A Girl Named Carla

“The Girl Carla” taught me a very simple thing: that avant-garde work could have an empathetic, human, even emotional bond with the world. Maybe I’m a “catho-communist”, or just a romantic, but the  rst time I read the poem, I thought Pagliarani had managed to invent a new language, one that was di erent and obscure, yet stay close to his subject, depict it in all its fragility and complexity – and even love it. That was it: the idea that an avant-garde writer could love his subject. Before I ran across Pagliarani, I thought the avant-garde was all about war, criticism, con ict; I didn’t think it could also be about empathy.
To be honest, I didn’t formulate all of these exact thoughts, and in any case they were the thoughts of a sixteen-year-old, much more muddled and cliched, but when I read “The Girl Carla” for the  rst time, I saw that even in contemporary art and literature there was room for emotion.
And then there are the personal elements that have always struck me in this poem, especially because of its setting in 1950s Milan: as a typical small-town guy, I’ve always been slightly awed by Piazza Duomo and its neon lights, even though it’s always evoked a mixture of love and hate, anger, and even – if one can still say this – a sense of class.
The economic boom – perhaps because of how Berlusconi has harped on it for years – is something I’d always seen as imbued with in nite sadness. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t there; I never saw the joy, the integration, the success, or even the smell of cleanliness that Enzo Jannacci sang about in “Vincenzina e la Fabbrica”. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t there, but all I ever saw in the economic boom was the injustice – the “vita agra”, the harsh life. And yet alongside those stories, Testori’s tenement yards, Pasolini’s slums, I was always surprised that in that same period there were the artists, scientists, engineers, Arte Programmata, that there were the cocktail parties at the Olivetti shop – that there was Olivetti himself. In Pagliarani’s poem those two worlds seem to coexist, each with its own dreams, enthusiasms and illusions.