Vittorio Bodini biography

(Translation: Milena Galeoto)

Vittorio Bodini (Bari, January 6, 1914 - Rome, December 19, 1970) was an Italian poet and translator, a leading Italian interpreters and translators

of Spanish literature Federico Garcìa Lorca, Miguel de Cervantes, Rafael Alberti, Francisco de Quevedo). His studies and his translations are still considered models. He became interested to translate works by Spanish surrealist poets (Poets Spanish surrealist, Einaudi, Turin, 1957) and also he wrote on Barocco di Gòrgora (Rome, 1964). He was a poet who has gone through all the artistic experiences of the twentieth century European art (he was, among other things, aeropoeta futuristic).

Vittorio Bodini was born from salentini (from Salento, south Italy) parents, January 6, 1914 in Bari, but still infant he was brought to Lecce.

Eighteen years old he founded a futurist group. In 1937 he enrolled at the Faculty of Philosophy in Florence, where he graduated in 1940. Here he became friend, among others, with Mario Luzi, Alessandro and Piero Parronchi Bigongiari, historical italian poets and writers. Back in Lecce, with Oreste Macri, he edited the third page of "Vedetta Mediterranea", historical periodical founded by Ernest Alvino, then he worked to "Letteratura" review, publishing his first poems, joined the movements "Giustizia e Libertà" and "Libera Voce".

In 1946 he moved to Spain as italian reader and antiquarian. In 1950 he returned to Lecce and after two years he taught Spanish Literature at the Bari University , in 1954 founded "Esperienze Poetiche". He continued to have stable relationships with Salento, although in the last ten years he moved to Rome, where he died in December 19, 1970.

Researcher of Baroque, on Luis de Gongora and Spanish surrealists, Bodini has made excellent translations of Don Quixote of Cervantes, the Theatre of Garcia Lorca, with Einaudi publisher, as well as manage pages of Francisco de Quevedo, Rafael Alberti , Pedro Salinas.

His precious books of poetry: La luna dei borboni (1952), Dopo la luna (1956), Metamor (1967) and Poems (1972, posthumous collection output in recent years with Mondadori and republished by Besa). A correct interpretation of the Bodini’ poetic you can make considering the continuing attraction for the South. This is demonstrated by the many poems in which several places in Salento like Lecce, Torchiarolo, Cocumola are mentioned.

Bodini is a poet of great sensitivity, the supreme singer of a mythical, ancestral South. His verses are among the best Southern poetry of the twentieth century.