With books, around the world: Dino Campana on his travels and in the library

Abstract

If we speak of Campana’s Library as a space or as a concrete collection of volumes, we are forced to make a drastic observation: because of the poet’s vagabond and disordered life, this library doesn’t exist. If, however, we look more closely at Campana’s biography from a perspective rarely adopted by critics, we instead discover an unexpected connection between the poet’s instability - he was constantly travelling, also because he was unable to remain in any one place - and the depth of his cultural formation. Even when he did not physically own books, Campana in fact read incessantly, because he frequented libraries, in Italy and abroad. Research by Alberto Petrucciani and Renato Martinoni has provided irrefutable evidence in this regard, revealing the poet’s presence in libraries through his reading slips, which have been preserved. The picture that emerges, together with the dense network of reminiscences running through Campana’s texts, reveals a highly up-to-date, international culture, made possible by his ability to read in several languages and by his regular consultation of many reviews from different countries, through which Campana followed the debates of his time. The richness and very atypical nature of his education are decisive for defining his distinctive poetics, in which a striking closeness to the avant-gardes takes root in a declared fidelity to the finest Italian literary and artistic tradition, pointing toward a text capable of uniting the expressive resources of different media and becoming a “Gesamtkunstwerk”. In recent months, finally, an unexpected discovery has emerged from the archive of Franco Matacotta: a volume believed to have been lost, on which Campana worked out some poetic passages in 1915. This dramatic turn opens up new perspectives for research - only just begun - on the possibility that, having passed through the hands of Sibilla Aleramo, other books belonging to Campana may also have survived. We cannot say that we have found Campana’s lost library, but some fragments of it, yes.