Interviews
2015
Renato Ranaldi
Clinamen – An exercise in deviance
I have taken the poem Alone, I come to you by Alexander Blok, and at the end of each line I have added, in bold, segments from some of the captions to my drawings. The enforced coexistence of the two poetics fosters bewilderment generated by the reciprocal dislocation of meaning, an assault on the fluidity of the rhythmic unity in an oscillation of intent, a swerving of judgement. It is as if, while writing the poem, the poet suddenly succumbed to an entirely different modus of parodistic vein, and then at the beginning of the next line resumed his original voice again.
Alone, I come to you but can't he change the chords that idiot in the yellow shoes playing the sax
Bewitched by the fires of love I think of how many butts are smoke in the space of a moon
You speak of chance– don’t call me – I won't be home tonight, dear Xanthippe, I'll be with the saints
I've been racking my brains for so long in the mistaken prospect of French kissing
From the heavy weight of years which exploding with intense brief colic sink into the Gehenna of the bog
Sorcery alone has saved me while turning you into a strutting hunchback
And again I rack my brains about you shaman and search the sky for the constellation of your return
But the reply is confused and unclear because by now I'm shrunken and wrinkled and no longer bulge
The days are enthralled by sorcery you can always say I wasn't there I had nothing to do with it
I cosset the years – don't call …in any case I raise you to my nose like a rose
Perhaps the fires will soon die down so that I can don the mourning garb out of solemn embarrassment
Of that bewitched brooding love? Hark my brother and I shall tell you how fine culture weds the song.
(Alexander Blok, 1901, Renato Ranaldi, 2014)
Renato Ranaldi is an artist who lives in Florence.
