Air and Memory
Franco Loi

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After World War II dialect poetry became widespread in Italy, with the Milanese poet Franco Loi being one of its most prominent practitioners. In the 1970s, a leading critic called Loi “the most powerful poetic personality of recent years,” and since then Loi has been considered one of the most distinguished living Italian poets.

Loi was born in Genoa in 1930, but his family moved to a working-class area of Milan in 1937. His father was from Cagliari, Sardinia, and his mother was from Colorno, near Parma. The Milanese dialect was the language that Loi learned growing up in a traditional Milan neighborhood, and it became for him an expression of a human community and a way of life that were shattered by the homogenizing effects of mass consumerism and elitist culture. But Loi cannot be described simply as a “political poet,” for his poetry is rich in another impulse as well, a lyrical and visionary aspect, which is just as basic to the ethos of his writing.

The present volume, translated and edited by Andrew Frisardi, provides a selection of Loi’s shorter lyrical poems, drawn from the full span of Loi’s career, as well as a long interview with Loi in which the poet voices his thoughts on everything from poetry to religion to politics to writing in dialect, and shares some stories about his own life, including the shaping experience of living through wartime Milan. The translator also provides a preface that describes Loi’s work and the task of translating it.