"Out, everybody, everybody out!" - The Romanesco Sonnets of Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli

I’ve been having a ball learning about Roman poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli (1791-1863). Belli is, from first glance, a striking writer, and at second glance even more captivating. The Internet offers a good deal of information about him and examples of his work; while I hesitate to add to that considerable accretion, I do so in an access of enthusiasm and a desire to proselytize: Belli is a writer worth getting to know and too little known. The attention paid to him seems undeservedly piecemeal despite his having had prominent and ardent admirers including, to name but a few, Anthony Burgess, James Joyce and Nikolai Gogol, who likely heard the poet recite his poems in one of Rome’s taverns. Save for a single sonnet, Belli was unpublished during his lifetime, but apparently developed a significant reputation through publicly reciting his poems. Here are a couple:

A Miraculous Relic (Mike Stocks, translator)

This much I know: among the rare sensations

and relics that the Popes have gathered for

the prefect of the Sacristy to store

in holy shrines with the authentications,

Christ’s foreskin – plus his other little bits

and vital members – is the pride and joy;

as relics go it’s just the real McCoy,

and any other relic looks like shit

compared…Now then, my dear good sir, don’t say

this holy foreskin also seems to hail

from other countries which lay claim to it;

have faith my man, have faith, a little bit.

there could be eighty foreskins? Fine, okay -

perhaps it grew and grew, like fingernails.

What Might Have Been (Anthony Burgess, translator)

There’d be, if Adam hadn’t sold our stock

Preferring disobedience to riches,

No sin or death for us poor sons of bitches.

Man would range free, powerless to shame or shock,

And introduce all women to his cock,

Without the obstacles of skirt and breeches,

Spreading his seed immeasurably, which is

To say: all round the world, all round the clock.

The beast would share the happy lot of men,

Despite a natural plenitude of flies.

There’d be no threats of Doomsday coming when

Christ must conduct the dreadful last assize.

Instead, the Lord would look in now and then,

Checking our needs, renewing our supplies.

Though sonnets like the above may initially appear to share some of the “shock value” of Antonio Beccadelli’s The Hermaphrodite, Belli, writing 400 years later, is as a poet by magnitudes more serious, talented and, perhaps surprisingly, devout. Despite an acidic wit aimed at the church in many of his poems, they contain an undercurrent of piety and faith. Though Belli mercilessly mocks Pope Gregory XVI in a number of sonnets, he later defended the Pope against a political challenge and even, towards the end of his life, worked for the church as a theater censor, redacting racier passages from Shakespeare and Italian opera. In a life marked by traumatic family losses and mercurial swings in solvency, Belli was a devoted husband and father. Belli did, though, resemble Beccadelli in one aspect: he too came to renounce his verses, even ordering that his oeuvre be burned. Fortunately for posterity, the friend and confessor with whom he entrusted his manuscripts ignored this request.

Belli wrote copiously in standard Italian throughout his life, including many religious poems and his own zibaldone – a collection of encyclopedia-type essays about all manner of phenomena – that stretched to more than 11 volumes. However, his renown comes almost entirely from the sonnets he put into Romanesco, the Roman dialect, after having been inspired by the Milanese dialect poetry of his contemporary Carlo Porta. Setting out with no less a project than to recreate the Rome of his time in sonnets, Belli wrote 2,279 of these dialect poems. They spread across a vast range of subjects of daily life, not just “the six P’s” for which Rome was famous - “popes, priests, princes, prostitutes, parasites, and the poor” - but also dogs, cats, colds, religious relics, butcher’s shops, advertising, graffiti, empty rituals, lecherous sextons, public executions, winter, beautiful weather, seduction, secrets, small talk, gossip, circumcision, the callous rich, lonely beggars, the annunciation, Abraham’s sacrifice, pregnancy, exhausted mothers, the difficulty of getting children to sleep, Noah’s ark, the rapture, the lottery, food, hunger, and even a sonnet about the pain women can experience in breast-feeding.

These sonnets seem like almost nothing else: raw, energetic, caustic, irreverent, comical, daring, sarcastic, cynical, drawing on a long satirical tradition in Italian literature and on the bawdy irreverence of the poesia giocosa of the Middle Ages. Many lance the hypocrisy in the institutional Catholic church and the sense of entitlement of the wealthy - sometimes within the same poem:

The Two Human Species (Eleanor Clark, translator)

We, you know, were brought into the world

Kneaded in shit and garbage.

Merit, manners and stature

Are all stuff of the gentry

To His Excellency, to His Majesty, to His Highness

Vanities, phoney medals, titles and luxuries;

And for us craftsmen and servants

The stick, the load and the halter.

Christ made houses and palaces

For the prince, the marquis and the knight

And the earth for us ass-faces

And when he died on the cross, he thought

To spill, in his goodness, among such tortures

For them his blood and for us the whey.

Belli’s range, though, is both vertical and horizontal; he can shift suddenly from lancing wit and prurient content to a remarkable empathy and insight into suffering - sober, even bitter, glimpses of the struggle of his fellow Romans to survive amid poverty and squalor.  Where in some sonnets he can display a rancor towards women bordering on misogyny, in others he seems unusually attuned and sympathetic to the travails of poor women, particularly mothers:

The Poor Family (Mike Stocks, translator)

Now hush my darlings, hush my little ones,

Your daddy’s coming soon so don’t you worry…

Oh Holy Blessed Virgin Mother Mary,

You who can help me – help me, just this once.

Flesh of my flesh, don’t cry, don’t cry my sweet dear lambs, don't make me die with grief for you.

Your daddy will have scrounged a scrap or two,

And we will get some bread, and you will eat.

If you could understand a mother’s love…

What’s that, Joey, what are you frightened of?

The dark? But son, I’ve got no oil to light.

And Laura, what, what is it, little mite?

You’re cold? Well then, don’t sit there all alone,

Come to your mummy’s arms and warm your bones.

The variety of topics is nearly matched by that of Belli’s experimental approaches to the sonnets and by their daring linguistic diversity. Belli incorporates proverbs, street slang, onomatopoeia, and an enormous variety of voices, from smooth-talking prostitutes to shop owners, from beggars to the rich, from lowly prelates to the Pope himself. Some sonnets get conveyed entirely in dialogue, others in monologue, a couple in baby talk, another by a stutterer, yet another in mocking imitation of bad poetry. Nearly all, as Eleanor Clark observes, present a story or form a vignette, as in the following where the reader can envision a copy writer spelling out the words aloud as he pens an advertisement:

Advertisement (Harold Norse, translator)

Got-rox-th-Ven-ble-Rev-rnd-Mo-nas-ste-ry

Of-St-Cos-ma comma & Da-mi-an

To-se-ll comma or-re-nt-o-ne-l-rge-flo-or

Of-o-ne-of-his-hou-ses comma &th-en-ti-re

Or-ch-rd comma whi-ch-fa-ces-to-th-hi-gh-er

Si-de comma at-num-br-th-ree-fo-ur

Of-Ex-ca-va-ti-on-Al-ley-by-th-ce-me-te-ry

Of-St-Sp-i-rit comma wi-th-o-pen-sp-a-ce

Fr-a-st-all semi colon gi-ves-not-ice

To-a-ll comma &sun-dry-ap-pli-ca-nts

Comma th-at-t-mr-row-at-th-pre-c-ise

Ho-ur-of-fi-ve-p-m-be-ad-vi-sed

By-th-Not-ry-of-th-si-te-Mr Bri-gand….

Shove it; and I’ll put in the full point.

Once one starts reading Belli’s Romanesco sonnets, it’s hard to stop. I’ll end here with another poem on a religious theme, one that captures the deft combination of hard-edged wit, underlying religiosity, and ultimate pessimism that Belli exhibits in his work:

The Last Judgment (Anthony Burgess, translator)

At the round earth’s imagined corners let

Angels regale us with a brass quartet,

Capping that concord with a fourfold shout:

“Out, everybody, everybody out!”

Then skeletons will rattle all about

Forming in file, on all fours, tail to snout,

Putting on flesh and face until they get,

Upright, to where the Judgment Seat is set.

There the All High, maternal, systematic,

Will separate the black souls from the white:

That lot there for the cellar, this the attic.

The wing’d musicians now will chime or blare a

Brief final tune, then they’ll put out the light:

Er-phwhoo

                 And so to bed.

                                         Owwwwww.

                                                             Bona sera.

Perhaps a bit more on Belli later.

Pinocchio

I’ve been focusing on Italian literature now for many months, so Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (more precisely The Adventures of Pinocchio: The Story of a Puppet, 1883) perhaps should not have offered many surprises. Instead, it hit me like a slap in the face. Never before, not even in Roberto Saviano’s books about the scourge of the Camorra or Pier Paolo Pasolini’s accounts of vicious street kids, had the darker side of Italian literature revealed itself so penetratingly. Pinocchio seemed to shed an illuminating – though not particularly sunny – light on what had otherwise impressed me as a national literature of unusual expressiveness, playfulness, imagination, intimacy, magnanimity, and attention to beauty. One need only think of the generous, attentive narrators of Ariosto’s “Orlando furioso” or Manzoni’s The Betrothed, and even when authors turn their attention to the terrible vicissitudes of life - Verga, for instance, or Belli, or Sciascia - there’s often a comic element that buoys one above life’s wretchedness.

In Pinocchio, however, while some of those sunnier elements and comedy are there, particularly in the expressiveness and play of imagination, the tone starts dark, and the challenges to which the puppet, dreaming of becoming “a real boy,” is put are beyond grim and perhaps even beyond Grimm. Early on, Pinocchio, falling asleep with his feet propped up by the fire, has his feet burned off. Not long after, accosted by a fox and a cat intent on robbing him, he is lynched on an oak tree. And this scene, coming after only 15 of the 36 chapters that make up Collodi’s book, would have been the end of the story had not the readers of the initial, serialized tales of Pinocchio clamored for more and had not Pinocchio, calling to his father like Christ during his execution, been resurrected for more. A note: once one starts down the path paved by Collodi’s religious allusions, one runs the danger of hopping onto runaway metaphors barreling towards going off the rails.

Translator Nicholas Perella’s 79 page essay on Pinocchio included in the bilingual edition I read is thorough to the point of making it nearly impossible for me to say anything about the book that he hasn’t already observed. I’ll just note one aspect upon which Perella only lightly touches - a few potent, fluid dichotomies in the story - which may help explain the book’s enduring popularity as well as some of its attraction for an adult reader looking for an essentially weird reading experience.

First among these, of course, is Pinocchio himself, an amalgam of wood and human spirit (those wanting a ride on a runaway religious metaphor may board now). Born from a father who forms the puppet from a block of organic material much like the Biblical god forming Adam (one wonders if that god was as surprised as Geppetto at the material’s sudden animation), Pinocchio is, throughout the book - or until at the end he discards his wooden frame and ascends into boyhood - a curious composite human-puppet, flesh that is at the same time not flesh, object that is at the same time human, a shape shifter of sorts. Repeatedly he suffers violence visited upon his wooden/human body; repeatedly he pulls himself back together or has help doing it. Collodi’s enjoyment in playing with this material is evident.

Even more fluid a dichotomy is that between life and death. In chapter 15, that final chapter of Collodi’s initial serial, just before Pinocchio dies from hanging, he encounters for the first time the character we’ll later know as The Blue Fairy, described as “a beautiful Little Girl with blue hair and a face as white as a wax image who, with eyes closed and hands crossed over her breast, without moving her lips at all, [says] in a voice that seemed to come from the world beyond: ‘There is nobody in this house. They are all dead,’” then adds, “’I am dead, too.’” Pinocchio is a fantasy with multiple instances of resurrection, in which death, despite the horror associated with it, is ever mutable into new life. Even a giant serpent Pinocchio encounters is alive, then apparently dead, then alive, then (a nice comic element) really dead – from laughing so much that his heart bursts.

A third interesting dichotomy is that between the moralizing thrust of the book – its insistence on obedience – and the delight readers (young readers especially) may find in Pinocchio’s repeated rejection of authority. If ostensibly the book is aimed at inculcating in children a respect for rules and toeing the line, the subtext is clear: little of interest may happen in life if one doesn’t transgress from time to time.  I’m speculating, but children may love the book in part because it allows them to go off on fantasies of disobedience under the guise of being instructed to do just the opposite.

I’ll add one last thing: in addition to Pinocchio’s fascinating darker aspects, the book contains some marvelously imaginative passages that make it a rewarding reading experience in general and a rewarding Italian reading experience in particular. There are many examples of the former – rabbit pallbearers, a thousand woodpeckers who peck Pinocchio’s nose back to a manageable size, a coach “the color of air…padded with canary feathers, and lined on the inside with whipped cream and ladyfingers in custard,” drawn by a hundred pairs of white mice and driven by a poodle. One favorite passage that strikes me as particularly Italian is Pinocchio’s fantasy, in chapter 19, of what he’ll do when the gold pieces he has planted in the Field of Miracles come up as coin-laden trees:

Oh, what a wealthy gentlemen I’d become then! I’d get myself a beautiful palace, a thousand little wooden horses and a thousand stables to play with, a cellar full of rosolio cordials and alkermes liqueurs, and a library chock-full of candied fruit, pies, panettoni, almond cakes, and rolled wafers filled with whipped cream.

All those baked and candied marvels! One is transported into a pasticceria. And a child dreaming of alcoholic cordials? Darkness be damned; how can one not want to be in Italy after reading this?

Many thanks to Amanda of the Simpler Pastimes blog for organizing the Pinocchio read-along. 

“Things ought to be looked at differently in life than in speech” – Antonio Beccadelli’s The Hermaphrodite

Palazzo del Panormita, Naples

Maybe I shouldn’t write about Antonio Beccadelli’s most infamous work, a 15^th century collection of epigrams entitled Hermaphroditus (The Hermaphrodite). For one thing, though it loosely fits my current focus on Italian literature, the poem was written in Latin. For another, Beccadelli, a.k.a Antonio Panormita - a Sicilian who led a career as libertine, academic, court poet, and diplomatic envoy for King Alfonso V of Aragon - is a relatively minor figure of “the heroic age” of Italian humanists, and his work is perhaps primarily of interest to scholars. It may not even be of much interest to them; Holt Parker, the translator/editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library edition of The Hermaphrodite, says about the poet that the “truth of the matter is [that]…he was not especially good…is also largely tone-deaf…[and] lacks wit.” Parker warns that readers may be initially disappointed in Beccadelli. I count myself among them. I did not especially like the poem.

But liking differs from appreciating, and I’d been intrigued to read The Hermaphrodite after stumbling upon Beccadelli’s palace, the Palazzo del Panormita, in Naples. The first page of Parker’s introduction stoked the flame born from what little I already knew. Parker quotes Ludwig Pastor (1906) as saying that “the spirit of the false Renaissance is here manifested in all its hideousness,” then adds that “the reputation of the book in your hands is…so loathsome that it (eventually) set off the French Revolution or worse – Protestantism.” It’s difficult to turn one’s curiosity away from a reputation like that. But the book’s notoriety stems not so much from its poetic merits as from its titillating subject matter. Beccadelli described The Hermaphrodite as consisting, like the subject of its title, of two parts: the first “stands for the cock, the next will be cunt.”

I probably don’t need to add that Beccadelli had set out to shock. The Hermaphrodite, dedicated to Cosimo de’Medici ("something for you to read to a guest after lunch") was in general warmly received, even by some within with Catholic church. But it also incited the hanging of Beccadelli in effigy and public burnings of the book, not to mention papal edicts against its being read and the creation, for the poet, of a slew of enemies.

In substance, The Hermaphrodite is something of a messy hodgepodge, mixing lewd, sexual and scatological poems with elegies to the dead, attacks on Beccadelli’s detractors, and purplish, flattering paeans to his patrons and followers. Much of the poem indulges in an explicit, adolescent sexual humor: crude descriptions of sexual organs and acts, with a notable, celebratory fixation on sodomy; accusations of sexual anomaly and inadequacy hurled at Beccadelli’s enemies; depictions of prostitution (“I was sweet and pleasant. My deeds pleased many,/But except for my fee, nothing was sweet to me”); even a poem in which the poet invites the sexually profligate to copulate on his own tomb and thus “honor my soul by fucking, not with incense.”  Among the most amusing of these not particularly funny poems parodies the pastoral genre, as the poet’s visit to a bucolic location to write lofty verse is ruined when a peasant comes along and

…places his cloak on the ground, nearby,

then opens his pants and pulls out his cock and balls:

and the breeze gently lashes his naked buttocks.

He bent his knees and curled up into a circle,

Placing his elbows on his thighs and his hands on his cheeks.

Seeming to rest his heels on the back of his thighs,

He squeezes, loosens his bowels, and then shits.

At that from this talkative asshole windy thunders

Break forth; the whole field is stricken by the crack.

I was shaken, my pen fell, the goddess betook herself to the breezes,

The bird fled terrified by the rumble of the fart.

Some of the epigrams aimed at Beccadelli’s foes contain the kinds of insults one might hear today on the Italian street (presumably in coarsest dialect rather than Latin). But even in so minimal a collection - 81 short poems, some of only a couple lines - this kind of thing can grow tiresome. Beccadelli himself avowed that his poems were merely frivolous distractions, the only verses he could complete given “a thousand and one calls on my time,” and easy to write since epigrams should be “short, must be pointed, and [quoting Martial]…fight ‘not with massed troops but a spearhead’” (or as Martial says elsewhere, more in line with Beccadelli’s style, “little books/like husbands with their wives/can’t please without a cock”).

The manner of the poems’ reception and defense, in poems and letters Beccadelli appended to later editions, proves of perhaps greater interest than the poem itself. Beccadelli dealt with the controversy surrounding his work in myriad ways, ranging from lacerating condemnation of his critics to almost complete renunciation, off and on during his life, of these early poems, reflecting, at least in part, the danger in which his verses put him. Mostly, though, he appeared to walk a middle line by defending “obscene” poetry in terms of its precedence, articulating a tradition of such poems by Virgil, Catullus, Sappho, Juvenel and Martial to name but a few.

As a further line of defense, Beccadelli several times distinguishes between the poet and his verses: “These people say that my life is like my words;/I’ll prove clearly that they speak with a false tongue.” A kind of pre-emptive campaign by Beccadelli’s colleague, Guarino da Verona, in a prefatory letter to the collection, underscores this distinction:

…I would not approve less of the poem itself and the author’s talent just because it smacks of jokes, playfulness, and something a little wanton. Would you therefore praise Apelles, Fabius, and other painters the less because they painted naked and open to view those parts of the body which by nature prefer to be hidden? What if they painted worms, snakes, mice, scorpions, frogs, flies, and disgusting vermin? Wouldn’t you admire and praise their art and the skill of the artist? I in truth praise the man, admire his talent, delight when his verse plays around, when he cries I cry, when he laughs I laugh, praise it when it goes whoring in the middle of a brothel. The authority of my fellow countryman, a not inelegant poet, carries more weight with me than the shouting of the ignorant, who can delight in nothing but tears, fasting, and psalms, and who forget that things ought to be looked at differently in life than in speech.

I did not much enjoy The Hermaphrodite (especially not its palpable dislike of women), but I did appreciate the attempts made by Beccadelli to defend his subject matter and his identification of a long literary tradition for such subjects. The Hermaphodite and its related documents make for another fascinating example of the strategies at work in justifying the irreverent, obscene and decadent in literature, and it’s nearly inconceivable to think that such sophomoric poems could have played a part in giving birth to Europe’s greatest schisms. And while I may not have liked The Hermaphrodite, its defense of such irreverence appears to plant a flag on new soil as a stand against those lacking open-mindedness, perspective, and a sense of humor, and who could be incited to violence by a mediocre poem about (to use one of Beccadelli's favored terms) "butt-fucking." I imagine that Beccadelli would have been dismayed to learn that, 600 years after his frivolous epigrammatic “distractions” created so much controversy, even a mere cartoon can provoke a like response.