Antonio Delfini

Antonio Delfini (Modena 1907 – 1963) was a writer, poet and journalist. Self-taught, he began writing in the late 1920s for the publishing house Guanda. He had distinguished mentors, from D’Annunzio to Montale, from Pasolini to Garboli, and is considered the eternal talented youth, with the tender, tormented voice of a desperate man full of grace, eccentric both as regards the avant-garde and tradition. One who used literature as a surrogate for life, turning his own, troubled biography into a story. He founded, ran and worked for various periodicals. His short poems are clearly influenced by Baudelaire, and his prose by the French surrealists.

His marked his debut in 1938, with Il ricordo della Basca, a collection of short stories that propelled him to national fame and for which he was awarded the 1963 Premio Viareggio, just a few months after his death. Delfini’s other works were equally inspired by his feelings and grievances as a man from Modena: the surrealist provocations in Il fanalino della Battimonda (1940), the bizarre, part Orwell, part Po Valley utopia in Manifesto per un partito conservatore e comunista in Italia (1951), his short stories in La Rosina perduta (1957), his sarcasm in Misa Bovetti e altre cronache (1960), the municipal grudges in Poesie della fine del mondo (1961), and the punctiliously fantastical philology in Modena 1831, città della Chartreuse (1962).