An Evening of Literature in a Southern Italian Town

by EMMANUEL R. FERNANDEZ

“Poets today are liberated – free

From rhythm, rhyme, and structure – even sense,

Producing with their freedom an immense

Fog of unreadable obscurity.

So, at the risk of seeming orthodox

I’ll squeeze my words into the sonnet’s  box.”

           

-- Kenneth E. Boulding, “Sonnet for Sonnets”¹

     The tourist book I consulted on the eve of our trip was not very enthusiastic about Reggio di Calabria.  It said there were only two reasons why anyone would wish to go to this southern Italian town:  to get a boat to the neighboring island of Sicily, and to see the Bronzi di Riace (the bronze statues of nude Greek soldiers that were discovered in the Ionian Sea near the town of Riace in 1972, more than 2000 years after the ship that was to transport them to an unknown destination sank).  “Neither of these activities will take you far from the waterfront,” the tourist book noted, “which is good news because it’s the only part of town worth seeing” (sic.).²  It also warned the tourist about the town’s problem with organized crime, which should make him understand why there would be an unusually large police presence in the area.  

     We were going to Reggio di Calabria to attend the launching of a book on the history of Philippine-Italian relations.  It was authored by Domenico Marciano, an Italian married to a Filipina from Batangas, whose desire to learn more about his spouse’s country of origin had made him, in his own right, an ardent student of Philippine history.  (He had previously written a pamphlet on Jose Rizal’s sojourn in Rome.)  

     The plane trip from Rome to Reggio di Calabria took only an hour and fifteen minutes.   We touched down before 11 o’ clock on a sunny November morning.  After a sumptuous lunch of native Calabrian recipes and a very fruitful meeting with the leaders and members of the Filipino community in the area, we were driven to the venue of the book launch:  the Salone dei Lampadari of the Palazzo San Giorgio (Reggio di Calabria’s town hall). 

     No less than the young mayor of Reggio di Calabria, Dr. Giuseppe Scopelliti, opened the book launching ceremony.  Then came the speeches of the invited guests which included a university professor, a journalist, and a couple of government officials dealing with international cooperation. They talked about the book’s merits and how its insights could help enhance Philippine-Italian relations.  As I listened to their speeches and surveyed the crowd that had gathered there for the occasion, I remembered the self-deprecating joke told by the Filipino scholar, Dr. Florentino Hornedo, during a joint book launch of the UST Publishing House about two years ago.  We were launching our respective books, along with some other authors.  When it was his turn to speak, Dr. Hornedo wondered aloud why authors like us keep writing books despite our knowledge that hardly anyone actually bothers to read them!  (Unlike novels, scholarly works and other so-called “trade books” hardly sell, much less make it to the bestseller list.)

     Indeed,  I wondered as I sat underneath the huge chandeliers of the Salone dei Lampadari, how many of those who had gathered there were actually going to read this pioneering book which took its author almost three years to produce.

     Yet, writers like him will continue to write even if they know that only a few people will actually read them.  For there are a number of reasons why writers feel the need to write, regardless of how low their prospects are of being actually read.  George Orwell, in his famous essay, “Why I Write,”  proposed that writers are driven by four major motives (putting aside the need, for professional writers at least, to earn a living):  sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.  “It can be seen,” Orwell added, “how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time.”³

     Whatever his motives were for writing the book that was being launched that evening, I found myself wishing that its author would continue to write, regardless of how many or how few his immediate readers would be. 

     After the book launch, the author and his family hosted a dinner for us in a restaurant along the shore of the Ionian Sea.  It turned out to be the most “literary” dinner I ever had.

 

     During the dinner, one of the invited speakers, Professor Pasquino Crupi (the Deputy Rector of the Universita per Stranieri Dante Alighieri in Reggio di Calabria, and a recognized expert in Calabrian history and literature) literally enchanted us with his spontaneous recitation of Italian poetry.  With a glass of wine in one hand and a cigar in the other, Professor Crupi would ask each one of those gathered around the table what his or her name was, then he would recite an appropriate poem where he could insert one’s name in perfect rhyme and rhythm with the rest of the piece.  He recited the poems with such passion and eloquence, one literally found oneself cast under the spell of his words.      

     Listening to him, I realized what a powerful art oral poetry could be.  Poetry, as everyone knows, was originally an oral art – something to be heard with one’s ears, not just read with one’s eyes.   That was probably the reason why rhyme and rhythm were very important in those earlier days of poetry.  Not only did rhyme and rhythm make poems pleasurable to hear, they also served as mnemonic devices for the poet delivering them.   A poem that only seeks to be read as a text on a page by a pair of silent eyes does not have to worry about these.  It can afford to have lines that do not rhyme, a structure that lacks an easily decipherable pattern, and words and phrases that only another poet can understand.   But, when recited, it can never have the power of the poems Professor Crupi recited that November evening in the southern Italian town of Reggio di Calabria.

NOTES

     ¹Kenneth E. Boulding, Sonnets from Later Life:  1981-1993 (Wallingford, Pennsylvania, 1994), 3.

     ²Damien Simonis et al., Italy (Lonely Planet Books, 2004), 696.

     ³George Orwell, Why I Write (London:  Penguin Books – Great Ideas, 2004), 4-6.