Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli: Songs of Sacrilege!
“There is so much spice and wit in his poems…and the contemporary life of the Roman people is so realistically portrayed that you cannot help laughing out loud.” –Nikolai Gogol.
Funny, odd, impish, subversive, scandalous, at times shocking… on the
same hand brutally honest, Anthony Burgess describes him as “a scholarly
recorder of the filth and blasphemy,” Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli is
regarded as one of the finest Italian poets of the nineteenth century. His
sonnets (written clandestinely while he led a respectably conformist life of letters and bureaucracy ) were stated to be often satirical and anti-clerical (The Mass they put on is a sad affair;/ they tap Christ's lamp for oil, and take it home/and dress their salad with it all alone) Belli is the
greatest poet to have written on Roman (Romanesco is the dialect spoken by the
descendants of the original inhabitants of Rome) dialect. He would later
renounce the language claiming it is a “corrupt, twisted deviation from the
Italian language.” His sonnets will not give him away as a melancholic which he
actually was according to his biographers.
If alive and writing today his writings would most likely be either shunned as obscene (Oh bloody hell, so no one kiss from you?/ One little squeeze inside that bra you wear?/ Don't worry, I'll be careful what I do /I only want to feel what's under there...) or banned.
You’re much too nice-why put your back out when
The world goes hurtling downhill anyway?
So what’s the point? Just let it go, okay-
Or do you mean to push it up again?
Who cares about the future –now’s enough –
And once you’re dead you’re dead, that’s what I say.
The day to live for, sonny, is today,
Don’t waste your breath on all this stupid stuff.
Just think of Jesus Christ, who sweated blood
In buckets when he tried to do his bit-
But what the hell did he get out of it?!
To live as long as Noah, and you could,
I’ve got a surefire secret- you’re in luck:
A little cure-all called Who Gives a…
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giuseppe-Gioacchino-Belli
He died of a sudden apoplectic fit on 21st
December 1863, sometime between eight and nine in the evening. He was buried at
the Verano monumental cemetery in Rome.
--------------------------ends
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