There is no evidence at all that Belli ever met Keats in Rome before the Englishman quietly succumbed to his disease on 23 February 1821 in his rented rooms on the Spanish Steps, listening to the sound of gurgling fountains beneath his window in Bernini’s Fontana della Barcaccia. ‘Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water’, reads the inscription on the Keats grave in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery, an ironic epitaph when one thinks of his poetic legacy some two centuries on. In fact, a Roman meeting between the poets almost certainly never took place, not least since Belli was frequently away from the Eternal City in those years. But by juxtaposing the two of them, Burgess is able to create a context for his ingenious translations of Belli. The device allows him to muse on the apparent differences between Italian and English culture, before alluding to various points of crossover, not least in the historical tradition of the sonnet form itself, with Burgess surveying chief practitioners including Dante, Petrarch and Tasso (a favourite of Keats), as well as other dialect poets like the Milanese Carlo Porta. Through the sonnet form, Burgess claims, Keats and Belli find a transcendent kinship. Culture, he seems to be saying, and literature in particular, unites and survives us all.
Images by kind permission of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester
arte e cultura