On the occasion of the publication of the new edition of Poesie complete di Giorgio Bassani (Feltrinelli 2021)
the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in New York and the Giorgio Bassani Foundation celebrate the writer from Ferrara in his capacity as a poet, with the seminar:
“A Man of Letters: Giorgio Bassani in North America”
Event part of the commemorations of the "Remembrance Day - Giorno della Memoria 2023"
The seminar will be introduced by professor Fabio Finotti, IIC director, and Paola Bassani, president of the Giorgio Bassani Foundation. The editor of the volume, Anna Dolfi, will present the entire corpus of poems, ranging from 1945 to 1982 from which emerges - differently from his prose - a more autobiographical and intimate Bassani, one who looked at post-war Italy with a stern and watchful eye.
In the 1970s, Bassani came to the United States as Visiting Professor in the universities of Indiana and California and also went to Canada. There, he reworked the Romanzo di Ferrara and wrote some new poems for the volume, In gran segreto, some of which he defined as his “American Poems”.
Alain Elkann will evoke his meetings with Giorgio Bassani in New York and the writer’s opinions on the United States and on American literature.
Valerio Cappozzo will discuss original materials from the correspondence between Bassani and the New York Times as well as with other journals published in New York, a city where Bassani’s work was, and continues to be, published.
To add to the seminar, there will also be an exhibition of documents made available by the Fondazione Giorgio Bassani Foundation, curated by Cappozzo with the collaboration of Gaia Litrico and Francesco Franchella. Autographs of letters and poems will be on display. Also on display for the first time, Bassani’s newly rediscovered translation of Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, done in 1943, and considered lost until today: a work that opens new paths of inquiry on the relationship between the Ferrarese writer and US literature.
