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Abstract
This article pushes at the interdisciplinary boundaries of literary ecocriticism to suggest a new rhetorical figure: the “geometaphor.” The geometaphor is a metaphor that is not only geographically marked, but also rooted in a specific territory. In short, it is a poetic metaphor with a specific address. This article defines this concept through references spanning from the medieval Francis of Assisi to the nineteenth-century poet Giacomo Leopardi, and through a sample of geometaphors in three Northern coastal areas: Liguria, the Veneto, and Friuli. They are the enclosed gardens of the Cinque Terre in Eugenio Montale’s collection Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones); the harbor and hills of Trieste in Umberto Saba’s Trieste e una donna (Trieste and a Woman); and the amphibious streets of Venice in Anna Toscano’s Doso la polvere. The technological component of this research is indispensable, and it grew out of a pedagogical need to present Italian poetry to an audience of students on the other side of the ocean with the help of Google Earth. In this essay, the omino facilitates a visualization of poetical terms. It is “dropped” in specific places on the Italian map to trace the contours of its poetic geography.
Notes
1 The 2019 issue of Italian Culture (37.2) focused on Digital Humanities and Italian Studies. In particular, Serena Ferrando‘s The Navigli Project: A Digital Uncovering of Milan’s Aquatic Geographies (Citation2020) deals with a poetic geometaphor not included in this article. For reasons of space, I am leaving aside the geometaphors of Milan, the Naviglio and the bridge, as created by Giovanni Raboni’s poetry, even though they offer an interesting insight on the poet and his city.
2 In the issue of Geography titled “Poetry and Place,” Hayden Lorimer’s article affirms that “Poetry might be figured as earth-growth, an expressive form that coils into, and out of, places. When it is most affective, it can seem formed or fabricated not so much of words but of the very things or phenomena it describes” (Citation2008, 181). Owen Sheers reinforces: “Landscape and poetry share the same grammar and semantic of associations and suggestion if not the same vocabulary and language” (Citation2008, 174). The relationship between geography and the humanities is also advocated in the journal Cultural Geographies and by the collection of essays edited by Stephen Daniels, Dydia DeLyser, J. Nicholas Entrikin, Doug Richardson, Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities (Routledge, 2012).
3 See Jay David Bolter’s challenge in his entry “Posthumanism” in The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy (Citation2016).
4 See Antonella Tarpino’s Paesaggio fragile: L’Italia vista dai margini. Torino: Einaudi, 2016 and Spaesati. Luoghi dell’Italia in abbandono tra memoria e futuro. Einaudi, 2012. See Iovino, Serenella. Ecologia letteraria. Una strategia di sopravvivenza. Ambiente, 2015 [2006], and Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, Material Ecocriticism (Indiana UP, 2014).
5 See Robert Tally’s Topophrenia. Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (Citation2018).
6 “What begins as undifferentiated ‘space’ becomes ‘place’ as we get know it better and endow it with value” (Tuan, 6). We prefer to leave out of this essay the treatment of non-places (Marc Augé) and atopias (Siobhan Carroll).
7 This idea – born in the island of Sardinia, during my research on poet Giovanni Corona – was developed during the course, “Poetic Geography of Italy,” taught in Spring of 2020, a time of unprecedented physical, if not social, isolation. Pedagogy is not the focus of this article which instead tries to define a new rhetorical interpretative device.
8 Luigi Ghirri collaborated with writer Gianni Celati on a visual art project in the Po valley landscapes in the 1980s. His work on the omino is in Almanacco delle prose: il semplice and is discussed by Rebecca West in her “Preface” to Italian Environmental Literature. An Anthology.
9 I am borrowing this list of literary entryways from Tally’s Topophrenia.
10 There is a clear difference between visiting a place in person and seeing it on Google maps. The mediated view (through a lens and through a computer screen) is not comparable to an in-person experience, but it is much more affordable and today, very common. Technological advancement also allows for certain mobility in the view. It is different from still photography as the virtual omino’s actions are interactive: users can really make him walk in the streets, turn his head left and right, tilt it up and down, and come closer to certain details to see them better (zooming in and out). This mobility opens the discussion on virtual reality and even the new concept of “metaverse,” which is where virtual lives play as important a role as physical realities. Protecting the personal experience of place, when dealing with literature, is the goal of the Italian association of Literary Parks, under the direction of Stanislao De Marsanich. To read about this collaboration see the online article, “Parchi Letterari virtuali alla Florida Atlantic University di Boca Raton” by Ilaria Serra (Citation2020).
11 See Barbara Piatti’s “Mapping Literature: Towards a Geography of Fiction” (Citation2009).
12 See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, Citation1994) and Mikhail Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" in The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: U Texas P, Citation1981).
13 “There is almost no place in Italy that has not found a poet to sing them and steal them away from the grind of time.”
14 Patrick Barron notices this irony in his Introduction to Italian Environmental Literature (Citation2003, xxv).
15 This extreme case of double gaze is not uncommon in religious views of the world. The mystics recognize shreds of divine immanence in very small details of sensible world, close to earth and their own homes.
16 “Literature also functions as a form of mapping, offering its readers descriptions of places, situating them in a kind of imaginary space . . . Or maybe literature helps readers get a sense of the worlds in which others have lived… From a writer’s perspective, maybe literature provides a way of mapping the spaces encountered or imagined” (Tally Citation2013 2).
17 See the fascinating trip through Dante’s Italy in Giulio Ferroni’s L’Italia di Dante (La Nave di Teseo, Citation2020).
18 To offer more clarity, and to homage the students who first worked with me on this idea, I include here the definitions of geometaphor they proposed in the language they decided to use. Almost out of a dictionary comes Odra Dorante’s definition: “Geometaphor (n.): An object, landmark, or terranean aspect of a place that can aid in the definition of the cultural, social, and historical dimension of the place, as seen through the lens of literature. Thus, serving as a (geo)metaphor for the poetics of the writer who inhabits the land, grounding him/her to the environment that has shaped his/her vision.” Talya Dunleavy analytically explains the strong ties between literature and world: “Metaphor compares two unrelated objects. A geometaphor uses a geographical location or a local object that incarnates particular human conditions for a writer. It implies a deep connection between place and man/woman.” Domenica Diraviam puts the accent on the active power of nature that humbles our anthropocentric vision: “A geo-metaphor is not the image that results from reading poetic verse and picturing the scene in nature, but rather the inverse. It is the catalyst. The human is not the superior being who is able to put into words the description of the setting, but rather the setting that encourages the description penned by the writer/artist.” Angelo Bribiesca stresses the area of study, poetry: “The geo-metaphor, the union between a geographic place and a literary metaphor, can be found in poetry because its lyricism better expresses ideas through metaphors.”
19 Simon Schama’s important Landscape and Memory departs from an understanding of the thick poetic value of places: “It is our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw matter and landscape” (Citation1996, 10).
20 “In the Chianti I once read on a plaque some moving verse of British poet Richard B. Sheridan: “Come into my garden, / I would like my roses to see you.” This overturning is beautiful, and truthful. Perhaps our roses, our squares desire to meet us every day: we water them and they tell us the ephemeral and eternal story of beauty, we feel quieter for a moment, and they feel for a moment protected by our gaze.”
21 In teaching, a large portion of the lesson should be geared to the geographical explanation of the region.
22 It may appear as an anachronism to read Saba or Montale through 21st-century GPS technologies, but this is a welcome evolution in literary criticism. It is, however, very important to keep in mind of the changes that time produced on the landscape and to give relative weight to the contemporary appearance of the land.
23 See Antonella Tarpino’s Paesaggio fragile, 72.
24 See “Eugenio Montale,” Il valore letterario, vol. 4, 514.
25 “Till one day through a half-shut gate / in a courtyard, there among the trees, / we can see the yellow of the lemons; and the chill in the heart / melts, and deep in us / the golden horns of sunlight / pelt their songs” (translation by Galassi, Citation1997).
26 “Liguria, / your image, my land, / I'll always carry in my heart, / as one setting out does / the rough scapular his mother / gave him, weeping,” my translation. Sbarbaro’s “rozzo scapolare che gli appese / lagrimando la madre” is translated by Vittorio Felaco in “the simple cross that his mom hung around his neck, crying” (194).
27 Take the omino on the panoramic lookout of Salto della Lepre (hare’s leap) in Bonassola: the perfect place to enjoy the power of this geometaphor, the vertigo on emptiness.
28 Saba writes: “There are people in Trieste who still today have ten, twelve types of blood in their veins, and this is one of the reasons of the particular ‘neurosis’ of its inhabitants” (“Inferno e paradiso di Trieste” 282). Sigmund Freud lived for a time in Trieste and his theories were firstly practiced by doctor Edoardo Weiss (1889-1970).
29 “Umberto Saba has succeeded in making us understand that our place is for us a second skin, stained, scratched, signed by moles and scars.”
30 “In Trieste there’s a street in which I see myself / reflected, on long days of sequestered gloom / it’s called Via del Lazzaretto Vecchio. / Among old houses, all alike as hospices, / there is but a single note of happiness: / the sea at the end of its side streets.” (“Three roads”). Saba’s poems are from the translation by Stephen Sartarelli, in Songbook. Selected Poems by Umberto Saba.
31 Often when I’m walking home I’ll go / by way of some dark street in the old town / The thoroughfares are crowded (…) / Here, among the men that come and go / between tavern and home, or the brothel (…) / I in passing find eternity / in wretchedness. (…) / In them all, and me, there moves the Lord. / Here, side by side with the lowly, I feel my thought / in streets of greatest squalor grow most holy. (“Old Town”). I changed Sartarelli’s translation of the last verses to respect the original “in compagnia” (stressed in its rhyming position as well as in its meaning), from “in the presence of the lowly” to “side by side with the lowly”.
32 “I crossed the whole city, / then climbed a slope, / crowded at first, deserted higher up, / closed off by a low wall, / a niche where I can sit alone (…). / My city, in all its parts alive, / keeps this quiet spot for me, for my life, brooding and solitary” (“Trieste,” Hockley’s translation).
33 “Where the pathway in the sun is a ribbon / of gold, I bid myself ‘Good evening.’ // In me alone are my mists and fine weather” (“Solitude,” Hockley’s translation).
34 Iovino’s chapter in her Ecocriticism and Italy effectively highlights the evils that corrode the city, from corruption to poisonous refinery of Porto Marghera, from dredging to environmental damages.
35 To see Anna Toscano’s Venetian home, see the photo reportage by Giacomo Cosua, “La casa di Anna Toscano” Houzz, Citation2015. This is the point of view of the poem, “Seduta sul cuscino” that paints a geometaphor of her colorful, eclectic, and curious outlook on the world. “This is my landscape,” she says. My student, Stella Alves, translated and interviewed Anna Toscano during the 2016 summer study abroad program in Venice.
36 “I grind steps I grind thoughts / sometimes the ink ends / the film stops (…) / I grind steps I grind thoughts / the ink ends sometimes / then I open the desk drawer / the large one in the middle and I search / I find steps and I find thoughts: / because I think with my feet” (“Macino passi macino pensieri”). Toscano’s poems are my translations.
37 “I don’t know if Venice chose me, or I chose her. … Here every state of my soul finds a refraction in all that surrounds it, the things that are around me have a form or an odor or a color that remind me of myself. (…) I watch her and whatever state my soul is she is also, and she is like me. Or me like her. I don’t know if the sun is there because of my good mood, or if my good mood is there because of her sun. I don’t know if when I am angry, she fills the streets with people when I am in a hurry for work, or vice versa.”
38 See Anna Toscano and Gianni Montieri’s article, “Riavvolgendo il nastro dell’acqua” (Doppiozero, November 21, 2019) about the high water of November 12, 2019, that almost reached the “aqua granda” record of 1966.
39 “When the world will watch it on the TV saying “ooohhhh” with bated breath while the sirens hoot and hoot and hoot. I will also be here, with yellow plastic boots on my feet to match my mood with that of its light, to look for my nose in its fog, with my nose, to feel my bones creak like steps over the stones.”
40 “I counted the steps / long steps cautious horizontal / telling the unbelievers / that the water comes from below / not only from above/ how it rises with the sun / not only with the rain … then I stopped crying / and the tide flowed back.”
41 “The future does not exist / the future does not arrive / in my city: / even though my step is long / even though the wind favors me / the vaporetto number 2 can’t go faster than 22 km per hour. / How to surpass the past how not to look back / (at this speed) / with our neck turned back three quarters: / time stops in piazzale Roma so we live embroiled / in the history of populations. / We live, happily, / inside a rearview mirror.”
42 “I like the eternal jokes of the reflections on the water and on glass, they amplify the infinity visions, everything reflects off everything: I can be in one place but also be reflected in another: I am always that one, but with what other life? Like the mirrors that protrude from the window to let you see who is outside without having to come out, they continuously reflect the inside between light and glass. Continuous parallel worlds from which to exit and enter, other existences and other rooms to live in, looking from the inside while ringing the bell from outside.”
43 The pedagogical value of this method is strong, especially in a course on Italian poetry taught outside Italy. The use of virtual reality can substitute experiential learning in a time (as ours at the time of writing) when traveling possibilities are limited. It could offer the next best thing when visiting the country that produced so much literature is not possible. A course centered on the geometaphor (such as the one taught at Florida Atlantic University in Spring 2020) would include virtual walks and the actual mapping of a literary path. In fact, a peculiar technological feature contained in Google Earth allows users to construct a personalized thematic itinerary on any part of the globe.
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Ilaria Serra
Ilaria Serra is Professor of Italian and Comparative Studies at Florida Atlantic University. Her research extends from Italian cinema and literature to the history of Italian immigration to the United States. Among her books are The Value of Worthless Lives: Writing Italian American Autobiographies (Fordham UP, 2007), The Imagined Immigrant. Images of Italian Emigration to the United States between 1890 and 1924 (Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2009), and Italia cantata: A Language and Culture Textbook (Linus Learning, 2021).