ALTHOUGH IT IS tempting to frame Italy's tumultuous trajectory through the twentieth century by placing the twenty-odd years of fascist rule under il Duce at one end of the century and Berlusconi's (aka il Cavaliere) buffoon-style tyranny of moneyed conceit at the other, the duke-to-knight analogy fails to do justice to the complexity and variety of realities that characterise Italy. The subtle strength of The Faber Book of 20th-Century Italian Poems lies in the fact that within the scope of some 150 poems by fewer than fifty poets it manages to review the variety and vitality of Italian poetry.

Even though Jamie McKendrick's anthology presents the poets in chronological order (without, unfortunately, giving the dates of composition or the collections from which the individual poems are drawn), it is possible to view the variety of voices of Italy's past century as one might an orchestral score. Some voices irrupt on the scene without warning or preamble, some counterbalance or act as a response to another's call, others give out a sudden cry and fade only to be echoed much later. Naturally the boundary of a century, as all man-made boundaries, is an artificial construct; nonetheless it operates in our minds as powerfully as the construct of a national identity. If we cannot do full justice to a poetic tradition by talking of a single century's opening and closing period without taking into consideration what came before and followed, we can discern the tone of its central themes and voices.
McKendrick's selection opens with a brief sample of the 1905 masterpiece Halcyon by Gabriele D'Annunzio, a controversial and innovative figure whose sensationalist lifestyle inspired the fascist program and turned him into a fallen angel of Italian literature. D'Annunzio wove together the noble aspects of the classical tradition with a truly modern poetic style and language. His Halcyon, a hymn to summer, opens our orchestral score with a powerful flourish; inevitably some found his style too bombastic and reacted with a subdued tone full of irony.

Montale was to say that Guido Gozzano entered Italy's poetic scene casually, strolling in with his hands in his pockets. The seven pages in the present anthology (selected from J.G. Nichols' masterful translation of The Colloquies published by Carcanet in 1987) of Gozzano along with a couple of poems by the fellow crepuscular poet Govoni, illustrate the shift to a prose-like simplicity with a strong narrative drive.

Meanwhile the futurist Marinetti irrupted into the orchestra pit to proclaim that the time had come to awaken the old hammer-wielding god from lethargic sleep. His "The Futurist Aviator Speaks to His Father, Vulcan" is a brilliantly chosen example to represent Italy's echo to the French surrealist movement. The image of an aviator who circles and teases Mt Etna, mythical home of Vulcan, shows just how bold the call to anarchy and a new machine-driven age was in 1912 when men began to fly:

Etna, Etna, who dances better than I
pirouetting above your fearsome maw
bellowing a thousand metres below?
Watch me descend and dip towards your sulphurous breath

In form the poem is perhaps rather tame compared to Marinetti's later experiments, but its opening lines "I come to you, Vulcan, to give back the laugh / to you, sputtering, old ventriloquist" show well enough the tenor of the foment the futurist movement--not unlike the more recent punk subculture--sought to provoke in the provincialism of Italian culture in the first decades of the twentieth century. If only anthologists would give the date and title of collections that poems are drawn from they would help readers place the material in some context. In Marinetti's case the above poem is from The Pope's Aeroplane, 1912 in French and 1914 in Italian; such bibliographical details speak for themselves.

Dino Campana's extraordinary erudition and breadth of influences have only recently begun to be recognised, debunking the poète maudit myth that his tragic life evoked. The two poems in the anthology drawn from Orphic Songs, his one and only collection published in 1914 before he became mentally unstable (by 1918 he had been permanently committed to a mental hospital), do not give a sufficient picture of Campana's genius but in them one can glimpse the ethereal world of dreams and archetypes that was inspired by the classical journeys to the underworld as well as by Rimbaud and Freud.

WITH UMBERTO SABA, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale and Salvatore Quasimodo we enter the central themes and period of Italy's twentieth-century poetry. Saba's call for a lyricism based on complete sincerity takes form in a candid portrayal of both the inner and outer self unencumbered by any masks or shields: a self in search of redemption via the themes of love and death that permeate his poetry. McKendrick's decision to employ more than one translator for each poet bears rich fruit, for it means that the voices are not homogenised, and, as with the selection of poems by Saba, it shows the range and facets that make up a given poet's voice. McKendrick's own translation of one of Saba's poems, "Caffe Tergeste", is both masterful and memorable, especially so in the second stanza:

Cafe of thieves and den of whores,
I suffered agonies at your tables,
suffered to fashion myself a new heart.

Montale, as McKendrick notes in his introduction, "has held the same kind of sway, both within his culture and internationally, that T. S. Eliot did". Accordingly, he has been the most translated Italian poet of the twentieth century; the representative selection in the present anthology includes translations by Jonathan Galassi, Robert Lowell, Paul Muldoon and others, and covers both the classic early Montale from the 1920s to the 1950s, as well as poems from the 1970s that exemplify the shift in tone of the late Montale with its intensified self-irony and more accessible diction.

The poems Montale wrote in memory of his wife, selected from "Xenia", which was first published in Satura, 1971, have been compared to Hardy's late poems for his first wife and could just as easily be compared to Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters. In them Montale continues his Petrarchan debate of poet-critic with the absent beloved, but the presence evoked by memories acts increasingly as pain and balm at the same time; the presence of his deceased wife is that of an angel-muse of irony. Nowhere is the parallel to Hughes' Birthday Letters as striking as in "Xenia" I, 5:

I've never understood
whether I was your dog,
faithful and sick with distemper,
or you were mine.
To others you were a myopic insect
at a loss in the blah-blah
of high society. They were naive,
those clever ones. They didn't know
they were your laughingstock:
that even in the dark you made them out
unmasking them
with that infallible sense of yours,
your bat-radar.

At eighteen pages, the selection of Montale represents the widest sample of a single poet in the present anthology, and is flanked on either side by a comprehensive selection of Ungaretti and Quasimodo, making up the three poets that are commonly said to form the triumvirate of the hermetic school.

In presenting a literary prize to Sandro Penna and Margherita Guidacci in 1948, Gadda described Penna's poetry as emanating uniquely from his own self, so that in reading him one experiences a pleasant surprise: "the narrative unfolds in the unforeseen, the theme, rendered impartial, transforms itself into gnomic variations". The aphoristic or gnomic quality of Penna's poetry, coupled with a simplicity of diction, renders his poetry difficult to translate insofar as it can easily slip into a banal form of English; above all the "pleasant surprise" in the original relies on the syntax, which is often subtly distorted, and a prosody that, as Gadda notes, is "slightly mocking ... but almost always polite". The selection of Penna's poems (unfortunately Margherita Guidacci is not included) is limited by the choice of a single available translation and the only alternative interpretation of Penna's own voice is given by McKendrick's translation of the last poem in the selection.

BY FAR THE WIDEST selection of poets in The Faber Book of 20th-Century Italian Poems is made up by the voices that came to prominence between 1945 and 1975. Here will be found the Italian poets that are familiar to an English audience, such as the voices of realism and ideology of Cesare Pavese, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Vittorio Sereni, and the perhaps slightly less familiar Attilo Bertolucci and Franco Fortini, whose closing line to "Translating Brecht" exemplifies the credo of poetry written in any language since the 1950s "Poetry / changes nothing. Nothing is certain, but write."

Equally well represented are the voices of irony, Luciano Erba, Nelo Risi and Giovanni Giudici, whose language demystifies and collapses the notion of poetic diction. Irony and satire, it must be remembered, are one of the threads that weaves through Italian literature, harking back to ancient Rome and championed by such modern figures as Dario Fo. Risi's "Italy", once again admirably translated by McKendrick, gives a wonderful synopsis of the power of satire and is worth quoting in full:

She's a woman with her heart in the south
but what she wears is rich stuff from the north.
Courted by businessmen, at the mercy of
canny, quick-fingered folk, she's lost
her smile and her lovely body's left
stained among tombstones.

But still they set her up in the pose
of the Madonna, girt in a sky-blue mantle
for the family photo. Gravid in armchairs,
governors and priests have fashioned
a crown for her.

She's no longer a mother to us
--averse to offspring, she gives birth
to disasters. Over the incessant
hum of motors there's no mistaking
the hammer blows as they prepare
her long narrow coffin.

Mario Luzi's token one-page representation in McKendrick's anthology reflects the judgment of the English-speaking world upon a poet who within Italy is touted as the pre-eminent grand old man of Italian modernist and postmodern poetry. Born in 1914, Luzi espoused the hermetic agenda and in the 1950s immersed himself in a study of French Romanticism and its Italian echoes. "Night Cleans the Mind" (1956) and "Year" (1949), the two poems in the present anthology, stem from collections of this second period. Although his poetry is well crafted and at times exhibits an exhilarating verse structure that metrically modulates itself to the subject, and notwithstanding having searched the thousand-odd pages of his collected poems, I continue to be baffled as to why Luzi holds such a prominent position in Italy. What fails to excite is the message itself; somehow the images do not stay, but transform themselves into philosophical platitudes.

Belonging to the same generation as Luzi but in total contrast, Andrea Zanzotto's language and images are firmly rooted in the reality of his native Veneto. Recognised as "la grande voce oracolare" (the great oracular voice) of Italian poetry of the twentieth century, he has attracted much attention in the English-speaking world and is perhaps better appreciated outside than within Italy. Part of the reason stems from the fact that Zanzotto writes much of his poetry in a rural Veneto dialect, and belongs to that robust tradition of Italian dialect voices that refute Dante's injunction to write "eloquently in the common tongue". What the half-dozen pages in the present anthology amply show, however, is that far from limiting the audience, Zanzotto's language gains tremendous import. The problem, from an Italian perspective, is that translating him into a foreign tongue keeps the impact, whereas a translation into Italian would lose much of it by the sheer socio-political "overshadowing effect" of the standard language. Much of Zanzotto's experimental flavour in his poetry, as when he employs nonsense talk used by mothers to their children, brings to evidence the dampening and muting affect of societal norms on language.

IF WOMEN POETS from the first half of the century are overlooked in this anthology this only partly reflects their neglect by the Italian literary establishment of the time. Although Ada Negri's (1870-1945) poems with their social injustice theme were well received and widely read at the time (between 1892 and 1936 she published nine collections of verse as well as several works of narrative) and in 1940 won the "Mussolini" prize and was the first woman to be admitted to the Accademia d'Italia, her poems have dated badly and history has sided with Croce's criticism of her work as "un-poetic" rather than with Carducci's praise of it.

On the other hand, some of the better voices, such as Vittoria Aganoor Pompilj (1855-1910) whose first collection Leggenda Eterna of 1900, and Nuove Liriche of 1908, were also well received, seem to fall into neglect because they are somehow deemed to have followed rather than instigated a trend or belong to a lingering style of a previous time. Such judgments, however, distort the reality of a poetic tradition or milieu.

Women were certainly writing poetry in Italy before 1950. Some, like Lalla Romano, who turned to fiction after having published a collection of poetry in 1941, did not pursue a poetic career. Others, for one reason or another, did not produce a large corpus of poetry but like a shooting star flared and burned in the same instant. Their poetry, nevertheless, deserves our attention.

The poetry of Antonia Pozzi (1912-38) was published in 1939 following her suicide, but as Montale and other critics have pointed out, far from being a naive or spontaneous voice, her work, written over a ten-year period, shows a definite progression and dialogue with the main currents of the poetry of the time, especially with the early hermetic strand. The omission of her voice from the present anthology is perhaps its most obvious lacuna.

With the second half of the century, women's voices in McKendrick's anthology begin to be represented by Maria Luisa Spaziani and Amelia Rosselli. Although closely associated with the neo-avant-garde movement of Gruppo 63 (which is best represented in the anthology by Edoardo Sanguineti) the poetry of Amelia Rosselli (1930-96) wrenches normal and poetic linguistic codes but does so from a deeply private and disconcerting struggle with mental illness and the individuals and institutions she turned to for help. The opening poem, taken from her first collection, War Variations of 1964, attests to the singularity of her voice and foreshadows the images of illness and suffering of her later collections:

I was, I flew, I fell trembling into the
arms of God, and may this last sigh
be my whole being, and may the wave reward,
held in difficult union, my blood,
and from that supreme deceit may death
become vermilion be given back to me, and I
who from the passionate brawls of my comrades plucked
that longing for death
will enjoy, finally--the age of reason;
and may all the white flowers along the shore, and
all the weight of God
beat upon my prisons.

Italian feminist poetry, perhaps the only poetic trend to have come to fruition in the 1970s, is represented by Biancamaria Frabotta, Rossana Ombres, and the light humorous touch of Patrizia Cavalli.

Federico Fellini's 1979 television film Orchestra Rehearsal, in which a conductor loses control of the musicians, who revolt against the idea that the music they are to play is decided for them, epitomises the disintegration and increasing disillusionment with ideologies that Italy, and the world at large, experienced after 1968 through to the late 1980s. Like the musicians in Fellini's satire, many poets rebelled against any strictures of form or content and the very concept of forming part of a tradition was rejected, each voice claiming total independence. Only after the old church in which the musicians are rehearsing begins to crumble under the impact of a large wrecking ball does the orchestra re-group among the rubble to begin the rehearsal.

IT IS PROBABLY still too early to clearly make out the dominant themes of Italy's poetry at the close of the past century and the opening of the present one. The last generation of poets, represented in McKendrick's anthology by half a dozen voices, point towards a distinct trend; a poetry that purposefully avoids any political and historical function, that searches for an original untrammelled vision, best exemplified by the orphic verses of Valerio Magrelli and Antonella Anedda. Absence and void figure prominently.

Another trend, not represented in the present volume, was inaugurated in Italy by the publication of Poesia Italiana della Contraddizione in 1989, an anthology of "Italian poetry of contradiction", which renewed the avant-garde movement of 1963 and has been dubbed Gruppo 93. It advocates "una scrittura materialistica", a "materialistic" poetry that aims to rouse; polemical and critical, conscious of its aim to provoke and reawaken a poetry embedded in its sociopolitical and historical context.

Italian poetry, as McKendrick notes in the introduction, is characterised by a strong cultural context, the poems and the poets are in constant interaction with each other and are animated by "the text versus text, the tributes, the quarrels, affectionate or otherwise" that give the poetry its more "self-reflexive and philosophical cast ... than is common with the Anglo-Saxon tradition". The three distinctive trends of the last generation of Italian poets--the feminist voices, the poetry of void and absence, and the new avant-garde movement--continue and renew the dialogue that epitomises Italian poetry.

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