Cristina Campo (1923–1977)
Autore di The Unforgivable: And Other Writings
Sull'Autore
Opere di Cristina Campo
Opere correlate
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Nome canonico
- Campo, Cristina
- Nome legale
- Guerrini, Vittoria
- Data di nascita
- 1923-04-29
- Data di morte
- 1977-01-11
- Luogo di sepoltura
- Certosa di Bologna
- Sesso
- female
- Nazionalità
- Italy
- Luogo di nascita
- Bologna, Italy
- Luogo di morte
- Rome, Italy
- Luogo di residenza
- Florence, Italy
Rome, Italy - Attività lavorative
- poet
translator - Relazioni
- Zola, Elemire
- Breve biografia
- Her real was Vittoria Guerrini, but she published all her books hiding under the pseudonym of Cristina Campo.
She lived hidden, she read books greedily, she wrote like few in the story of our literature. She didn't publish much, she would have published even less, but her pages are still today a classic for both poetry and prose.
She died very young, due to a heart deformity, in a room on the Aventino that she almost never left; just like Emily Dickinson, Cristina's role model, whose poems she translated marvelously.
Utenti
Recensioni
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 20
- Opere correlate
- 1
- Utenti
- 190
- Popolarità
- #114,774
- Voto
- 4.4
- Recensioni
- 4
- ISBN
- 22
- Lingue
- 5
- Preferito da
- 1
Having said that, there are some wonderfully incisive aspects to her non-fiction writing. Here are short essays on Donne, a neatly constructed account that goes from his life, to his influences, to those that influenced him, and particularly the way he balances romantic imagery with precise depiction ("...thhe enduring mystery of an art informed and illuminated to the end by a more or less arcane symbolism that walks along with him and follows him and is inseparable from him...") and on Simone Weil's Venice Saved ("Only such an undivided sense of reality has the power to create, in a work of poetry, a corresponding measure of truth..."). Included here also are some of her essays on the subject of fairy tales, which she was entirely enraptured by. She writes in an essay titled 'A Rose' about the fable of Beauty and the Beast, in which the Beast is depicted as a suffering martyr, every night subjecting himself, his intellect, and his appearance to ridicule and mockery. To Campo this is not a Sisyphean project, but a Persephonian (?) one. The Beast, she says, "Girded in the age of horror and ridicule...he risked hatred and execration of what was dear to him; he descended into the Underworld and made her descend there too."
The title of this collection comes from Campo's best known essay, 'The Unforgivable', which is included in this book, but I found another translation and commentary by Andrea di Serego Alighieri and Nicola Masciandaro, available online here https://glossator.org/volumes/ as well. Campo draws from an Ezra Pound poem ("Come, my songs, let us speak of perfection -/We shall get ourselves rather disliked.") to make the case against criticism; and particularly, against the performative public life of the writer in society, instead lauding those like Djuna Barnes who live as reclusive. To her, above all is style - which is culture, solitude, a 'heightened feeling for life'. Such writers, she argues, "Have looked at beauty and not withdrawn from it," but are a fading group. She closes with advice: "Sit with your back to the wall, read Job and Jeremiah. Wait your turn. Every line read is a gain. Every line in the unforgivable book." While much of this is deeply moving, there are also the well-worn iterations familiar to anyone on facebook today - people don't read anymore, no one understands language, younger people are far too simplistic; at one point she questions whether her own generation is even capable of reading Proust anymore (reminder that Campo died in 1997, and fortunately never lived to be horrified by Booktok). I find that kind of thinking unimaginative, and indeed, a little lazy; Campo seems unaware that the same might be said of her beloved Proust by those that pre-dated him, or indeed of her own, rather laborious and florid style.
All in all, this is a challenging, but worthwhile read. It was released this year, so hasn't been reviewed much apart from one essay in the TLS, which I leave below and is far more useful than my wittering.
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-unforgivable-cristina-campo-book-review-a...… (altro)