Franco Loi, farewell to one of the greatest postwar poets

2021-01-04T19:30:06.303Z

The poet Franco Loi, considered one of the greatest authors of the second post-war period and the greatest among those in the Milanese dialect, died in Milan at the age of 90. He was born in Genoa on January 21, 1930. He moved to Milan in 1937 with his family, after having undertaken various jobs (among other things he took care of public relations at the advertising office of the Rinascente and worked in the Press office of the Arnoldo Mondadori publishing house Publisher), starting from the early Eighties he intensified his activity in the publishing field, becoming among other things also an appreciated literary critic and collaborator of magazines and newspapers. In his poetic work Loi assumed the Milanese dialect as the crucible of a more complex linguistic expressionism, sometimes also animated by a resentful political passion (he was a young active Communist militant, later joining the movements of the new left, until the end of the 70s) mixing elements of various origins, sometimes reworked and reinvented to bend them to his expressive needs. He is the author of numerous poetic collections in which he has been able to blend a wide-ranging narrative poem and sudden lyrical leaps. After the early collections "I cart" (1973, with drawings by Eugenio Toniolo, Edizioni Trentadue) and "Poesie d'amore" (1974, with etchings by Ernesto Treccani, Edizioni Il Ponte), Loi established himself with the collection " Stròlegh "(1975, with an introduction by Franco Fortini, Einaudi), a penetrating and at the same time visionary look into the working and popular world of Milan in the 1940s and 1950s, followed by" Teater "(1978, Einaudi), in which, as suggested by title everything takes place as if on a theatrical scene, and "L'angel" (1981, Edizioni San Marco dei Giustiniani; Mondadori 1994), a sort of novel in verse in which passages in Genoese, Emilian and Romanesque also appear. In 2005 Einaudi published the anthology "Aria de la memoria, Poesie choices (1973-2002)". Among his most successful collections "Amur del temp" (Crocetti Editore, 1999, republished in 2018). Among the numerous awards, Loi obtained the Bonfiglio Prize, the Nonino Prize, the Librex Montale Prize and the 2008 Brancati Prize. He was awarded the gold medal by the Province of Milan and received the Ambrogino d gold and the Lombard seal of the Lombardy Region. In his texts Franco Loi uses a Milanese dialect very open to contamination, intertwining different voices: from the Milanese dialect of the literary tradition to the proletarian and underclass dialectal jargon, from archaisms to forestryisms, up to neologisms and his personal inventions, obtaining a linguistic mixture of strong expressive originality, which often feeds on social and sometimes even political controversy. With the collections "L'aria" (1981), "Bach" (1986), "Liber" (1988, Nonino Prize), his linguistic research combined popular epic and lyrical intimism. He subsequently published "Memoria" (1991, Boetti & C.), "Umber" (1992, Piero Manni), "Arbur" (1994, Moretti & Vitali), "Isman" (2002, Einaudi), "Aquabella" ( 2004, Interlinea Edizioni). With "Voci d'osteria" (2007, Mondadori, Librex Montale Prize and the Brancati Prize) Loi put the vast material into poetic form by listening to the voices of ordinary people. He is the author of a collection of essays ("Short Diary", 1995, La Nuova Compagnia Editrice) and of short stories ("The amplitude of the sky", 2001, Gallino). In 2010 he published the autobiography "Da Bambino il cielo" (Garzanti) edited by Mauro Raimondi. Among his most recent works it is worth mentioning, both of 2012, the poetic collection "I niül" (Interlinea Edizioni).