A Chicago Journal Poetry Center Event Review
Originally Published May 13, 2004
By Lydialyle Gibson

From the earth to the sky:
Terse, ironic, and uncluttered, Luciano Erba's poetry reaches heavenward through hidden humor


Up on the 14th floor of 500 N. Michigan, Francesca Valente was a fluster of staccato chirping and magisterial hovering. Perfume and clattering heels. Six p.m. was approaching, and Italian poet Luciano Erba was ready to begin his reading. Already the room was full of listeners in high heels and short skirts, faded shawls, silk suits. More kept coming.

"Bring another chair!" commanded Valente, director of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura. Along with the South Loop-based Poetry Center of Chicago, the Istituto had arranged for Erba's reading April 19 inside the group's lofty Mag Mile headquarters. A pair of staffers scattered obediently in search of chairs. Audience members squeezed into aisles and empty corners, turned their faces toward the front of the room, where Erba sat with his wife, Mimia, his translator, Ann Snodgrass, and fellow poet Mark Strand, who'd agreed to read Erba's poems in English. Erba would recite them in Italian.

At 81 years old, Erba has won Italy's most exalted literary laurels and a translator a dozen times over, earned a spot among his generation's most glittering poetical luminaries. Over the decades, he's published more than 10 books of verse, and besides teaching French lit at the Universitia Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, he serves a visiting prof at a handful of American universities. Last month he read from The Hippopotamus, a 1989 book of poems only recently rendered into English.

"Oh, he's very important," Valente had said on the phone the day before his reading. "He's a very important Italian poet."

Calling to order the gathering inside the Istituto, she told audience members the same thing. So did Strand.

"I met Luciano Erba in Italy when we did a little tour together, myself and three or four Italian poets, and Erba," Strand said, recalling readings scheduled for 8 p.m. that would begin instead at midnight, and suppers that commenced at 2 a.m.. "It was the most extraordinary tour I've ever been on."

Then Erba spoke, and what he said was--not much. He read aloud. He waited. And when Strand came to the end of an English translation, he dived in again, announcing the names of poems to listeners: "Sketch of a Farewell," "Clouds," "A Soft Swamp Wood," "I Was Following Your Trip," "Self-Portrait."

"It's me, of course," Erba said, offering the crowd a rare grin. "The self-portrait." During a short question-and-answer session that followed the reading, Erba--who spent most of the Second World War in Switzerland--dispensed a few gems of wisdom: "A true poet cannot help but turn to innovation," he said. And, "It's very simple to be against society, but how? It is a game sometimes, being against." Or, "There is a difference between religious and sacred." According to Mimia Erba, her husband's breviloquence--both on and off the page--is part of his refined poetical expression.

"He's becoming more expert," she said after the reading. "He's saying less and saying more. He can do the most, you know, with less."

And he does. In The Hippopotamus, Erba's poems emerge in perfect little cubes of irony and humor and nostalgia built sublimely on simple sentences, everyday objects, uncluttered lines. The longest of the book's poems doesn't stretch the length of a page. At least, that's how the English translation reads.

Mimia Erba's favorite is "The Metaphysical Streetcar Conductor"--a poem that faces an "ancient doubt" about purpose in the randomness of life--and at last month's reading, it was she who read it aloud into the microphone.

"This is one of Luciano's poems that I like very much, and that is why you will forgive me if I speak instead of him," she said, before launching into the page of words.

It comes back sometimes, the dream in which
I maneuver a streetcar without tracks
between fields of potatoes and fig trees.
Wheels don't sink into the ground.
Veering around scarecrows and sheds
I go to meet September on my way to October.
The passengers are my dead family members.

"There are very few abstract words and very few syntactical complications in the poem," said Mimia Erba, a self-appointed editor of sorts for her husband. "It is full of objects." So is a poem called "Sketch of a Farewell." It's nothing but images, one piled atop the other until the final emotional stroke:

This gentian blue of this July without you
is crossed by too many black swifts
the color of aerials
with the style, the dart, of your handwriting.
It goes from the "dear" to your signature,
from the sky to the earth,
from the first line to the last,
from the rooftops to the clouds.

In "The Metaphysical Streetcar Driver," the poem's most moving image centers around an unlikely object: "I believe. I don't believe. When I believe/ I'd like to bring with me to the hereafter/ a little of this side, also the scar marking my leg that keeps me company." More and more, Mimia Erba said, her husband looks for the profound in what's prosaic--streets, bridges, the roots of a beech tree, a dog's bark, a black and gray cape, sheets hung out to dry, a virgin wool cap bought from a Sioux Indian.

"It's like looking through the holes of a slice of Swiss cheese," Mimia Erba said. "All this is said simply, and you laugh at it. There is always hidden humor, and at the same time he's making jokes, he's solemn."

And no two made alike. "Very seldom do you feel like a poem is a repetition of the one before it," Mimia Erba said. "Each one is a small stone, but it is new. It ripples."