"Buenos Aires, Benares". What are we talking about? (1)

Luigi Fontanella (“Gradiva. Internationl Journal of Italian Poetry”, n. 66 (2024), Leo Olschki Editore, Firenze, pp. 293-4).

“... Carlo Di Legge... gives us a diverse, ambitious and elegant book, Buenos Aires, Benares (Delta3 Ed., 2024, Afterword by Gabriele Pulli). It is a trilingual edition (Italian, English, Spanish), lovingly dedicated to his daughters. The author, a native of Salerno, has taken on the triple linguistic task himself, stating fideistically in the Preface, “I know very well that these are (linguistic) paths fraught with obstacles, it is not easy; by common opinion, however, it is more difficult and complicated to export my language to another, but language, not just this or that language, is our home, and I would like to inhabit it even better.” It then remains, of course, to be seen how many English and Spanish readers in Italy will read this book published by the courageous publisher operating in Grottaminarda (Avellino), intelligently directed by Silvio Sallicandro.

   I quote the touching eponymous text, written by Carlo Di Legge between Buenos Aires, Benares and Nocera Inferiore, wishing him, as this book deserves, as wide a readership as possible, that from Campania it may climb and cross mountains and seas.”

Buenos Aires, Benares

They came out at dusk, the clochard under the

usual doorway, and the blond woman with children,

would spend the night

on the sidewalk in Corrientes, in front of the Farmacity

not yet closed.

This now, which I would have called the future, how can it be,

and that time, it was August, how could it.

A stone’s throw away were the

downtown milongas and the tourists,

I was one of them, on vacaciones de tango.

The pyres in Benares, they burn the dead, and at the time

chapels with coffins, at the Recoleta

of Buenos Aires.

On the streets I use,

here

the silent, discontinuous waves of time crash.

And always they strike me: the so-called love,

the unknown in my shadow, or of those I call my similar,

and I share every fate,

I mean the meekness and doubts of the righteous,

stand with the desecrated or sold bodies.

I am that hunted man, then as now,

it is the morning of departure,

I have a child in my arms, ask for medicine.

Buenos Aires August 2010

Benares October 2017

Nocera Inferiore July 2018

Giansalvo Pio Fortunato (FormaFluens International Literature Magazine, fluid books, novembre 2024).

Giansalvo Pio Fortunato (FormaFluens International Literary Magazine, fluid books, November 2024)

It is often expected that poetry and philosophy systematically follow two different paths: one almost has the impression that, rather than language, it is the field of existence of poetry and philosophy that differs. Art and systematic-analytic construction seem to pose as an inescapable pair, a bet toward different goals, different dispositions or, more simply, different inherencies. And it is not enough - in truth - to point out that the earliest forms of philosophy arose through the inquiring handwriting of poetry; it is not enough to list philosophers as great exegetes of poets. It will come to a point where, despite all admixture, it will be pointed out that philosophy presents too massive a degree of ideation and conceptualization to be traced in real poetic texts. It will be pointed out that poetry, in turn, lashes out much more epidermically than philosophy. So, it will come to an indeterminacy, a step backward, a missed opportunity.

Then, one gets a chance to read Buenos Aires, Benares (Delta3 Editions, 2024), and that escape, that draconian-platonic separation comes to disintegrate. Certainly, distinct are the essence of poetry and philosophy: one apt to name the world, the other to motivate the naming of the world. Yet there resists a uniformity of language, an indissoluble phenomenon that nurtures both. Carlo Di Legge is, without a doubt, poet and philosopher in equal measure.He is so because there is evinced in him a thundering epiphanic expectation, a boundless force and search for living matter that takes on its meaning laterally, never for itself.This, after all, is the great secret of language, the monstrous machination (never exceptional) that makes the world transpire in the procreated conjunction of objects: a fulcrum, this, as valid in poetry as in philosophy.

In Buenos Aires, Benares, Carlo Di Legge offers us a new, unprecedented landscape, familiar and transcendent at the same time, sign-like, shadowy with a new desire to familiarize with the unknown of my shadow, or of who we are like, to reach a new map of existence proper to the world.A new map already constructed in the choice of the trilingual edition (Italian, English, Spanish and a Chinese text), which the poet delivers to us. In this topomnestic effort, the beginning of a long liturgy is established that questions the saliva of the shadow, the cell of potential, the renewed designation of the millimeter that escapes not because it is inescapable in itself, but because it is not named and not differentiated enough. One is, then, faced with a pluralistic scaffolding, in which the intimate is no longer the luxuriant pause of a claustrophobia motivated by the immobile given; rather, it turns on and, translucent, seeks a consequential filiation, a motive that received and gives.Welcome the images, host the images, / they say, / what seems insignificant can be the most important, / like those messengers the Lord sent to Abraham.This is Carlo Di Legge's epistemological and existential bet: to know how to characterize the everyday residual.Not to expect the miracle, but to clothe with silence and listening the obvious, the objective, in order to reshape it. In this enormous endeavor, then, fits that supreme dialogue between poetry and philosophy to which we referred earlier.That willingness to know how to write, to describe, to know how to raise the perception of the mountain and the sky in the part of that ancient paradox that I have here / at home: on the table. The poetic gaze is, in this sense, never habituated, never puny, always ready for a multi-layered, sign-like veining and edification.As general linguistics would have it, in the everyday alphabet is inserted, then, a broader spacing, signified as well as signifier, embedded in a conscious creative attitude.In the inventory / alongside what you are emerges the search for a specific ontology, the rest of a peremptory that, wishing to be, is not. Of Law, then, makes us addicted and revived in the grace of the indefinite, in the fog built around even the headlands and ships of Elea,

, to take one step further, to love another sun (or the same one, but never the same), another story of wanderings: the idea of being/chains things to the pride of thought that never ruins.No longer the already established thing, but the intent object between the not yet and the never; the object descended from the breast of man.

With nocturnal mind I stroll

In an unhurried tango

And do not care for the surprised figures,

Who tend to hide, laughing:

some will remain.

I am the gentleman who leads the night

in a ball gown

quilted with luminous stones.

Night is the horizon on which Buenos Aires, Benares is inscribed. A night discernible as the physicality of history, as the squaring of reflective presences, which the poet never poses motivated by the imposed frisson, but evokes, rather, by charming them with a single moment of dust and light. It is the sinuous and silent night, bewitcher and guarantor of a coveted, hoped-for, present transience (like the best dasein), ruler of fragile and long fingers that touch me to make the secret of the world be, the expectation of a verisimilitude narrative that purposely lets slip away. It is the night of the sensible, the night of the constrictors of wondrous secrets, of the fearful before the yoke of manifestation, of lovers who tune their limit, their historical oxygen counted to know themselves, turning in the balance, erect in a glimpse of nothingness. You are showing and hiding, / what is seen hides the invisible, /seeing and not seeing is the door to the secret: the poet epigraphs us and does so with a renewed dialectical doing, with a critique sedimented in the bones of living transpired, long and subdued, to emerge when perception expands, when the cone of light unites point and horizon. It is from the night that the play of essences emerges, from the night Carlo Di Legge argues the story to us.

History - winking at History and a history - is, no doubt, another vigorous fulcrum of reading in this valuable latest poetic effort.A different radicality resides in Di Legge. A radicality, perhaps, daughter of his two highest emblems of formation, Vico and Hegel.A radicality that subverts the stern call made by Hannah Arendt to the Philosophy of History: our poet's human being and, a fortiori, the poet himself is not a spectator within the traversal of a complexity of facts that can be narrated a posteriori, it is not the incensation of that horizontal transcendence that depletes the particular in order to lead back definitively to the universal, it is not the thing removed from its benign cosiness. In Di Legge, history takes on the features of a perpetual resedimentation, of a negative stratigraphy with respect to each new emergence: it is the great movement of continuous life. In Buenos Aires, Benares, there is never abstraction, no transcendent commiata, no psaltery voice. There is a multivoicedness, a muddiness inherent in the expressive “trauma” of meticulous and honest, valid and procreative analytics. The recipe, then, insists on a self that I should grasp only the essential / and I believe it must be so, / but it is an art I do not possess. Giving for solution, rather than daily despair, the agonism to the perfectible, the healthy middle of the self that at best has just begun.But: started what?

This is all well and good.It seems to me

that incalculable things are here,

together, you just can't see them all.Or

If, by adventure, right now

I was in a remote countryside, among foreign people

speaking an unknown language,

it would be true, and for that other dimension

what need is there to die

He began to derive meaning, better yet: to derive himself. This is the great task of art (of poetry, then): to receive ourselves, to open ourselves increasingly, to position ourselves to the world, to position ourselves to the world, to straddle the near past and the future. And each act of speech, each verse becomes the effort of a distinction, the versatile density in the installation of another binary, the irony that lightheartedly procreates the envelope of society and lets it shine through. What are these poets for? / If a poet goes off the rails / and loses his patience, / you don't know what he can say. Is the poet, then, the mediocrity of that History? Is he the solipsist? The priest who alienates himself? The dead poet can serve (paraphrasing); and he can serve, because, hearing and hearing himself at the same time, he can release a strained voice, a voice that essentializes itself to establish not only the different and the potential -- in some ways the mythical -- but also, and above all, the unforeseeable, the intentional with all the force of a society that has unfolded and externalized, making the voice of a time gone, in which a hundred thousand remained / in the field, and it was the end of the Empire, the scenery of the streets the fields the palaces in which one kills.This is the power of poetry: to be highly inherent and, precisely because it is inherent, modulating a single language, a single reciprocal position of senses that overcome each other, emptying themselves by filling, skeletonizing and disintegrating, whispering to each other, never being overcome, because always in an act of overcoming. Thus, Carlo Di Legge teaches us the harsh and saving law of the anterior future: of the learned fecundating the to-be-learned, in a learning that scatters the cards.This is how poetry is born. This is how poetry is realized, simply.

You separate yourself from the things you possess,

yet you do not have them.

You say it is something what you see and touch

and leave it.

But what you have really been given

is like a shadow, it's hard for you to see it

and you don't know whose it is.

It always accompanies you and you could pass it on:

an author, invisible to the eyes, disposes without writing.

Then, and it is still different, there are

your way of dancing with her, the pleasure of

traveling, the pain of loss, the will to know,

to know how to do, to say something to another.

Gabriele Pulli, Afterword to "Buenos Aires, Benares".

Thought is born from emotion, says Chilean psychoanalyst

Ignacio Matte Blanco. For Plato and Aristotle, it is the

emotion of astonishment, of wonder. Emanuele Severino

interpreted the term they both use, thauma, as anguish in

front of nothingness. Between the two ways of interpretation,

the one of the classical translators and the Severino’s,

there is, however, no opposition: wonder in the face of

being, of everything that is just for the mere fact of being

what it is, and the intuition of nothingness are given

together, at the same time, each constituting the profound

sense of the other.

However, if thought arises from emotion, this cannot happen

extemporaneously: it will involve a journey, a vicissitude,

even pain. I would situate precisely here, in this vicissitude

in which there is indeed tension towards thought,

but not as a catharsis of emotion, rather as a lingering

around its acme of intensity, the space of Carlo Di Legge’s

book, if not the one belonging to poetry in general.

An author in equal measure, and intensity of outcome, of

philosophy and poetry, aiming to give form to emotion

without betraying its innermost essence and to exercise

thought as an understanding of life without keeping feelings

at a distance, he perhaps achieves his best synthesis in

this collection. Another positive feature of the collection is

the presentation of the same poetic text in three different

languages, to the extent that it is no longer one and the

same poetic text, or it can be considered as one only if

understood as a whole in all three different versions.

Finally, it seems to me that the references to philosophy,

in a work that remains pure poetry – because it is poetry

as such, or at least this kind of poetry as such that recalls

philosophy – have a precise intrinsic reason: the forty-four

precious gates (as the author calls the poems) of which the

set is composed, trace the boundaries of the space where

thought can be caught in the very act of its formation. It

is a space in some way objective, wherein everyone, the

author as well as the reader, can recognise the very sense

of their own research, the place where their own, personal

vicissitude unfolds.

Giuseppe Vetromile, (“Transitipoetici”, 26 novembre 2024 – “Carlo Di Legge: Buenos Aires, Benares, la sua nuona raccolta poetica trilingue”).

Carlo Di Legge, known and appreciated poet, philosopher, and critic in Italy, has been refining his studies and literary researches in recent times thanks to travel experiences that have allowed him to get to know new cultures and new realities. Although he is a very talented poet, he has not published many books, but the few he has produced are certainly very intense and representative of his poetic thought. Multiverse was his most significant previous poetic work, but a great many of his texts are collected on online sites and in professional journals.

Now he reaches this voluminous trilingual publication: Italian, English and Spanish, Buenos Aires Benares, published by Silvio Sallicandro's Delta3 Editions.

He says himself at the end of the introductory note: Poetic texts are a door: they conceal and show meanings, as poetry should. I believe that the core and also the purpose of his poetic saying is concentrated here. Poetic texts, like sci-fi cosmic portals, open gateways to other dimensions, other realities, other ways of understanding and meaning. Here already in the title we discern-and most clearly in the very first poem “Buenos Aires, Benares”-a direct connection between two cities, two realities thousands of miles apart: Buenos Aires in Argentina and Benares in India. The play on words, the alliteration, is obvious, but the foundation lies precisely in the simultaneity of two distant social and cultural realities united by poetry.

However, this contemporaneity, this duality suggested by the title, expands into a kind of new Multiverse, where Carlo Di Legge's creative potential manifests itself in his texts that tell, depict, bring to light pictures and visions the most various, gathered in the 9 sections of the book, from reflections in the sentimental sphere (of the life of love) to considerations on life and death (the viaticum), to historical transpositions (Isso 333 b.c.).

The universality of the said-and the unsaid, or implied (returning to misunderstanding as a useful and necessary in poetry...) -is complemented here by the exposition in the three languages, edited directly by the author. A risky but successful experiment, as Carlo Di Legge himself says, tackling a particularly tricky and arduous literature to practice. But, so be it, our Carlo, availing himself of the studies and experiences gained in the field of foreign languages, particularly English, Spanish and even Chinese, felt that the self-translation was almost necessary, thus completing a poetic picture that truly can be interpreted and experienced globally.

The book was presented as part of the Review “Poetry is... Renaissance” by Melania Mollo and Giuseppe Vetromile, on November 8, 2024 in Pollena Trocchia (Na).

(1)Translations of the texts are by Carlo Di Legge

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