The city of Venice inspired storytellers, poets and thinkers from all latitudes; Henry James, Thomas Mann, Simone Weil, Joseph Brodsky and Abel Posse, among many others, wrote about the “Beatrice of the invisible cities, endless and incomprehensible,” as Marina Maggi writes in the prologue of Venetian blackan original poetry and art treat conceived years ago by two friends in the city of Rosario. Adolfo Nigro (1942-2018) and María Lanese (Campobasso, 1945) had worked together Bass soundswhen the artist surprised the poet with twelve collages made from sheet music and asked her to accompany them with her writings.
In this case, the experience was the opposite: to write, Lanese chose a series of collages in Nigro’s workshop, which he had made after a trip to Venice. If you count the cover, there are seven works, made up of cuttings of playing cards, labels, sheet music, cards and letters, which interact with the poems with elegant ease: “Weightless / panting between burning crystals / they gave rise to what we are / wayward heralds.” The verses, in turn, also project images: “The light of midday / has color and reflections”, “Another streaking light flies by”, “Flawless backlight that immunizes”.
The triple challenge of Venetian blackwhere “forms testify to their reason for being” includes art, poetry and translation. And as Nancy Rojas notes in the afterword, the “never-ending conversation” between friends becomes a prerequisite for beauty.
Venetian black
By María Lanese and Adolfo Nigro
Translated into Italian by Antonio Pinto
La Pecore Nere
48 pages; $20,000
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