La collina, o Dormono sulla collina

"The Hill" is the opening poem of The Spoon River Anthology and sets the stage for the book's 240 poems from 212 different characters that follow. - Dennis Criteser

Cette chanson de Fabrizio De André est la première d'un album (intitulé d'un vers de cette chanson : « Ni à l'argent, ni à l'amour, ni au ciel ».) entièrement dédié à une anthologie « Spoon River Anthology » de textes du poète étazunien Edgar Lee Masters (Garnett, Kansas, 1868 – Melrose Park, Pennsylvanie, 1950).
Édité en recueil en 1915, « The Spoon River Anthology » rassemble les épitaphes des habitants de Spoon River, village issu de la fusion imaginaire de Lewistown et de Petersburg, bourgades de l'Illinois.

Comme le signale Riccardo Venturi, c'est une chanson à deux titres : « La Colline » et « Ils dorment sur la colline ».

Par ailleurs, il se confirme qu'il faut toujours se relire... Car, il y a de fortes chances, qu'on ait laissé traîner quelques erreurs. On peut alors se corriger et enlever un peu de la cendre dont il convient de se couvrir le front...

Marco Valdo M.I.

Spoon River Anthology (1915), by Edgar Lee Masters, is a collection of short free verse poems that collectively narrates the epitaphs of the residents of Spoon River, a fictional small town named after the Spoon River, which ran near Masters' home town of Lewistown, Illinois. The aim of the poems is to demystify rural and small town American life. The collection includes 212 separate characters, in all providing 244 accounts of their lives, losses, and manner of death. Many of the poems contain cross-references that create an unabashed tapestry of the community. The poems originally were published in 1914 in the St. Louis, Missouri literary journal Reedy's Mirror, under the pseudonym Webster Ford.

The first poem serves as an introduction. Each following poem is an autobiographical epitaph of a dead citizen, delivered by the dead themselves. Characters include Tom Merritt, Amos Sibley, Carl Hamblin, Fiddler Jones and A.D. Blood. They speak about the sorts of things one might expect: Some recite their histories and turning points, others make observations of life from the outside, and petty ones complain of the treatment of their graves, while few tell how they really died. The subject of afterlife receives only the occasional brief mention, and even those seem to be contradictory. Speaking without reason to lie or fear the consequences, they construct a picture of life in their town that is shorn of façades. The interplay of various villagers — such as a bright and successful man crediting his parents for all he's accomplished, and an old woman weeping because he is secretly her illegitimate child — forms a gripping, if not pretty, whole.

Many of the characters who make appearances in Spoon River Anthology were based on people that Masters knew or heard of in the two towns in which he grew up: Petersburg and Lewistown, Illinois. Masters sometimes substantially disguised the names of these real-life inspirations, but he sometimes disguised them only barely and, in a few cases, not at all. Most notable is Ann Rutledge, regarded in local legend to be Abraham Lincoln's early love interest (though there is no actual proof of such a relationship); Masters heard this legend from his grandfather. Rutledge's grave can be found in a Petersburg cemetery, and a tour of graveyards in both towns, especially Oak Hill Cemetery in Lewistown, reveals most of the surnames that Masters applied to his characters.

After growing up and leaving Lewistown for Chicago, Masters met and befriended William Marion Reedy, the owner, publisher and editor of the St. Louis-based literary magazine Reedy's Mirror. By the time Masters wrote the poems that became Spoon River Anthology, he had published some poetry with some success; these prior poems, however, were more conventional in style and subject matter. Masters later wrote that it was Reedy, through his criticism and friendship, who encouraged him to write “something more distinctive than what I was doing, somehow, someway, but without telling me how to do it.” Masters in particular credited Reedy with introducing him to the Greek Anthology, a collection of classical period epigrams, to which Spoon River Anthology is stylistically similar.

Spoon River Anthology originally was published in serial form in Reedy's Mirror from May 29, 1914 until January 5, 1915. The poems were attributed initially to the pseudonym Webster Ford. William Marion Reedy, owner, publisher and editor of the magazine revealed the poems’ true authorship in November 1914, after 21 weekly entries.

The first bound edition of Spoon River Anthology was published by The Macmillan Company in 1915 with a total of 209 poems. Masters added 35 new poems in the 1916 edition, expanding on new characters with connections to some of the originals. Among these new additions were "Andy the Night-Watch", "Isa Nutter," "Plymouth Rock Joe" and "The Epilogue."

Critical reception and legacy

Spoon River Anthology was a critical and commercial success. Ezra Pound's review of the Spoon River poems begins: "At last! At last America has discovered a poet." Carl Sandburg's review is similarly glowing: "Once in a while a man comes along who writes a book that has his own heart-beats in it. The people whose faces look out from the pages of the book are the people of life itself, each trait of them as plain or as mysterious as in the old home valley where the writer came from. Such a writer and book are realized here." The book sold 80,000 copies over four years, making it an international bestseller by the standards of the day.

Meanwhile, those who lived in the Spoon River region objected to their portrayal in the anthology, particularly as so many of the poems' characters were based on real people. The book was banned from Lewistown schools and libraries until 1974. Even Masters's mother, who sat on the Lewistown library board, voted for the ban. (Masters claimed "My mother disliked [the anthology]; my father adored it.") Despite this, the anthology remained widely read in Lewistown; local historian Kelvin Sampson notes that "Every family in Lewistown probably had a sheet of paper or a notebook hidden away with their copy of the Anthology, saying who was who in town."

Masters capitalized on the success of The Spoon River Anthology with the 1924 sequel The New Spoon River, in which Spoon River became a suburb of Chicago and its inhabitants have been urbanized. The second work was less successful and received poorer reviews. In 1933, Masters wrote a retrospective essay on the composition of The Spoon River Anthology and the response it received, entitled "The Genesis of Spoon River." He recounts, among other things, the "exhaustion of body" that befell him while writing, which eventually manifested in pneumonia and a year-long bout of illness as the work was being prepared for publication. He claims that the Lewistown residents who strove to identify the poems' characters with real people did so only "with poor success."

More recently, Lewistown celebrated its relationship to Masters's poetry. The Oak Hill Cemetery features a memorial statue of Masters and offers a self-guided walking tour of the graves that inspired the poems. In 2015, the town celebrated the 100th anniversary of the anthology's publication with tours, exhibitions, and theatrical performances.

Today Spoon River Anthology often is assigned in high school and college literature classes and as a source of monologues for theatrical auditions. It is also often used in second-year characterization work in the Meisner technique of actor training.

Spoon River Anthology is credited as an initial inspiration for the "audio log" storytelling device in video games as it first appeared in the game System Shock, a narrative technique that became a standard trope of narrative games. - en.wikipedia

La storia della pubblicazione in Italia dell'Antologia di Spoon River fu travagliata. Durante il ventennio fascista la letteratura americana era osteggiata dalla censura del regime, in particolare se esprimeva idee libertarie come nel caso di Edgar Lee Masters. La prima edizione italiana porta la data del 9 marzo 1943. La traduzione fu a cura di Fernanda Pivano, la quale raccontò: «Ero una ragazza quando ho letto per la prima volta Spoon River: me l'aveva portata Cesare Pavese, una mattina che gli avevo chiesto che differenza c'è tra la letteratura americana e quella inglese».

I primi libri americani che Pavese portò alla Pivano furono visti da lei "con grande sospetto", mentre con l'Antologia di Spoon River fu come un colpo di fulmine: «L'aprii proprio alla metà, e trovai una poesia che finiva così: "mentre la baciavo con l'anima sulle labbra, l'anima d'improvviso mi fuggì". Chissà perché questi versi mi mozzarono il fiato: è così difficile spiegare le reazioni degli adolescenti».

Per un'adolescente cresciuta in un'epoca dominata dall'"epicità a tutti i costi", i versi di Masters e la loro "scarna semplicità" furono una rivelazione.

La Pivano iniziò a tradurre in italiano le poesie quasi per conoscerle meglio, senza dirlo a Pavese in quanto temeva che la prendesse in giro. Un giorno quest'ultimo scoprì in un cassetto il manoscritto e convinse l'editore Einaudi a pubblicarlo. Pavese raccontò alla Pivano di essere riuscito a evitare la censura del Ministero della Cultura Popolare cambiando il titolo in «Antologia di S. River» e spacciandolo per una raccolta di pensieri di un quanto mai improbabile San River, sebbene la Pivano non fu mai sicura che Pavese parlasse sul serio quando le raccontò l'accaduto. L'iniziale ritiro del libro da parte delle autorità fu quindi motivato dalla immoralità della copertina, copertina che fu cambiata in fretta e il libro poté di nuovo circolare.

La Pivano, tuttavia, pagò questa sua traduzione con il carcere; a tal proposito ha dichiarato:



L'Antologia di Spoon River ebbe, e ha ancora oggi, un grande successo in Italia, anche in nuove traduzioni. Il cantautore Fabrizio De André lesse Spoon River nel 1970, rivedendosi in alcuni personaggi, scelse nove poesie dall'intera raccolta e, con la collaborazione di Giuseppe Bentivoglio e Nicola Piovani, ne trasse liberamente dei testi e scrisse delle basi musicali per essi; le canzoni che ne risultarono furono pubblicate nell'album "Non al denaro non all'amore né al cielo". - it.wikipedia