Luigi Ballerini


Luigi Ballerini is an Italian writer, poet, and translator.

Biography

Son of Umbertina Santi, a seamstress, and Raffaele Costantino Edoardo, known as Ettore, himself a tailor who died in combat against the Germans on the island of Cephalonia in 1943, Luigi Ballerini was born in Milan and grew up in the district of Porta Ticinese. Since 2010, he has divided his time between New York, Milan, and Otranto. He studied literature at the Università Cattolica in Milan, lived for a time in London, and graduated from Bologna with a thesis on the American writer, Charles Olson. His first poems, Inno alla terra, debuted in Inventario in 1960.
In 1963, he began working on the editorial staff of Rizzoli, sending to print the Italian translation of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization. In 1965, he moved to Rome, where he met neo-experimental artists and poets such as Adriano Spatola, Giulia Niccolai, Nanni Cagnone, Eliseo Mattiacci, Magdalo Mussio, Emilio Villa, Alfredo Giuliani, Giovanna Sandri and, in particular, Elio Pagliarani, with whom he became a collaborator. Through Pagliarani, he met the founder of publisher Marsilio Editori, Cesare De Michelis, with whom he maintained a deep friendship. Through Marsilio, he published his first volume of literary criticism, La sacra Emilia, an anthology of selected poetry by Gertrude Stein, which he translated himself, and several poetry collections. Meanwhile, he wrote book reviews in the newspapers Avanti! and l’Unità, and the journal Rinascita; he taught in secondary schools; and he translated American critics and writers such as Lionel Abel, Leslie Fiedler, Herman Melville, Benjamin Franklin, James Baldwin, and Henry James. In 1971, for the publisher Guanda, he translated Kora in Hell by William Carlos Williams.
Balleriniana, a collection of essays, reminiscences, anecdotes, and other writings dedicated to Ballerini and his work, edited by Giuseppe Cavatorta and Elena Coda, was published in honor of his seventieth birthday.

The American Years

He moved to Los Angeles in 1969 and taught modern and contemporary Italian literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. This was not, however, his first experience in the United States. The following year his son, the actor Edoardo Ballerini, was born.
He moved to New York in 1971 to teach at City College and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In 1972, his first poetry collection, eccettera. E, was issued. He became chair of Italian studies at New York University in 1976, and in 1990, for a brief period, director of the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò. This post led him to assume that of chair of Italian at UCLA in 1992. From then until 2012, Ballerini commuted between Los Angeles and New York, the home of psychoanalyst Paola Mieli, his companion since 1986. In this period, he collaborated with Angelo Savelli, Paolo Icaro, and Salvatore Scarpitta, photographer Charles Traub, art critic and poet Mario Diacono, and the Language poets Charles Bernstein and Ray DiPalma. He met and collaborated with critic and writer Marjorie Perloff, poet and translator Paul Vangelisti, sculptor Richard Nonas, and composer Jed Distler, for whose opera, Tools, Ballerini wrote the libretto.
During these years, he was the promoter of Italian poetry and culture in exhibits, and at conferences and meetings.

Poetry and Poetics

Sixteen years after publication of eccetera. E, Ballerini wrote Che figurato muore, followed by Che oror l’orient, a collection of Milanese poems and translation into Milanese dialect of the thirteenth-century poems of Guido Cavalcanti, for which he won the Premio Feronia-Città di Fiano.
The subsequent collection, Il terzo gode, was published in 1994. Shakespearian Rags, published in 1996 by Roman publisher Quasar, was written in English with facing text translated into Italian by the author, with an introduction by Filippo Bettini. This was followed by Uno monta la luna and his best known work, Cefalonia 1943-2001, for which he won the Brancati Prize and the Lorenzo Montano Prize for Poetry. A complete collection of his poetry, edited by Beppe Cavatorta, was published in 2016 by Mondadori. Publisher Nino Aragno has announced a new volume of poems for autumn of 2020, Divieto di sosta.
The trajectory of Ballerini's poetry can be clearly divided into three phases. The first is apprenticeship, the second an oracular phase and, thirdly, a consistent series of “developed subjects” in which an unrenounced narrative aim is “led astray” by stimuli inherent in the language in which it is manifested. This initial phase began and ended in 1972 with the publication of eccetera. E, in which Ballerini brought to bear lessons of the Neoavanguardia and which reflected Pagliarani's influence. The second phase is characterized by extreme conciseness of conversational material. In latest phase, encompassing works between approximately 1994 and 2020, a rational function takes effect. Many texts are organized as a succession of apodoses and protases, as polysyndetic catalogues and with de-pragmaticizing appositions. “Rather than beheading meaning,” writes Cavatorta in the introduction to the Oscar Mondadori edition, “one must speak of liberation, because without this transformation, one remains trapped in the consoling slavery of a deceitfully confessional ego.”
Ballerini mixes sectorial and foreign languages, and idiomatic and vernacular expressions. Rich in literary references, his poetry is rife with straightforward as well as parodic quotations from both high literature and popular ballads and songs. His lexicon includes borrowings -- perversely turned inside-out – from sketches of Italian variety shows.

Work as a Critic

As a critic, Ballerini has worked principally in the fields of medieval poetry, Futurism, and contemporary poetry and art. The first includes essays on Cavalcanti and the Dolce Stil Novo. With regard to Futurism, he produced two editions of the Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s novels, Gli indomabili and Mafarka il futurista . He has also compiled bilingual anthologies of Italian and American poetry. Many of his essays have not been collected into a single volume, but those published include his 4 per Pagliarani and Apollo figlio di Apelle , which collects his reflections on the work of four contemporary sculptors: Lawrence Fane, Marco Gastini, Paolo Icaro, and Eliseo Mattiacci. Anthologies of American poetry published in Italy include La rosa disabitata and in collaboration with Paul Vangelisti and Gianluca Rizzo, four volumes on new American poetry: Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago. Anthologies of Italian poetry published in the United States include: Shearsmen of sorts, The Promised Land, and the volumes of Those Who from afar Look like Flies, edited in collaboration with Beppe Cavatorta and dedicated to the research poetry and poetic criticism of the late twentieth century, from the mid 1950s to 2015.

New Translation of Spoon River

For his version of Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, Ballerini sought to rework the lexical and syntactic angularity of his predecessors and translated, as he writes in a note to the text, not so much with Italian but in Italian—that is, respecting the stylistic and rhetorical demands of the target language in a way that does justice to the original's lucidity: Melville's “wise men,” for example, becomes “quelli che se ne intendono.” In 2016, through Mondadori, he published a new translation of Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, which had become famous in Italy through the joint action of Cesare Pavese and Fernanda Pivano. Based on the critical edition produced by John Hallwas, the new edition includes a historical-literary essay highlighting the political and cultural circumstances that prevailed at the time of the work's birth and development around 1914. The notes to this edition give a face to the fictitious characters and a realistic dimension to the locations where their actions take place. Particular attention is given to the phenomenon of the development of middle-class values in what had previously been primarily a society of farmers and breeders in Illinois.

Editorial Work

In 1975, in New York, Ballerini founded OOLP, with which he published titles dedicated to art criticism and research poetry. In 1988, he was Marsilio's editor for the United States, and in 2003, with ambassador Gianfranco Facco-Bonetti, head of cultural services of Italy's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he created the Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library — a series of classics of Italian culture in the fields of history, jurisprudence, political science, literature, linguistics, and philosophy, published by University of Toronto Press. In the same period, with Beppe Cavatorta, Gianluca Rizzo, and Federica Santini, he created Agincourt Press, which published texts of experimental poetry, essays on Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, and philosophy.

Gastronomic Studies

Ballerini has worked with the history of Italian gastronomy, which became the subject of his teaching at UCLA between 2005 and 2008. In 2003, he published, with his own introductory essay, the first complete edition in English of Pellegrino Artusi’s, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well. In 2004, he published the Book of the Culinary Art by Maestro Martino, the first chef of the modern era, whose work, identified only in 1931, dates to the second half of the fifteenth century. An edition of the Italian original, Libro de arte coquinaria, based on four of the five existing manuscripts and edited by Ballerini and Jeremy Parzen, was published by Guido Tommasi Editore in 2001.
Since 2012, he has created a series of meetings entitled “Latte e Linguaggio” . These rendezvous have taken place in the former dairy Chiesa Rossa in Milan. His book Erbe da mangiare was issued by Mondadori in 2008 and republished in March 2020. An English translation, A Feast of Weeds, was published by University of California Press in 2012. For many years, he has been interested the pairing of food and the visual arts, with particular attention to canvases of convivial and religious subjects painted during the Renaissance.

Works

Poetry Collections