Sex & The Book / The sadomasochistic love between domination and narcissism in the verses of the poet Patrizia Valduga

Patrizia Valduga was born in Castelfranco Veneto in 1953 and is one of the greatest Italian poetesses of our time. An educated, beautiful woman with a shady charm, she translated Mallarmé, Céline, Valéry, Molière, Kantor, Shakespeare. In 1988 he founded the magazine Poetry and for a year she was the director. He made his debut with the collection Medicamenta in 1982, followed - among others - by There temptation , Pain woman , Requiem , Ward of the incurable , One hundred quatrains and other love stories and he dedicated both the moving poetic afterword to Last verses that collection The book of lauds to Giovanni Raboni, an illustrious poet and literary critic who died in 2004 to whom Valduga had been linked since 1981, despite an age difference of more than twenty years.

Look! Tell me, beg: Have mercy ...
Or I'll hang you from the ceiling by your arms.
More humble: Pity!
Now undo here. I said: Undo!
Baby, if you want to heal,you must learn the art of obeying.

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Don't make that face, moron ...
Stop adoring yourself, adore me!
Down, on your knees, like someone who repents.
Do you want another slap ... huh?
I am your lord
And I can what love cannot.

In the collection Lesson of love (Einaudi, 2004) Valduga stages the dynamics of a sadomasochistic relationship which, amidst very composed rhymes and septenary schemes, shows all the ruthlessness and the carnal reality of a brutal and narcissistic desire. The protagonists are a man and a woman, two lyrical selves who alternate in a succession of madrigals of impeccable formal perfection in strong tension with the raw and violently expressive content, followed by a third movement, a short theoretical treatment on the poetry of love and love for poetry.

The male self of the collection gives orders to the woman as if they were punishments, with a desire for power and enjoyment in humiliating her fragile self, forcing her to beg for mercy and to adore it, instead of adoring herself, as if the satisfaction of her pleasure and her ego was the only saving solution to heal her from herself (Child, if you want to heal, / you must learn the art of obeying). Raging on the lover's nudity, he profoundly humiliates the identity that he had painstakingly built up with his language, that is, with words and with his poetry (I'll fix your beautiful self for you / [...] little girl, bitch who rhymes, / who sublimes herself to make herself sublime). It would seem that the man, in victimizing her, wants to affirm a superiority that the poetic talent of the woman seems to question. Yet it is she herself who needs that violence, who gets excited by every word uttered by her executioner (He doesn't miss a single word / and everything he says excites me ...), constantly divided between exaltation and humiliation.

Violence then becomes liberating, it is like a slow perception of oneself, an almost mystical cancellation in which to finally obtain rest: Inner rest ... eternal rest, she would say. But the suspicion always remains that this difficult amorous embrace, slow exhaustion of words and desires, more than a lesson in love, is nothing more than a lesson in poetry.

by Giuliana Altamura

Here you can read the previous appointment with the column, Sex & The Book / Thérèse and Isabelle, carnal passion and forbidden love between hiding and homosexuality

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