CA'ZORCI, Giacomo 1898-1960

(Giacomo Noventa, Emilio Sarpi)

PERSONAL: Born March 31, 1898, in Noventa di Piave, Italy; died of a brain tumor, July 4, 1960; son of Antonio and Emilia Ceresa Ca'Zorci; married Franca Reynaud, April 16, 1933; children: Alberto, Antonio, Emilia. Education: University of Turin, earned law degree, 1923. Religion: Roman Catholic.

CAREER: Poet and journalist. Worked briefly as an attorney. La riforma letteraria (journal), coeditor, 1936-38. Founder of La Gazetta del Nord (newspaper), 1946-47, Il Socialista Moderno (periodical), 1949-50, and Il Giornale dei Socialisti (periodical), 1951.

AWARDS, HONORS: Viareggio prize, 1956, for Versi e poesie.

WRITINGS:

UNDER NAME GIACOMO NOVENTA

Versi e poesie (poems; title means "Verse and Poems"), Edizioni di Comunità (Milan, Italy), 1956, revised and enlarged, Mondadori (Milan, Italy), 1975.

Il vescovo di Prato (selected journalism; title means "The Bishop of Prato"), Saggiatore (Milan, Italy), 1958.

Nulla di nuovo (selected journalism; title means "Nothing New"), Saggiatore (Milan, Italy), 1960.

Il re e il poeta, Scheiwiller (Milan, Italy), 1960.

Il grande amore in "uomini e no" di Elio Vittorini e in altri uomini e libri (journalism), All'Insegna del Pesce d'Oro (Milan, Italy), 1960.

(With Antonello Trombadori) Renato Guttuso, Gott mit Uns, Saggiatore (Milan, Italy), 1960.

Versi e poesie di Emilio Sarpi (poems; title means "Verse and Poems of Emilio Sarpi"), edited by Vanni Scheiwiller, Scheiwiller (Milan, Italy), 1963.

I calzoni di Beethoven (journalism; title means "Beethoven's Trousers"), Saggiatore (Milan, Italy), 1965.

Tre parole sulla Resistenza, All'Insegna del Pesce d'Oro (Milan, Italy), 1965, enlarged edition, Vallecchi (Florence, Italy), 1973.

C'era una volta, edited by Vanni Scheiwiller, Scheiwiller (Milan, Italy), 1966.

Portème via . . . , All'Insegna del Pesce d'Oro (Milan, Italy), 1968.

Caffè Greco, edited by Franca Noventa, Vallecchi (Florence, Italy), 1969.

Storia di una eresia, edited by Franca Noventa, Rusconi (Milan, Italy), 1971.

Hyde Park, All'Insegna del Pesce d'Oro (Milan, Italy), 1972.

Opere complete, four volumes, edited by Franco Manfriani, Marsilio (Venice, Italy), 1986-1989.

"Dio è con noi" e altri scritti, 1947-1960, edited by Franco Manfriani, Marsilio (Venice, Italy), 1989.

Also author of a play, La fiala (title means "The Vial"), published in Situazione, February, 1961. Contributor of essays to periodicals under the pen name Emilio Sarpi.

SIDELIGHTS: Italian poet, philosopher, and journalist Giacomo Ca'Zorci wrote under the pen name Giacomo Noventa. As a writer, Ca'Zorci stood throughout his life in a unique position outside the predominating trends of the age, including fascism, communism, socialism, and even the liberal Catholicism with which he was most in sympathy. Above all, he was anticonformist, criticizing the status quo in whatever form it took. Thus, though he was at heart a traditionalist who felt that no liberal political or cultural reforms should be so far-reaching that they alienated the Italian people and the true Catholic religion, he never aligned himself for long with any single political party or stance. "However," stated Erlena Urgnani in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "it is precisely his refusal of ideologies and his battle against all kinds of dogmatism that place him among the moderns."

Ca'Zorci was born into an aristocratic family in Venice. He was educated in the law at the University of Turin and spent a short time practicing law in Rome before giving up his practice to spend the next decade traveling through Europe. He began writing poems and songs in the Venetian dialect that was his mother tongue and his language of choice throughout his career, and he adopted his pseudonym Noventa. During this time he published occasionally in the journals La Libra and Cultura. Ca'Zorci's affiliation with these journals brought him into conflict with Italian fascists in the 1930s, and he was jailed for a month in 1935; upon his release he was forbidden to travel abroad. The bulk of the poetry he published at this time appeared in the journal he started, Riforma Letteraria, under the pseudonym Emilio Sarpi, a poet Ca'Zorci claimed had died in London in 1933. Riforma Letteraria also gave Ca'Zorci a forum for his political and religious views, collected later in the volumes Nulla di nuovo and I calzoni di Beethoven (both 1965). Ca'Zorci's poems take up themes of love as well as politics and religion. As Urgnani wrote: "There is in the background of [Ca'Zaorci's] poetry a polemic revolt against hermetic solitude, which, he felt, built between people and the world a space populated by obscure and artificial forms. His values were friendship, loyalty, poetry, and love."

Ca'Zorci published his first book of poems, Versi e poesie, in 1956, for which he received the prestigious Viareggio Prize. He then published Il vescovo di Prato, a fictitious dialogue on Catholicism that resurrected Ca'Zorci's alter ego, Sarpi. Shortly before his death in July of 1960 of a brain tumor, Ca'Zorci published a collection of his philosophical essays in Nulla di nuovo. The remainder of his work was published at the behest of others after his death. Ca'Zorci's choice to write in the Venetian dialect instead of standard Italian, and his nuanced polemical stance, alternately anticlerical-Catholic and socialist-Catholic, found resonance with few others of his generation. John L. Brown, in a review of "Dio è con noi" e altri scritti, 1947-1960 in World Literature Today, concluded: "[Ca'Zorci], isolated and controversial as he was, remains . . . for a minority of followers 'an indispensable alternative' to the dominant Italian culture of his time." On the other hand, Thomas G. Bergin, writing in World Literature Today, described Ca'Zorci as honorably rising above his self-contradictions: "Patrician yet socialist, Catholic yet anticlerical, conservative yet radical, he was throughout his lifetime consistently anti-comformista, supporting his position with ironic eloquence and notable integrity."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Astengo, Domenico, La poesia dialettale, Marietti (Turin, Italy), 1976.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 114: Twentieth-Century Italian Poets, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992.

Fortini, Franco, I poeti del novecento, Laterza (Bari, Italy), 1977.

Grana, Gianni, editor, Novecento, I contemporanei, Marzorati (Milan, Italy), 1979.

Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Passione e ideologia, Garzanti (Milan, Italy), 1960.

PERIODICALS

Comunita, December, 1986, "Giacomo Noventa," pp. 170-187, "Scrittura letteraria e intenzione," pp. 188-198, and "Noventa e Olivetti," pp. 199-220.

Diverse lingue, February, 1986, "Giacomo Noventa," pp. 19-26.

Italianist, Volume 4, 1986, "Introduzione ala lirica venta del Novecento," pp. 35-53.

Letteratura italiana: i contemporanei, Volume 3, 1975, G. Pampaloni, pp. 281-298.

Nuova Antologia, Volume 1, 1957, Claudio Varese, "Giacomo Noventa," pp. 273-275.

Ponte, Volumes 8-9, 1956, Franco Fortini, "Giacomo Noventa e la poesia," pp. 1393-1404.

Quaderni d'Italianistica, autumn, 1997, "The Dialect Poetry of Giacomo Noventa," pp. 261-271.

Vita e Pensiero, Volume 51, 1968, "Noventa Debenedetti," pp. 888-900.

World Literature Today, spring, 1987, Thomas G. Bergin, review of Versi e poesie, pp. 266-267; summer, 1990, John L. Brown, "'Dio è con noi' e altri scritti: 1947-1960," pp. 449-450.*