|
CLEMENTE REBORA
The life
C.Rebora – the great poet fallen in love with the crucified Christ – is born in Milan, in 1885 from a very lay family of Genovese origin: his father, who had been with Garibaldi at Mentana, keeps his boy far away from the religious experience and brings him up to Mazzinian and progressive ideals, very trendy among the Ambrosian middle class of that time.
After the ‘Liceo’, the young man attends medicine in Pavia for a year, but this is not his track. He passes to arts: the scientific-literary academy of Milan – with which he gets his degree – is an environment full of creative fervour. Rebora meets schoolfellows of great intelligence, with whom he entertains fascinating conversations.
Afterwards he is a teacher. In his opinion school is a place of integral education, to form people ready to change society; and just with pedagogical articles he begins collaborating on ‘La Voce’ (The voice) the prestigious Florentine review.
As exercise book of ‘La Voce’, his first work is issued: the Frammenti lirici (lyrical fragments), this success is immediate.
At the end of the same year he meets Lidya Natus, a Russian Hebrew artist: an affection that binds them until 1919 is born between them.
At the outbreak of the world war I Rebora is on the front of Karst: sergeant, than officer. Wounded in the temple by the brest of grenade, he remains marked by it especially at psychological level (the biographers speak of “neurosis from trauma”).
In the immediate post-war period he returns to teaching, opting for evening schools, attended by workers: by that simple people that he, with humanitarian impulse, loves.
He imposes himself a very austere life regime, assigning a big part of his salary to the poor and often giving hospitality to them at home. To a lot of people he appears like a sort of lay saint, but actually, “l’ignorato battesimo operando”, he is more and more fascinated by religion. You infer it also from the Canti anonimi (anonymous songs): his second book of poetry, of 1922.
His publishing initiative goes in the same direction: I sedici libretti di vita (the 16 booklets of life), through which he spreads works of western and eastern mysticism (and on such subjects he is also an appreciated lecturer).
These are various signals that prelude the landing place: the conversion to Catholicism in 1929. The figure of cardinal Schuster, from whom he receives the sacrament of Confirmation, is decisive for him. Now Rebora understands that the way of totality passes through the succession of a particular charisma: in his case it is the Rosminian one, with the “vow of cancellation” – losing oneself to find oneself again -, with the mystic prospect of “suffering and dying darkly disappearing pulverized in the love of God”.
In the Curriculum vitae the poet, already elderly , will remember Rosmini as the teacher on whom he had relied filially, form through which the novelty of Christ had invested and changed his person: and I was entrusted by the heaven to that wise man, who, supreme genius, humiliated himself in Christ through whom His virtue innovated everything. Ordered by the perfect rule, the dislocated bones found their place: he found out the intelligence the first gift: the Word worked like light for the eye, His forgiveness almost air for the breath.
Rebora’s life can already advance with sure pace: in 1931 he enters, as a novice, the Rosminian institute of Domodossola, in 1933 he delivers his religious profession, in 1936 he is ordained. For a twenty-year period Don Clemente spend his energies among the poor, sick and prostitutes. The man that, walking among a lot of words (even poetic), had come across the Word who made himself flesh, doesn’t need any longer to write now: the word makes room for the action of charity. Only in the last years of his life, ill in the flesh, he will comeback to the poetic word: Curriculum vitae, autobiography in verses of 1955; Canti dell’infermità (poems of infirmity) of 1957, the year of Rebora’s death.
The poetic itinerary.
The gymnastics in which the young Rebora refines his poetic style is the review “La Voce” (The Voice): he, together with Sbarbaro and Jahier, and with narrators such as Boine and Slataper (“people who – Gianfranco Contini informs – were subscribers al Cahier de la quinzaine (to exercise book of the about fifteen), which felt the religious demand …”), thinks of an art like nude, authentic, even polemic testimony, always laden with moral and existential tension.
Among these authors who “testify in verses the deep torment of man alienated and exposed to the anxiety of extreme existential demands, Rebora is the man who, more than all, instilled existentiality and morality, despair and hope, the refusal of the Existent and the anxiety of the Absolute in poetry, till he built the most authentic monument of expressionistic poetics of our literature of the first part of the twentieth century” (Elio Gioanola).
His expressionistic style consists in distorting the linguistic sign, making it aggressive and heated, not being afraid of mixing solemn and dialectical terms to obtain jarring and clashing concordances, “The attack of distorting violence by which he assaults the language – Mengaldo writes – mimes the sinful chaos of rough reality”. Gioanola echoes him: “Rebora’s poetry appears rent by a deep restlessness, by the sense of radical inadequacy as to the world as it is and as to men as they appear to live. He has guessed the disproportion between common human work and the anxiety of the demands on the sense of being and existing”.
You can answer Mario Apollonio definitely in an affirmative way, who wonders whether Rebora’s poetry is not all religious (also the one which comes before his conversion): in the lyric fragments and even more in the Canti anonimi (anonymous poems) the religious sense expresses itself just like “disproportion” which evolves in “demand” of totality, while the moments that run are like a funeral vice which attacks bits of joy. Clearly the poet will remember it in the Curriculum vitae: a morning hemmed all my joys: Longing for the Infinite, I heard Cumming statements around, in the traffic and in the noise: When there is health there is everything, And they understood plump checks, In the ring-a-ring-a roses of this world.
For the heart, structurally made for the infinite, good sense, health – epidermic complexion on cheeks – is not enough; the last Sense, Salvation, is rather necessary for it.
The young Rebora missed just this: “winking at the enigma of the finite I opened my eyes wide at any flash: outside irregular like a Neapolitan urchin, inside I moaned, without Christ”.
This moan, this big sadness is the fundamental feature of the life conscious of itself, which is – as Saint Thomas said “wish of an absent good”. That good, that unique much looked for object, escapes the human ability of “catching”. Then a fellow is tempted to cling to idols, but which offer themselves first to a precarious possession, then slide away – scoffing – between the fingers. The creature remains alone with his “cry”, with “a secret demand”.
It is the theme of the splendid lyric Sacchi a terra per gli occhi (sacks on the ground for the eyes): Whatever you say or do There is a cry inside: It is not for this, it is not for this! And so everything refers To a secret demand … In the imminence of God Life makes short work Of perishable reserves, While everyone grasps At one of his goods that shouts at him: goodbye!
Reason is exigence of adequate and total explanation of existence. There is the answer: the intimate question that is at urgent in the heart is the proof of it; there is the answer but it stays beyond the horizon measurable by us. The reason its top leans out on the “mystery”.
It is the dynamics of Il pioppo (the poplar) by Rebora (like once of Il libro (the book) by Pascoli, from which the milanese poet takes the triplet of rhymes again: “thought – mystery – true”): The severe poplar Vibrates in the wind with all its leaves; The air yearns in all its pains In the anxiety of the thought: It expresses itself from the trunk into branches through the fronds all aimed at the heaven with gathered tops: The trunk of the mystery remains firm, And the trunk sinks where there is more truth.
The whole reality is sign that refers to something else, beyond itself, further on; every thing is “analogy” which asks to “aim at”, or to “tend to”. If the lark was, in Claudel as well as in Pascoli, air symbol of the man that has recognized God and spends his life to praise him, in the young Rebora instead it is the emblem of the poet: aimed at the heaven for which he is made, but close to the earth, he sings the elegy of the conscious slave, nailed to the mission of recalling the (apparently) free brothers to become aware of his condition. Any go towards the heaven of happiness seems intended to fall down again painfully to the ground: Oh lark, tied up to a thin wire, Slave attraction of the free ones in flight, you act as in a trill to go to the heaven, Torn to the ground you agitate your wings in vain.
He remains “without home in this lie, up there excluded. This confession is eloquent, in the last of the Frammenti lirici (lyrical fragments): My poem is a feeling That, exhausted by the day, Tires the night hours: And it asked for life.
This “application for life” crosses the first work from the beginning to the end: fragments crowded by an application for totality.
In Dall’intensa nuvolaglia (from the intense mass of clouds) the poet projects the being threateningly imminent which pervades him intimately into an external event – the storm. Consciousness of evil and application for Good: in O pioggia dei cieli distrutti (O rain of the destroyed heavens) “a continuous anxiety of overcoming, an application for absolute moves also from the most common sights, like the one of rain” (G. Barberi Squarotti). In O carro vuoto sul binario morto (O empty wagon on the dead–end track) the realistic datum is transformed into a worrying symbol of a conditioning without escape – the track that forces to a bound route – and of anxiety for free space”; it is the existential contrast “between imprisonment dell’hic et nunc (of here and now) and will of absolute” (E. Gioanola).
In the second book by Rebora, the Canti anonimi (anonymous poems), “his trend to disappear as ego is stressed – as still the very good Gioanola says – to become the voice, just anonymous, of a common situation, that of pain in the modern city more and more lacking in humanity, and of loving anxiety for something different and higher”.
From the aimed image I am keeping watch on the instant With imminence of wait And I am not waiting for anybody In the lit shade I am spying upon the bell Which, imperceptible, is spreading A pollen of sound – And I am not waiting for anybody Between four walls Astonished of space More than a desert I am not waiting for anybody: But he must come; He will come, if I resist, To blossom not seen, He will come all of a sudden, When I least realize: He will come almost pardon Of what he makes die, He will come to make me certain Of his and my treasure, He will come as a relief Of my and his pains, His whisper Will come, perhaps it is already coming.
Universally recognized as Rebora’s masterpiece, Dall’immagine tesa (From the aimed image) is on the threshold of is conversion: written in 1920 and closing the Canti anonimi (anonymous poems) this lyric seals the “lay” production of Ours. Poem of wait, or better of the “Waited”, it is considered “the most religious and the most vibrant Italian lyric of our time” by Margherita Marchione, and Stefano Jacomuzzi defines it “one of the highest religious poems of contemporary art”.
Structurally it is divided into two parts of 13 verses each. In the first one, built on a dense series of affirmations and negations, the body is strained to keep watch on the instant, on the alert like a sentry (or like the prudent vergins: the arrival of the bridegroom is at hand). ”In the lit shade” (bold oxymoron), in the darkness of the uncertainty in which the wait glitters, the poet is spying upon that silence filled with imperceptible sounds, perfumed and light like pollen (splendid the mixture of sensation: “pollen of sound”!). The space, in the immobility, hanging and full with estonishment, seems to expand to infinity. In it the poet, who is confirming three times “I am not waiting for anybody”, is having a presentiment of being on the verge of a revelation. The “aimed image” dell’incipit (of the beginning) – the already old Rebora will explain - is “my own person assumed in the look of my face outstretched not only towards a longed – for announcement longed for a long time, but maybe (vaguely) towards the Dulcis Hospes animae (Sweet Guest of the soul).
The second part of the lyric, opened by the adversative “but”, assert peremptorily that the longed for Guest “will come” (the anaphora recurs six times). My capability of vigilance is weak, always threatened by carelessness – the poet says – but, “if I resist” in the wait, I won’t be able not to see His imperceptible “blossoming” (therefore it was Him – the Guest – to spread “a pollen of sound”). His coming will be a “sudden” event, unforeseen (here like already in Peguy); and it will bring the “for-giveness”, the great present of the victory on sin and on death (here the concept is already fully Christian, although the conversion will happen only after nine years. It will come as certainty that there is a “treasure”, which to buy it is worth selling everything; aches and pains will persist, but hugged by a humanly unthinkable relief”. “He will come, maybe he is already coming”: “His Presence is near and asks for total trembling silence, so that his discreet “whisper” can be hear” (Jacomuzzi). Witnessing his own faith to Eugenio Montale, Rebora – in his last days of life – will come back to that whisper: “God’s voice is subtle, almost unnoticeable, is just a buzzing. If you get accustomed to it, you can hear it everywhere”.
Curriculum vitae
In this work the poet, already old and ill, goes back over his own existential event, staring from his youth years, when ”alone, roamed and poor a soal wondered”. Every “idol” deceived and disappointed punctually. “Imagining I exalted myself in fame / of musician and poet and great sage: / and what discouragement followed!”. Culture grew in quantity, not in depth: “I piled up wisdom from every origin / to evade learning”. A social existence was “civil asphyxia”, until he yieled to Grace.
Like in the classical mysticism, the meeting with l’Agnus Dei (God’s Lamb) happens at the top of a long slope, after passing through the dark night of loss, when he had seen himself crushed by fog and mist, when he had felt terror, despair and anxiety. To save him from loss it had been a recall first, a sign: a feeble bleat. Then everything gets clear, and the road goes downhill at last: he is given to kiss God’s tenderness, to pause in the “good home”, to walk happily, “remembering” – carrying in his heart – Him who came through Mary.
Lay critics didn’t like this very new Rebora, this poem, which gets a hymn, solemnity, paraliturgical word. Instead Giovanni Getto finds that just now this lyric “takes a sharp taste”: the sense and the taste recognized in ”Jesus the faithful, / the only firm point in the motion of times”, centre of the cosmos and of history.
From Roberto Filippetti – Il Per-corso e i percorsi (the way and the ways) _ Cards of review of Italian and European literature, volume III° “ From mid – Eighthundred to 2000” – Ed. ITACA
|