ABSTRACT
Lorenzo Calogero (1910-1961) is the poet's name, and in the bookstore his recently reissued Parole del tempo, a gathering of his earliest work, was awaiting the author. Conversations later that day with Italian poet friends confirmed that Calogero, who had remained unknown during his lifetime, mostly spent in Calabria, except to a few enlightened peers such as Carlo Betocchi and Leonardo Sinisgalli had been discovered shortly after his death and hailed as a 'new Rimbaud'. In Italian, Calogero puns here with 'due' (two) and 'soli' as 'suns' as well as 'sole', 'single', 'solitary'. It occurs to me that the color 'brown' might also be a leitmotiv in his poetry, referring, here, at least, to the suntanned faces of his fellow Calabrians. Calogero's astonishing oeuvre, with its compelling luminosity, its 'atmospheres rich in mystery and ambiguity', its earnest longing, its philosophical scope, and its bold modernism built from semantic leaps and disjunctions, should be perused as seriously as possible, and translated.
