Lerici Pea 2019

LericiPea Lifetime Achievement Prize 2019 to Antonio Colinas

Antonio Colinas, one of European Poetry’s most significant voices of the last fifty years, makes a “long love consideration” starting from Spain, his home country, and then moving to cultural and artistic places such as Italy, England, Mexico and the Far East. He lived in Italy for a while, and here composed intense poems such as “Sepolcro a Tarquinia” (Sepulcher in Tarquinia), with the foot note “Monterosso, 1972”. Colinas explores symbols and myths following Jung, Eliade, Zambrano, as well as the Taoist wisdom; he describes moments and figures such as Casanova, Pound, Juan de la Cruz with participation and “pietas”, inviting us to a shrewd yet decisive journey to the very heart of poetry. He studied Italian poetry for a long time, and then he became the Spanish voice of Quasimodo (he translated his complete work), Leopardi and Sanguineti. A polyphonic poetry and an admirable commitment to which the LericiPea Prize wants to give voice.

Massimo Bacigalupo

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LericiPea “Edito” Prize 2019 to Davide Rondoni

Davide Rondoni has been one of the main protagonists of Italian poetry since 1999, when he published his collection“La natura del bastardo”(The nature of the bastard). Besides, he is an excellent translator, the founder and director of the Center for Contemporary Poetry of the University of Bologna, the editor of the magazine “ClanDestino”, as well as an important presence both in television and radio. His works embody a tormented and vital impulse – quite unusual for contemporary Italian poetry –, as well as a passion for life that knows “quanta oscurità/ occorre attraversare/ per divenire luminosi” (“how much darkness / you need to cross / to become luminous”), a “torn” heart travelling across bars, motorway restaurants, suburbs, divided among family affections, impulses and excesses, able to see a “drugged girl” in the moon and the universe in a half-empty “hangar”. The Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti marked his life through rivers; Rondoni, instead, runs through avenues: avenues, highways, ring roads crossed by drunks, outcasts and angels. Rondoni’s religion is not mystical. His ethics is deeply, painfully carnal, he knows the sense of guilt, he pronounces the word “sinner”. The main topic of his collection “La natura del bastardo” is love – love as an impressive and expressive power. The collection also hosts those verses that best summarize the author’s moral and artistic world: “Possiamo soltanto amare/strappandoci felicemente figli dalla carne/ parlando d’amore continuamente/ ubriachi, feriti, vili/ma con gli occhi lucenti come un laser/ di fiori splendidi”.
(We can only love / happily snatching our children from our flesh / constantly speaking of love / drunk, wounded, cowardly / but with our eyes shining like a laser / of magnificent flowers).

Giuseppe Conte

President of the Jury of LericiPea Golfo dei Poeti Prize

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LericiPea Paolo Bertolani Prize (dialect section) 2019 to Biagio Guerrera

The LericiPea Paolo Bertolani Prize 2019 goes to Biagio Guerrera. Born in Catania in 1965, the poet has distinguished himself for a continuous contamination between poetry and music, performativity and dramaturgy, singing and direction, as well as for his notable cultural commitment in Catania, Sicily, where he organized international shows based on the dialogue between the West and the Mediterranean, the Maghreb and the Middle East. Prominent poet of the dialectal “neo-renaissance” of the Eastern Sicily, Guerrera is the Homeric poet par excellence: his art is based on orality and song – a typical aspect of Western civilization and poetry. His rhythmic, urgent and percussive writing seem to come from an ancient orality. His poetry is based on a narrative structure enriched by the iterations (anaphora, repetitions, lists, repeated lines as in song refrains) typical of the poetry of the origins, the so-called “cantàri” (Sicilian word for “chants”), and of the Old Testament prayers. Besides, the reader has also to face with Guerrera’s inventive language made of neologisms, philological revivals of obsolete words and also a touch of Baroque culture: long, overflowing periods pushing the “phonè” and the “koinè” beyond. His language consists of multiple levels accumulating as geological eras or very small variations of tonality in music. The result is a text with a strong sociolinguistic, social and ethical characterization.
Manuel Cohen

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LericiPea Translation Prize 2019 to Marco Sonzogni

The Jury of the Prize, awarding Marco Sorzogni the LericiPea Translation Prize 2019 for translating Seamus Heany’s works, wants to enhance that for Sonzogni translation is an act of pure love. He places himself at the text’s service with curiosity and humility, overcoming syntactical, lexical, phonetical and semantic obstacles. Besides his capabilities, he is helped by his deep poetic soul – he himself is a poet. As Leopardi wrote in his Zibaldone: “Messomi all’impresa, so ben dirti avere io conosciuto per prova che senza esser poeta non si può tradurre un vero poeta” (“I perfectly know that you cannot translate a real poet, if you are not a poet yourself”). Sonzogni published five poetry collections – Assenze (2005), Alibi (2011), Prove di canto (2013), Tagli (2014) e Passaggi (2017) –and for this reason he perfectly embodies what Leopardi meant.

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LericiPea “Liguri nel Mondo” Prize 2019 to Alessandra Pierini

The Lerici Pea “Liguri nel Mondo” Prize is the only section of the LericiPea aimed to award not only poets, but also those personalities who distinguished themselves as “Ligurian excellences” in many other fields.
This year, given that Italy is a worldwide excellence also for food and wine, the LericiPea Association has decided to award Alessandra Pierini the “Liguri nel Mondo” Prize.
Born in Liguria, Alessandra Pierini is an entrepreneur who has been living in and working in Paris for more than twenty years, and thanks to her RAP, an Épicerie and restaurant in the heart of Paris, and her work, she is now a precious benchmark of Italian food in the French capital.
Given her culinary culture, her entrepreneurial skills and her taste, as well as her particular “Ligurian aptitude” to perfectly adapt everywhere, we consider Alessandra an excellent World ambassador of the so-called “Made in Italy”.

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Press Conference of Lerici Pea Prize 2019

The press conference of the 65^th edition of the LericiPea Golfo dei Poeti Poetry Prize was held on Monday September 16^th 2019 at 11 am at the Spanish Embassy in Rome.

The press conference was attended by:

– The Spanish Ambassador to Rome, Alfonso María Dastis Quecedo

– The Irish Ambassador to Rome, H.E. Colm Ó Floinn

– The Mayor of Lerici, Leonardo Paoletti

– Lucilla Del Santo, President of the LericiPea Golfo dei Poeti Prize

– Adriana Beverini, Cultural Advisor of the Prize

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