The following appeared in Italy’s Il Manifesto, on the occasion of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror appearing in a new Italian translation, with translation here courtesy of Google Translate…
American poets. Retranslated by Damiano Abeni, «Self-portrait in a convex mirror» is inspired by the painting by Parmigianino, and he specifies what art is for the poet: from Bompiani
EDITION OF 27/10/2019
John Ashbery in Acapulco in 1955
In the fall of 2017, the Tibor de Nagy and Pratt Manhattan galleries in New York paid tribute to John Ashbery, a few months after his death, exhibiting his bizarre collages , over one hundred and twenty works made over seventy years. The most influential American poet of his generation was also revealed to the public as a pop artist: since 1948 he had in fact been delighted to paste cuttings of various origins on postcards and boards of board games, recomposed in humorous combinations with an elusive meaning. Characters from the world of comics and advertising are shown in secret conversation with the great masterpieces of art - Giorgione with Crazy Cat, Parmigianino with Buster Brown - often accompanied by faces of enigmatic cats, or set between playing cards and old stamps.
The alienating effect of contrasts immediately refers to Ashbery's verses, to his familiar and mysterious, playful and melancholy language. These collages are iconographic glosses to his writing and his way of juxtaposing high and low registers, what in the seventies made Ashbery a reference poet among the many experimenters looking for new expressive ways. The masterpiece of that decade, Self-portrait in a convex mirror , now returns in Italian translation, lovingly curated by Damiano Abeni (Bompiani «Capoversi», pp. 240, € 18.00) after the 1983 version of Aldo Busi for Garzanti, introduced by Giovanni Giudici.
Ideas on thoughts
The little poem, inspired by the painting by Parmigianino mentioned in the title, made the collection famous, in which Ashbery composes a portrait of the contemporary artist stating what it means, for him, to make art: if this is to give the book a thematic unity , the stylistic one comes instead from the uninterrupted reasoning of the American poet on everything that happens to him, observes and perceives, as if the thoughts were rings of a chain of free associations. What is writing, one asks in a poem: "it is to fix on paper / not really thoughts, but ideas, perhaps: / ideas about thoughts".
A poetic always seems on the verge of manifesting itself, but it immediately melts into something else and gives way to various considerations advanced by its reasoning. Ashbery's soliloquy thus continues to branch out in ever new directions: at the very beginning of the book, we read: everything "is a quotation of itself" and germinates names that "branch into other references".
Similar fragments of meta-poetry are inserted as pauses in the flow of words and things in continuous metamorphosis and extend their meaning beyond the limit imposed by reality. As Harold Bloom writes in the 1979 essay that Abeni republished at the beginning, Ashbery goes "hunting for the soul".
In the manner of a songbook (as defined in the bandella), Self-portrait within a convex mirror documents everyday life and reinvents it, lightly showing the other side of everything. And although modern sensibility cannot be contained in a formula, Ashbery finds in his variegated discourse a lyrical method to represent it.
It happens, in fact, to recognize phrases that we have just said ("One day one called while I was not there ..."), but inserted in his rhythmic reasoning, between spoken language and fragments of sparse life ("Today for lunch: omelette of onions, potatoes / and peppers ... ") that coexist with a high linguistic register, made of refined terms, cultured quotations, speculations on living that seem to give voice to apprehensions and questions in a magmatic world without boundaries and without order. A look at collages - a good number of which are online - illustrates Ashbery's poetics well, in those whimsical and surprising combinations.
Ashbery, who hardly corrected his texts, used to say that he had instead elaborated for months the 552 verses inspired by Parmigianino's painting that close the book. A slight change of pace is indeed noticeable: the author comes out of his monologue and confronts himself with the artist of the past, questions him about why he portrayed himself with that " eccentricity ", the right hand widened by the convex mirror and larger than the head. Obsessed by the alteration of the real, Ashbery enters and leaves the picture, breaks it down and reassembles, cites Vasari and other sources to reconstruct its history, measures the distance between his time and that of the painter: «Vienna is where it is today, where / l I saw with Pierre in the summer of 1959; New York / is where I am now, a city that is logarithm of other cities ".
If the first of the six parts is part of the ekphrastic genre, in the following Ashbery compares the idea of art that refers to the motionless image of the Mannerist painter with his poet in a mobile time and without sure grips. As in fading, in the end the painting with the deformed hand recedes from the young poet's gaze, until it becomes a thing among things.
When it was released in the United States in 1975, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won the Pulitzer and other prestigious awards consolidating the reputation of Ashbery, a poet already quite well known and avant-garde since the Fifties. Together with Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch he had been associated with the so-called New York School , a label coined by Robert Motherwell to refer to the artists who frequented the Tibor de Nagy art gallery. His poems were published in 1953 precisely from this gallery where young poets met with an interest in contemporary art, the metropolitan environment and the search for a new language.
Barely perceptible
For Ashbery, the artistic world of mid-century New York also marked the beginning of his relationship with the figurative arts. In France, where he lived for about ten years, until 1965, he began to collaborate as a critic with important art magazines, a job that accompanied him throughout his life along with the minor art of collage . Precisely one of these, entitled Still Life and dated 2016, is entirely dedicated to Parmigianino's self-portrait: here the disproportionate hand of the Renaissance artist is covered by another hand, the one with the bunch of grapes from the sick Bacchino by Caravaggio, who comes forward to the right of the picture: the homage of the elderly and authoritative poet to his most famous poetry is resolved in a mixture of high register in an ironically pop key. The painter's face is pushed into the background, the immense caravaggesque hand that hides the one in the painting visually reformulates what for Ashbery is the artistic invention: an alterity that enters «the most common / forms of daily chores» by changing everything «in a way barely perceptible and deep».