Summer, the timeless season of our life

Our gestures, our actions, our emotions and passions fit together within two variables that none of us can escape. This is the most important message that Alessandra Corbetta's poems contained in the collection “Estate corsara” (Puntoacapo Editrice, 2022, pp. 94) want to convey to us.

It is no coincidence that the booklet is marked by three sections, Before, During and After, and towards after towards one moves in the space of the Peninsula often with the calm and safety of the train, at other times with the amazement and surprise of the walk in places unfamiliar.

There are many cities mentioned, Milan, Bologna, Florence, Cattolica, Siena, Rome, and several others, especially Tuscan ones. Each place in its peculiarity, however, retains the ability to exist in an extended time, that of memory, and to welcome within itself, as in an eternal rewind, the people, words and gestures that have inhabited it. In this way the verses of Alessandra Corbetta invite readers to a very long journey into the soul, which takes hold since the summer of 2006, firmly in the author's memory as the exact "succession of blue umbrellas", up to a ' a timeless summer in which the promises of love are consummated, the nostalgia of the past moments and the memory of some phrases. A corsair summer, referred to in the title of the book.

But why exactly "corsair" and why the summer between the four seasons? We ask Alessandra Corbetta:

“The title 'Estate corsara' arises from the need to approach the noun that is the protagonist of the collection, in both real and figurative form, an adjective that somehow returned the image with which I wanted to present this season. Ennio Flaiano wrote that 'There is only one season: summer. So beautiful that the others go around it. Autumn remembers it, winter invokes it, spring envies it and childishly tries to spoil it '; I have always loved these words, finding them in perfect harmony with my idea of summer. Season between seasons, not only in reference to the annual cycle but, obviously, also to the path of life, in which summer is identified with the time of youth, of great leaps, of tremendous unawareness, of abysses of joy and pain , of hopes. Every summer, like any superscript, intrinsically brings with it its subscript, its opposite constituent; for this reason she is necessarily, according to my vision, a privateer ".

Here, tell us why ...

“Corsair, that is, predator, pillager of what she herself had shown us and, in some way, promised. With a reference to Pasolini's writings, the term is extrapolated from the song Le fane by the Baustelle musical group which, not surprisingly, describes the 'after' adolescence, the non-maintenance of what one dreamed of, which one hoped for for one's own future; the song ends with the phrase 'I will bring dying that corsair joy with me' or with the awareness that, at least, the memory of that time full of deep and unknown immensity will accompany us until the end, however it went. Summer does what, perhaps more easily, we can see in the Ferris wheel, of all the rides my favorite together with the wheel with horses: it takes us to the highest point, makes us look far away giving us vision trampolines and then, inevitably , comes down. But if we manage to stay there, if we are capable of not being moved, then we will still have many opportunities for ascent. Then we will be able to live forever in our 'Corsair Summer' ".

What does time represent for you?

“Time is my great obsession, in life and in poetry, which for me continue to intertwine seamlessly. As a child I loved being told about the dynamics of fatal accidents or the great tragedies of history; my existence has always been an attempt to rationally understand death and, somehow, try to get there prepared. Obviously an impossible and, at times, crazy undertaking but which, as an excellent counterpart, has had and continues to have the ability to make me appreciate and fully live every moment of my working life and even my private one. Time, with its relativity and its inability to stop, is like a butterfly that we cannot hold in our hands except for a few seconds, but in its beauty, very rapid and powerful, we can see the meaning of our being in the world. And the partiality of perception or its continuous change does not matter: what matters is to try to live in the time that is given to us, as long as we believe it is worth doing. Summer corsair divides this time, just as it is customary to do, in Before, During and After which, in fact, are the titles of the sections that make it up; although we are in an uninterrupted flow, there are events, which I like to call watershed events, which interrupt this flow or, at least, it seems to us that they sanction precisely that tripartition. Sometimes these triggers are meetings, name exchanges and handshakes that in a few moments change the course of things forever. Estate corsara is built around one of these meetings, one that redefines time and gives it a new rhythm ”.

And how should we pigeonhole travel?

"The adjective corsair that accompanies the summer also etymologically refers to the 'currere' that is to go quickly, which belongs to my life and therefore to the image that I try to recreate with my writing: something is here and immediately afterwards already elsewhere . If the relationship with time exerts on me a charm that is by its nature attractive and at the same time malevolent, the relationship with space is much more harmonious and resolved, so much so that in this collection it is precisely the passage from one place to another. other to act as an anchor because in the movement, in the transit, in the crossing of things the root of what I try to be sticks. Relationships change, our identity is forced to change continuously, the chronological dimension is elusive to us but cities, emblem of a material and mental space together, resist, go beyond us, retain memories, help us to understand who we have been and who we could be, keep track of our being continually traveling to and from something ".

In the poems of the collection there is a lot of talk about love. How do you deal with this typical theme of poetry?

“In Estate Corsara, love is not investigated in a diary or sentimental way; indeed, the object of love is canceled, it undergoes a damnatio memoriae, although this will to obscure the presence gives it an omnipotence that makes it, in all respects, an acting subject. In other words, love becomes a chronotope, a spacetime in which, starting from the moment of the meeting, someone outside of us is allowed to hold a mirror in front of us. The vision of ourselves and, therefore, our redefinition of identity, confronts the other in a no holds barred tête-à-tête, after which it is no longer possible to go back and that is to still be who we were. When we deeply love a person, once the blood ties have been removed, it is as if we fell into the summer: everything seems possible to us, everything seems a beginning and we discover ourselves, we touch with our hands the pluralities that inhabit and constitute us. Here: the love of Summer corsair, which is a flare shot in the sky and at the same time an arrowhead stuck in all the vital organs, wants to be a tool to talk about the relationship with the Other in the most intimate dimension that we can reach with him " .