Camillo Sbarbaro comes from Squid bones by Montale, the “bizarre child” of Italian literature. But his long, somewhat restless and very reserved life as a poet and writer goes far beyond the great – perhaps a little ironic – image of the future Nobel Prize winner, of him as younger and obviously much less well known at the beginning.
Francesco De Nicola tells us about it in a kind of poetic biography (Camillo Sbarbaro. Write for a living Ares editions) a few months after the publication of the correspondence with Giovanni Descalzo, also a Ligurian author, an autodidact who gained a certain esteem among his contemporaries. And he proposes the text of a letter that remains as the perfect, truest portrait of the author of Pianissimo e di TRucioli.
The year is 1948 – when Sbarbaro, now in his sixties, was a highly sought-after translator from French and had finally found a decent source of income after the difficulties of his youth. The publisher Paravia intended to update his Historical Dictionary of Italian Literature, and it fell to Descalzi to look after the poet: when asked for an annotated bibliography of his work, he responded disarmingly, citing only a few reviews and declaring that he was truly sorry for “being in the impossibility , to specify the following: I.” I have neither my books (except for the latter at the moment) nor reviews. I arrive at my destination naked (and therefore light).
Not too dismayed, he added: “During the war, towards the end, Giacinto Spagnoletti published a pamphlet about me.” I saw it several times before giving it to Servettaz, but I didn’t understand anything. And in Bos 8 or 7 studies there is another article about me; of which ditto”.
The one who was now considered master shied away; In fact, he quietly admitted that he had always shied away from it: This is perhaps not an example that we should show to our contemporary writers, in short, to all of us who are more or less interested in historicizing and promoting ourselves, on paper, on social media. in the living room or at festivals – not to mention on television. But that would be too much to ask, and why the hell?
Everyone has the inviolable right to disseminate their work: even if the memory of the “bizarre child” could sometimes act as a corrective, at least in moments of extreme breathlessness.
However, Sbarbaro was certainly resourceful in his own way; child perhaps; but don’t think about a nice guy. De Nicola points out that the perfidious Montale had already written to Sergio Solmi in ’21, before that Squid bones (which dates from 1925 and includes a section of poems dedicated to him) While speaking of Genoa and his acquaintances, he excluded that of Sbarbaro, which was “tragically gloomy.” It’s not like everything has changed.
The loving look, in epigram it is almost dewy tenderness: “Sbarbaro, an imaginative boy, folds multicolored papers and draws little boats from them, which he entrusts to the mud/mobile of a gutter; See how they go out./ Be foresightful for him, you sir, who passes by:/ Reach with your staff the delicate flotilla,/ That it is not lost; “Lead them to a little stone harbor,” and it is rightly a very famous lyric poet.
But one suspects that there is an insidious memory of Manzoni in this invitation to a “passing gentleman”. Gentlemen, come Engaged, there are many, true or more commonly suspected. Manzoni liked the term and used it with a certain irony: for example, when the Milan notary sent Renzo away after his arrest in the tavern, accompanied by two “Birri”.
And he says to them: “Walk in such a way that no one notices anything: as if you were three honest men going for a walk.” Could it be that the reader to whom Montale is addressing his invitation is one of those who actually “pass by”? Ultimately, Camillo Sbarbaro’s youth was, as he himself says, a Genoese bohemian, consisting only of home and tavern. In fact, and Renzo has nothing to do with this, a “closed house”.
