Giorgio Caproni
Giorgio Caproni was an influential Italian poet born on January 7, 1912, in Leghorn, Italy, and later moved to Genoa, a city central to his work. He began his career as an elementary school teacher and became an active participant in the resistance movement during World War II. His early poetry collections, such as "Come un'allegoria" and "Ballo a Fontanigorda," exhibit a naturalist style and reflect on rural life, while his later works, like "Finzioni" and "Il passaggio d'Enea," delve into themes of love and the human condition, particularly in the wake of the war. Caproni is noted for his mastery of the sonnet form and for blending traditional Italian literary influences with modern sensibilities. His later poetry took on a more fragmented style, characterized by irony and aphorisms, marking a shift in his artistic approach. Caproni's contributions to literature extend beyond his own poetry, as he also translated notable works from various authors, enriching the Italian literary landscape. He received honorary citizenship in Genoa in recognition of his deep connection to the city and its reflection in his poetry. His work is celebrated for its thematic depth and innovative use of form, making him a significant figure in 20th-century Italian literature.
On this Page
Giorgio Caproni
Poet
- Born: January 7, 1912
- Birthplace: Leghorn, Italy
- Died: January 22, 1990
- Place of death: Rome, Italy
Biography
Giorgio Caproni was born on January 7, 1912, in Leghorn, Italy. His family moved to Genoa, a city which figures prominently in his poetry, when he was ten years old. Upon completion of his studies, Caproni worked as an elementary school teacher in various small towns. In 1938, he married Rina Rettagliata, with whom he had a son and a daughter. The following year Caproni moved to Rome, where he lived until his death in 1990. He was active in the resistance movement and fought on the western front in World War II.
Except for a brief period of silence after the end of the war, when he contributed articles, stories, and translations to a number of journals, Caproni wrote poetry consistently while working as a teacher. His early collections, Come un’allegoria (1936), and Ballo a Fontanigorda (1938), display a mannered naturalist approach to the poet’s rural surroundings and pay particular attention to moments of transition. While rooted in twentieth century experience, Caproni’s work speaks more to the Italian literary tradition than it does to a given poetic movement.
Finzioni (1941), predominantly a collection of love lyrics, demonstrates Caproni’s increased comfort with rhyme and incorporates the sonnet, a form Caproni would use often in his career. Finzioni combines moments of happiness with an awareness of the inescapable passage of time. The pinnacle of Caproni’s first poetic phase is Il passaggio d’Enea (1956), which includes reflections on the human condition after World War II in its many poemetti (long poems divided into shorter ones). The title poem in Il passagio d’Enea, widely regarded as Caproni’s masterpiece, is based upon a sculpture of Aeneas in a Genoa square. Another poem in his collection Stanze della funicolare (1952) explores the shifting perspective from a Genoan funicular as it steadily progresses toward death.
In 1985, Caproni received honorary citizenship in Genoa for his inspired incorporation of the city into his work. Caproni’s 1965 collection, Congredo del viaggiatore, ed altre prosopopee, began a new phase in his poetic career. Caproni eschews closed metrical forms for a more epigrammatic style in which the dominant modes are aphorism, irony, paradox, and an emphasis on spoken language. By 1982, when Il franco cacciatore was published, Caproni’s poetry had become so fragmented and his syntax so dislocated that his poems often consisted solely of a single word or line.
In addition to his own poetry, Caproni’s contribution to the Italian world of letters includes his translations of writers Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis C�line, Jean Genet, Guy de Maupassant, and Marcel Proust. His greatest achievement was the restoration of the literary modes pioneered by such canonical Italian poets as Giacomo Leopardi and Dante Alighieri in a fragmented form for modern readers. Caproni’s constant reworkings of form may provide the unifying motif for his work as a whole. With its graceful and obsessive repetition of a few themes within the vast space of the Italian poetical tradition, Caproni’s poetry resists easy classification.