By HOYT ROGERS.
MARCO GENOVESI GREW up in Vasto, a town on the coast of Abruzzo, and, at an early age, became friends with the poet Michele Celenza, whose work has exercised a lasting influence on his writing. Symptomatically, Celenza is the only Italian mentor Genovesi can distinguish, though he is conversant with the ancient and modern classics of his country. A voracious reader, he has concentrated on Anglo-American and Japanese literature, as well as the Russian novelists. Not surprisingly, his first foreign inspiration came from Charles Bukowski, a favorite among young Europeans: for them his appeal stems partly from the fact that he focuses on Los Angeles, a city imagined to lie at the farthest remove from genteel conventions. All the same, Genovesi insists that the American’s philosophy of life was more important to him than his bumptious style or hard-edge themes. In other words, he identified with Bukowski’s anti-elitist stance rather than with the details of his literary practice. As he comments: “We of the younger generation are entirely products of the mass culture, in a way that previous generations have not been. And that’s a good thing, I think. The problem is that the elite culture has become more and more restricted and isolated, and so it has lost its desire to innovate.”
Certainly the Telegrams stick as closely as possible to the raw surfaces of existence, though they are quickly subverted by an ominous undertow. From Bukowski, Genovesi’s fascination with Anglo-American literature rapidly expanded to John Fante and Jim Thompson (not coincidentally, two more rough-hewn California writers), Ernest Hemingway, Joe R. Lansdale, W. H. Auden, Oscar Wilde—and above all, Philip Roth, Virginia Woolf, and J. D. Salinger. From this list it will be clear that our English-speaking literary planet, when seen from without, is often a different world than when viewed from within.
Reading works in translation is far more common in Italy than in the United States or even in Britain, and cultivated Italians always know a lot more about our contemporary literature than we know about theirs. Untrammeled by their own categories when they take up foreign literature, they are likely to adopt an eclectic approach, mixing trends that might seem like strange bedfellows to us.
Much as he admires them, Russian novels seem to have had little impact on Genovesi’s writing. Instead, the other major influence on his work besides the Anglo-American vein is Japanese literature, especially the great haiku poets and the modern novelists Kawabata and Murakami. In Genovesi’s Telegrams, this element encourages a clipped phraseology and focused imagery that counter the more exuberant American strain, though Hemingway clearly plays a role as well.
By systematically reducing his vocabulary and syntax to the lowest possible common denominator, Genovesi declares his independence from the Italian rhetorical tradition. He has taken this approach in his novel and his short stories as well as in his poetry, and it will be interesting to see how he develops his work from here. Like him, many young Italian writers seem to consider that in a country almost crushed by the weight of its cultural heritage, any fresh impetus must spring from an outside source.
♦
Hoyt Rogers has published a poetry collection, Witnesses, and a volume of criticism, The Poetics of Inconstancy. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in many periodicals. He translates from the French, German, Italian, and Spanish. His translations include the Selected Poems of Borges and three books by Yves Bonnefoy, The Curved Planks, Second Simplicity, and The Digamma. Openwork, an André du Bouchet reader, will be published in 2014. He lives in the Dominican Republic and Italy.
Telegrams from the City under Siege (US/UK/Italy-EU) has been published in a bilingual edition by The Fortnightly Review in our Odd Volumes series.
Eight telegrams from the City under Seige | Original text | Index
