Per un’edizione genetica e commentata dell’Ippopotamo di Luciano Erba

The genetic edition collects all the drafts of the poems included in the first two sections of the collection L'ippopotamo (Einaudi 1989) by Luciano Erba. The texts now included in those sections have been previously published by Scheiwiller in 1983 (Il cerchio aperto) and 1987 (Il tranviere metafisico), but have been reorganized in a new architecture in order to display within a more peculiar structure the evolution of Erba's poetry from the so colled poetica degli oggetti to a dematerialized representation of objects, places and characters (poetica dell'assenza or poetica del sogno). The comments after every text try and follow this process via a progressively emphazised focus on the gap between Erba's adherence to the topoi of the Linea lombarda and later to a very personal reinterpretation of Minimalism, within a tautological, anti-pathetic and anti-rhetorical frame. The edition also stresses the relations between Erba's lines and his visual heritage based on explicit mentions (Arcimboldo, Gothic Art in Siena, Picasso and Hornby) and obscure references (Fausto Melotti, Bernardo Luini, Italian Art Nouvea, Milanese architecture). Erba's visual imagination tends indeed to depict monochrome surfaces glanced off by a second hue in the foreground as it is common in American Minimal Art.