Virgil Schönbeck (15 January 1885 – 21 September 1957), known by his
pen name Virgilio Giotti, was an Italian poet writing both in Italian and in the
Triestine dialect
The Triestine dialect ( it, triestino, Triestine: ) is a dialect of Venetian spoken in the city of Trieste.
Many words in Triestine are taken from other languages. As Trieste borders with Slovenia and was under the Habsburg monarchy for almost s ...
. Giotti's poetry "which is not so much linked to the vernacular tradition as to contemporary poetry in the Italian language, from
Pascoli and the
Crepuscolari to
hermeticism
Hermeticism, or Hermetism, is a philosophical system that is primarily based on the purported teachings of Hermes Trismegistus (a legendary Hellenistic combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth). These teachings are containe ...
, uses the dialect to give more intimate vibration to its lyrical motifs, now inspired by a loving or familiar, serene or painful intimacy, now by nature, by the landscape, by the minute life of his city; in forms that from the musicality of the ''
canzonetta
In music, a canzonetta (; pl. canzonette, canzonetti or canzonettas) is a popular Italian secular vocal composition that originated around 1560. Earlier versions were somewhat like a madrigal but lighter in style—but by the 18th century, especial ...
'' approach more and more, and with ever greater grace, an epigrammatic essentiality."
He has been credited as one of the great Italian poets of the 20th century,
and is regarded as the greatest Triestine dialect poet.
Biography
He was born in Trieste, at the time still part of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, on 15 January 1885, the son of Riccardo Schönbeck, a native of
Kolín
Kolín (; german: Kolin, Neu Kolin, Collin) is a town in the Central Bohemian Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 32,000 inhabitants. The town centre is well preserved and is protected by law as an urban monument reservation.
Administra ...
,
Bohemia, of German descent,
and Emilia Ghiotto, a Venetian, from whose surname he derived his pseudonym.
In 1907 he moved with his family to
Florence
Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany Regions of Italy, region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilan ...
to escape the Hapsburg draft and for several years was a commercial traveler, mainly travelling to Switzerland. In 1912 he met the Muscovite noblewoman Nina Schekotoff,
who soon became his partner and with whom he had three children: little Tanda (Natalia), and Paolo and Franco.
In 1914 he published in Florence the collection of poems ''Little songbook in the Triestine dialect'', which was to be followed by ''Caprizzi, Canzonete e Stòrie'' published in the 1928 edition of ''
Solaria'', ''
Colori'', published in 1941, ''Sera'' in 1946, ''Versi'' in 1953.
In May 1919 he returned to Trieste, opening a small newsagent selling newspapers and books. He published prose and above all poetry for many magazines, including ''Solaria'', ''Riviera Ligure'', ''Circoli'', ''L’Italia letteraria'', ''Lirica'', and ''Letteratura''. He later had a job at the ''Lega nazionale'', as an inspector of kindergartens in Istria and the Karst. Giotti was a skillful painter, and during this period produced many drawings.
He also produced his ''Caprizzi canzonete e stòrie'' and was reported by his friend
Roberto Bazlen to
Eugenio Montale
Eugenio Montale (; 12 October 1896 – 12 September 1981) was an Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, and recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Life and works
Early years
Montale was born in Genoa. His family were che ...
, who reviewed his book, emphasizing his qualities of "elegiac landscapist" and observer, and comparing him to
Salvatore Di Giacomo
Salvatore Di Giacomo (12 March 1860 – 5 April 1934) was an Italian poet, songwriter, playwright and fascist, one of the signatories to the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals.
Di Giacomo is credited as being one of those responsible for ...
.
After the suppression of the ''Lega nazionale'', Giotti was an employee at the Comune di Trieste, and later at the Maggiore Hospital in Trieste, where he worked until the end of his life.
In the 1920s his daughter Tanda married the antifascist Emilio Quarantotto, with whom she had a daughter, Vittorina, and followed her husband to the Tremiti Islands and to Chiaromonte. His other son Paolo started military service in 1937 but was accused of antifascism and sent to the Tremiti Islands for a year of internment, which was a hard blow for Giotti, although his son was released in 1938 for good behavior.
Giotti, who in 1941 lost his mother Emilia, worked so that his son Paolo may set out to the
Eastern front to act as an interpreter. His son did depart in February 1942, and his brother Franco followed him in December. Both his sons were captured, and died in January 1943. Giotti kept hoping until January 1946, when the news of Paolo's death finally reached him. Thereafter, keeping his sobriety and lucidity, he started writing a diary which was published posthumously as ''Appunti inutili'', published with an introduction by Stuparich in 1959.
He was a longtime friend of
Umberto Saba
Umberto Saba (9 March 1883 – 26 August 1957) was an Italian poet and novelist, born Umberto Poli in the cosmopolitan Mediterranean port of Trieste when it was the fourth largest city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Poli assumed the pen name ...
, for whom he designed the logo of the ''Libreria Antica e Moderna'' and cured and illustrated the ''
plaquette'' of ''Cose leggere e vaganti'',
and helped in the formation of philosopher
Giorgio Fano, who married his sister Maria.
However, when Giorgio left his sister for the writer Anna Curiel, Maria committed suicide, taking her sick child with her.
Facing such tragedies, Giotti always kept a calm and sober attitude. He didn't share Saba's passion for psychoanalysis, and his relationship with Saba deteriorated during the 1930s, up to when they even avoided to meet.
He was also the author of delicate poems in the Italian language, such as ''
Lyrics and Idylls'' published in the 1931 edition of ''Solaria'', of the aforementioned private diary ''Appunti inutili'', and of some short stories; in 1946 he translated the poet
Esenin's ''A Letter to Mother'' from Russian into Italian. In 1937 the critic dedicated an article to the poet from Trieste in the
Corriere della Sera. Pancrazi, in his '' Giotti poeta triestino'', put him among the great poets of the century, calling his dialectical poetry ''écriture d’artiste''.
Other prominent critics, such as
Natalino Sapegno,
Cesare Segre
Cesare Segre (4 April 1928 – 16 March 2014) was an Italian philologist, semiotician and literary critic of Jewish descent, and the Director of the ''Texts and Textual Traditions Research Centre of the Institute for Advanced Studies of Pavia'' ...
,
Gianfranco Contini
Gianfranco Contini (4 January 1912 – 1 February 1990) was an Italian academic and philologist.
He studied at the Collegio Mellerio Rosmini in Domodossola, then at the University of Pavia, where he graduated in 1933. Later, he studied also ...
wrote positively about him. In the essay ''Poesia di Giotti'' published by on ''Il ponte'' in November 1948, he was acknowledged as the greatest among the poets writing in dialect.
He was consecrated as such by
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini (; 5 March 1922 – 2 November 1975) was an Italian poet, filmmaker, writer and intellectual who also distinguished himself as a journalist, novelist, translator, playwright, visual artist and actor. He is considered one of ...
, first in the anthology ''Poesia dialettale del Novecento'' (1952), and then in a memorable conference in 1956, later published in ''
Paragone
Paragone ( it, paragone, meaning ''comparison''), was a debate during the Italian Renaissance in which painting and sculpture (and to a degree, architecture) were each championed as forms of art superior and distinct to each other. While other ar ...
''.
Poetry
The first verses of Giotti were influenced by
Pascoli,
Gozzano and the ''
Crepuscolari'', both in the style and in the themes; starting from ''Caprizzi, Canzonete and Stòrie'' the melodic motifs dominate in his verses, which will bring him closer to
Di Giacomo and to some production of Saba.
Giotti's dialect is a dialect which, while remaining natural, is not vernacular but intellectualistic and seems to contrast with the character of its themes linked to the daily life of a quite internalized Trieste. Unlike Svevo and Saba, Giotti's Trieste is not the Habsburg port of Central Europe but rather a simple picture of affections and people: its "Triestinity", alien to the search for the picturesque and folkloric, lies in the use of the dialect and in the setting, background for poetry of high lyrical tension.
In his verses the quatrain of partially rhythmic hendecasyllables with typical metric inversions prevails (''Dei purziteri, / ne le vetrine'') which make the syntactic- rhythmic figures well balanced (''le feste / de Pasqua xe vignude, e vignù xe / l'istà'').
Typical of Giotti is also the use of
enjambement
In poetry, enjambment ( or ; from the French ''enjamber'') is incomplete syntax at the end of a line; the meaning 'runs over' or 'steps over' from one poetic line to the next, without punctuation. Lines without enjambment are end-stopped. The or ...
, especially in the second collection, which divides not only the syntactic groups between
strophe
A strophe () is a poetic term originally referring to the first part of the ode in Ancient Greek tragedy, followed by the antistrophe and epode. The term has been extended to also mean a structural division of a poem containing stanzas of varyi ...
and strophe or between verse and verse, but also the same word into two parts (''veda- / rò"; "de con- / tentezze''). The punctuation is very dense and analytical. A more colloquial agreement between syntax and meter is found in the last collection, closer to certain verses of Saba, where the hendecasyllable becomes discursive and elegiac.
Works
*''Piccolo canzoniere in dialetto triestino'', Gonnelli,
Florence
Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany Regions of Italy, region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilan ...
1914
*''Caprizzi, Canzonete e Stòrie'', Edizioni di "
Solaria", Florence 1928
*''Colori'' (
silloge delle sue liriche), Florence, Parenti, 1941;
Padua
Padua ( ; it, Padova ; vec, Pàdova) is a city and ''comune'' in Veneto, northern Italy. Padua is on the river Bacchiglione, west of Venice. It is the capital of the province of Padua. It is also the economic and communications hub of the ...
, Le Tre Venezie, 1943;
Milan
Milan ( , , Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 million, while its metropolitan city h ...
-
Naples
Naples (; it, Napoli ; nap, Napule ), from grc, Νεάπολις, Neápolis, lit=new city. is the regional capital of Campania and the third-largest city of Italy, after Rome and Milan, with a population of 909,048 within the city's adminis ...
, Ricciardi, 1957; Milan, Longanesi, 1972 (con l'incorporazione delle ''Poesie per Carlotta'', scritte nel 1949);
Turin
Turin ( , Piedmontese: ; it, Torino ) is a city and an important business and cultural centre in Northern Italy. It is the capital city of Piedmont and of the Metropolitan City of Turin, and was the first Italian capital from 1861 to 1865. The ...
, Einaudi, 1992, a cura di Anna Modena (anche questa edizione è comprensiva delle ''Poesie per Carlotta'')
*''Sera'', Edizione privata,
Trieste
Trieste ( , ; sl, Trst ; german: Triest ) is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy. It is the capital city, and largest city, of the autonomous region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, one of two autonomous regions which are not subdivided into prov ...
1946; Turin, De Silva, 1948
*''Versi'', Edizioni dello Zibaldone, Trieste 1953
*''Appunti inutili'', Edizioni dello Zibaldone, Trieste 1959
Bibliography
*
Giuseppe Citanna, ''La poesia del Giotti'', in «Pagine istriane», VII, 26-27, 1956, pp. 19–28.
* ''Celebrazione di Virgilio Giotti'', discorsi di Biagio Marin e Alfonso Gatto, Trieste, Circolo della cultura e delle arti, 1959.
* Anna Modena, ''Virgilio Giotti'', Pordenone, Studio Tesi, 1992.
* Mauro Caselli, ''Il canto di Hestia: appunti su Virgilio Giotti'', in «Tratti», n. 59, 2002, pp. 73–86
* Mauro Caselli, ''Biavo zeleste. Su Marin e Giotti'', in «Studi mariniani», 2002, pp. 53–65.
* Mauro Caselli, ''Il femminile in Giotti'', in ''Il banco di lettura'', n. 26, 2003, pp. 13–22.
* Mauro Caselli, ''La voce bianca: su Virgilio Giotti'', Udine, Campanotto editore, 2004.
* Mauro Caselli, ''Il qualunque altro: intorno ad una poesia di Virgilio Giotti'', in «Tratti», n. 72, 2006, pp. 94–96.
* Mauro Caselli, ''In seconda persona: identità e trascendenza in Virgilio Giotti'', in ''Si pesa dopo morto: atti del convegno internazionale di studi per il cinquantenario della scomparsa di Umberto Saba e Virgilio Giotti'', Trieste 25-26 ottobre 2007, in «Rivista di letteratura italiana», n.26, 2008, pp. 305–307.
* Paolo Senna,
Le cose viste. Per un’analisi dei “Racconti” di Virgilio Giotti', «Rivista di letteratura italiana», XXVI, 2008, n. 1, pp. 187–190.
* Paolo Senna,
Virgilio Giotti tra "idealizzazione poetica" e lingua della prosa (1920-1926)', in "Otto/Novecento", a. 2014, n. 1, pp. 149–159
*Lorenzo Tommasini, a cura di, ''Virgilio Giotti poeta e triestino'', Centro studi Scipio Slataper, Trieste 2018, con contributi di R. Benedetti, G. Cimador, M. Menato, A. Modena, F. Senardi, L. Tommasini, S. Volpato, L. Zorzenon, ISBN 978-88-941961-2-2.
External links
Giotti at the Italian EncyclopediaVirgil Schönbeck at the Italian Encyclopedia
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Giotti, Virgilio
1885 births
1957 deaths
19th-century Austrian people
19th-century Italian poets
19th-century Italian short story writers
19th-century Italian male writers
20th-century Italian poets
Italian male poets
Italian male short story writers
People from Austrian Littoral
Writers from Trieste
20th-century Italian male writers