Alessandro Carrera, University of Houston (“L'anello che non tiene. Journal of Modern Italian Literature”, rivista dipartimento di Italiano della Yale University)

Giancarlo Majorino, born in Milan in 1928, is among the contemporary Italian poets who did the most to transform into poetry such an unpoetical city as Milan (Giovanni Raboni and Maurizio Cucchi are the other two immediately coming to mind). Whoever is familiar with the notion of "Lombardic tradition" (linea lombarda) in the history of Italian poetry will not have any difficulty placing Majorino's work in the line evidenced by Linea lombarda, sei poeti a cura di Luciano Anceschi (Varese: Magenta, 1952), and the recent updating Poesia italiana 1941-1988: la via lombarda, edited by Giorgio Luzzi (Milano: Marcos y Marcos, 1989). One has only to remember that linea lombarda is made up of two major trends. One is a "school of restraint", where the voice of the poet is careful not to exceed a certain modesty of language which reflects a cautious approach to expressiveness. Vittorio Sereni is the author who exemplifies this trend at its best. The second trend of the Lombardic tradition, not represented in the two cited anthologies, is based on contamination between "low" and "high" level of language, between the crudeness of dialect and the detachment of literary language. This tendency is exemplified by Delio Tessa and, as far as prose is concerned, by Carlo Emilio Gadda. Majorino does not use contamination systematically, but his "ear" for everyday speech and the necessity that he feels, from time to time, to force the limits of comunicative language cause him to lean on the multi-leveled approach of the "second" Lombardic school.

La solitudine e gli altri is Majorino's eighth book of poems. Il follows La capitale del Nord (Milano: Schwarz, 1959); Lotte secondarie (Milano: Mondadori, 1967); Equilibrio in pezzi (Milano: Mondadori, 1971); Provvisorio (Milano: Mondadori, 1984); Ricerche erotiche (Milano: Garzanti, 1986), and Testi sparsi (Catania: Prova d'Autore, 1988). The city and the body are Majorino's major themes: how the city shapes the body of its inhabitants, and how the city eventually coincides with the body of its inhabitants. La capitale del Nord was realistic, narrative poetry. And, for Majorino, (neo)-realism and narration were only the starting points. Majorino's poetry is full of objects and everyday situations which seem to have a life of their own, forcing the narration to collapse into minimalistic mäelstroms where sleeping pills, bedrooms, glasses on the windowsill, and parts of the body demand a alanguage capable of expressing their insuppressible privateness. Yet Majorino is far from minimalism. His most extreme linguistic experiment, Provvisorio -a book virtually written in an Italian of its own- was a serious struggle against the devastating "publicity" of language, a consciously desperate attempt to recreate in poetry the same intimacy that things, feelings, and people are searching. Majorino is telling us that places of experience are becoming narrower and narrower. One there was "the capital of North", the whole city as a protagonist of the narrative. Then, in Lotte secondarie and Equilibrio in pezzi, the subject was the political upheaval of the Sixties and the Seventies. Now, except for some poems where the sea appears briefly, the landscape of La solitudine e gli altri is restricted to the desk and the window of the writer:

circa i convogli della solitudine (24)

The sea, too, is brought into the writing room:

tra dita giace mentre fisso la finestra (26)

Outside the window, a tree (the "beautiful wood animal", 62), the sky, and jet streams are found. Inside the room, there is the bed, which is often "a continuation of the desk" (80). Two lines sum up the whole scenario:

sta nella grande grotta della casa (27)

In many of Majorino's previous books (Provvisorio and Ricerche erotiche among the others) images of the body exploded under the pressure of his words. Now the body is a "little cave" inside the "great cave" of the house. The implosion of the body parallels the implosion of the urban landscape. Majorino, always a political poet even in his most private moments, does not want to seclude himself in a lair from which he may observe the outside world. From his bed-desk-window universe he is sending a poetic-political message in a bottle to others (gli altri) like him: this is our experience now, this is the leftover of the collective, progressive dream of the City. We don't know who the others are anymore:

mentre furiosi conversiamo in tanti. (15)

The aging of the dream and the aging of the body superimpose upon each other. Majorino rarely describes landscapes: his city descriptions are composed of the words its inhabitants speak. His best poems are of voices, of distorted fragments of speech one can hear on a street-car in the morning that give shape to the poetic body of the city. Through his aging and the aging of his generation, Majorino feels the aging of the city, and the end of the city as a shared experience. Eros too is aging, but the process of getting old is not a personal tragedy justaposed to the indifference of the outside world. With a beautiful reversal of the cliché, in one of the best poems of the book, Enrica, the poet's life-companion, cannot easily surrender her "young age" to the judgement of time:

alle speranze del mutamento (9)

Paradoxically, getting old becomes like the extinction of a social debt, like retiring while still mastering one's intact skills, just because the calendar shows another birthday. In the intimacy of the house, the private reality speaks differently:

nelle parole addio (58)

Some reviewers have insisted on the existential-urban angst displayed in the poems. On the contrary, I think that Majorino has never been so relieved by pressure and a sense of historical duty. Whereas the linguistic experiment of Provvisorio (an istructive "failure" in its own way) was concerned with the violence implied in any form of communication, La solitudine e gli altri testifies that the discourse on that violence, even though it has not been overcome, it has nonetheless been put aside. This book is not about angst; it is about the pleasure of exploring a voluntarily delimitated space; it is about the joy of writing against all odds. As a short, final epigram it says: Sono brevi poesie, sono fortune (89).