Giovanni Raboni

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Giovanni Raboni (22 January 1932 – 16 September 2004) was an Italian poet, translator and literary critic. Raboni was born in Milan, Italy, the second son of Giuseppe, a clerk at Milan commune, and Matilde Sommariva. In October 1942, after the first bombings of Milan, the family moved to Sant'Ambrogio Olona, near Varese, where Raboni concluded his primary and intermediate school. His father's love for French and Russian classics made him read and appreciate Proust, Dickens, Dostoevskij and when his cousin Giandomenico Guarino, knowledgeable about contemporary literature and poetry, found shelter in Sant'Ambrogio too after 8 September 1943 armistice, Raboni met the works by Piovene, Buzzati, Ungaretti, Quasimodo, Cardarelli, and Montale about whom he said: "I know I owe much to Montale, I realise this upon rereading him, even if I did not love him as much as Eliot and Sereni, but he affected me a lot... especially his expression of the limits, of the fact that we cannot demand too much in 20th century of poetry as a source of truth." Having completed law studies, he was a lawyer for some years, but at the end of the 1950s, he felt more attracted to literature and poetry. He met in Milan Vittorio Sereni, Antonio Porta, Giovanni Testori, Giorgio Strehler and began working for periodicals and newspapers, at first in the editorial staff of Aut Aut, a magazine edited by Enzo Paci, then writing for Piergiorgio Bellocchio's Quaderni piacentini and Roberto Longhi's Paragone and finally for Corriere della Sera for which worked several years. Raboni became was appreciated as both a literary critic and a translator of classic works: he translated in Italian some works by Gustave Flaubert, and by Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire for Einaudi publishing house, Jean Racine and Proust's In Search of Lost Time in Mondadori's "I Meridiani" collection. In 1961 he published two short poetry collections, Il catalogo è questo and L'insalubrità dell'aria, followed by Le case della Vetra in 1966, Cadenza d'inganno in 1975, Nel grave sogno in 1982 and, in 1988, the anthology A tanto caro sangue. In the 1970s he began editing the poetry series "I quaderni della Fenice" for Guanda publishing house, acting as a kind of talent scout for new poets. Milan (especially the memory of the old city, before the recent town plannings) is at the heart of his matters: ...e sì, il Naviglio è a due passi, la nebbia era più forte prima che lo coprissero, la piazza piena di bancarelle con le luci a acetilene, le padelle nere delle castagne arrosto, i mangiatori di chiodi e di stoviglie non era certo un posto da passarci insieme a una ragazza.