Intervista a Laura Garavaglia sul tema ROADS FOR POETS
ROAD FOR POETS
Your country Italy
has great history related with ancient road. My first question is “Do you write poems often on “Road”?
1 – I think that all the literature in every country is constituted by
poems, tales or novels about “The Road”. Because the Road is the metaphore ef
our life. We travel not only trought the spaces but also trought the time. Our
whole life can be considered a road full of encounters, stop-overs toghether
other people. In our literature we have
a lot of big poet and writers which wrote about road: the first example is without any doubt Dante
Alighieri and his wonderful Divina
Commedia: this poema is an allegoric
road of Dante from Hell to Heaven, that means from Evil to Right, from the dark to the light, from the
sin to the deliverance.
I didn’t write
propely poems about the road. But
I think a lot of my poems are metaphores of the road. Because poetry is for me
a road to knowledge, thus inseparable from reason.
The poet, thanks to his own sensibility, has a sort of
magnifying glass that allows him to see “the golden heart” of things,
to discover the essence of reality.
I can read some of my poems that are example of road: a poem about Birth, but also about the start
of the road that every human being has to undertake. Birth and Daeath are the
start and the end of our road interpreted as our life. But also “La bambina
irlandese “ is a poems about life and death, a poem about
our road that is metaphore of our life.
In Japan, since Nara era more
than 1300 years ago, poets wrote so many poems on the road. However, nowadays,
people’s
interests in the road is getting less.
Young people are indifferent with such images and do not try to get new image
of the road. How do you think about creation new image of the road?
2 – If I think about the Road in Japanese literature and expecially
Japanese poetry, I think the tanka of
Saigyo Hoshi (included in the Shinkokinshu). He abandoned his family to become
buddist monk and after he travelled
througt Japan writing wonderful tanka about nature and religion.He was a model
for Basho, one of the most important Japanese poet : he went
trought the life and language making of his road a song of the world. I don’t
think nowadays people interest in the
road is getting less. I rather think
that is changing our perception of the road. I mean, nowadays the distances are
shortened travelling by plane, for example and expeciallly are shortened by
mass media, above all TV and computer: we can travel just sitting at home and
watching images of every country in the
world. So our road became a kind of virtual road .But this is not so bad: I
think we live in a very critical age, where technology has a deep impact on our
kind of life, radically changing all our
habits. We cannot refuse this situation, we have to deal with it. On the other
hand in Europe a lot of people are attracted by ancient road. For example the
world famous Cammino di Santiago, from Saint Jan Pie de Port (Roncisvalle -France)
to Santiago de Compostela (Spain) for a lot of people is take a road not only for
religious reason but also because is a
kind of travel inside themselves, a kind of purification, of redemption.
Viewing on ancient times, road is regarded the source of the life, also
sometimes the ruins of ancient civilization are discovered at the bottom of the
sea. Poets are moves very much by such news and inspired to writing poems. Here
is the last question,- What is the road, what is path for you?- Please let
us know
3 – The road for me is my whole life, with the good
and the bad things I meet during this wonderful travel. And poetry is my travel fellow. It help me to deliver the answers to various essential
questions that the mankind has always been arguing about: the comprehension of
nature, the universe, where we come from and where we are expected to continue
going. From this point
of view, I believe that thescientist (physicist, mathematician) and the poet,
both operate in areas of culture and knowledge,importantly linked together. Creativity
is another aspect that scientists, mathematicians and physicist, and poets
share together. Creativity is intuition, imagination: the scientists often has
the intuition about what he aims to demonstrate; in the same way, the poet has
the intuition of what he aims to show, since poetry cannot demonstrate anything,
differently than philosophy and science, but rather “reveal”.