Tomorrow, Saturday 27 April 2024 – at 6.00 pm – in Matera, in the Malvinni-Malvezzi Palace in Piazza Duomopresentation of the re-edition of the book by Rocco Scotellaro “It’s daylight“, with notes and commentary by Giovanni Caserta, Villani editore, 2024 (https://giornalemio.it/cultura/ripubblicazione-di-e-fatto-giorno-di-rocco-scotellaro-curata-da-giovanni-caserta/) . They will talk about it: Luciano Garramone of the Space Geodesy Center of Matera, Giovanni Caserta literary historian and critic, Franco Villani publisher. Screening of the film “Giuseppe Infantino remembers Scotellaro” edited by Gianni Maragno. Musical interlude by Antonio Guastamacchia of Tricarico. Below we report an excerpt from Giovanni Caserta’s Foreword to Scotellaro’s work.
“On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Rocco Scotellaro, there is no one who has not recognized that, apart from the first ten years following the unexpected Viareggio prize in 1954, the poet’s name has disappeared from national literary histories and school anthologies, half the more suitable to maintain the memory of a poet and a writer
Critics have had two different and, in a certain way, opposite attitudes towards Rocco Scotellaro. At the beginning, in times of neorealism and committed literature, much emphasis was placed on the political-social message that passed through the poet’s verses, exalted and proposed as a socialist, southernist, organic intellectual, protagonist of the struggle for the land, promoter of initiatives social, which ranged from the construction of roads and schools to the construction of a hospital, the third in the region. The social assistance works which he had enacted in his capacity as Mayor in favor of the needy were not counted. He was the “Mayor-poet”, the “Peasant-Poet”, the “Poet of peasant freedom”.[…] Rather than Scotellaro as an author of verse, we preferred to speak of Scotellaro as a prose writer, author of two works, one autobiographical, the other a social investigation, which however, left incomplete and fragmentary, were necessarily inadequate and incomplete. It means Contadini del Sud (1954) and Uva Puttanella (1955). […]
It was towards the end of the Seventies, in a different political and cultural climate, while criticism aimed at the word, i.e. philological criticism, was having success, it was then that the hunt for Rocco Scotellaro’s notes and unpublished works began. Quickly, Uno si distrate al bivio (1974), Giovani soli (1984) and Margherite e rosolacci (1978) were published; there was also the re-edition of È fatto giorno (1982), edited by Franco Vitelli, who, in Oscar Mondadori, added poems excluded by Carlo Levi. In 2004 the volume All poems (1943-1953) appeared, edited by F. Vitelli and pref. by M. Cucchi, Milan, Oscar Mondadori. Finally, in 2019, the edition, in a single volume, of All the works of Scotellaro, also by Oscar Mondadori, arrived, edited by F. Vitelli, S. Martelli, G. Fofi, G. Appella and G. Dell’Aquila. […]
Today, one hundred years after his birth, it is believed that the discussion should be taken up again, first of all carrying out an anthological operation, such as that of Carlo Levi, which, however, albeit with the addition of some poems from the final period of 1950 -53, could only operate on what had already been set up by Scotellaro.[…] As for our work, we are convinced that the critic’s function is that of mediator between author and reader. We, therefore, ventured into this first undertaking, with commentary and interpretation of the texts collected by Levi in 1954, in the ambition, or illusion, of returning Scotellaro to Scotellaro and, having perhaps discovered the poet, making him, together with others, a protagonist of Italian literature. […] Of course, there will be no shortage of severe criticism of our work. Unfortunately, in Italy, it is not without consequences to bump into the shrines of literary criticism. However, it is necessary for someone to start and make a mistake, hoping that others, who take over, will correct and broaden the choice to all of Scotellar’s production, particularly abundant in the years 1950-53, when, a period of crisis and disaffection, after prison, poetry of Scotellaro was a source of self-consolation, at times divertissement, but also an expression of anger and venting.
Much, in this critical operation, will be expelled from the field of true poetry; but it does not matter. Perhaps it was Goethe who said that poetry cannot be measured by meter and is always fragmentary. Before him, Callimachus had written that poetry cannot be measured with the Persian pole. Leopardi, Pascoli, Croce, Montale, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Montale, Ungaretti, Quasimodo, Luzi, Caproni, Pavese, Sinisgalli were and are in agreement… Sometimes, of an entire poem, only a few are saved, from a poetic point of view. steps. Indeed, we must ask ourselves why, of the poets just mentioned, more or less always and only the same poems circulate in the anthologies. There is a reason. It’s that those poems are understandable; the second reason is that they go beyond the contingent, finding, in the fact and in the individual, the instances that are of life and of man as always. The important thing is that they have found the right “style”, or, as the classics of criticism and aesthetics of the past would have said, they have passed through the right forge of the “forming form”, or process of “transfigurationAnd”.”
Registered in the register of journalists of Basilicata.
