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Charles Jernigan - Irene Marchegiani / Patrizia Valduga
She is not a poet going through a crisis; rather she talks about
and with(in) “crisis”. According to the critic, more than any other
poet, Valduga inherited Eugenio Montale’s discourse on the impossibility
of using our contemporary language to write poetry, as
if the poet is in a prison of words in which, however, some word
games are still acceptable. Patrizia Valduga appears to play with
words, or rather with the common language, cutting it and recomposing
it as she pleases. Her intense, rich, and “baroque” language
becomes a metaphor for the anguish of our contemporary
life: in fact, in a sense she dismantles the patrimony of words she
has inherited to re-construct a “new” language. At the same time,
she avoids all unjustified experimentations; rather, she uses a high
and sublime style. From a multiplicity of registers, a few prevail
and can be recognized as most distinctive of Valduga’s poetry:
one extremely sophisticated and literary, and one close to the spoken
language, or, in other words, one sublime and one almost satiric
and very physical. However, they are amalgamated together
and constitute a third language sprouting from them, in which all
elements are well balanced.
In particular, in Cento Quartine, this sort of dual register is reflected
also in a duality of voices, indicated by the brackets. This
sequence of linked quatrains tells us of a love story almost in real
time, a “love encounter” that develops in one thousand verses to
reveal an erotic metamorphosis. Two voices, intertwined with one
another, tell us of this — somehow extreme— love experience that
enfolds completely within one night. The poetic discourse, however,
is held primarily by the woman, while the man intervenes
constantly, breaking in and interrupting it. As Luciano Gramigna
wrote, here the bodies twist around each other in the love making
and words and sentences entwine as well.
The female voice emerges strong and clear, even more evident
thanks to the contrasting “second” voice of her partner. “She” appears
more intent on finding some kind of stability, to build a relationship
that could go beyond the physical encounter, one in which
there could be a fusion of spirit and body, a female voice attentive
to feelings in addition to her own pleasure; on the other hand, “he”
is after a merely corporeal satisfaction, a showing off of his “maleness”.
These two different “voices” are reflected in the style and
language.
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