Blackout by Nanni Balestrini
Translated by Peter Valente
Introduction by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
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Italy’s iconic revolutionary author offers a requiem for the rebels of 1968, of the Hot Autumn and the Creeping May, imagining ablackout like New York City’s famous moment of chaos and in this framework trying to understand the political events that led to the brutal repression and destruction of a generation. Ferocious, despairing, beautiful line by line, this book captures the era we cannot stop leaving.
From Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s introduction:
If we want to understand the peculiarity of this enduring wave of social movements in Italy, reading the poems and the novels of Nanni Balestrini can be useful — even if Balestrini has never been a storyteller, or a chronicler of neorealist descent.
Instead, Nanni Balestrini is simultaneously the most radically formalist poet of the Italian scene and the most explicitly engaged in a political sense. He follows a methodology of composition that may be named recombination, as he is always recombining fragments taken from the ongoing public discourse (newspapers, leaflets, advertising, street voices, politician’s speeches, scientific texts, and so on). But simultaneously he is remixing those fragments in a rhythmic wave that reverberates with passions and expectations and rage.
…This double dimension is the defining feature of Balestrini’s poetics: formalism of the machine, and dynamism of the movement. Cold recombination of linguistic fragments, and hot emotionality of the rhythm. Although the event is hot, this poetical treatment transforms it into a verbal crystal, and the combination of verbal crystals gives way to the energy of a sort of a-pathetic emotion.
Nanni Balestrini participated in revolutionary struggles in Italy, co-founded Potere Operaio, and was forced into exile in 1979. Author of The Unseen and We Want Everything among other books, he is the most celebrated and iconic novelist and author of this crucial period in Italian and global political history.
Peter Valente is a poet, translator, filmmaker, & photographer. Born in Salerno, Italy, he grew up in New Jersey. He is author of A Boy Asleep Under the Sun (Punctum Books, 2014), The Artaud Variations (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014), Let the Games Begin (Talisman House, 2015), and others.
May 16, 2017
$16.00 | ISBN: 9781934639214 | 80 pages
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From Publishers Weekly, a starred review:
Translated into English for the first time, this 1980 homage to “persecuted comrades” from revolutionary Italian writer and artist Balestrini (We Want Everything) recalls an epoch of upheaval that is keenly pertinent to new waves of anticapitalist and antifascist revolt in the 21st century. Known for his recombinatory text experiments, Balestrini here employs a technique in which he snatches lines from selected texts and arranges them as “a patchwork quilt with strips sewed at 45° angles across a checkered base.” The result is an incantatory song of urgency and restlessness, a curation of already-penned words that’s both formally inventive and surprisingly simple. Balestrini steals from many sources—a Mont Blanc tourist guide, newspaper articles, personal letters—and melds the 1977 crushing of Italy’s revolutionary autonomia operaia movement with New York’s infamous 1977 blackout. Though tied to historic moments, Balestrini’s work evades specificity and harnesses a transcendent voice of rebellion. Instead of one man insisting that his own voice speak for the people, the book makes room for the disaffected cries of the many. One repeating line hums that “a new concept is emerging it is the concept of direct counterpower,” though, of course, the concept was not new then and isn’t now. And yet, with nothing new—not even his own words—Balestrini evokes the timelessness of the people’s rage against oppression. (May)
From Asymptote Journal:
Balestrini’s “how” therefore enacts a remarkably nuanced view on the “what.” Perhaps the most relevant if intriguing paradox of this book is its unrelenting focus on the radical movement and related events, expanded by an inclusive, democratic perspective that invites diversity and a discordance of viewpoints and voices—all of which is eventually turned on its head, political stance included. Radicalism itself thus gets subverted, in the sense that any possible single-minded version of it is blown up by the most uncompromising—and therefore inclusive—radicalism of all: that of the (politically and commercially unsanctioned) algorithm. (more)
