PROGRAMME >> EVENT #34  

sunday aug. 31.time 19.00.Chiostro San Francesco - 3,00
Vittorio  Sermonti - The music of meaning

listen to the audio file

Okay, poets don’t mean anything other than what they say, even if they don’t really know who means it. But if a poem is a verbal and rhythmic gear which cannot absolutely be altered without losing all the efficacy of its magic formula - literally, all its charm - there is still something left to understand of the “indefinable harmony between what a verse says and what a verse is”, and we have to agree with Paul Valery, that the golden grape of poetry lies in “the impossibility to define this relation, and in the impossibility to deny it”. Oh, and by the way, what does the rhyme “uscolo” have to do with the melancoly of the twilight - the “crepuscolo”?

Vittorio  Sermonti
was born 1929 in Rome, and has always investigated, in all kinds of guises (novelist, essayist, theatre translator and director, teacher, poet, performer), the relationship between writing and voice, i.e. the vocal energy hidden in literary language. He has written three novels, a book of short stories set in Prague, an epic essay on soccer, a Dante trilogy in the shape of a critical account published by Rizzoli (L’Inferno di Dante, 1988; Il Purgatorio, 1990; Il Paradiso, 1993), a book of verse, a couple of opera librettos, a book of short stories derived from Verdi’s scores. Between 1995 and 2006 he has thoroughly “read and told” Dante’s Comedy, in Ravenna, Rome, Florence, Milan and Bologna. In 2006 in Milan, and in 2008 in the Roman Musei Capitolini, he has read and commented on the twelve books of Virgil’s Aeneid, translated by himself and published by Rizzoli in 2007. He’s been working for years on a huge handbook on meter.