Luigi Ballerini

During these years, he was the promoter of Italian poetry and culture in exhibits (Italian Visual Poetry 1912-1972 at the Finch Museum of New York and the Turin Civic Gallery and Spelt from Sybil's Leaves at the Power Gallery of Sydney), and at conferences and meetings (The Disappearing Pheasant I in New York in 1991 and, in Los Angeles, The Disappearing Pheasant II in 1994 and La lotta con Proteo in 1997 ).

Sixteen years after publication of ''eccetera.

Luigi Ballerini (born 1940, Milan) is an Italian writer, poet, and translator.

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.

His first poems, Inno alla terra, debuted in Inventario in 1960.

This was not, however, his first experience in the United States (from 1960 to 1962, he had studied at Wesleyan University in Connecticut).

The following year his son, the actor Edoardo Ballerini, was born.

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.

He moved to Los Angeles in 1969 and taught modern and contemporary Italian literature at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

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.

He moved to New York in 1971 to teach at City College and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).

In 1972, his first poetry collection, ''eccettera.

E'', was issued (Guanda).

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.

Through Marsilio, he published his first volume of literary criticism (Ila piramide capovolta, 1975), La sacra Emilia, an anthology of selected poetry by Gertrude Stein, which he translated himself, and several poetry collections (Il terzo gode, 1993, and the reissue of Cefalonia 1943-2001, in 2013).

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.

He became chair of Italian studies at New York University (NYU) in 1976, and in 1990, for a brief period, director of the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò.

In this period, he collaborated with Angelo Savelli (Selvaggina, 1988), Paolo Icaro (La parte allegra del pesce, 1984 and Leggenda di Paolo Icaro, 1985), 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.

E (republished by Edizioni Diaforia of Viareggio with an introductory essay by Cecilia Bello Minciacchi and contributions by Remo Bodei, Giulia Niccolai, and Adriano Spatola), Ballerini wrote Che figurato muore (All'insegna del pesce d'oro imprint of publisher Vanni Scheiwiller), followed by Che oror l'orient'' (Lubrina, 1991), 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

.

This post led him to assume that of chair of Italian at UCLA in 1992.

The subsequent collection, Il terzo gode, was published in 1994.

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.”

Shakespearian Rags, published in 1996 by Roman publisher Quasar, was written in English with facing text translated into Italian by the author (Stracci shakesperiani), with an introduction by Filippo Bettini.

This was followed by Uno monta la luna (Manni, 2001) and his best known work, Cefalonia 1943-2001 (Mondadori, 2005), for which he won the Brancati Prize and the Lorenzo Montano Prize for Poetry.

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.

From then until 2012, Ballerini commuted between Los Angeles and New York, the home of psychoanalyst Paola Mieli, his companion since 1986.

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.