Alfonso Gatto


Alfonso Gatto was an Italian author. Along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale, he is one of the foremost Italian poets of the 20th century and a major exponent of hermetic poetry.

Biography

Gatto had a difficult childhood, studied at the Salerno classic lycaeum where he discovered his passion for poetry and literature. In 1926 he attended the University of Naples Federico II, but he had to discontinue his studies due to financial problems. Like many Italian poets of his age, such as Eugenio Montale and Salvatore Quasimodo, he never graduated.
Gatto fell in love with the daughter of his maths teacher, Jole, and being only 21 he eloped with her to Milan. From that moment his life became quite restless and adventurous, with many changes of residence and employment: he was first a bookshop assistant, a college instructor, a proofreader, a journalist, a teacher. In 1936, because of his open anti-fascist activism, he was arrested and jailed at the San Vittore prison in Milan.
During those years, Gatto had been a contributor to various innovative journals and magazines of the Italian literary culture. In 1938 he founded the magazine Campo di Marte together with writer Vasco Pratolini and commissioned by Italian publisher Vallecchi, but it only lasted a year. It was however a significant experience for Gatto, who was able to enter the leading literary circles.
":it:Campo di Marte |Campo di Marte" had been created as a fortnightly magazine and with the specific remit of educating the public in the artistic and literary production of all genres. The magazine was directly connected with the so-called Florentine Hermeticism.
In 1941 Gatto was appointed professor of Italian literature for "high merits", at the Art School of Bologna, and a special correspondent for the newspaper L'Unità, thus being placed in a primary position for the promotion of literature of communist inspiration. Subsequently, Gatto abandoned the Italian Communist Party and became a dissident communist.
The poet died in a car accident on 8 March 1976 at Capalbio in the province of Grosseto. He is buried in the cemetery of Salerno and on his tomb is engraved his friend Montale's funeral farewell:

Poetics

Hermeticism recognizes in Alfonso Gatto one of its most important and active exponents. Not much is known about him during his first years in Salerno, which surely must have had a determinant role in his cultural background, and little is known also of his first readings, his first literary meetings, his friends. However, the publication of his first book of poems in 1932, entitled Isola, was highly welcomed as a truly new lyrical voice. When Giuseppe Ungaretti published in the same year his Sentimento del tempo, he included Gatto in a relevant chapter, notwithstanding the latter's very recent arrival on the literary scene.
With Isola, Gatto commences his poetical existence, which will conclude with his tragic death forty-four years later. Isola represents a decisive text for the construction of a hermetic grammar which will be defined by the poet himself, as a quest for a "natural absoluteness". His language is rarefied and timeless, allusive, and typical of a poetics of "absence" and empty space, rich in melodic motives. These will be the main elements of all of Gatto's output: these elements, in fact so distant from traditional models, are found in all his poems until 1939 and will gradually pass from familiar themes and landscape visions from youth, to a new phase, before and after World War II, which opens with his Arie e motivi and culminates with Poesie d'amore.

The motif of love

Gatto's motif of love is sung in all possible manners and to all possible directions and, even if with classicist tones, never loses the phonic value of words, as they become their own moment of suggestion.
In the period between 1940 and 1941 the poet revised his previous poems – which will later be included in a collection published in 1941 under the title Poesie – and they will not undergo changes until 1961 when, by giving them a better chronological and inspirational order in a new volume, will achieve Gatto's greatest lyricism.
One of the most vivid images of modern Italian poetry can be found in his poem Oblio, where the poet expresses the joy of life he feels, and which becomes memory and celebration:
In these verses one can detect a disappearing of strict analogy, part of Gatto's first books, and in his Amore della vita of 1944, he will succeed in conveying a rare vigour to a rhetorical moment dedicated to the Italian Resistance. As a matter of fact, Gatto adhered to the poetry of Italian resistance, moved by the Italians' civil and political spirit, and in his subsequent collection of poetry, Il capo sulla neve, he will create forceful and emotional words for the "Martyrs of the Resistance", expressing them in poems of deep meditation and poignant immediacy.
Gatto is thus a poet of nature and instinct, who continuously reinvigorates his poetic form and narrative structure, including in them a lyrical self-analysis and historical sense of participation. In reading his latest works – Rime di viaggio per la terra dipinta, and Desinenze – the latter published posthumously, the image lingers of a poet with a turbulent life, yet always happy to fix in memory all emotions, in a language rich of motifs and surprises.

Major worksEnglish translations of Gatto's opus are very rare, mainly due to the difficulty in translating his hermetic language. Cf. anthologies in the bibliography below.

Poetry

Alfonso Gatto also appeared in various films. In Il sole sorge ancora by Aldo Vergano he was a train conductor. Other roles he had in two films by Pier Paolo Pasolini: in Il Vangelo secondo Matteo he was the apostle Andrew, in Teorema he was a physician. He also appeared in Cadaveri eccellenti by Francesco Rosi where he was Nocio and in Caro Michele, by Mario Monicelli, from the novel by Natalia Ginzburg, where he interpreted Michele's father.