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                           CARBONES

Carbones is a collection of poems by Michele Sovente, published in 2002. In this work the trilingual poetry asserts itself: Sovente alternates Latin, the dialect of Cappella and Italian without a precise scheme.  The poet considers poetry as “one and triune”[1]. Each language has its own function and meaning:

  •Latin is the language of the ancestors and of the mythical past of the Phlegraean Fields. It is not a classical Latin, but it is used             in a modern way and it results very musical. The Latin that Sovente uses has almost a magical rhythm, it is a Latin that he                     himself invents.

  • The dialect is the language of family and childhood, connected to his land, Cappella and the Phlegraean Fields.

  • Italian is the language of literature and life, the language of contemporaneity.

The poet wants to analyze in detail the deep meaning of things, since each language is an expression of a different way of interpreting reality, the story of a different temporal dimension. Of the three fundamental times of existence, what dominates is Past, which welcomes in its womb more and more lives and things and that extends its shadow even on the present; as for Future, it seems to be shy and fragile. The themes developed in this work are related to his territory. While reading the verses of Sovente, we discover his real lived life in every word, especially the life of his origins, of his land, which he continually praises and describes using precise connotations in order to convey to the reader the sense of his belonging to the territory, as we can note in the poem A Cappella, in Via Petrara io vivo.  As De Blasi[2] points out, the literary production of Michele Sovente recalls the activity of Giovanni Pascoli, who used, as well, three literary languages in his poetic production: Greek, Latin and Italian. The use of  three languages is experimented in the pages of Carbones, where the poems, in different languages, do not occupy separate sections, nor are they juxtaposed as text and compared translation: they are distributed at a certain distance one from the other, acquiring, differently from Pascoli, their complete autonomy, as if the author wanted to present the texts not as secondary derivations compared to an original, but as many originals, certainly similar to each other, but still different because they were born in different languages. The author is able to capture a dense and simple linguistic force, in so doing. We can read examples of poems in three different languages in Divido, while in Cose sta  lengua sperduta, it is the poet himself that  describes his language. Ferragosto europeo is another example of poem written in several languages, while in Parla Agrippina the relationship between myth and history is evident.

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[1] Michele Sovente, Perché scrivo in dialetto, in "Enne", n°89- 9th/15th December 1991 p.23.

[2] Cfr. Nicola De Blasi, Le tre lingue poetiche di Michele Sovente, Poesia, n.170, March 2003.