Sandro Penna
(1906 - 1977) Italy
Poet
Sandro Penna was born in Perugia, Central Italy, in a middle-class family. Graduating at the Commercial School, at first he worked as a bookkeeper or as an accountant. It is difficult to get sure data from the news he gave about himself, as in telling about his life he was vague and discontinuous.
As if he wanted to escape the outlining of his private life, or else as if he wanted make a myth of himself. G. Debenedetti in his book Poesia italiana del Novecento defines him "... chronicler and yet evasive".
We know for sure that for a while he was a shop assistant in a bookshop in Milan, a job that Sergio Solmi found for him. But again unemployed, during the war he made ends meet with some black market -- cigarettes, soap, clothing and even books.
His first collection of poems, including the lyrics that Saba read in manuscript ant that he had his friend read in 1933, was Poesie, printed in 1938 by the printer Parenti in the editorial series of the magazine "Letteratura"
Then he also published Notes, A strange joy of living, Poesie (complete and enlarged collection, that earned him the Viareggio prize) and Cross and Delight.
He died in Rome in 1977
Sandro Penna's poetry is of a relational kind, and this in an epoch when the "ermetismo" (hermeticism) was the most followed poetical style. It was relational in the meaning that it is an irrelative poetry, sprouting out from the "impossibility or incapacity to establish a rational and recognizable relationship with the world." (G. Debenedetti). World, it is known, is made of Nature and History. On one side Sandro Penna feels the nature as his homeland, at times sweet, at times disagreeable, but anyway always the place where he, the poet, lives.
Thus the nature acquires his meaning, and his aspects show sentiments that, right alike those of man, could be expressed in a similar way, with the same language, as pain, joy, sadness... On the other side there is History, and the one that Sandro Penna lived is that of the middle class epoch, in the period called of Imperialism, that is the one of a stronger aggression by the capitalism, that forced on man a situation of slavery, of alienation. Man is forced to work only for the sake of profit, for results that have nothing to share with the man's moral or spiritual advantage.
Sandro escapes alienation, creating the possibility to ignore it -- he is able to grasp in the world natural scenes and human relation enough to allow him to live "his" life, what us enough for him, that to him is a full life. From here is born Sandro's "absence" -- he escapes alienation and reaches the space where his "faint star" glimmers, as the poet himself says in this poem expressing his "vacancy" from history, becoming at once witness of it:
Come è forte il rumore dell' alba!
Fatto di cose più che di persone.
La precede un fischio breve
una voce che lieta sfida il giorno.
Ma poi nella città tutto è sommerso.
E la mia stella è quella stella scialba
mia lenta morte senza disperazione. |
How strong is down's noise!
Made more of things than of people.
A short whistle precedes it
a merry voice challenging the world.
But then, all is submerged in the city.
And my star is that faint star
my death, slow and without despair. |
Sandro's poetry strikes for its extraordinary lightness and confession's transparency, for the simplicity of his way to speak, that doesn't need intermediary or subterfuges. From Poesie and Cross and Delight, to the posthumous collections Oddities and Confused Dream, there is a rare continuity in the way he remained faithful to his inner economy, with his very limpid modulations where there is no need of literary tricks.
He ignored schools and systems, and always recurred to his poetic memory. If we think about the life he carried out, so unbounded from the usual ties, it is strange not to find in his poems hints, even if veiled, to the strokes that undoubtedly he received in his life. But Sandro never loaded his poems with allusions to intentions or projects. He allowed life to melt in a unique invocation. The understood time is always the present, it is the love, freed from historical and moral reasons. The poet's voice, essential and pure, never surpassed the controlled shudder, even when the deepest element forced him to bend under the life pain and the await of love, and the dream of the discovery of a new encounter cut the sad vein and surfaced.
In 1956 Penna met the 14-year-old Raffaele, a street boy who had run away from home at the age of six. They became lovers and the boy moved in wit Penna and his begrudging mother. It was a stormy, intense relationship which suffered several ruptures before Raffaele's final departure, but it also gave much pleasure and solace to Penna.
He and Raffaele bought a German Shepherd puppy which they named Black, and once Raffaele was old enough to drive, Penna bought a car. This enabled them to spend many idyllic afternoons walking the dog in the countryside outside Rome. When, after fourteen years of intermittent cohabitation, Raffaele left to get married, all he took with him was Black. During subsequent years he granted Penna access to Black on a limited basis, as if she were their child.
If you want to read some more of Sandro Penna's poetry, please go at his page in our book Famous Homoerotic Poems.
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