Alfonso Gatto

Alfonso Gatto was an Italian poet and writer. Along with Giuseppe Ungaretti he is one of the foremost Italian poets of the 20th century and a major exponent of hermetic poetry.

Biography

Gatto studied at the Salerno classic lycaeum, where he discovered his passion for poetry and literature. In 1926 he attended the University of [Naples Federico II], but he had to discontinue his studies due to financial problems. Like many Italian poets of his age, such as Eugenio Montale and Salvatore Quasimodo, he never graduated.
Gatto fell in love with Jole, the daughter of his mathematics teacher, and at the age of 21, he eloped with her to Milan. He worked many different jobs: bookshop assistant, college instructor, proofreader, journalist, and teacher. In 1936, due to his anti-fascist activism, he was arrested and jailed at the San Vittore prison in Milan.
During those years, Gatto had been a contributor to various innovative journals and magazines of the Italian literary culture. In 1938 he founded the magazine Campo di Marte together with writer Vasco Pratolini and commissioned by Italian publisher Vallecchi, but it only lasted a year. It had been created as a fortnightly magazine and with the specific remit of educating the public in the artistic and literary production of all genres. The magazine was directly connected with the so-called Florentine Hermeticism. Founding the magazine was a significant experience for Gatto, who was able to enter the leading literary circles.
In 1941 Gatto was appointed professor of Italian literature for "high merits", at the Art School of Bologna, and a special correspondent for the newspaper L'Unità, thus being placed in a primary position for the promotion of literature of communist inspiration. Subsequently, Gatto abandoned the Italian Communist Party and became a dissident communist. Gatto died in a car accident on 8 March 1976 at Capalbio in the province of Grosseto. He is buried in the cemetery of Salerno and on his tomb is engraved his friend Montale's funeral farewell:

Poetics

Alfonso Gatto was one of the most important and active exponents of Hermeticism. Not much is known about Gatto's first years in Salerno, which surely must have had a determinant role in his cultural background, and little is known also of his first readings, his first literary meetings, and his friends. However, the publication of his first book of poems in 1932, entitled Isola, was highly welcomed as a truly new lyrical voice. When Giuseppe Ungaretti published in the same year his Sentimento del tempo, he included Gatto in a relevant chapter, notwithstanding the latter's very recent arrival on the literary scene.
With Isola, Gatto commenced his poetical existence, which concluded with his tragic death forty-four years later. Isola represents a decisive text for the construction of a hermetic grammar which will be defined by the poet himself, as a quest for a "natural absoluteness". His language is rarefied and timeless, allusive, and typical of a poetics of "absence" and empty space, rich in melodic motives. These will be the main elements of all of Gatto's output: these elements, in fact so distant from traditional models, are found in all his poems until 1939 and will gradually pass from familiar themes and landscape visions from youth, to a new phase, before and after World War II, which opens with his Arie e motivi and culminates with Poesie d'amore.

The motif of love

Gatto's motif of love is sung in all possible manners and to all possible directions and, even if with classicist tones, never loses the phonic value of words, as they become their own moment of suggestion.
In the period between 1940 and 1941, the poet revised his previous poems – which would later be included in a collection published in 1941 under the title Poesie – and they did not undergo changes until 1961 when, by giving them a better chronological and inspirational order in a new volume, they achieved Gatto's greatest lyricism.
One of the most vivid images of modern Italian poetry can be found in his poem Oblio, where the poet expresses the joy of life he feels, and which becomes memory and celebration:
In these verses, one can detect a disappearance of strict analogy, part of Gatto's first books, and in his Amore della vita of 1944, he will succeed in conveying a rare vigour to a rhetorical moment dedicated to the Italian Resistance. As a matter of fact, Gatto adhered to the poetry of Italian resistance, moved by the Italians' civil and political spirit, and in his subsequent collection of poetry, Il capo sulla neve, he will create forceful and emotional words for the "Martyrs of the Resistance", expressing them in poems of deep meditation and poignant immediacy.
Gatto is thus a poet of nature and instinct, who continuously reinvigorates his poetic form and narrative structure, including in them a lyrical self-analysis and historical sense of participation. In reading his latest works – Rime di viaggio per la terra dipinta, and Desinenze – the latter published posthumously, the image lingers of a poet with a turbulent life, yet always happy to fix in memory all emotions, in a language rich of motifs and surprises.

Major works

Poetry

Isola, Naples 1932
Morto ai paesi, Modena 1937
Poesie, Milan 1939, new edition Florence 1943
L'allodola, Milan 1943
La spiaggia dei poveri, Milan 1944
Arie e motivi, Milan 1944
La spiaggia dei poveri, Milan 1944, new ed. Salerno 1996
Il sigaro di fuoco. Poesie per bambini, Milan 1945
Il capo sulla neve, Milan 1947
Nuove poesie 1941–49, Milan 1949
La forza degli occhi, Milan 1954
La madre e la morte, Galatina 1959
Poesie 1929–41, Milan 1961
Osteria flegrea, Milan 1962
Il vaporetto. Poesie, fiabe, rime, ballate per i bambini di ogni età, Milan 1963, new eds. Salerno 1994 & Milan 2001
La storia delle vittime, Milan 1966
Rime di viaggio per la terra dipinta, Milan 1969
Poesie 1929–69, Milan 1972
Poesie d'amore, Milan 1973
Lapide 1975 ed altre cose, Genoa 1976
Desinenze, Milan 1977
Poesie, Milan 1998
Tutte le poesie, Milan 2005

Prose

La sposa bambina, Florence 1944, new eds. Florence 1963 & Salerno 1994
La coda di paglia, Milan 1948, new ed. Salerno 1995
Carlomagno nella grotta. Questioni meridionali, Milan 1962, new ed. Florence 1974 & Salerno 1993
Le ore piccole , Salerno 1975
Parole a un pubblico immaginario e altre prose, Pistoia 1996
Il signor Mezzogiorno, Naples 1996
Il pallone rosso di Golia. Prose disperse e rare e l'inedito "Bagaglio presso", Milan 1997
L'aria e altre prose, Pistoia 2000
Diario d'un poeta, Naples 2001
La pecora nera, Naples 2001
La palla al balzo – un poeta allo stadio, Limina 2006

Theatre

Il duello, Milan 1944, new ed. Salerno 1995

Filmography

Alfonso Gatto also appeared in various films. In The Sun Still Rises by Aldo Vergano he was a train conductor. Other roles he had in two films by Pier Paolo Pasolini: in Il Vangelo secondo Matteo he was the apostle Andrew, in Teorema he was a physician. He also appeared in Cadaveri eccellenti by Francesco Rosi where he was Nocio and in Caro Michele, by Mario Monicelli, from the novel by Natalia Ginzburg, where he interpreted Michele's father.

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1946	The Sun Still Rises	Railroad conductor
1964	Il Vangelo secondo Matteo	Andrea
1968	Teorema	Doctor
1976	Illustrious Corpses	Nocio
1976	Caro Michele	Padre Vivanti