Mario Benedetti

Mario Benedetti (9 November 1955 – 27 March 2020) was an Italian poet. He was among the founders of the contemporary poetry magazines Scarto minimo (published in Padua from 1986 to 1989) and Arsenal littératures (published in Brest from 1999 to 2001).

Biography

After spending the first twenty years of his life in Nimis (Udine), his parents' hometown, he moved to Padua in 1976, where he graduated in Literature with a thesis on the work of Carlo Michelstaedter, after which he graduated in Aesthetics at the Postgraduate School of the same university faculty. He devoted himself to teaching in high schools, first in Padua and then in Milan, where he moved. His life, his poetry and his way of being were strongly characterized by the presence of a chronic disease: a particular form of multiple sclerosis that accompanied him from childhood. Serious episodes due to this pathology occurred in 1999 and 2000. On the night of 14 September 2014 following a heart attack with cerebral hypoxia, he was hospitalized at the San Luca Hospital in Milan, where he was kept in a pharmacological coma for some time. Upon his gradual awakening, he began rehabilitation therapy, and was then transferred to a Milanese health facility to continue treatment.

He died on 27 March 2020, aged 64, of COVID-19, in the care home where he had been living since 2018 in Piadena (Cremona). He was buried on 30 March 2020.

Literary activity

Benedetti started writing poetry in the late 1970s, but became famous among contemporary Italian poets in 2004, when his collections of poems Umana gloria was published by Mondadori. In 2005 he published Reliquiari, a selection of ten previously unpublished poems; three years later he published Pitture nere su carta (also published by Mondadori), another collection of poems, inspired by works of art such as Francisco Goya’s Pinturas negras. After Materiali di un'identità (2010), in which different literary typologies (essay, poem, poetic prose and interview) participated together in the enucleation of the key points of the author's poetics, in 2013 Benedetti published his third main collection of poems, Tersa morte.

For this work, Benedetti was awarded the 2014 Brancati Prize for poetry. In 2017 Garzanti published a collection of all his poems.

Benedetti also translated into Italian Michel Deguy's works, and Pjesme by Serbian poet Dejan Ilić.

Works

Il cielo per sempre, published on poetry magazine “Schema”, Milan, 1989 I Secoli della primavera, Sestante, Ripatransone, 1992 Una terra che non sembra vera, Campanotto, Udine, 1997 Il parco del Triglav, Stampa, Varese, 1999 Borgo con locanda, Circolo Culturale di Meduno (Pordenone), 2000. Umana gloria, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milan, 2004 Pitture nere su carta, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milan, 2005 Materiali di un'identità, Transeuropa, Massa, 2010 Tersa morte, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milan, 2013

Benedetti's works have been included in several anthologies, including Poeti italiani del Secondo Novecento, Mondadori, Milan 2004, and Parola plurale, Sossella, Rome 2005.