"THE TWO POETS PIACERED EACH OTHER
WARILY"
Giorgio Vasari thought it was almost divine. Anthony Burgess called it ‘the most terrible image in the world’ – terrible in the Biblical sense of awe-inspiring. I chose Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel as the cover illustration for my edition of ABBA ABBA since Burgess uses the ‘muscular ceiling’ as a focal point in the book. As the weak, consumptive John Keats is led along the Stradone dei Giardini and taken into the Vatican’s inner sanctum, he is overawed by the ‘horror’ and ‘hell’ of Michelangelo’s fresco. Shocked by the unchristian depiction, Keats ventures that it is certainly not “the Christ they teach of in the churches”. Behind Keats, holding a large candelabrum in whose light the small group contemplates this astonishing work of art, stands the Roman poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli. As if by chance, Burgess’s protagonists thus meet for the first time ‘under the Day of Judgment’.
Anthony Burgess is best remembered today, on the back of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation, for his 1962 dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange in which he demonstrated his prowess as a linguist by inventing Nadsat, a kind of futuristic slang based on elements of Russian. His inventive side is on full show again in ABBA ABBA – the rhyme scheme of the first eight lines of a Petrarchan sonnet, but also Burgess’s initials playfully repeated and reversed – where he imagines England’s greatest Romantic poet, famously and fatefully sent to Rome to convalesce in the winter of 1820, encountering the figure whom Pier Paolo Pasolini considered Italy’s greatest poet of all time. Belli was the author of an extraordinary corpus of over 2000 sonnets in romanesco, the language of the uneducated masses in Ottocento Rome. Part One of ABBA ABBA is a novella setting up this fictional meeting of minds separated by language and culture, whereas Part Two offers Burgess’s own verse translations of seventy of Belli’s Biblical sonnets, concluding with a climactic poem entitled ‘The Day of Judgment’ (‘Er giorno der giudizzio’ in the original romanesco).
BY: PAUL HOWARD
arte e cultura