“Dear brother, live poetry! … We must recover the taste for literature in our lifebut also in training otherwise we are like a dry fruit. Poetry helps us all to be human, and today we need it so much “this writes Pope Francis In a message a Father Antonio Spadaro For the recent book by Francesco “Long live poetry!” Ares editions, presented on Friday in Rome on the occasion of the International Day of Poetry. A poem, the one to which the Pontiff is linked, as a passionate and eccletic reader, as a teacher (professor of literature at the Jesuit high school of the Colegio de la Inmaculada Concepción of Santa Fe) and as a shepherd, cited often also in the documents of the pontifical magisterium and other sources to which he drew the curator of the book, such as letters and apostolic exhortations, speeches, prefaces, interviews, interviews, interviews. videomexes.
It is a poem attached to the pasta of life, in the need of man of a mystery that dominates us but also gives a name to palpable things in the weekday warp of existence. “See? The novel, literature reads the heart of man, helps to welcome desire, splendor and misery. It is not theory.” (In your eyes it is my word. Homilies and Discourses of Buenos Aires 1999-2013, Rizzoli). A poetry that speaks to everyone, not a stylistic exercise or Hortus Conclusper Eruditi.
Antonio Spadaro, Jesuit Messina, fertile essayist, literary critic (Degree at the University of Messina), sub-secretary of the Dicastery for the culture and education of the Holy See, in the in-depth introductory essay to the writings of Francesco, for which “Reading a literary text means making life of life … relationship with reality, which is fundamental for faith, is” says well. Others “. The Pope also writes in the preface to a collection of poems by Osvaldo Pol:” The poetic word has the dwellings of meat in the heart of man “. The words of greats like Czeslaw Milosz resonate” I am only a man I need sensitive signs, build abstraction stairs tired me “or Mario Luzi:” Sing me something equal to life “.
This precious book reports the conception of Bergoglio della Poetry as a session that helps to open up, understand the world in its complexity and in the explosiveness of the ego: “Literature thus has to do, in one way or another, with what each of us wants from life, since it enters an intimate relationship with our concrete existence, with its essential tensions, with her desires and its meanings. The first plenary assembly of the dicastery for culture and education.) The words of Davide Rondoni to young poets (Florence 2023) come to mind: “Writing things that are worth in the face of the suffering of the people, who are worth in the face of the miracle of the stars that you have not created … believe in the word that believes in life and the soul, the need, invokes it, observes it, he loves it. The sacred of reality in favor of abstractions “. P. Spadaro reports a step of the preface written by Francesco to his book a divine plot. Jesus in Controcampo, ed. Marsilio: “We need the genius of a new language, of powerful stories and images, of writers, poets, artists capable of shouting the evangelical message to the world, of showing us Jesus”. But what were the authors who read and on which Jmbergoglio also formed? Lover of the universal classics and the mostcontemporaneous authors, has a familiarity with the South Americans as all-l. Borges, then Paz, Hernández, Güiraldes, Pemán, Marechal, Cortázar. Among the European authors Dostoevsky (the Karamazov brothers and memories with a subsoil “a jewel”).
Then Ts Eliot, Hölderlin, Benson (the master of the world) Malègue and Jrrtolkien: “he resumes the image of the man called to walk in bilbo and fraud, and his heroes know and act, walking, the drama that unleashes between good and evil. The” man on the way “denotes a dimension of hope” (in your eyes it is my word). The Pope has a preference for Dante and Manzoni who has always read in his family, Italian.
On Dante in the letter Candor Lucis Aeternae: “The author of the poem asks us to be in some way imitated, to make us his travel companions, because even today he wants to show us what the itinerary towards happiness is, the straight way to fully live our humanity, overcoming the dark forests in which we lose orientation and dignity”. On Manzoni, in a 2013 interview: “I read the book I Promessi Sposi three times and I have it now on the table to reread it. Manzoni has given me a lot. Manzoni’s work is the novel of the” mechanical and small affair people “who becomes an instrument of divine providence”. With the suggestive message of Francesco in the letter to the poets you can close this foray into the horizon of the poetry to which this beautiful volume has postponed us: “Dear poets, I know that you are hungry for meaning, and for this reason you also reflect on how faith is questioning life. Thanks for your service to our humanity … continue to dream, to worry, to imagine words and visions that help us read the mystery of human life and orient our societies towards universal beauty and fraternity. “