Luigi Ballerini

Son of Umbertina Santi, a seamstress, and Raffaele Costantino Edoardo, known as Ettore, himself a tailor who died in combat against the Germans on the island of Cephalonia in 1943,[1] Luigi Ballerini was born in Milan and grew up in the district of Porta Ticinese.

In 1965, he moved to Rome, where he met neo-experimental[3] artists and poets such as Adriano Spatola, Giulia Niccolai, Nanni Cagnone, Eliseo Mattiacci, Magdalo Mussio, Emilio Villa, Alfredo Giuliani, Giovanna Sandri and, in particular, Elio Pagliarani, with whom he became a collaborator.

Balleriniana, a collection of essays, reminiscences, anecdotes, and other writings dedicated to Ballerini and his work, edited by Giuseppe Cavatorta and Elena Coda, was published in honor of his seventieth birthday.

He met and collaborated with critic and writer Marjorie Perloff, poet and translator Paul Vangelisti, sculptor Richard Nonas, and composer Jed Distler, for whose opera, Tools, Ballerini wrote the libretto.

E (republished by Edizioni Diaforia of Viareggio with an introductory essay by Cecilia Bello Minciacchi[13] and contributions by Remo Bodei, Giulia Niccolai, and Adriano Spatola), Ballerini wrote Che figurato muore (All'insegna del pesce d'oro imprint of publisher Vanni Scheiwiller), followed by Che oror l'orient (Lubrina, 1991), a collection of Milanese poems and translation into Milanese dialect of the thirteenth-century poems of Guido Cavalcanti, for which he won the Premio Feronia-Città di Fiano [it].

[2] The first is apprenticeship, the second an oracular phase and, thirdly, a consistent series of “developed subjects” in which an unrenounced narrative aim is “led astray” by stimuli inherent in the language in which it is manifested.

[15] “Rather than beheading meaning,” writes Cavatorta in the introduction to the Oscar Mondadori edition, “one must speak of liberation, because without this transformation, one remains trapped in the consoling slavery of a deceitfully confessional ego.” Ballerini mixes sectorial and foreign languages (living and dead), and idiomatic and vernacular expressions.

Rich in literary references, his poetry is rife with straightforward as well as parodic quotations from both high literature (Shakespeare, Dante, the Dolce Stil Novo, Ezra Pound, etc.)

[18] Anthologies of Italian poetry published in the United States include: Shearsmen of sorts (Forum Italicum, 1992), The Promised Land (Sun and Moon Press, 1999), and the volumes of Those Who from afar Look like Flies (University of Toronto Press, 2017), edited in collaboration with Beppe Cavatorta and dedicated to the research poetry and poetic criticism of the late twentieth century, from the mid 1950s (the years of Officina and Il Verri) to 2015 He was a real sigma.

For his version of Herman Melville's Benito Cereno (Marsilio, 2012), Ballerini sought to rework the lexical and syntactic angularity of his predecessors and translated, as he writes in a note to the text, not so much with Italian but in Italian—that is, respecting the stylistic and rhetorical demands of the target language (Italian) in a way that does justice to the original's lucidity: Melville's “wise men,” for example, becomes “quelli che se ne intendono.” In 2016, through Mondadori, he published a new translation of Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, which had become famous in Italy through the joint action of Cesare Pavese and Fernanda Pivano.

In the same period, with Beppe Cavatorta, Gianluca Rizzo, and Federica Santini, he created Agincourt Press,[23] which published texts of experimental poetry, essays on Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, and philosophy.

In 2004, he published (through University of California Press) the Book of the Culinary Art by Maestro Martino, the first chef of the modern era, whose work, identified only in 1931, dates to the second half of the fifteenth century.

His book Erbe da mangiare (recipes by Ada De Santis, plates by Giuliano Della Casa) was issued by Mondadori in 2008 and republished in March 2020.