Emilio Villa (Affori, Milan, 1914 – Rieti, 2003) was a poet, a critic of both prehistoric and contemporary art, a scholar and translator of the Bible, a historian of religion and ideas, an expert of pre-modern languages and civilizations, as well as a polymorphous, elusive, anarchic artist. Like a permanent avant-garde, his writings spanned the 20th century, taking many different forms (poetry, essays, installations, performance) and using many languages, both ancient and modern (Italian and its dialects, French, English, Portuguese, Latin, Ancient Greek).
Multiple generations of readers have engaged his works from different disciplinary perspectives: Poetry, anthropology, and visual studies. The verbal images, the etymologies, and the different idioms that interact in his writings, the lost words, the sounds he explored in his poems, continually redefine poetry itself. Villa writes, gives a voice, transforms, and projects his words and his languages beyond their historical boundaries, like a shaman, like an ancient traveling bard, rooted in faraway origins, but open to his own times and to all their wounds: First of all war, violence, and all forms of oppression by the powerful over the helpless; but also the everyday miracles that surround us all, like the vibration of the human voice, and its life-giving properties.
To investigate Villa’s works today is to re-examine the entirety of modern poetry: Discussing the relationship between different arts; revisiting in a critical manner the dichotomy of tradition vs. avant-garde; reassessing the importance of translation and multilingualism; determining which socio-anthropological categories are essential to literary studies today. In short, it is a matter of looking at the Novecento from Villa’s point of view: That of an irreducible poet and artist, who often stood proudly at the margins of academia and is essential to experiencing the full gamut of contemporary writing.
Image credit: Arquivo fotográfico do MASP _ Pasta 019 Exposição Didática II – F.1947.00026.004h
