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ABSTRACT
The city of Venice has historically been open to travellers and newcomers, and its stones have spoken in many languages, engendering a myriad of cross-cultural dialogues between the human and the nonhuman environment. With its waters reflecting multiple images, the city is an apt example for a proposed new theory on geometaphors that considers the poetic metaphors in their exact geographical and physical location. This essay applies this concept to Eugenia Bulat's contemporary poetry. A unique figure in the Italian literary landscape, Bulat invites an innovative geocritical reading of the city and her verses. In Moldova she was the first democratically elected mayor of her town, but in Venice she was a caretaker for the elderly. This experiential clash inspired three collections of poems. Through her gaze, elements of the amphibious Venetian ecosystem – water and stone – become metaphors of migrant femininity and stimulate an ethic of openness and respect.
SOMMARIO
L'apertura storica della città di Venezia a viaggiatori e migranti, e le diverse lingue che le pietre della città hanno parlato, hanno dato origine ad una vasta varietà di dialoghi cross-culturali tra l'ambiente umano e quello non-umano. Attraverso le diverse immagini riflesse nelle sue acque, Venezia è un caso ideale per la proposta di una nuova teoria geo-metaforica che interpreti le metafore poetiche situandole nella loro esatta collocazione geografica e fisica. Il saggio applica questa teoria alla poesia contemporanea di Eugenia Bulat. Figura unica nel panorama letterario italiano, Bulat invita ad un'innovativa lettura geo-critica della città e dei suoi versi. In Moldavia, Bulat è stata la prima sindaca della sua città eletta democraticamente, mentre a Venezia ha lavorato come badante. Questo scontro esperienziale ha ispirato tre raccolte di poesie. Attraverso lo sguardo di Bulat, le componenti dell'anfibio ecosistema veneziano, acqua e pietra, divengono metafore di una femminilità migrante e articolano un'etica fondata sull'apertura e il rispetto verso l'altro.
PAROLE CHIAVE:
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 ‘Bisognerebbe, per capirci qualcosa, arrivare a vederne cupole case capanne emerse dal niente dopo che si sia sprofondati con le gambe in sabbie mobili intrise di cielo, in zolle di succhiante forza vegetale, o dopo corse all’impazzata stroncate da una caduta in avanti nell’infinito’. A. Zanzotto, Luoghi e paesaggi (Milan: Bompiani, 2013), p. 87.
2 See S. Iovino and S. Oppermann, Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).
3 ‘Ecocriticism becomes a device to delve into the world’s own eloquence and to elicit both the implicit message of those material texts and their generative connections with literary representations’. S. Iovino, Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance and Liberation (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 48–49.
4 I. Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. by William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1974).
5 See Westphal’s developments of the concepts of smooth and striated space proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, where smooth is the space of the nomad and striated (by borders, walls, enclosures) is the space of the sedentary. Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Places, trans. R. T. Tally Jr. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 39–40.
6 These visits have left tangible testimonies starting from written descriptions, such as the fourteenth-century pilgrim’s report of the Doge’s funeral, conserved in the Marciana Library and transcribed and translated in D. Chambers, B. S. Pullan, and J. Fletcher, Venice: A Documentary History: 1450–1630 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). As for the signs of today’s visitors, look no further than the vandalistic graffiti on the walls or clusters of padlocks on the bridges.
7 J. Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the In-Human (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. 10.
8 Zanzotto, p. 94. ‘Come potra’ un io “qualunque”, un io minimo, senza pretese, ritrovare quella sola pietra di Venezia, quel solo lampo di Venezia che valga a fargliela individuare come sua, conducendolo insieme a un’autocoscienza?’
9 D. Gladwin, ‘Ecocritical and Geocritical Conjunctions in North Atlantic Environmental Multimedia and Place-Based Poetry’, in Ecocriticism and Geocriticism: Overlapping Territories in Environmental and Spatial Literary Studies, ed. by R. Tally and C. Battista (New York: Palgrave, 2016), pp. 37–54 (p. 50). In other words, walking produces a specific literary geography (geocriticism) and at the same time it endows the walkers with an ecological conscience, by reminding them of their being limited, interconnected parts of a larger whole (ecocriticism).
10 Westphal, Geocriticism, p. 158. This critical approach is also clarified by D. Gladwin: ‘a geocritic would approach analyzing a text by first focusing on its specific place – geographic location, landscape, bioregion or environment – instead of on a writer, text, or historical context’ (p. 39).
11 The ‘sticky’ relationship between emotions and places is described by S. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). Barclay and Riddle underline the variations in this relationship caused by different engagement, hierarchies of authority and agentic capacity in Urban Emotions and the Making of the City: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. by K. Barclay and J. Riddle (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). In our case, emotions are strictly related to Bulat’s outsider positionality. A. Giovanangeli, A. Loda, and N. Manganas speak of ‘emotional scapes’ and use the walking method to make sense of three cityscapes in ‘Emotional Scapes in Mediterranean Port Cities: Walking Barcelona, Marseille and Genova’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 25.6 (2022), pp. 1–26. In the Italian case, Genoa, they foreground the poems by Giorgio Caproni, to highlight the human/non-human feeling of the city.
12 S. Bettini, ‘Introduzione’, in Venezia e la sua laguna (Milan: Touring Club, 1963), p. 8. ‘Per me la spiegazione risiede nella forma, nella stessa struttura formale di Venezia: interpretata naturalmente, non in riferimento a categorie ideali, non in relazione a un ideale dover essere’.
13 ‘La forma a Venezia non è data, per così dire una volta per sempre, ma continuamente si discioglie e si ricompone e … proprio perché questa forma, a Venezia perpetuamente si crea, essa è piu’ vera; cioè con più immediatezza riscatta in noi il conflitto tra l’esistenza e lo spirito’. Bettini, p. 14.
14 ‘Somewhere between the geography of the “real” and the geography of the “imaginary”’. Westphal, Geocriticism, p. 170.
15 My forthcoming article in Italian Culture discusses this newly proposed concept.
16 J. Muir, the nineteenth-century Scottish naturalist, was known and even ridiculed for his strange habit of ‘stone sermons’, moments when he dialogued with rock he encountered in his walks. ‘Muir stoops to listen, not to conquer. L. Duckert, ‘Speaking Stones, J. Muir, and a Slower (Non)humanities’, in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. by J. J. Cohen (Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Books, 2012), p. 279.
17 I am referring to Westphal’s treatment of metaphor in Geocriticism, p. 99, where he maintains that a metaphor is both displacement and projection. It grows in a space of minimal distance between instances, a cushion between the ‘realeme’ and the plausible reality expressed by the poem. Other critics have theorised on the relationship between place and poetics: Bachelard’s topoanalysis indicated places to which the individual imagination most strongly responds, in G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969). Bakhtin’s chronotope recognised the fundamental time-space units of a narrative, in Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Aesthetic Visualizing of Time/Space: The Chronotope’, in The Bakhtin Reader, ed. by P. Morris (London: Arnold, 1994). The interplay between reality and imagination has been theorised in geographical terms by Barbara Piatti who has offered that the ‘geospace’, the so-called ‘real world’, can and must entertain a relationship with the ‘geography of fiction’ (the representations of space or imaginary spaces), as they enrich each other. See Barbara Piatti and others, ‘Mapping Literature: Towards a Geography of Fiction’, in Cartography and Art: Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography (Berlin: Springer, 2009). E. Soja calls this felicitous meeting the ‘Thirdspace’: a blend of the real and imagined space, ‘real-and-imagined’ or ‘realandimagined’ (10), that comes after the Firstplace or the ‘real’ material world, and the Secondplace or the ‘imagined’ representation of space. See Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 1996).
18 ‘Image-maker’ or ‘immaginifica’ is the epithet given to the city by G. D’Annunzio, especially in his novel The Flame (1900).
19 E. Bulat, La Putna mi-e drumul / Verso Putna m'incammino (Chişinău: Ed. Liceum, 1994); Eugenia Bulat, Poeme de pe Valea Plângerii / Poemi dalla Valle del Pianto (Satu Mare: Ed. Vatra Românească, 1996); Eugenia Bulat, Si-la-bi-sind în tai-ne-le iu-bi-rii / Sillabe del mistero d'amore (Satu Mare: Ed. Vatra Românească, 1996); Eugenia Bulat, De dor de voi. / Nostalgia di voi (Năsăud: Ed. Năsăud, 2000); Eugenia Bulat, Stalactite / Stalattiti (Chişinău: Ed. Universul, 2002); E. Bulat, Scrisori de dragoste din Orașul Libertății / Lettere d'amore dalla Città della Libertà (Chişinău: Ed. Prag, 2002).
20 L. Davidsen, ‘La badante’, in Italieni: Le lettere dall'Italia dei corrispondenti stranieri (Roma: Internazionale, 2003), pp. 77–79 (p. 78). ‘Hanno una vita alle spalle. Non sono diciannovenni ragazze alla pari. Queste donne rumene, moldave, ucraine sono grandi casalinghe o hanno studiato, sono dottori, ingegneri. Sono intelligenti, veloci’. Francesco Vietti underlined that the delicate equilibrium between caretakers and families creates the paradoxical figure of ‘the home strangers’ (‘l’estranea di casa’) in Francesco Vietti, Il paese delle badanti (Rome: Meltemi, 2010), p. 29. A wave of movies focused on these migrants (La sconosciuta (by Giuseppe Tornatore, 2006), Il resto della notte (Francesco Munzi, 2008) or La doppia ora (Giuseppe Capotondi, 2009)) highlighted the anxiety potential of these figures and the sense of guilt they may have triggered as the phenomenon appeared.
21 ‘E allora, nell’Ovest, la Donna dall’Est è spinta ad abbracciare il “mestiere” di Testimone della Morte, vivere nella clausura assieme a una persona che se ne sta andando all’aldilà (cosa che si manifesta in vari modi), non sapendo nulla delle disastrose implicazioni che potrà subire la sua salute in seguito a questa pericolosa combinazione: clausura e … ’. Bulat reports the musing of the Moldovan ladies about going back to their home country: ‘One of these prisoner women was saying: “You would be spitting your soul out even in my country, but there nobody would pay you!” Exactly. A friend who had just gone back from the Country of Lindentrees [Germany]: “I told my friends: ‘You will go home only to die’”’ (‘Diceva una delle donne in clausura “Sputare l’anima si troverebbe anche a casa, ma lì nessuno ti paga!” Esatto. Mi raccontava un’amica, tornata da poco dal Paese dei Tigli: “Ho detto alle mie amiche: ‘Tornate a casa solo per morire!’”’) in Eugenia Bulat, La pietra di Ca’ Vendramin (Tropea: Meligrana, 2018), p. 43.
22 A poem in In debara: Nello sgabuzzino describes the depersonalising effect of her job as caretaker. ‘The Slave Owner, / was now your God. / You did not know, you had to know / You did not want, you had to want / You did not accept, you had to accept. // Not what you see / but what she sees. / Not what you believe, / but what she believes. / Not what you think / but what she thinks. / So she want, / the slave owner’ (‘La padrona di schiavi, / era lei adesso tuo Dio. / Non lo sapevi, dovesti sapere / Non lo volevi, dovesti volere. / Non accettavi, dovesti accettare. // Non è quello che vedi tu, / è ciò che vede lei. / Non è quello che credi tu, / bensì ciò che crede lei. / Non è quello che pensi tu, / bensì ciò che pensa lei. / Così vuole lei, / la padrona di schiavi.)
23 E. Bulat, Venezia ti fu data: Diario di una latitante dell’Est, trans. by G. Molcsan (Chişinău: Cartier, 2007); E. Bulat, In debara: Nello sgabuzzino: Il secondo diario di una latitante dell’Est, trans. by Geo Vasile. Postfazione di Matilde Caponi (Chişinău: Gunivas, 2010); Bulat, La pietra.
24 The word ‘badante’ is a relative new entry in the Italian vocabulary (Accademia della Crusca included it in 2002 as a borrowing from the care of animals). Interestingly, badare (paying attention) is a verb that does not entail the presence of affection as much as prendersi cura (caring for): this is a job.
25 B. Westphal, The Plausible World: A Geocritical Approach to Space, Place and Maps, trans. by Amy D. Wells (New York: Palgrave, 2013), p. 7.
26 The duality is explained by recurring topos of the siren in Ilaria Serra’s ‘La poesia liquida di Eugenia Bulat a Venezia’, Lingua Romana. Special issue on ‘Women and Territories in Italian Literature and Culture’, 11.2 (2013), pp. 54–77.
27 Bulat, Venezia ti fu data , p. 19.
28 A. Sayad, La double absence: Des illusions de l'émigré aux souffrances de l'immigré (Paris: Seuil, 1999).
29 Alberto Comparini stresses this combination in his Geocritica e e poesia dell’esistenza (Milan: Mimesis, 2018) where he unravels the dialectic between ‘il senso dell’essere dell’ente’ (phenomenology) and ‘il senso dell’essere dell’uomo’ (existentialism) (p. 115) to introduce the poetry by Antonia Pozzi and Vittorio Sereni. His existentialist view foregrounds human perception.
30 There is a discrepancy with the published version of this poem that here finds its correct version (confirmed by the author in an e-mail exchange): ‘sorrise’ not ‘sorrisi’. Bulat, La pietra, p. 78.
31 Heather Yeung describes the ‘poem in space’ as the trajectory between the ‘eye’ and the ‘I’ in Heather Yeung, ‘Affective Mapping in Lyric Poetry’, in Geocritical Explorations, ed. by Robert Tally (New York: Palgrave, 2021), pp. 209–22 (p. 209).
32 Bulat, La pietra, p. 85.
33 See Giustina Renier Michieli, Origini delle feste veneziane (Venice: Filippi, 1994).
34 Bulat, Venezia ti fu data.
35 ‘Per scoprire queste risposte e trovare la bramata pace, a Venezia – una città in cui tutto si muove – ho trascorso più di 7 anni, immobile nel mio intimo come una pietra – la pietra Ca’ Vendramin’ (p. 21).
36 Email to the author, 11 January 2017.
37 See ‘Mesterul Manole-Mastro Manole’, trans. by Marco Cugno, in Letteratura della Romania, ed. by Associazione Giuseppe Acerbi (Verona: Gabrielli Editori, 2005), pp. 34–40.
38 ‘Ti metterai in salvo nel tuo armadio, in fine’, in Nello sgabuzzino, p. 59.
39 ‘Ho capito che queste due ballate non sono favole, ma il nocciolo ontologico della mia stirpe, lo spirito del mio popolo che si muove insieme a me’ (email to the author, 19 June 2012).
40 ‘Una stanza di due metri e cinquanta per un metro e settanta. E la finestra si affacciava su un muro’ (Interview with the author, 18 June 2012).
41 Westphal, Geocriticism, 43.
42 Westphal, Geocriticism, 44.
43 Bulat, In debara, p. 59.
44 Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, Paradise, XVII, v. 59.
45 ‘Concentriche, ancor più concentriche … ’, La pietra, p. 112.
46 ‘Deriva’, La pietra, p. 31.
47 Bulat, La pietra, p. 106.
48 In the past, the city has been represented as a shapely blond woman, from Veronese’s ‘The Triumph of Venice’ on the ceiling of the Gran Consiglio room in the Doge’s palace, to Antonio Lamberti’s musical ballad ‘La biondina in gondoleta’ (‘The Blond Girl on a Gondola’).
49 Bulat, La pietra, p. 152. ‘Nell'ala marginale dell’ospedale si trovano gli spazi freddi, riservati al riposo di quelli che si trovano tra i vivi solo col corpo ancora per tre giorni. Per di qua passano solo i parenti dei deceduti, qualche addetto ospedaliero ed i Testimoni della Morte. Verso l’uscita, un’arcata romana come una bocca rinsecchita e fredda si apre verso la chiesa e la piccola cappella. Qui arrivano bare marrone, scintillanti al sole da tutti i lati. Esse salgono poi, in silenzio, con le corone di rose bianche sopra, nei taxi d'acqua, che portano i residenti eletti sulla loro isola’.
50 Bulat, La pietra, p. 159.
51 Bulat, La pietra, pp. 159–60. Note that Heather Yeung considers the opposite process, the anchoring of verses to stone, in her Spatial Engagement with Poetry (New York: Palgrave, 2015). Yeung analyses Ian Hamilton Finley’s 15-ton slab of Purbeck stone positioned on the cliff-top on Rousay, an island in Orkney, off the north tip of Scotland. On it, Anchises’s apostrophe to the gods in the third book of Virgil’s Aeneid, ‘Gods of the earth / Gods of the sea’, is chiseled. This monument turns the spontaneous Classical invocation into a static, solid, and lasting poem in space.
52 Bulat, La pietra, p. 103. Italics in the original.
53 My geometaphorical method includes the invaluable apport of the digital and invites the creation of virtual walks through Google Maps. See also Ilaria Serra, ‘Parchi Letterari virtuali alla Florida Atlantic University di Boca Raton: “Poetic Geography of Italy”: Il primo corso universitario statunitense ad “entrare” nella rete dei Parchi Letterari’, I parchi letterari (29 May 2020) <https://parchiletterari.com/eventi-scheda.php?ID=01723> [accessed 6 March 2023].
54 Zanzotto, p. 96. ‘Quando uno si sarà tirato fuori dalla catena di montaggio ammirativa … riconosca ognuno il proprio totem, trovi il proprio vuoto-pieno, urti il proprio mattone, o pietra, o spigolo, vi batta la testa, ne sanguini, se ne risollevi rianimato dallo scontro con una forza prima’.
55 Cohen, Stone, p. 197.