Nella Nobili
Born1926 (1926)
Bologna, Italy
Died1985 (aged 58–59)
Cachan, France
Occupation
  • Poet
  • writer
Language
  • French
  • Italian
Genre
SubjectFactory work

Nella Nobili (1926–1985) was an Italian poet and writer. She is considered a representative of proletarian literature.[1] She wrote in French and Italian, notably about factory work and lesbian love.

Biography

Nella Nobili was born in 1926 in Bologna. Coming from a modest background, she left school at the age of twelve to work in a factory,[2] first in a ceramics workshop, then at fourteen as a glassblower.[3] It was as a self-taught person that she began to develop a link with writing and poetry. During breaks after work, she wrote her first texts[4] and avidly read everything she could find: Italian poetry, but also Rainer Maria Rilke and Emily Dickinson.[2] She met Giorgio Morandi, to whom she dedicated the poem Landscape in 1926.[5]

After the World War II, she came into contact with the artistic and literary circles of Bologna in the immediate post-war period. She met the painter Aldo Borgonzoni (1913–2004): she assiduously frequented his studio in via Saragozza. She met the director of "Giornale della Sera" Giuseppe Galasso.[5]

She frequented the house of Renata Viganò and Antonio Meluschi [it] in Via Mascarella, where intellectuals such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Sibilla Aleramo, former partisans and students met.[5]

At the Caffé Zanarini in Piazza Galvani, then a meeting place for left-wing activists, she met Enrico Berlinguer, the future secretary of the Communist Party.[5]

In 1949, she moved to Rome. There she met anti-fascist groups, artists and writers and she began to gain recognition and support, notably from Elsa Morante and Michel Ragon.

Working in a workshop in her youth, as a nurse's aide during the war and later as the head of a cufflink company,[1] Nella Nobili published poems related to the world of the factory (La jeune fille à l'usine, 1978), which earned her recognition as a representative of proletarian literature. But in Rome, she felt that she was being “paraded around like a little monster dressed as a worker-poet” and, disenchanted, she left for France.[6]

Nobili arrived in Paris in 1953, where she remained for the rest of her life. There she made handicrafts with miniature works of art using the self-invented cold-casting method.[2]

She began writing in French in the 1960s. She published collections of poems and books, including Les femmes et l'amour homosexuel, with her co-author, Édith Zha, in 1979, which brought together testimonies, reflections and documentation on female homosexual love.[7] She published in magazines such as Sorcières[8] and corresponded with figures such as Giorgio Morandi, Michel Ragon, Bernard Noël, Claire Etcherelli and Henri Thomas.[9] In 1975, Simone de Beauvoir, one of her detractors,[2] judged her writing to be clumsy, inexperienced and improvised, and this judgement was very painful for Nobili.[10][11]

She committed suicide at the age of 59, in 1985, in Cachan.[12]

She left a legacy of poems to be read, for they are a denunciation, a beacon of light on the condition of women and workers in the 1940s, a cry against stigmatising society, factories that are prisons and prejudices about love.

— Marie Potel[13]

Works

Legacy

Her works have been partly translated by Marie-José Tramuta, professor at the University of Caen Normandy.[3] His archives are kept by the Institut mémoires de l'édition contemporaine.[14][9]

In September 2018, her compositions were read and performed by Drusilla Foer as part of Il Tempo delle Donne, the event organised by Corriere della Sera at the Milan Triennale.[15]

References

  1. ^ a b Ragon, Michel (2012-09-11). Histoire de la littérature prolétarienne de langue française (in French). Albin Michel. ISBN 978-2-226-22890-1.
  2. ^ a b c d de Cesco, Andrea Federica (2018-06-22). "Nella Nobili come Saffo, una raccolta celebra la poetessa morta suicida". Corriere della Sera (in Italian). Retrieved 2022-02-13.
  3. ^ a b Simonini, Jessy (2017-12-31). "Nella Nobili, riscoperta di una poeta di frontiera". La macchina sognante (in Italian). Retrieved 2022-02-13.
  4. ^ Nobili, Nella (2018-06-22). Ho camminato nel mondo con l'anima aperta (in Italian). RCS MEDIAGROUP (Solferino Libri). ISBN 978-88-282-0083-3.
  5. ^ a b c d "Bologna Online". www.bibliotecasalaborsa.it (in Italian). Retrieved 2022-02-13.
  6. ^ "Ho camminato nel mondo con l'anima aperta". Associazione Orlando (in Italian). Retrieved 2022-02-13.
  7. ^ Nobili, Nella; Zah, Édith (1979-01-01). Les femmes et l'amour homosexuel (in French). (Hachette) réédition numérique FeniXX. ISBN 979-10-376-0646-4.
  8. ^ "Sorcières: les femmes vivent". Sorcières: les femmes vivent (in French). Retrieved 2022-02-13.
  9. ^ a b "Ressource «Nobili, Nella (1926-1985)» -". Mnesys (in French). Retrieved 2022-02-13.
  10. ^ Simonini, Jessy (2018-10-01). "Dalla frontiera: Nella Nobili, Ho camminato nel mondo con l'anima aperta". La macchina sognante (in Italian). Retrieved 2022-02-13.
  11. ^ Nobili, Nella (2018-06-22). Ho camminato nel mondo con l'anima aperta (in Italian). RCS MEDIAGROUP (Solferino Libri). ISBN 978-88-282-0083-3.
  12. ^ "Nella Nobili, in ascolto del mondo" (in Italian). ilmanifesto.it. 2020-09-23. Retrieved 2022-02-13.
  13. ^ "Nella Nobili la poetessa ritrovata". Dante Alighieri Cph (in Italian). Retrieved 2022-02-13.
  14. ^ "Poésie d'ailleurs. La poésie de Nella Nobili et autres expériences poétiques transnationales". iicbruxelles.esteri.it (in French). Retrieved 2022-02-13.
  15. ^ "Drusilla Foer all'Auditorium Paganini" (in Italian). Retrieved 2022-02-13.
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