T

he poet, critic and translator Giorgio Caproni (1912–1990) was born in Livorno, Tuscany—once known by the English as Leghorn—and he lived most of his adult life in Rome. Yet he moved with his family to Genoa in 1922 and spent the rest of his childhood and early adulthood in that city. Although he did write about Livorno, his place of birth, his name is associated with the city of Genoa.

As a young English poet teaching at the University of Genoa in the I980s I was keen to find a way into Italian poetry. It wasn’t easy. The kind of poetry I had known as a student in England—Philip Larkin, the Liverpool Poets, the Beat Poets, American confessional poets such as Lowell and Plath as well as Frank O’Hara from the New York School for example—didn’t have any equivalence in Italian.

To worship at the altar of Italian poetry seemed rather like attending high mass on a holy day with all the trimmings—incense, Latin supplications, priestly garments, knee bending. The first literary event I attended in Italy was a reception for the Florentine poet Mario Luzi (1914–2005). In that hushed and reverential room it felt as if a literary god had dropped by to rest his wings and take a little nourishment from his adoring acolytes. Any discussion of poetry at the university threw up the word ermetico or hermetic in a flash. I knew post-war neorealism had pushed back against the ‘impenetrability’ of the hermetic style both on the screen and on the page yet in the classrooms the old brigade still ruled the roost: Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888–1970), Salvatore Quasimodo (1901–1968), Eugenio Montale (1896–1981).

Montale, after all, was a Ligurian poet and furthermore he had received the Nobel Prize. No doubt seized by a visceral clutch I sometimes passed the house in which he was born: ‘Il Poeta Eugenio Montale Nacque in Questa Casa, Il 12 Ottobre, 1896.’ The house is in Corso Dogali.

Not long after the beginning of my lengthy sojourn in Genoa (or Zena in the local dialect) a mature student of mine invited me for dinner. No doubt we ate trofie with pesto, followed by fish. During dinner she presented me—rather ceremoniously—with an annotated copy of Montale’s Ossi de Seppia (Cuttlefish Bones)—published in 1925. No easy read! I felt as if I’d been inducted into the Knights Templar. I was both honoured and touched but I didn’t feel I was really cut out for the role.

During the fascist years (1922–1945), in order to throw the authorities off their scent, it was easy to see why poets might cloak their work in opaque manoeuvres and linguistic complexity. Yet as a young Englishman now based in Genoa I wanted to find an Italian poet whose writing resonated with my own experience of living in that remarkable, dilapidated city.

Caproni came to the rescue. My Italian was improving and Caproni’s poetry was approachable. There’s the risk, of course, that in celebrating his engagement with named streets and named piazzas that one fails to recognise the metaphysical fiat which quickens much of his writing. Simplicity, so-called, can be beguilingly misleading. Important to remember too that Caproni was a partisan during the Second World War (in Val Trebbia/Liguria) and much of his earlier poetry is mindful of Italy’s tortured history. Nevertheless I was delighted to read about places I might pass on my way to work or piazzas where I might drink coffee with friends and colleagues.

I need to say something about the morphology and/or lay-out of Genoa because Caproni is a poet who is alive to the particular atmosphere of Liguria’s capital city. Historically it’s always been wrapped around the port. Genoa was a leading sea power in the medieval period, rivalling and sometimes getting one over Venice. The old city or centro storico—dripping with exhausted grandeur—is the biggest extant medieval centre in Europe, a veritable labyrinth, whose vicoli (the narrowest of streets) might themselves be viewed as the lines of a poem forever seeking appropriate form. After which the hills which take you up to elegant Castelletto and far beyond with its ancient forts. Genoa is not a bicycle city. Making one’s way around the place inevitably involves lifts and funiculars and steep climbs up and down the carrugi and creuze. The Genoese have strong calf muscles and doughty legs. The physical act of ascending and descending as you criss-cross the city, dipping in and out of sunlight, creates a quasi-Dantean metaphysic. I always felt Genoa—the city against the sea or, more magnificently, La Superba—was a world unto itself. It was unique yet it was not without a wider symbolic valency.

Before turning to Caproni’s Litania I would like to refer quickly to his poem ‘L’Ascensore’ (‘The Lift /Elevator’). In Piazza Portello, just off Via Garibaldi, which Thomas Hardy described as the most beautiful street in Europe, you can catch the lift to Castelletto. Soon enough you step onto the Spianata to be greeted with a panoramic view of the sea and the city spread out along the coast. Poet and poem are immortalised in lapidary manner on the wall near the lift itself. These are the opening lines:

Quando andrò in paradiso
non voglio che una campana
lunga sappia di tegola
all’alba—d’acqua piovana.

Quando mi sarò deciso
d’andarci, in paradiso
ci andrò con l’ascensore
di Castelletto, nelle ore
notturne, rubando un poco
di tempo al mio riposo.

Caproni’s work, in general, has not been widely translated into English. In Jamie McKendrick’s The Faber Book of 20th Century Italian Poems (2004), for example, Caproni is represented by three short poems. I have located a translation of ‘L’Ascensore’ on the Poetry Foundation site. This is how Michael Palma deals with the opening stanzas:

When I go to paradise
let there be only one
bell, scented with rainwater
and with tiled roofs at dawn.

When I decide to go
to paradise, I will go
there in the elevator,
at night, of Castelletto,
stealing a little piece
of my eternal peace.

All Genoese know how to find the lift to Castelletto; most Genoese will know about the poem, or at least the poem’s opening. When the moment comes to pack your bags you might attach your celestial wings and take the lift—or in effect be lifted up– to that paradisal place on the hill. It’s a brilliant conceit. It’s as if the poem has been bolted onto the city itself. Yet in actual fact the piece is a rather creative obituary for the poet’s beloved mother Anna Picchi. Now a schoolteacher in Rome, Caproni came back to Genoa in 1948 to visit his mother only to discover she was nearing the end of her life. Later in the poem, having reached Castelletto in the dark, the poet wonders if he’ll recognise his mother in the lamplight. If he does, he says, they’ll stand together at the iron railing

alone and hand in hand,
betrothed as we had never
been in all those years.
In the shudder of the railing.

Dreamlike, ghostly, heartrending, the poem is almost unbearably sentimental in a very Italian way. Years later when I was living in Castelletto myself—a kind of geographical promotion if you like—I had to take St Anna’s Funicular, rather than the lift, to get to and back from work. At some point I wrote ‘St Anna’s Funicular’. On my part an early nod to the great Caproni:

When I go down to hell
I will take St Anna’s Funicular.
It will be waiting for me
in the nearly dark of a
velvet-skied Genoese evening.

I will be the only passenger
and the doors will slide shut
with a sublime finality.
It will be quite an occasion,
this journey into eternity.

And in that narrow steep descent
I will be given my last vision
of the city against the sea
and I will pass lighted windows
full of comfort and chandeliers.

Of all his Genoese poems Litania/Litany most perfectly writes the city. Probably written in 1952 it’s an ambitious poem not least because of its length (45 stanzas, mostly quatrains, some 180 lines in all) and its virtuoso use of an AABB rhyme scheme, with an anaphoric drum beat. If I were to attempt a translation the rhyme scheme would have to be reconsidered or abandoned. To non-speakers of Italian the poem is not completely inaccessible. Italian is a phonetic language so one can speak it as it is written (unlike English) and thus it is possible hear the sharp rhyme again and again. The English poet Charles Tomlinson, who lived in Liguria, was well versed in Italian poetry including that of Caproni. Tomlinson argues: ‘The chances of rhyme are like the chances of meeting—/In the finding fortuitous, but once found, binding.’ Those who are interested in Caproni’s poem might listen to various readings/recordings on the internet/YouTube. The title of the Caproni’s piece is instructive. The structure is constant; kinetically repetitive. And in each stanza Genoa—or Genova—is called upon twice. Ninety times in the poem as a whole. The city is variously apostrophised, celebrated, fetishised, sometimes cursed. From the beginning:

Genova mia città intera.
Geranio. Polveriera.
Genova di ferro e aria,
mia lavagna, arenaria.

Genova città pulita.
Brezza e luce in salita.
Genova verticale,
vertigine, aria scale.

The panoramic, encyclopaedic intentions of the poem are revealed in that first line: ‘Genoa my entire city’. The reader is taken on a tour through the city and beyond. Naturally a Ligurian reader will be familiar with the landscape of the poem notwithstanding the fact Caproni’s poem was written in the 1950s. Place names, a Capronian speciality, include Castelletto, Caricamento, Albaro, Borgoratti, Sestri, Fontane Marose, Voltri, Sturla, Marassi, Sottoripa, Stalgieno, the famous cemetery and/or necropolis, Genoa’s iconic city of the dead.

In the second stanza we find ‘Genova verticale,/vertigine, aria scale’, namely a laconic description of that very dynamic I spoke of in my introduction to ‘The Lift/Elevator’. Vertical Genoa, giddying Genoa, a city whose steep walkways haul you up into the very air itself.

Caproni’s Litania employs concrete nouns and proper nouns generously. Reading the poem becomes a physical /somatic experience. At a psychological level it is also a poem of reconstruction. Genoa was heavily bombed in the war. It is said of Philip Larkin and his fellow travellers in the Movement that their celebration of pre-modernist traditional forms in their quest to restore the English line was analogous with the re-building of British cities after the destruction of the Luftwaffe. Caproni, too, remembers in stanza 43 the Genoa of ‘Bombardamenti’.

Genova di lamenti.
Enea. Bombardamenti.
Genova disperata,
invano da me implorata.

It’s easy here to see here how ‘Bombardmenti’ is followed by ‘Genova disperata’ (city of desperation) and ‘implorata’ (imploration, in vain, invano.) What is really fascinating is the reference to Enea/ Aeneas of Virgilian fame. The statue is still found in Piazza Bandiera which was bombed during the war. The statue survived and becomes for Caproni a poetic talisman. The poems discussed in this article are both found in his collection Il Passaggio d’Enea (1956). Aeneas survived the fall of Troy and made his way to Italy becoming an important ancestor of Romulus and Remus, mythical creators of Rome. Aeneas might be said to represent defiance and, ultimately, hope.

In fact Caproni’s Litany enjoys a post-fascist ‘democratic’ spirit as it celebrates the observable and pragmatic not to mention the growing power of the Italian left. This is of particular relevance to Genoa. It celebrates, in great part, ordinariness, the quotidian, and craftsmanship, working class labour and artistic prowess. There are references to slate, to building sites, ship building, to the port, dockers, ships, fishing, sex workers, conscripted soldiers, the hinterland with its partisan traditions and the ‘Genova di violino’, a reference to Paganini and Caproni’s own love of music. Noteworthy that ‘Genova di violino’ rhymes, ironically, with ‘topo’ (rats) and ‘casino’ (mess/chaos). All of this creates a tangibility that sets Caproni’s poetic against the abstractions of his predecessors who were of a hermetic persuasion. Caproni is conscious of what might be called a Ligurian line—he refers to the Genoa of ‘Campana. Montale. Sbarbaro’ (stanza 15), yet he is qualifying it here. Craft and clarity rather than modernist experimentation are foregrounded.

For all its locked in, quasi-gnomic economy, the poem is fraught with emotion. Consider stanzas 3 and 4:

Genova nera e bianca.
Cacumine. Distanza.
Genova dove non vivo,
mio nome, sostantivo.

Genova mio rimario.
Puerizia. Sillabario.
Genova mia tradita,
rimorso di tutta la vita.

The third stanza refers to the ‘black and white’ colour of the city thanks to the historical use of marble and slate. Yet ‘black and white’ might also suggest in a city whose buildings reach skywards, unlike Venice say, how sunlight can suddenly open up a dark piazza, as if there were some kind of binary opposition between the forces of good and something more sinister. Genoa is, by nature, a melancholic city and in 1857 Herman Melville noted in his diary that from above, with its forts and wild hinterland, Genoa seemed like the fortified camp of Satan ready to do battle with the archangels. In the medieval period, incidentally, Genoa had the largest slave markets in Europe.

In the third stanza Caproni uses the Latin word ‘Cacumine’ which might be described as a peak or summit, something in extremis, which again not only inscribes Genoa’s mountainous geography but also suggests perhaps some kind of overwhelming agony: the city on the hill now becoming a type of calvary. The third line of the third stanza reminds us that this evocation of Genoa is being written by a poet who no longer lives there—Genova dove non vivo—a poet in exile. And whereas the fourth stanza (anticipating the end of the poem) refers to the city as his rhyming factory it collapses into ‘Genova mia tradita,/rimorso di tutta la vita’—namely a city betrayed by the poet himself, a city, therefore, of lifelong remorse and suffering. The guilt and longing of the poet in exile is speaking here. He is doubtless remembering the loss of his mother; he is remembering the loss of his childhood and youth; he is remembering the war years which took him away from the city.

Caproni’s Litany is an emotional lever for Ligurians. Giorgio Caproni ‘is one of theirs’ which is not dissimilar to their adoration of Fabrizio De André (1940–1999). Notwithstanding his wealthy upbringing, De André became ‘il cantautore degli emarginati’, the singer-songwriter for the marginalised. His music still haunts the backstreets of the city rather in the way Caproni takes us in stanza 29 to the ‘Genova di Sottoripa./Emporio. Sesso. Stipa./Genova di Porta Soprana,/d’angolo e di puttana’:the Genoa of the Sottoripa, and shops and sex and throngs of people and the Genoa of Porta Soprana with its street corners and street walkers. Useful to think of the singer-songwriter and jazz player Paolo Conte too. He’s not Genoese but one of his most famous songs is ‘Genova Per Noi’ (‘Genoa for Us’). When he plays in the city the audience demands it and they get to their feet and weep and cheer. Conte says, ‘Genova, dicevo, è un'idea come un'altra’, ‘Genoa, I was saying, is an idea like any other’ but the reason the Genoese love the song is because they know that Conte knows that Genoa is not like anything else or anywhere else at all—there’s something strange, mysterious and alluringly phantasmagoric about it.

Caproni’s Litany is about loss of place as well as the recollection of it and the restoration of it. In that sense it works as a form of ‘nostos’. It is the poem for Genoese exiles (there are so many nowadays); it might be a poem for sailors and seafarers. My once father-in-law spent much of his life at sea dreaming of his return to Genoa. Caproni’s Litany is an act of nostalgia, a supplication, a great list, a funeral song, a prayer, joyous, humorous, wry, bitter, unbearably sad, full of lamentation and yearning, or struggimento. The Ligurians are known for their mugungni. A form of moaning and/or complaining, both existential and banal, and Caproni’s Litany seems to incorporate something of this too. This is his ‘Genova di lamenti’.

The last stanza, number 45, slips out from under the 4-line carapace to become a little longer; a flourish, of sorts, at the end.

Genova di tutta la vita.
Mia litania infinita.
Genova di stocafisso
e di garofano, fisso
bersaglio dove inclina
la rondine: la rima.

The poem signs off with yearning, with lyrical pulse.

Genoa my entire life.
My infinite litany.
Genoa of stockfish
and carnations,
my target where
the swallow tilts: rhyme.

If the piece begins with ‘Genoa my entire city’ it concludes with ‘Genoa of my entire life/. Infinite litany.’ Stepping away from the abstract once again Caproni gives us stockfish and carnations. Stockfish/dried cod is used to make baccalà, rather as you find in Portugal. It is another Genoese dish full of ‘emotion’ which reminds us of the city’s seafaring history. In the Italian ‘la rondine’ (swallow) alliterates with’ la rima’ (rhyme). In effect, at the very end of the poem, the switch of the swallow aligns itself with the luminosity of the rhyme.

I was surprised some years ago to find that the Italian scholar Luigi Surdich had cited my poem ‘City of Malefic Angels’ in Genova Ch’ E Tutto Dire (2011). His book—a commentary with photographs—is a study of Caproni’s Litany; the title itself comes from a line in the poem. I was delighted to find that he had described me as a ‘capronista’. The poem in question was first published in The Red Zone (2007). I was no longer living in Genoa yet hardly a day went by without my thinking about the place. Caproni wrote his poem in the 1950s. I was responding to it circa 2005, and thinking of my life in the Ligurian city in the 1980s and 1990s. The Genoese litany therefore unfolds; infinite litany. I share a few lines below:

City of my several corpses
City of light summery Italian waltzes
City of rhyme, city of slime
City of lifts, funiculars and strange particulars
City of Caproni and all that baloney
City of my broken knee
City located precariously on the curve of the sea

[ . . . ]

City of the mind gone wrong, De André, city of song
City of revisionist historians and, increasingly city of Ecuadorians
City of loose ends and long-toothed friends
City of Rina, I wish I’d seen her one more time

[ . . . ]

City of Via Gramsci and my estranged wife the banshee
City of the ghetto, Jack, William and Castelletto
City of Sampdoria and permanently deferred euphoria
City of Valery, Dickens, Montale, Melville and Hardy
City of green sauce, city of my not yet completed and expensive divorce.

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