I Was Born to Difficult Loves

Even though Elsa Morante presented herself as a poet, her first lyrical collection, Alibi, dates from 1958, when she was already an acclaimed novelist. It came out at the same time as Sandro Penna’s Croce e delizia (Cross and Delight) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s L’usignolo della Chiesa Cattolica (The Nightingale of the Catholic Church). They were friends, members of the lively Roman literary society, and shared an alternative poetics to that dominated by Eugenio Montale and hermeticism. Nevertheless, the book remained neglected by critics. An exception was Giorgio Agamben, who judged it ‘one of the great post-war books’.

Alibi consists of sixteen texts, written between 1941 and 1957. The ambiguous title, taken from the long song at the centre of the volume, can be interpreted as an excusatio of the poet’s ‘profession’ or, as reported in the ‘Preamble’, the confession that this work is just ‘an echo, or, if you like, a chorus, of her novels’. Indeed, ‘For Fable’, ‘To Personae’ and ‘Song for Alvaro the Cat’ are taken from Lies and Sorcery (1948), and ‘Arturo’s Island’ from the eponymous novel (1957).

The themes, in a supreme synthesis, are literature and love, often androgynous. Thus, the lover (the director Luchino Visconti) at the same time can be ‘the favourite page at the court of the Orient’ and, a few lines later, ‘the Chinese princess with the childlike foot’. The style is characterised by a language somewhere between Caravaggesque realism and the legendary tone of myth: and it ...