This paper explores the trope of liminality in Elena Schwarz’s poetic language. During the latter years of her life and literary work, Italian motifs became a central part of E. Schwarz’s conception of both poetic and cosmological models. Since 2000, she has visited Italy several times. Elena Schwarz traveled to Rome, Venice, Florence, Pisa, Bologna, the Marche Region, Trentino-South Tyrol and she enjoyed Italy’s beautiful sights with their complex and contradictory reality. In her Italian diaries and Italian poems Elena Schwarz underlines that she felt close to a different, particular sphere of experience, in a second homeland, where she is fascinated by the great and mystical beauty of the surrounding space and symbols, but at the same time she looks terrified, she is scared for her life. In this definite biographical context, the liminality in Elena Schwarz’s poems can be understood as the ontological condition of being caught between two opposing realities, in other words between physical and metaphysical universe, between life and death. The most significant metaphors of liminality between life and death appear through- out her last Italian poems, such as “Aqua alta”, or “L’Esprit de Venice”. The aim of this pa- per is to examine and to put in evidence the main rhetorical and thematic patterns in the poetic representation of liminality in the later Italian works of Elena Schwarz.
Лиминальность и итальянские мотивы в позднем творчестве Елены Шварц / Liminal'nost' i ital'janskie motivy v pozdnem tvorcestve Eleny Schwarz
Marco Sabbatini
2020-01-01
Abstract
This paper explores the trope of liminality in Elena Schwarz’s poetic language. During the latter years of her life and literary work, Italian motifs became a central part of E. Schwarz’s conception of both poetic and cosmological models. Since 2000, she has visited Italy several times. Elena Schwarz traveled to Rome, Venice, Florence, Pisa, Bologna, the Marche Region, Trentino-South Tyrol and she enjoyed Italy’s beautiful sights with their complex and contradictory reality. In her Italian diaries and Italian poems Elena Schwarz underlines that she felt close to a different, particular sphere of experience, in a second homeland, where she is fascinated by the great and mystical beauty of the surrounding space and symbols, but at the same time she looks terrified, she is scared for her life. In this definite biographical context, the liminality in Elena Schwarz’s poems can be understood as the ontological condition of being caught between two opposing realities, in other words between physical and metaphysical universe, between life and death. The most significant metaphors of liminality between life and death appear through- out her last Italian poems, such as “Aqua alta”, or “L’Esprit de Venice”. The aim of this pa- per is to examine and to put in evidence the main rhetorical and thematic patterns in the poetic representation of liminality in the later Italian works of Elena Schwarz.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
