The editorial series of the Research Centre

The volume offers a “garden of verbal zoology,” constructed alongside the many imagined by Edoardo Sanguineti, this perhaps being the only one he had not conceived himself. It draws on his vast lexicographic archive, reaffirming his conviction that “the word must strive to explore all the possibilities of language and make use of every experience from the past.” Starting from materials preserved at the Interuniversitary Research Centre Edoardo Sanguineti in Turin, the book develops an intermedial journey through lexicographic cards and unpublished or scattered writings. It offers a reflection on the relationship between the artistic work (from poetry to melodramma, from theatre to radio and cinema) and the depths of human experience, adknowledging how, in Sanguineti’s discourse, the unconscious and language may come together. 

Book launch

• Aprile 28, 2023 - Turin, Circolo dei Lettori, with Giorgio Ficara, Franco Poli and Federico Vercellone

Review

• Virginia Criscenti, «Sinestesieonline», XII, 39, May 2023 (clik here to read the review).

In 1971, Edoardo Sanguineti spent just over six months living in Berlin, a city where he wrote a series of poems in 'real time', handing the typescript over to his poet friend Gerald Bisinger so it could be immediately translated into German. These were images of a journey, a deliberate nod to Heine’s Reisebilder. The collection offers is a set of glances not only on the individual poet writing them from an entire circle of intellectuals - from Ezensberger to Breytenbach - forming a kind of ‘Comune’ where artistic labor and hopes for change meet, not for the poets themselves but for the people, paraphrasing one of Sanguineti's titles. As it previously occurred in Paris in 1969, Sanguineti was one of the four poet-friends engaged in a collective writing experiment: in Paris, this had resulted in Renga; in Berlin Made in Holland was born, a new renga (published only in Afrikaans, which the original unpublished manuscript reproduced here, courtesy of its owner Amichai). Its creation was promped by the Poetry International in Rotterdam, the festival that served as the prologue to Sanguineti’s Berlin stay. In this city, - his feet firmly planted in German culture, from Goethe to Marx to Brecht - Sanguineti looked upon and engaged with global events and culture. The verses of Reisebilder speak to the depths of the human experience because they unflinchingly confront the crisis of reality, to the East as well as to the West, traversed and worn by a silent, low-intensity conflict. As it peak, this struggle pits the alienating spectacle of consumer goods against an equally alienating, stagnant bureaucratic society. Sanguineti would return to Berlin multiple times in the years that followed. In his poetry, the city becomes a space for recording different the shifting stages of globalization, from the 1980s and 1990s into the new millennium. This essay seeks to uncover and interpret what Sanguineti so clearly reveals: the complexity of the human being and his constant struggle to reclaim all that is human: «io te lo racconto adesso / che l’ho capito, appena, subito: (e puoi capirmi): questo è il mio corpo:» Edoardo Sanguineti, Reisebilder 45.

Sanguineti’s work is presented here as the result of the convergence of two initially separate research initiatives: one focused on the preparatory materials held at the Centro Studi Interuniversitario "Edoardo Sanguineti", and the other on the performance scripts. The editors’ approach has produced a volume that presents, in their entirety, the different stages involved in shaping the text for the stage, while also revealing the underlying complexities of Sanguineti’s sustained engagement with Shakespeare.
It is precisely this distinctive structure that allows readers to enter Sanguineti’s compositional workshop and explore the dynamics of his collaboration with Liberovici, whose suggestions and needs - including specifically theatrical ones - Sanguineti incorporated into his work. As we read, Sanguineti’s richly expressive language takes us to the heart of Shakespeare’s words, enabling us to hear, through a play of thoughts and sounds, the voice of Judith Malina and the music of Andrea Liberovici.
While the critical apparatus helps readers navigate a series of complex textual dynamics, a selection of QR codes allows them to experience parts of the work as performed on stage.