Mario Benedetti (9 November 1955 – 27 March 2020) was an Italian poet. He was among the founders of the contemporary poetry magazines Scarto minimo (published in
Padua from 1986 to 1989) and Arsenal littératures (published in
Brest from 1999 to 2001).
Biography
After spending the first twenty years of his life in
Nimis (
Udine), his parents' hometown, he moved to Padua in 1976, where he graduated in
Literature with a thesis on the work of
Carlo Michelstaedter, after which he graduated in
Aesthetics at the Postgraduate School of the same university faculty. He devoted himself to teaching in high schools, first in Padua and then in
Milan, where he moved. His life, his poetry and his way of being were strongly characterized by the presence of a chronic disease: a particular form of
multiple sclerosis that accompanied him from childhood. Serious episodes due to this pathology occurred in 1999 and 2000. On the night of 14 September 2014 following a heart attack with
cerebral hypoxia, he was hospitalized at the San Luca Hospital in Milan, where he was kept in a
pharmacological coma for some time. Upon his gradual awakening, he began
rehabilitation therapy, and was then transferred to a Milanese health facility to continue treatment.[1][2][3][4]
He died on 27 March 2020, aged 64, of
COVID-19, in the care home where he had been living since 2018 in
Piadena (
Cremona).[5][6] He was buried on 30 March 2020.
Literary activity
Benedetti started writing poetry in the late 1970s, but became famous among contemporary Italian poets in 2004, when his collections of poems Umana gloria was published by
Mondadori. In 2005 he published Reliquiari, a selection of ten previously unpublished poems;[7] three years later he published Pitture nere su carta (also published by Mondadori), another collection of poems, inspired by works of art such as
Francisco Goya’s Pinturas negras.[8][9][10][11]
After Materiali di un'identità (2010), in which different literary typologies (essay, poem, poetic prose and interview) participated together in the enucleation of the key points of the author's poetics, in 2013 Benedetti published his third main collection of poems, Tersa morte.[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] For this work, Benedetti was awarded the 2014
Brancati Prize for poetry.[20] In 2017
Garzanti published a collection of all his poems.[21]
Benedetti also translated into Italian
Michel Deguy's works, and Pjesme by Serbian poet
Dejan Ilić.
Works
Il cielo per sempre, published on poetry magazine “Schema”, Milan, 1989
I Secoli della primavera, Sestante, Ripatransone, 1992
Una terra che non sembra vera, Campanotto, Udine, 1997
Il parco del Triglav, Stampa, Varese, 1999
Borgo con locanda, Circolo Culturale di Meduno (Pordenone), 2000.
Benedetti's works have been included in several anthologies, including Poeti italiani del Secondo Novecento, Mondadori, Milan 2004, and Parola plurale, Sossella, Rome 2005.
^Tommaso Di Dio, Il teatro degli spettri, in «Poesia, di Luigia Sorrentino» (
[1])
^Gianluca D'Andrea, Brevi Appunti Sulla Fine: “Tersa morte” di Mario Benedetti, Mondadori, Milano 2013 (
[2])
^Roberto Carnero, Mario Benedetti, versi scritti con il Friuli nei ricordi, in «Il Piccolo», 7 November 2013, p. 46
^Borio, Maria.
"Tersa morte". Nuovi Argomenti (in Italian). Retrieved 17 October 2022.(
Tersa Morte)
^"Note su "Tersa morte" di Mario Benedetti". Poetarum Silva (in Italian). 24 September 2013. Retrieved 17 October 2022.Luciano Mazziotta, Note su “Tersa morte” di Mario Benedetti, in «Poetarum Silva» (
[3])
^Giorgio Meledandri, Le parole hanno fatto il loro corso. Appunti su lingua e stile di “Tersa morte”, in «Carteggi letterari» (
"Archived page". Archived from
the original on 13 May 2014. Retrieved 23 June 2014.)
^"Non distrarti". AB2 (in Italian). 24 December 2013. Retrieved 17 October 2022.(
[4])
^Jean-Charles Vegliante, Una “landa impronunciabile”, forse, in «Nuovi Argomenti» (
[5])
Luigia Sorrentino, La realtà nella poesia di Mario Benedetti, 16 September 2014, in Poesia, di Luigia Sorrentino
Giulio Braccini, Le parole non sono per chi non c'è più. Appunti da una letta di "Tersa morte", 13 February 2014, in
Sguardomobile
Andrea Galgano, Il limite terso di Mario Benedetti, in Frontiera di Pagine II, Aracne, Rome 2017, pp. 807–811.
Simonetta Longo, Rielaborazione della memoria montaliana in Mario Benedetti, in Il Segnale, year XXXVI, n. 107, June 2017, pp. 65–70. Now in
Academia Account Simonetta Longo