Noemi Nagy

- Italy -

Noemi Nagy (1996) was born in Switzerland and comes from a Transylvanian family. She completed a PhD in Modern Philology and lives in Lugano and Milan. L'osso del collo (Neck bones, XVI Quaderno Italiano di poesia contemporanea, Marcos y Marcos, 2023) is her debut poetry collection. Her texts were translated into Spanish for the anthology Palabras jóvenes de Italia (Colección SurEditore, 2024), edited by Antonio Nazzaro. In 2023 she won the Literary Prize Nuovi Argomenti (Poetry section). She works with various magazines and cultural realities, such as «Treccani», «L’Ulisse», «Versodove», and translates from French and Hungarian.


Critical essay on the poems of Noemi Nagy

By Marilina Ciaco

 

Introducing the protagonist’s family saga, in the Notebooks of Malte Laudris Brigge Rilke writes that in the past, people were well aware of the fact that every human being carries his or her death within himself, just as the fruit conceals its kernel inside. On the contrary, the serial sanatorium death, the death in the age of technological reproducibility, has become mass death. Likewise, its foreboding in the inner life, the daily terror it provokes, has turned into an object of concealment or repression, slipping into the realm of the Freudian uncanny. Through its intense and highly calibrated weaving of intermittences – of language and bodies –, Noemi Nagy’s writing is not afraid to frontally address, without intercession, the most deep-rooted fears that ground our being human. That is, our defenceless and hopeless existence in the paradoxical consciousness of being finished («ugat bennem a halál kutyája» – ‘the dog of death barks inside you’).

 

It begins with a title, L'osso del collo (Neck bones), which seals the texts published in the XVI Quaderno Italiano di Poesia Contemporanea (edited by Franco Buffoni, Marcos y Marcos, 2023). We traverse the vertebrae as stations of an existential path with a great gnoseological relevance («naked, pulling nerves from the spine / one by one, as with the rosary»). But the anatomical human details, along with the actions or perspectival distortions in which they are involved (eyes, faces, feet, legs, knees, fingernails to be cut, arthritic fingers, bleeding teeth, drugs to be taken, tubes in the arms, the looming knife stuck in the throat), invade the domain of perception to the point of being represented, on the page, as cumbersome «symptom[s]» or «intrusion[s]», unavoidable warnings of a silent catastrophe. And yet, someone managed to escape death («Then you started breathing»), perhaps a «resuscitated» father, dismissed from the archetypal rigidity of the ‘role’ or ‘figure’. Here, the father is the one who gets to laugh in the face of death («No light, no tunnel or shit») and can therefore embody the semi-serious reversal of one of the emblematic literary topoi of Western culture.

 

If Aeneas carries Anchises on his shoulders to escape the Trojan fire, here the daughter-subject of the enunciation accompanies the father on a renewed low shot journey to re-appropriation of existence, starting from its minimal, infra-ordinary components, deprived of any codified meaning. The familiar story is thus placed within the broader framework of a history of substance and life forms, in that geological time which no longer knows categorical distinctions between human and non-human, as well as between organic and inorganic. We penetrate a ‘third landscape’, which is situated on the shifting borders that separate Hungary from Swiss and Italian territory, and rediscover submerged life «in the drainage ditch», in the compost of the soil. We proceed groping around among animal carcasses and dogs that still bark, while the anthropic elements, even if present, take on forms with uncertain, precarious or haunting features (the unpronounceable «tire», «windows, gas, doors», «the walls collapse for weight»).

 

Humans and non-humans have in common an obstinate resistance to becoming-objects, that is, to being forced back into the stage of inert matter, even though the risk of this happening is always looming between the silences of the verse: «Later fragile things become objects / otherwise they break»; «It is hard now to stay in our rooms / without rusting»; «between the plastic fibers you see – if not everything dies / it lasts a short time anyway».

 

The “vibrant matter”, as Jane Bennett defines it, is submitted in the totality of its parts to the same dangers and to the same fate. It is precisely this very existence in spite of – and thanks to – the constant risk of annihilation (referring back to Rilke, as well as to Celan) that characterises Noemi Nagy’s speech, which is sharp, exact and at the same time imaginative, itself vibrant.

 

A last and necessary observation concerns the stylistic and linguistic aspects of these texts: it seems to me that in Nagy’s work, a conscious and mature monostylism – which benefits from the aforementioned clarity of exposition and composition, entirely consistent with the most interesting proposals of contemporary Italian lyric poetry – coexists with an equally conscious multilingualism, grounded in the author’s biographical experience.

 

The fragments in Hungarian scar the surface of the neo-standard Italian (in itself far from lacking in register fluctuations, considering the frequent passages from the polished sectorial lexicon to colloquial-jargon inserts), cracking its transparency, that is, its immediate legibility. One could interpret such an operation as a dialectal use of the paternal language, or as the (inevitably filtered) emergence of an earlier ‘minor’ language, perhaps close to the realm of childhood.

 

However, this “foreign” and liminal pronunciation instils in the reader a (crucial) doubt about a complete nominability of the world and of life. In Nagy’s writing, the adherence to realia and to the complexity of experience – both on a cognitive-perceptual level as well as on an existential-anthropological level, along with the related exploration of the many shady areas that open up from this – proves to be definitely a priority over a more reassuring revival of pre-existing linguistic and formal institutions.

 

The twentieth-century tradition – particularly that of the Lombardy area and the one which is phenomenologically oriented – is in fact both absorbed and deconstructed by an internal telluric turmoil whereby, while certain recognisable enunciative modules remain intact (the constructs with verba sentiendi, cognoscendi and cogitandi, for example), their outcomes and intentions are substantially modified. In other words, the perception, the reflection and the cognitive process conveyed by poetry become nomadic. The anthropocentric enclosure of the ob-jectum is overtaken by the plural overture to the many possible sub-jecta – whether human bodies, animals or ghosts, «From here you reach the ground eventually». In return, almost whispering, their naked life seems to tell us that, perhaps, «that is how you heal»

More about the poet

Poetry

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