When Louise Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020, not many people knew the American poet, who was born in New York in 1943 into a family of Jewish immigrants from Hungary. However, the readers of his poems were aware of the necessity, the basis and, above all, the quality of his poetic construction site, which gradually expanded its cognitive and spiritual reach, as if it had developed in concentric circles, tidying up and annexing territories more and more widely . Furthermore, the Nobel Prize itself came after a long series of important recognitions, from the Pulitzer Prize (1993) to the National Book Award (2014) to being nominated as Poet Laureate of the United States in 2003.
The most original and recognizable character of her poetry probably lies in the connection between the dryness and severity of expression on the one hand (she is a surgical poet, as they say) and the harshness of the most frequently recurring themes and motifs on the other. Yes, because she is a writer with a very undeniable and complacent vision of human destiny. In his collections of poems he begins by talking about the traumatic turning points that mark the development, if you can call it that, of our lives (starting with his own, which is questioned and analyzed without any pretext). And it speaks of the difficulties of interpersonal relationships, of the wonders and at the same time of the pitfalls of love, of loneliness, of the rigidities and ideological distortions that permeate daily life and endanger its possible naturalness. His verses were written by someone who has experienced violence, abuse and injustice in the flesh and in the spirit.
Precisely for this reason, his poems often do not contain utopian and unattainable horizons of joy, but rather moments of genuine sharing and human participation, if not even happiness. For example, in “The Wild Iris,” by far his most popular collection of poems, Glück writes: “In the garden, in the drizzle/ the young couple plants/ a furrow of peas as if/ no one had ever done that before,/ the great difficulties were never/ overcome and solved” (the translation is by Massimo Bacigalupo, while the book, published in the original language in 1992, was published in Italy in 2020 by il Saggiatore, the Italian publisher of the American writer).
It is clear that, faced with the pain, suffering and anguish of life (which for this author are not only or so much of a metaphysical nature, but also wounds that always have historical and existential connotations), we strive for something not abstract, but direct lived and experienced, conquered now and here. It is no coincidence that “The Wild Iris” is the poetic account – almost a poem, or rather a symphony in verse – of a happy time the author spent with her son in a house in Vermont and, in particular, in its lush garden spent (thanks). under the care of the poet-gardener). Caring for the living is the most important thing his verses tell us.
It should then be added that Glück, like no other poet of our time, has succeeded in maintaining a profitable dialogue with classical authors and, in particular, with ancient myths. This is certainly noteworthy as it is always an extremely dangerous operation as it carries the risk of rhetoric and anachronism. And instead, from time to time, Glück seems to have found in the basic scheme of the myth not just a model, but a confirmation and confirmation of his intuitions regarding the current reality of life and, more generally, human behavior. Averno (2006), for example, draws directly on the myth of Persephone and the descent into hell (the ancients believed that Lake Averno was the gateway to the afterlife) to examine the nature of familial and marital relationships.
And it is precisely the latter – familial and marital love (or lack of love) – that are the two motifs that recur most frequently in his verses. Meadowlands (1997), for example, is not just about the catastrophic end of a marriage, but above all about the true substance of human relationships, their truth or lies, their duration, their conditioning. While in Ararat (1990) the focus is on family relationships that are obscured by the presence of grief, even if it is precisely the constant presence of the wound that evokes a very sweet and poignant poetic voice. In any case, this author, who is lamented today, managed to fix our existence in her verses, far from simple recipes and false conciliatory solutions (her poetry requires open and intelligent readers), but always with balance and sobriety, with intelligence and fraternal, very human Participation.
Life, awards and works
Louise Glück, who died on Friday, October 13, at the age of 80, was born in New York in 1943 to a family of Hungarian-Jewish immigrants. In 2020 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Swedish Academy wrote in the Nobel justification that it had chosen the poet “for her distinctive poetic voice, which with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” Before the Nobel Prize, he had received other important prizes, from the Pulitzer (1993) to the National Book Award (2014) to the nomination as Poet Laureate of the USA in 2003. In 2015 he received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. In Italy she was awarded the LericiPea for her life’s work in 2022. In Italy his books are published by Saggiatore. Translated by Massimo Bacigalupo: The wild iris (2020; it was published in 1992 by the Vicenza-based publisher Giano), Averno (2020), Notte segrete e virtuoso (2021) and Ricette per l’interno dalcollective (2022); by Bianca Tarozzi: Ararat (2021; published in 2020 by the Neapolitan publisher Dante & Descartes) and Meadowlands (2022)