Alda Merini

Alda Merini (21 March 1931 – 1 November 2009) was an Italian writer and poet. Her work earned the attention and admiration of other Italian writers, such as Giorgio Manganelli, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Merini's writing style has been described as intense, passionate and mystic, and it is influenced by Rainer Maria Rilke. Some of her most dramatic poems concern her time in a mental health institution (from 1964 to 1970). Her 1986 poem The Other Truth. Diary of a Misfit (L'altra verità. Diario di una diversa) is considered one of her masterpieces.

In 1996 she was nominated by the Académie Française as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2002 she was made Dame of the Republic. In 2007 she won the Elsa Morante Ragazzi Award with Alda e Io – Favole (Alda and Me: Fairytales), a poem written in cooperation with the fable author Sabatino Scia. In the same year, she received an honorary degree in Theory of Communication and Languages at the University of Messina. At the time of her death, President of the Italian Republic Giorgio Napolitano described her as an "inspired and limpid poetic voice".

Early years and education

Alda Giuseppina Angela Merini was born on 21 March 1931 in viale Papiniano 57, Milan in a family of modest means. Her father, Nemo Merini, was an employee working at the insurance company "Vecchia Mutua Grandine ed Eguaglianza il Duomo". Her mother, Emilia Painelli, was a housewife. Alda was the second daughter of three children, including Anna (born on 26 November 1926), and Ezio (born in January 1943). Her siblings are featured in her poems, albeit thinly disguised. Little is known about her childhood, other than what she wrote in the short autobiographical notes on the occasion of the second edition of the Spagnoletti Anthology: "[I was] a sensitive girl, with a rather melancholic character, quite excluded and little understood by my parents but very good in school ... because studying has always been a vital part of my life".

After graduating from primary school with very high marks, she attended the three-year school-to-work transition programme at the Istituto Laura Solera Mantegazza in via Ariberto in Milan, while trying to be admitted to Liceo Manzoni. However, she did not succeed, as she did not pass the Italian language test. In the same period, she took piano lessons, an instrument she especially loved. At the age of fifteen, she wrote her first poem. Her school teacher, impressed, brought it to the attention of literary critic Giacinto Spagnoletti, who replied with an enthusiastic critique. When Merini showed Spagnoletti's letter to her father, he tore it apart, declaring that "poetry will never feed you" The experience caused a breakdown, and in 1947 Merini spent a month in the mental health clinic Villa Turro in Milan. After being discharged, her friend Giorgio Manganelli, whom she had met at the house of Spagnoletti together with Luciano Erba and David Maria Turoldo, tried to help her by recommending her to the psychoanalysts Franco Fornari and Cesare Musatti.

Career

In 1950, Giacinto Spagnoletti published Merini's work for the first time in Antologia della poesia italiana contemporanea 1909–1949 (Anthology of Contemporary Italian Poetry 1909–1949). The selected works were the lyric poems Il gobbo (The Hunch), dated 22 December 1948, and Luce (Light), dated 22 December 1949 and dedicated to Spagnoletti. In 1951, at the suggestion of Eugenio Montale and Maria Luisa Spaziani, the publisher Giovanni Scheiwiller published two of Merini's previously unpublished poems in Poetesse del Novecento (Women Poets from 1900). From 1950 to 1953 Merini developed a professional connection and close friendship with Salvatore Quasimodo. Following a brief relationship with Giorgio Manganelli, on 9 August 1953 she married Ettore Carniti, a bakery owner from Milan. The same year Arturo Schwarz published her first volume of poems entitled La presenza di Orfeo (The Presence of Orpheus). In 1955 she published her second collection of poems, Paura di Dio (Fear of God). It included poems written between 1947 and 1953. It was followed in 1954 by Nozze romane (Roman Wedding) and, in the same year, Bompiani published the prose work La pazza della porta accanto (The Mad Woman from Next Door).

In 1955, she gave birth to her first daughter, Emanuela. Merini dedicated the collection of poems Tu sei Pietro (You are Pietro), published by Scheiwiller in 1962, to Pietro De Pascale, the doctor who took care of her child. Merini's pregnancy was followed by a bout of depression, and she spent a period of time in isolation until she was sent to the mental health clinic Paolo Pini. Merini divided her time between her home and the clinic until 1972. She had three more daughters, Flavia, Barbara and Simona, who ended up being raised in foster families due to Merini's fragile mental health.

Terra Santa

In 1979, Merini started putting together a particularly intense body of work based on her experience at the psychiatric ward. On 7 July 1983 her husband suddenly died and Merini, without any support from the literary community, worked hard to get more of her poems published to support herself and her family but to no avail. However, in 1982, Paolo Mauri, had offered to publish thirty of her poems, chosen from a typewritten document of about one hundred, in his journal (n. 4, Winter 1982-Spring 1983). In 1984 Scheiwiller republished Merini's forty poems in the collection Terra Santa (Holy Land). Maria Corti called the book "a masterpiece", and Merini went on to win the Librex Montale Prize.