Parodies of Sonnet in Late XXth-century Italian Poetry

Abstract

The article means to investigate the formal and metrical parody of the sonnet carried out by many important poets in the second half of the XXth century. The aim is to show how most of these sonnets – as those by Fortini, Zanzotto, Pasolini, Sanguineti – hide a non-parodic constitution due to the wide gradual slackening of the formal rules in contemporary art, whom parody itself took part to with its «dialectical development of forms» (Tynjanov).

In these modified aesthetic expectations, the «average metrical consciousness» (Fortini) made acceptable and so to speak normal many formal derogations, thus entailing the impossibility to classify these texts as parodies but, at the same time, suggesting a reading of the flawless sonnets written in the last decades as outdated and parodic (Giovannetti), even though lacking in dialectical development and therefore incomplete as parodies.

Concurrently, fulfilled parodies can be still found in the radical experimentations by Nanni Balestrini (Ipocalisse. 49 sonetti. Provenza, 1980-1983, 1986) and Marco Giovenale (Piccoli suoni, in Quasi tutti, 2010). Yet, since they recall lower forms such as the frottola and the “alla Burchia” sonnet, respectively, and since Ipocalisse was created during the exile of his author (following the famous “7 April operation”), we can read the use of the most codified form of poetry in their works as an allegory of the way in which power is able to preserve itself throwing out of its domain the subversive forms which threaten its authority.