The ANNOTICO Report
Mario Luzi's first book of verse, "The Boat," was published
in 1935. His
poems have been translated into most European languages,
and in 1999, Pope
John Paul II commissioned him to write a text to commemorate
Good Friday.
He was regularly promoted as Italy's prime candidate for
the Nobel Prize in
Literature, and could barely disguise his disapproval
when the Italian
playwright Dario Fo unexpectedly won the award in 1997.
Los Angeles Times
>From Times Staff and Wire Reports
March 2, 2005
Mario Luzi, 90, an Italian poet, essayist and senator-for-life,
died Monday
in his native Florence of unspecified causes.
Widely respected, Luzi had been considered Italy's best
hope for the Nobel
Prize in literature but never achieved that honor. He
became
senator-for-life last year. Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni
said that with
Luzi's death, the nation had lost "one of its purest,
clearest, strongest
voices."
Luzi studied French literature and began publishing his
poetry in the
1930s. His work was rooted in the "hermetic school,"
which originated in
Italy in the early 20th century and was characterized
by unorthodox
structure, illogical sequences and highly subjective
language. He became
well-known in literary circles in the 1950s with the
anthology "Primizie
del Deserto (Desert's Early Fruits)."
Also an essayist, Luzi published works on French poet
Stephane Mallarme and
the Italian poets Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Pascoli.
Luzi taught French
literature at the University of Florence.
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Mario Luzi of Italy (Florence, 1914) is considered by
some experts to be
one of the greatest Italian poets alive. He spent much
of his youth in
Siena, and the Toscane landscapes left lasting impressions
which marked his
poetry to this day. While studying French language and
literature in
Florence he commenced publishing poems. His first collected
poems, La Barca
(Canti), appeared in 1935.
Mario Luzi's poetic roots are in the hermetic school which
came into being
in Florence around 1930 with Carlo Bo as its theorist.
Notwithstanding the
depressing climate caused by the town's fascism, some
important literary
magazines saw the light of day; Florence remained Italy's
intellectual
capital after all. Luzi made a great many friends - Eugenio
Montale, for
example.
For some time Luzi taught French in Parma (where he met
Atillio
Bertolucci), then in San Miniato and finally in Rome
while continuing to
write poetry. His Avvento notturno (1940) was considered
a true hermetic
manifest. According to Olga Maria Brouwer, his poems
express his search for
liberation and a realization of both the contrasts in
- and the brevity of
human existence. The collection Il giusto della vita
(What's good in life,
1960) contains his best poems; they are less hermetic.
Mario Luzi has been living back in Florence since 1945.
He contributed to a
great many literary magazines and together with Carlo
Betocchi founded La
Chimera which engaged in the now famous polemic about
the crisis in
neo-realism with the periodical Officina of Passolini,
Fortini and Leonetti.
Mario Luzi also gained a reputation for his translations
of S.T. Coleridge,
Racine and Shakespeare, a.o. Together with T. Landolfi
he compiled the
Anthologie de la poésie lyrique française and he wrote
a great many studies
and essays on a variety of literary subjects. He traveled
widely, to India
and China for example, and continued lecturing at the
Florence Institute
for Political Science up till 1985.
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