Hölderlin's Patmos by Lucchesi: 30 years of an itinerary-experience

Abstract

2017 marked the thirtieth anniversary of publication of Patmos e outros poemas de Hölderlin, the first translated poetry book by Marco Lucchesi. The young poet traces a sample of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry through translation, while experiencing his own poetry, and refers us to the Benjaminian conception of Erfahrung [experience], which, as Jeanne-Marie Gagnebin, among others, observes “comes from the radical fahr-, still used in the Old German in its literal sense of walking, of crossing a region during a journey” (GAGNEBIN 1994: 66). In a reflection on the elements that make up a differentiated poíesis, we notice that an Erfahrung is put forth as a “itinerary” for Lucchesi’s future course of poet-translator. The present work aims to expose this “itinerary”, not with the intention to track down and to analyze exhaustively the references that are bent to produce a somewhat chaotic network or to interpret all the often hermetic poetry that operates this network, but to point out how, in spite of the condition of indomitable creation in a kind of collage or mosaic work, Lucchesi was launching an attempt at dialogue with the German lyric, as a privileged part of Western lyric production from different ages.