The Brooklyn Rail

Nicholas Benson (Rail): Where does your work originate from?

Gabriele Tinti: It originates from the fear of death, as an act of resistance against the power of death.

Rail: What differences have you noticed in how your work is received in Italy and the US? 

Tinti: There aren’t really such big differences. Poetry in general, and mine in particular which focuses on the typically avoided themes of death and suffering, occupies a marginal place for both Italian and American readers. Being outside of any commercial interest may be disappointing, but I truly believe that’s my strength and freedom.

Rail: Your writing occupies a unique space in Italian poetry. Which Italian poets (or writers in general), past or present, have been important for you?

Tinti: My main references, for different reasons, are Scipione, Foscolo, Leopardi, and then, going back in time, a poet tormented in his Christianity like Jacopone da Todi, and a true “bad boy” like Martial.

Rail: In addition to the ancient myths, in your work there are clear references to Renaissance and Christian art.

Tinti: Syncretic Christianity has absorbed many ancient themes. The Passion of Christ is liberation of the skin, bleeding, flaying, anointing. Marsyas—before he became a living wound, he freed himself from the body to free the spirit. Christianity has taken this aesthetics and these concepts to the extreme. Catherine of Siena said, “I will nestle in the wounds of Christ because it is in the wounds that the divine is visible.” “Fili quantum vales a te exire, tantum poteris in me transire,” which means “Son,” says Christ, “you can enter into me to the extent that you can leave yourself” [Tinti is quoting The Imitation of Christ]. The body as an impediment, a prison for the soul, an obstacle to contemplation. I am the result of that education, of that culture. A culture that admires sacrifice and willingness for martyrdom.

Rail: So, a work that gathers different inspirations.

Tinti: It’s always like that; every work is an accumulation that comes at a certain point in one’s life. And life is always a complex and contradictory experience. Let me give you an example regarding these different inspirations, given the use I made of an inscription found on a slave collar (for some scholars, it might even be a dog collar). The Latin inscription on the collar reads “fugi, tene me,” which can be translated as “now that I have fled, take me,” but also more poetically as “I run away, hold me tight,” which is how I translated it. This served as the incipit for a series of fragments read by Abel Ferrara in front of the Christ at the Column (Donato Bramante, ca. 1490) displayed at the Brera a couple of years ago. An ancient epigraphic fragment that is used and generates a series of epigrams inspired by that Renaissance masterpiece. All of this becomes an opportunity for a poetic discourse in which the spectator enters ambiguously: are we part of the crowd witnessing the torture, or are we the executioners ready to inflict suffering on the divine?

Rail: You’re beginning a very interesting pair of translation projects. What has guided your choices of poets to work on, and what are some of the challenges you’re facing in writing Italian versions of their poems?

Tinti: To translate an author, to be able to convey their work in my own language, brings a sense of well-being I had never felt before. I am currently working on translating Thomas Chatterton, a poet who died at the age of seventeen, a symbol of the misunderstood and visionary genius, a prodigious child, the “marvellous Boy” (W. Wordsworth, “Resolution and Independence,” 1802) marginalized by the cultural elite, a scapegoat whom the romantic and “maudit” poets glorified posthumously. He has never been translated into Italian, and the task is truly challenging. Translating John Gould Fletcher, also an outsider who I’m focusing on and who has never been translated into Italian, is much simpler. I’m making good progress but it’s a long road.

Rail: Tell us more about your epigrams.

Tinti: The short form is what suits me. I don’t know how to do anything else. It was natural for me to compose my fragments using elegiac couplets and the Alcaic stanza, albeit in an irregular manner, more for aesthetic reasons than technical ones. The couplet is the form that best represents me, almost exclusively because, from its origins and more forcefully in Latin, it was the meter of elegy, epigrams, and funeral inscriptions, the structure chosen to sing individual despair. It’s a form that gives shape to a specific content.

Rail: Your emblematic poem, I believe, is “Don’t leave my body to the dogs” a punk anthem.

Tinti: It’s curious that you mention this. Abel Ferrara often tells me that my verses carry a “punk expression.” You’re right. Writing for me is the result of the tragic violence that arises from all this fear I have, from this desire I share with those who want to be liberated through blood and suffering.