Winter Journey

Poetry. Translated here into English for the first time in its entirety by Nicholas Benson, Bertolucci's WINTER JOURNEY (Viaggio d'inverno, 1971) traces the author's nervous anxiety and the broader afflictions of an emergent consumer society at the Italian midcentury. Increasing social proximity illuminates a persistent isolation, relieved only-tenuously-by the bonds of family and friendship. In a country then recovering from the effects of nationalism, it is significant that a major poet would avoid the pitfalls of populism and paternalism, just as his writing avoids antagonism and aestheticism. Bertolucci's meditations on the effects of the Fascist ventennio can be read as a subtle critique of such divisions, which weakened resistance to the regime and enabled the country's later fragmentation.