‘I don’t have the courage to talk to you’, an unpublished song by Alda Merini

“I don’t have the courage to talk to you, / nor name you as only love”: it is the surprising unpublished song, between love and pain, that Alda Merini, the poetess of the Navigli, composed on a typewriter to remember her friend Roberto Volponi , the son of the writer Paolo, who died at the age of 27 in a plane crash on September 3, 1989: on the return flight from Cuba, the Cubana de Aviación aircraft crashed into the ground shortly after takeoff due to a tropical storm. “You were as pure as a medal, / and I, the medal that fell apart / just shine with light on your heart”, she writes.

“I don’t have the courage to talk to you. Unpublished poems for Roberto Volponi” is the title of Merini’s unpublished collection edited by Ambrogio Borsani and published by Interlinea (12 euros, 64 pp.), in bookshops from 28 October. It is an extraordinary collection that celebrates the story of an unusual friendship between the poetess and the young Roberto Volponi, born in the evenings spent until two o’clock talking in the Chimera bookshop bar in Milan, a refuge for poets and dreamers, from Pier Vittorio Tondelli to Aldo Busi, from Giovanni Raboni to Vivian Lamarque.

After the sudden death of the young Volponi – the editor of Interlinea and literary critic Roberto Cicala explains to Adnkronos – Alda Merini donated to the family the group of poems (three of which were poetic prose) of extraordinary intensity collected in this volume, a reminder of the esteem and of the profound affection that bound the poetess to Roberto: “My most pure ambition / that I touch your clothes / full of ingenuity and then / let go of my hands / as if they had had the greatest / lightning strike. In life you were so beautiful / that every profile of yours full of wind / became a farewell of words”. The texts were typed by the author with a typewriter with broken keys and a ribbon empty of ink (so much so that she often used sheets of carbon paper to replace the ribbon) and therefore the transcription had to interpret the many letters typed incorrectly.

“Roberto Volponi was fascinated by the human and literary story of the poet and above all by her lexical freedom in telling it – recalls the curator Ambrogio Borsani and himself a frequenter of the Chimera in the book’s preface – while she saw in him a passionate, curious, tender boy, with a stubborn faith in utopias and a surprising participation in the depths of human affairs”. They are texts that talk about love and death, friendship and pain, with the illuminations of Alda Merini so loved by her readers. As Ambrogio Borsani, a friend of both, recalls, it is the testimony of a unique season from which these poems were born which deserve to find “a place in Merini’s vast and varied poetic geography: the story of an unusual friendship lived in a place of refuge of poets and dreamers”.

The book “I don’t have the courage to talk to you. Unpublished poems for Roberto Volponi” will be presented at the 2024 Vercelli International Civil Poetry Festival as a preview on Saturday 9 November, at the Mondadori bookshop at 12.