Winter Journey Viaggio D'inverno

by Attilio Bertolucci, Nicholas Benson (Translator)

Translated here into English for the first time in its entirety by Nicholas Benson, Bertolucci's WINTER JOURNEY (Viaggio d'inverno, 1971) traces the author's nervous anxiety and the broader afflictions of an emergent consumer society at the Italian midcentury. Increasing social proximity illuminates a persistent isolation, relieved only-tenuously-by the bonds of family and friendship. In a country then recovering from the effects of nationalism, it is significant that a major poet would avoid the pitfalls of populism and paternalism, just as his writing avoids antagonism and aestheticism. Bertolucci's meditations on the effects of the Fascist ventennio can be read as a subtle critique of such divisions, which weakened resistance to the regime and enabled the country's later fragmentation. There are other precedents in Italian poetry for rejecting the florid rhetoric that seemed to overspill the nineteenth century; Bertolucci's enduring contribution may reside in his open examination of what remains possible if social and personal beliefs, typically connected to an idealized future or past, are extinguished in the voracious present of the inquiring self. About the Author ATTILIO BERTOLUCCI (Parma 1911 - Rome 2000), one of Italy's greatest twentieth-century poets, was also an influential editor, essayist, and translator. Among Bertolucci's many honors was the 1991 Eugenio Montale prize, considered the highest award in Italian poetry. About the Translator NICHOLAS BENSON holds a PhD in Italian from New York University. His poetry and translations have appeared in New England Review, Pequod, Seneca Review, and other journals. If WINTER JOURNEY is about Attilio Bertolucci's struggle to survive, it is also instructive; that rare thing: a poetic text that is both useful and beautiful. . . . Where Ungaretti and Montale and Pasolini and Pavese presented landscapes always fraught with extremity, both spiritual and material, Bertolucci offers a totality in which there is always work to be done and restoring the house is congruent with restoring the soul. The luminous, uncanny precision of Nicholas Benson's translations give Bertolucci's poetry a presentness that is altogether compelling. - Mark Rudman, author of RIDER (WINNER OF THE National Book Critics Circle Award in 1994) and, most recently, Sundays on the Phone Bertolucci's peculiar poetic genius is perhaps that of having brought to the surface the poetry hidden in that apparently most unpoetic subject, the "homme sensuel moyen" (and I use the word "subject" in both of its senses: as theme or object of poetry, and as a poetizing subject). The poem "Verso Casarola" seemed to me an apt symbol of all that: Bertolucci is able to describe as ultimately idyllic and tinged with eroticism the partial and property-assured displacement of a middle-class family against the background of one of the most tragic collective moments in Italian history (September 1943). The translator, Nicholas Benson, skillfully meets the challenge of rendering Bertolucci's peculiar Italian style. His translation is based on scholarly knowledge and, at the same time, animated by a poetic sensitivity. --Paolo Valesio, Giuseppe Ungaretti Professor in Italian Literature, Columbia University; founder and editor of Italian Poetry Review

240 pages, Hardcover

First published November 30, 2004

About the author

Attilio Bertolucci (18 November 1911 – 14 June 2000) was an Italian poet and writer. He is father to film directors Giuseppe and Bernardo Bertolucci.

Bertolucci was born at San Lazzaro (province of Parma), to a family of agricultural bourgeoisie of northern Italy. He began to write poems very early. In 1928 he collaborated to the Gazzetta di Parma, where his friend Cesare Zavattini was editor-in-chief. The following year Bertolucci published his first poetical collection, Sirio.

In 1931 he started his studies of law in the University of Parma, which however he left soon in favour of artistical and literary studies. In the following year his work Fuochi di Novembre gained him the praise of Italian poets like Eugenio Montale.

In 1951 he moved to Rome. His marriage with Ninetta Giovanardi had given him two sons, Bernardo (1940-2018) and Giuseppe (1947-2012), both future film directors. In 1951 he also published La capanna indiana and won the Viareggio Prize for literature. In this period he cemented a friendship with Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Viaggio d'inverno ("Winter Voyage") of 1971 is one of Bertolucci's finest works. This work saw a noteworthy change of style in Bertolucci's poetry: while the first works were, according to Franco Fortini, characterized by "the choice of a humble language for pastoral situations", his works were more complex and marked by unsureness feelings. From 1975, together with Enzo Siciliano and Alberto Moravia he directed the literary review Nuovi Argomenti. He won another Viareggio Prize for the narrative poem Camera da letto (1984–1988).

His last work was La lucertola di Casarola (1997), a collection of works from his youth and other unpublished poems.

Bertolucci died in Rome in 2000.