A phrase, a poem and a white handkerchief. Starting from these three elements Diego Bertelli, now the largest exegete of Bartolo Cattafi, proposes in the book “A happy journey”published by Carocci Editore (the result of a doctorate of research with the Swiss University of Friborg, in Cotutola with the University of Messina), an intent well expressed in the subtitle: “Poetry and destiny in Bartolo Cattafi (1951 – 1961)”.
The author follows an unprecedented and interesting trace, investigating the lesser known and valued creative period (from the debut with “in the center of the hand” to “Something precise ») by the poet born in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto in 1922a circumstance that in itself assigns to him a merit even before investigating the reading. Let’s start with the sentence. It is an author’s note that Cattafi wrote in “contemporary Italian poetry”, the anthology edited in 1959 by Giacinto Spagnoletti: “That of the poet is (…) a pure and simple human condition, poetry belongs to our most intimate biology, conditions and develops our destiny, is a way like any other of being men”. First destiny.
Let’s move on to poetry. Rich in metaphors, it is “loaded in bulk” and in it is the title of Bertelli’s book, but also the word “destiny”, used in a desired exchange with “destination”, thus enlarged it with meaning: “loaded with bulk / in this beautiful hold / charcoal salt cereal / all upside down / dashboard tonne / tonne / rock rogue spuma spur / sparkry bag / A happy journey / your arrival at fate / delivery to the bulk of the goods ».
This parable of life, made intense, strong and ferocious also by the Cattafiana absence of punctuationwhich brings a start directly at the end, gives us the strong idea of the elimination. An arrival written even before departure. Second fate.
And the white handkerchief? Here is the story – reported by Bertelli – by Ada De Alessandri, wife of Cattafi, who illuminates, in order to make us understand why he is recurring what he is in the verses entitled “tactics” inserts among the objects of his power as a poet.
A story that might seem of popular credit and which instead has an esoteric valueespecially if we take into account that we are in front of an author who immediately broke the limits of rationalism, investigating all possible ways of the mystery of human existence, in constant journey to the fate-adstination of death.
The white handkerchief, linked with a knot, was kept in a Milanese house wardrobe of Cattafi. The knot had been made by the poet on the indication of a gypsy who had read his hand and had to serve as an exorcism in the face of a negative prophecy. Did Cattafi believe in reading the hand? I do not believeRather, he had given the handkerchief and the knot a symbolic value, which perhaps made a disturbing mirror to his existential research, to the impossibility of finding a solution on the meaning of life, although so constantly investigated.
Somehow, even the fact that the case wanted that knot to be dissolved a few days before the poet’s death (in 1979), the sick of a lung neoplasm, actually transforms the symbolic fact that had remained in mental until then. Third destiny.
Moreover, speaking of the handkerchief and beyond, “the feeling – writes Bertelli – which ignites an unstoppable and” necessary “fate and that the events are the result of incomprehensible coincidences we feel in all the poetry of Cattafi”.
Diego Bertelli has already edited two volumes of the Barcelonese poet: “All the poems”, published in 2019, and “The bone, the soul” in 2022. It starts, therefore, from a unique knowledge of everything related to Cattafi, and also on this occasion he continued to dig on an infinite amount of materials: all the unpublished notes, the books of his private library, the topics underlined, the notations. A work worthy of the friars taking care of the libraries of the medieval monasteries, who is allowing to report Cattafi (as an authentic man of culture) in the place that he is up to him among the greats of the twentieth century, given that he had in life and that he gradually disclosed after his death.
Bertelli rewrites the relationships to give to Montale, Zanzotto and Sereni, finds the influences of Heidegger (and many others), recalls the cultural tear, in part even a little culturally subversive, of the University of Messina between the 1940s and fifty, the figure of Barcelona Nino Pino Ballotta and a lot of more.
Above all, refute with the width of arguments, the idea that there is a stylistic separation between what has been defined as the poetic apprenticeship and the production back to 1957 to affirm “the specificity of a poetry relentlessly faithful to itself, in which the rich procession of symbols and meanings that characterizes it is no longer cumbersome gear of the work, but the substances”. All to be subscribed.