I MISS YOU, THE BOOK THAT TELLS THE LACK (Italian Bazaar)
/Ashbery’s poetry makes a key appearance in this piece on Gioia Guerzoni’s book I Miss You. The book, by the Italian author, is written in English, but this piece appears in Italian in the the Italian edition of Bazaar, translated here compliments of Google Translate.
I miss you, the book that tells the lack
“When we miss someone or something we love, it’s very hard to keep that feeling inside us.”
BY SARA MARZULLO
01/05/2022
There is a woman in a house in a field of pines and pistachios, with the green turning sea blue of Greece, who asks you to close your eyes and think of a place that reminds you of something lost; to write a list of all the things you have done with someone far away and then to attach it to the window so passers-by can read it; who asks you to use the tears you cry to fill vases to fill with flowers. This woman's name is Gioia Guerzoni, and she is the Italian voice of many English-speaking writers, from Teju Cole to Siri Hustvedt to Sarah Manguso. The guide to lack is I miss you, the book she just published for Cicada Books, with illustrations by Rosie Leech - "I wrote it in English because I spent definitely a good part of my life in English: I work in English and I lived in America," she explains. If the exercises she teaches us to do in Miss You work, touch sore and sweet keys, it is because they are the result of experience, rituals that she herself has tested before others. "Now in terms of losing countries, homes, objects and people, I have a degree," he tells me when he talks and adds that at that time "I was missing a person and a country where I had lived, so I tried to turn all this soup of melancholy and nostalgia into something pleasant, and maybe even poetic and playful".
He thought it would come out of a children's book, of those who maybe read themselves out loud, but then Guerzoni realized that his language was too cryptic: maybe there is a thorny heart in that unspeakable emotion - absence? melancholy? nostalgia? -, it's too complicated a topic to be simplified into an elementary grammar - or maybe, if she ever found that grammar, she had to treasure it for her and adults. In the introduction he writes, “when we miss someone or something we love, it’s very difficult to keep that feeling within us. We need to express it in some way, so that it can be turned into something different. You may miss a person, a country you abandoned, an object you possessed, an emotion you felt. There are so many things that men lack."
She says that at first she felt a little silly, wrapped as she was in that endless melancholy, "because even though I no longer have a family, I still had a lot - a house in Milan, a job I like, a constellation of affections. Then came the pandemic and zac, I missed everyone - not everything, just people - and I missed the journey itself. I missed being in ‘in that egg laid in the skies by an admirable hyperuranian chicken’ as Manganelli wrote in Experiment with India.” Silly or not, definitive or not, irremediable or temporary, it goes to say that the absence of something is like a hole at the bottom of a bucket, a feeling with slow but inexorable release. In Paradoxes and Oxymometers, the great poet John Ashbery wrote, “You know it but you don’t know it. / You miss her, she misses her, she misses her, she misses her. You miss each other": it's not about a woman, but about poetry. He knew this as all poets know that loss is inherent in language, it is an integral part of it, but this reason we must not stop writing, even if what we read is only a slight invocation of a lost and irrecoverable original. About Ashbery, Ben Lerner had said that “his poetry remains out of your reach, engraved on the opposite side of the mirror”; he, in turn, too, had dedicated a booklet to the infinite and unattainable potential of the language.