Spazi e tempi di una metafora. Poetica del viaggio e cultura giovanile

The essay is a deep exegesis of a collection of poems by young authors from many different countries and various literary canons. The themes interwoven in these poems constitute a fabric with a changing weft, which invite us to reflect upon the relationship which the poetics of the journey, with its burden of experiences and imagination, of different cultures and emotions, establishes with time and history. The same places of our civilization, its figures and its words acquire different meanings: the ongoing journey carries a baggage of complex stories. It appears as if the same places, which throughout the centuries have hosted several paths and destinations, spoke the language of prophecy when the past and the present, seen with a swift glance, already talked about the enigma of the future. Ismael travelling through history, Ismael crossing the desert, Ismael with his Arab-Israeli identity, a refugee, a stranger, a dumb person – the languages surrounding him cannot become his languages – Ismael naked, who is afraid of love – in a civilization which mocks him is represetnative of the poetics of the journay. The poem remains suspended but the journey of Ismael beyond history and civilization goes on just like him, who drinks water from a source which is unable to quench his thirst. The exegesis of several other poems contextualises the journey in a peculiar post-modernity which retells the “great story” (the reference is to François Lyotard and to the debate surrounding him) between languages and multiple symbolical universes, literary suggestions and poetical experiences. After history comes the shame, the need to reset the time, to restart the journey, to come back home, to our origins. All around us, the landscapes have undergone a metamorphosis, like in the poem “Adriatic” by the Polish author Agnieszka Żądło-Jadczak: “Stones nestled in the hard skin, / burning with the sun, carving reliefs. // […] stones like drowned dreams” (cf. the cosmic inspiration in the poem “Before the after”, by Theodora Bauer, Austria). The poem by Michela Pusterla is a ballad whose rhythms are interrupted by broken metrics which are put together verse after verse through a sequence of enjambments. The great protagonists are: war (she is over), peace, the past, and a long silence in the deepest side of thought. Peace is a past which is falling silent. This deep silence after the grenades, the devastation, the exiles and the death itself wear history down. The protagonist comes back but everybody has already gone away: perhaps to other countries? Did they die? This strange return journey comes back to a history, which no longer exists. However, the dance begins here (the dance of rambling tales) under shattered skies with the tragedy in her heart. We have to talk about s very “poetics of journey”. This generation of young poets is undoubtedly one of those, which makes virtual or real journeys, more than other generations. However, the exegesis of their verses, though partial and selective, has shown that the journey is not the only element characterising their poems. In all poems, many references and fil rouges could be found. Apart from the aspects pointed out in this introduction, the reader could also find many other recurring themes and discover nothing else than a “culture” with its figures and its changing contexts, ready to be posed with different values in different frames and to compose a mosaic with reverberating colours. At the heart of this culture, the thought of the word “after” (it is no coincidence that this is one of the most recurring words in the current research on the paradigms of knowledge) has marked the authors’ inspiration. As if the “journey” did not exist without a “after-journey” and this “aftermath” in time could be always represented and lived as a “journey”: return, regret, salvation, bewilderment a memory, oblivion, after civilization, after history. The young poets who wrote this book, “travelling” from different parts of the world towards the ideal place of poetry, are like an emerald which absorbs reflected faces. The essay focuses primarily on the thematic element of the book, although the expressive force, which overwhelms the reader, cannot be underestimated. There is a lot of thinking in the book (after the journey the thought), which expresses itself with a riveting and emotional poetics, a prophetic answer to the enigma of time and its transcendence.