Pasolini "in tutta la loro gelida, disarmante crudezza... nudo, esposto, con tutte le macabre ferite esibite del suo 'sacro' martirio" (in their icy, disarming rawness... naked, exposed, with all the grisly wounds exhibited of his 'sacred' martyrdom), Bellezza wrote the biographical essay Morte di Pasolini (Death of Pasolini). [5] [6]
In 1983, he published io (me), the lack of capital letters intentional. In this work, Bellezza lightly but concretely describes his everyday life and the mediocre desperation of his loves in ample detail. The poet associates life with insomnia, a curse that constantly pursues him:
mi imprigioni, o insonnia | you imprison me, o insomnia |
In the book, he describes suffering from insomnia because, as a highly educated bourgeois and homosexual bigot, he feels tortured by a feeling of guilt and driven by the many contradictions that struggle against each other. Such contradictions are the quintessence of his existence:
l'insonnia viene solo ai bugiardi, | insomnia comes only to liars, |
In his guilt-ridden insomniac persona, he anticipated the poetry that would be too often adopted in the 1980s, that of the artist-outcast. [7]
Bellezza was consumed by anguish and by the relics of (a now mocking) sense of hope: [8]
E se l'orecchio poso al rumore solo | And if the ear I place to the noise only |
He is reduced to corrosive accounts of his own social condition: [9]
Io | I |
The difficulty of homosexual life in Rome, particularly the requirements of secrecy and clandestinity of the love act, is a staple of Bellezza's poetic and prosaic writing. In Bellezza's first novel, L'innocenza ("Innocence", 1971), Nino, the protagonist, consciously chooses the perdition and corruption of a living homosexual hell. In Bellezza's infernal world, homosexuality can be nothing else but prostitution and neurotically masochistic obsessions: in Lettere da Sodoma ("Letters from Sodom", 1972), his conclusion is that everything is Hell and that the only salvation is the systematic refusal of the self. [10] [11]
Bellezza won the Viareggio Prize in 1976 for Morte segreta, the Gatto Prize in 1991 for Invettive e licenze, the Montale Prize in 1994 for L'avversario, and for the play Ordalia della croce he received the Fondi la Postora Prize in 1994.
He died of AIDS in Rome on 31 March 1996. That year, a poetry prize was established in his name.
The collected works were published as:
His poems have appeared in English translations:
{{cite journal}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
Biagio Marin (1891–1985) was a Venetian poet, best known for his poems in the Venetian language, which had no literary tradition until then. In his writings he never obeyed rhetoric or poetics. He only employed a few hundred words for his poems.
Victor Cavallo was an Italian actor and underground writer.
Salvatore Antonio "Rino" Gaetano was an Italian musician and singer-songwriter. He is famous for his satirical songs and oblique yet incisive political commentary. He is remembered for his raspy voice, for the heavily ironic lyrics of his songs and his social protests. He died in a car accident at age 30. He was a popular and influential figure, widely re-evaluated by the following teen generations.
Nico Perrone is an Italian essayist, historian and journalist. He firstly discovered papers on the plot for killing Enrico Mattei, the Italian state tycoon for oil in the 1950s.
Sandro Veronesi is an Italian novelist, essayist, and journalist. After earning a degree in architecture at the University of Florence, he opted for a writing career in his mid to late twenties. Veronesi published his first book at the age of 25, a collection of poetry that has remained his only venture into verse writing. He has since published five novels, three books of essays, one theatrical piece, numerous introductions to novels and collections of essays, interviews, screenplays, and television programs.
Raffaele La Capria was an Italian novelist and screenwriter.
Roberto Carifi, is an Italian poet, philosopher, and translator, supported since the beginning from Piero Bigongiari, one of the major exponents of Florentine Hermeticism. Considered one of the most important poet and intellectual of his generation he has been influenced by having a very difficult illness to cope with.
Vincenzo Jannacci, more commonly known as Enzo Jannacci, was an Italian singer-songwriter, pianist, actor and comedian. He is regarded as one of the most important artists in the post-war Italian music scene.
Luigi Augusto Fontanella is a poet, critic, translator, playwright, and novelist.
Beppe Costa is an Italian poet, novelist and publisher.
Andrea Bajani is an Italian novelist, poet, and journalist. After his debut with Cordiali saluti, it was Se consideri le colpe which brought him a great deal of attention. Antonio Tabucchi wrote about his debut novel, "I read this book with an excitement that Italian literature hasn't made me feel in ages." The book won the Super Mondello Prize, the Brancati Prize, the Recanati Prize and the Lo Straniero Prize.
Igor Sibaldi, born from Russian mother and Italian father, is an Italian writer, scholar of theology and history of religion.
Dario De Toffoli is an Italian board game designer, gamebook author, and games player who founded the games company Studiogiochi and established many games events. Born in 1953 Venice, after an early career as a chemist he entered the world of games. Winner of over 60 medals at the Mind Sports Olympiad. He won the 2002 and 2012 Pentamind Competition for the best games all-rounder in the world. In 2006, he won a special award for his contribution to games which includes contribution to all aspects of games.
Franco Fortini was the pseudonym of Franco Lattes, an Italian poet, writer, translator, essayist, literary critic and Marxist intellectual.
The Pellicanolibri editions is a publishing house founded in 1976 in Catania by the poet and writer Beppe Costa, with the specific intent to highlight authors and discover forgotten or unknown youth.
Mauro Macario is an Italian poet, essayist and director.
Franco Pappalardo La Rosa is an Italian journalist, literary critic, and writer. He graduated from Turin university. He has lived in Turin since 1963. He contributed to cultural pages of Giornale del Sud, L'Umanità and Gazzetta del Popolo, and to many dictionaries, as Dizionario della Letteratura Italiana, Grande Dizionario Enciclopedico-Appendice 1991 and Dizionario dei Capolavori. Nowadays he contributes to many literary magazines, as Hebenon, Chelsea and L'Indice. He edited the publication of some works written by contemporary Italian writers, as Stefano Jacomuzzi, Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti, Emanuele Occelli, Francesco Granatiero and Angelo Jacomuzzi. He took part in National and International Conferences on figures and aspects of contemporary poetry and fiction. He edits I Colibrì, fiction library between journalism and literature. He is founding member and member of the Board of Governors of the International Association “Amici di Cesare Pavese”.
Maria Rosa Cutrufelli is an Italian writer and journalist.
Mario Benedetti was an Italian poet. He was among the founders of the contemporary poetry magazines Scarto minimo and Arsenal littératures.
Virgil Schönbeck, known by his pen name Virgilio Giotti, was an Italian poet writing both in Italian and in the Triestine dialect. Giotti's poetry "which is not so much linked to the vernacular tradition as to contemporary poetry in the Italian language, from Pascoli and the Crepuscolari to hermeticism, uses the dialect to give more intimate vibration to its lyrical motifs, now inspired by a loving or familiar, serene or painful intimacy, now by nature, by the landscape, by the minute life of his city; in forms that from the musicality of the canzonetta approach more and more, and with ever greater grace, an epigrammatic essentiality."
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
