The poetic metaphors of Alberto Capitta

In SV’s thesis., Il Maestrale 2023, Alberto Capitta enters the black hole of loss through continuous verbal acrobatics. The reading of an end-of-year essay that disconcerts the teacher and keeps the whole class in suspense, transforms into the narration of the pain and confusion that accompany the disappearance of a boy who disappeared in pursuit of a ball.

Alongside some protagonists of children’s literature, from Mark Twain’s Finn to Italo Calvino’s Cosimo rampante, the protagonist, indicated only with the initials SV, gets lost in the dark forest of adolescence, the new painful condition into which he has fallen .

At the beginning SV finds refuge in an abandoned railway carriage in the woods where the burning enchantment that he has around and within himself confronts him with a nature that cannot be bent to its own needs, but which bends over him, looks at him, she touches it, and she is alive, sentient. Within this dimension that knows no differences or leaps between the animal, vegetal and mineral worlds, the boy’s moods and mental and physical pathologies materialize, which also act as separate entities: apathy “lights incense” and dupes it with his coaxing, the insomnia torments, but it also gives “dazzles, sparks and stars”.

Poetic metaphors

Only poetic metaphors seem able to lay bare all the wounds and wounds of the dimension of absence and loss into which the protagonist has disappeared. Moving from the carriage to the Passage Bar populated only by donkeys who turn out to be dreams, to the Fisherman’s House and finally to the Lovers’ Refuge, SV seems to gradually return among human beings, but always keeping a great distance. Between a continuous fraying of the external and internal worlds which lose their contours to spill over into other spheres of reality, as in Capitta’s other beautiful novels, from Creaturine a The sky is snowinga Wandering and shipwrecked trees, plants, landscapes, animals are not only next to the protagonist, but live inside him which turns out to be inhabited by birds. If the splendor of nature lights up before his eyes, and the sun “comes down in ladlefuls”, “in buckets”, and the grass releases “seventy greens”, one thought is enough to blacken everything. The metaphors scattered throughout the story push the reader to continually confront a kaleidoscopic vision of pain and loss where the common notion of time seems banned. Above human existence, a cosmic dimension, which never forgets the knife planted in the heart, embraces with the plates of the astral Libra the tormented life that takes place at its feet, participating in the multiplication of images on the love of those who lose and of those who are lost.

The thesis by SV, Alberto Capitta, Il Maestrale, pages. 304, €20.00