My thesis, supervised by Dr Giuliana Adamo, aims to provide the first critical edition of a still unpublished collection of Tarot texts by the multilingual and visual poet Emilio Villa (1914-2003). My central research question focuses on how the innovative poetry of Villa goads the reader to meditate on the power of the word and on the ‘serious game’ that language plays.
In my philological approach, I examine handwritten material taken mostly from one of the author’s archives, consisting of 200 poems in draft form, as well as a jotter detailing the author’s literary aims. Written during the 1980s, this material represents the mature phase of his work, and is fundamental to understanding his originality within the context of contemporary literature. It’s also an opportunity to discover the poet’s modus operandi, his peculiar style of work. Like all the author’s poems of the 1950s, his Tarots are not written in a standard Italian but in a linguistic pastiche of French, Italian dialects, as well as fragments of Latin, Greek and Sumerian. In his poems, Villa created surprising new words, cross-language neologisms, puns and paraetymologic games. He also enjoyed experimenting with changeable page settings to accompany the fluidity of his poetic diction; visual constructions that sustain his attempts to extend the potential of language.
Testo autografo di Emilio Villa dal materiale Tarocchi. © di Francesco e Stefania Villa.
The use of poetic licence is undoubtedly the author’s guiding principle. Villa’s search for artistic freedom becomes a quest for an unconventional, sibylline and universal, ‘absolute language’. His study of religious and mythological texts probably accounts for the oracular tone he adopts in many of his writings and esoteric verses. This practice always aims to transcend the merely communicative and mundane. The poet is engaged in a battle against language, in a confrontation with the inexpressible. His poetry wants to embrace the primordial chaos to get closer to the origins of language and of our being.
My thesis aims to investigate his unique interdisciplinary approach in international contemporary literature. This particular project contains all Villa’s leit motives and different skills coming from his parallel activities of poet, biblist, scholar of archaic languages and visual arts interpreter. Like James Joyce, Villa’s texts are labyrinthine and condense multiple meanings, polysemous nuances, intercultural and intertextual connections demanding active participation on the reader’s behalf. Indeed, in his notebook, Villa describes the reader as both tempter and player. In fact, he takes advantage of the mysterious aura of the ancient Tarot cards to challenge and involve the public in a real artistic experience (“se rencontrer/ se battreâ€).
Finally, I will highlight how Villa’s unfinished project can deeply question our knowledge, guiding us towards the structure and the limits of languages, and constantly searching for a place outside the boxes of trends and conventions: a place beyond representation and form, that tends to linguistic unity, a memory of another time, the origins.
