Vittoria e dissoluzione

Franco Fortini traduttore e interprete del Surrealismo

Abstract

This essay reconstructs Franco Fortini’s complex theoretical, critical, and poetic trajectory in relation to Surrealism, highlighting the metamorphosis of his judgment over more than thirty years. Beginning with his early interest in the 1940s and 1950s—culminating in the 1959 anthology published by Garzanti—Fortini engaged with the French avant-garde movement in multiple ways, both as a critic and as a translator and poet, focusing above all on the relationship between poetry and politics and on the dissemination (and dissolution) of Surrealism within contemporary culture. In the 1970s, the shift in historical and cultural conditions led Fortini to formulate the concept of “mass Surrealism,” describing the transformation of Surrealism into a depoliticized collective imaginary absorbed by the society of the spectacle and by the mechanisms of consumption. In this new phase, the author developed a systematic critique of the notion of immediacy—psychic, linguistic, mnemonic—opposing to it the necessity of voluntary memory, mediated form, and conscious historical transmission. This stance is also reflected in his poetic production, which reuses Surrealist procedures—critically—to reveal their limits and move beyond them. The essay focuses in particular on texts such as L’ora delle basse opere, in which the visionary dimension is reabsorbed into a clear-sighted representation of bureaucratized horror. In his essays as well, Fortini arrives at an anti-Surrealist position that requires the abandonment even of masters such as Proust and Benjamin, in the name of a poetry grounded in conscious remembrance, in fidelity to the intergenerational pact, and in the ethical-political function of mediation.