Paris and Berlin: 3 days to remember Andrea Zanzotto

As part of the initiatives for the centenary of Andrea Zanzotto’s birth, the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris is organising a conference from 25 to 27 November. The aim is to project the literary and intellectual figure of a writer who is too often reduced to a local Italian and Venetian matrix on to the European plane, by comparing a series of ideas that come to us from his poetic work and his non-fiction reflections with key figures with whom his critical (and translation) output has always had a fruitful dialogue: Hölderlin, Rimbaud,  Bataille, Leiris,  Michaux, Celan, and Mallarmé. Entitled  “Zanzotto europeo, la sua poesia di movimento” [“Zanzotto the European; his poetry of movement”] the conference will be opened at 10 a.m. on 25 November by the Director of the Italian Cultural Institute, Diego Marani. Speeches will follow by Antonella Anedda, Philippe Di Meo, Valerio Magrelli, Alessandro Carrera, and others. In the afternoon the conference will continue with talks by Laura Toppan, Giuseppe Sandrini, and Francesco Carbognin. The day will end with an evening at the Maison de la Poésie, led by Martin Rueff, entitled “Poète avant toute chose: Andrea Zanzotto dans la società des poètes“. On Friday 26 November there will be a discussion about Zanzotto the Surrealist, with important foreign speakers. The day will conclude with a screening of the documentary by Denis Brotto, “Logos Zanzotto”. Finally, on Saturday 27 November at the École Normale Superieure there will be a seminar with young European scholars, coordinated by Martin Rueff, entitled “Andrea Zanzotto au pied de la lettre: éditer, commenter et interpréter la poésie d’Andrea Zanzotto”. A second session of the conference, organised by the Italian Cultural Institute in Berlin, to take place at the Institute from 29 to 30 November, will present Zanzotto from a German perspective. The programme will be curated by Andrea Cortellessa and Theresia Prammer.