The resurrection of Dario Bellezza has been more than half a century in the making. The Roman poet, novelist and playwright – who published his first collection of verse in 1971 – is considered a literary martyr for many Italian queer readers growing up in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.
However, for many years, Bellezza’s out-of-print repertoire was nearly impossible to track down. This is especially true outside of Italy. What is perplexing about this is that Bellezza was quite prolific and influential. He wrote more than 20 books and won both the Gatti and the Viareggio Prize, and he had a powerful inner circle of supporters. Names such as Patrizia Cavalli, Allen Ginsberg, Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante and Pier Paolo Pasolini (who called Bellezza “the best poet of the new generation”), have all raved over Bellezza’s knack for truth-telling and scene-spawning.
Aside from his potent verse, Bellezza’s very presence was an anomaly in Italy. He could be counted as one of the only out and proud gay poets of his time. Never one to hide in the shadows or take on the role of a literary shrinking violet, Bellezza regularly denounced Italy’s mounting homophobic, racist and anti-feminist regimes in interviews and readings. Reading his book on Pasolini’s death, La morte di Pasolini, feels like reading a weapon manual against right wing rhetoric. It is a prime example of how Bellezza used literature to combat what he considered to be the backward and miseducated bourgeois society of Italy. Published in 1981, La morte di Pasolini, was condemned by fascist-leaning media as it dared to outline – in detail – how most of Italy shared the same attitudes and social convictions as Pasolini’s murderer. Bellezza highlighted the synergies between Pasolini’s killer and the country’s moral majority – both were fascinated by him, and both sought his destruction.
The synergies Pasolini and Bellezza share are glaring. Both were Roman and queer, outspoken and underestimated. Pasolini’s Roman Poems were translated and embraced by readers in 1986, 11 years after his death. Bellezza’s literary re-ascension, which began with tentative, almost imperceptible steps over two decades ago, has taken more than fifty years to blossom. Now, Bellezza’s journey reaches a new pinnacle, as this month marks the highly anticipated launch of What Sex Is Death? – a groundbreaking new book by translator/poet/scholar Peter Covino. This new book does more than just unearth Bellezza’s body of work, it re-introduces Bellezza as a vital queer literary figure to an international audience. Named after one of Bellezza’s most provocative poems, the collection translates more than 50 of Bellezza’s poetic works into English, building on the growing public interest in the poet’s legacy. While Covino has previously translated select pieces of Bellezza’s poetry for smaller presses like Guernica, What Sex Is Death? is the first major publication to present Bellezza’s work on the global stage.
Dario Bellezza (Photo: Dino Ignani. From “Dark Rome” Exhibit. Source: E Iannacci.)
What Sex Is Death? arrives 29 years after Bellezza passed away from an AIDS-related illness and 10 years after a comprehensive anthology of his poetry was published in Italian. Roman poet/editor Roberto Deidier gathered up 700-plus pages for the marvellous tome called Tutte le poesie [All the Poems], published in 2015, yet it was never translated. For many of Bellezza’s admirers, this publication was a hopeful sign that his work would soon be accessible and be acknowledged worldwide. In 2023, a documentary titled Bellezza, Addio, tried to further highlight the potency of the poet’s life. Last year, a podcast episode of the Italian literary series called Orecchie e Segnalibri [Ears and Bookmarks] dedicated a full episode to Bellezza’s impact. Adding to the rising Bellezza renaissance was a 2024 exhibit called Dark Rome at the Museum of Rome in Trastevere. It showcased a series of photographs of Bellezza in his home with a series of notes about the poet by photographer Dino Ignani, who captured the talent in his natural habitat.
Covino’s new translations in What Sex Is Death? feel like a bridge to all of the reignited interest in Bellezza. The poems chosen – and decoded – amplify Bellezza’s voice. Whether it is brash and critical or tempered to resemble an afternoon while having a chiacchierata amongst close friends, Covino’s respectful approach is constant. That mix of intimacy and potency can be found in poems such as “Coliseum,” cherry-picked from one of the eight books of Bellezza’s that Covino samples from. Here, as in many others in Bellezza’s body of work, the poet proves he is never afraid to talk about his relationships with men, while describing the challenges of living in such a shame-laden society. Covino’s translation keeps Bellezza’s contempt for those who considered his love to be demonic or diseased – something that the poet reinscribed in his interviews with Italian media. In “Coliseum,” the reader is able to absorb Bellezza’s forthright demeanour by way of Covino’s translation. In the excerpt of “Coliseum” below, Bellezza’s desire and his equally mighty contempt for the norm are front and centre:
I’m suffocated by this queer need to touch by hand the real health of men
nourished on justice and liberty. Here, in the decrepit, decaying world all diversities
exactly because they are similar, political, racial, sexual,
are epiphenomena of one singular anguish
that allows for existence: that of neo-capitalism,
of the bourgeoisie that fears the monsters
it itself produces.
Dario Bellezza (Photo: Dino Ignani. From “Dark Rome” Exhibit. Source: E Iannacci.)
Throughout What Sex Is Death, readers are assured that Covino has studied Bellezza’s voice for years. Covino keeps Bellezza’s flow, spacing and line demarcations faithful to their father. However, what is most impressive is the way Covino relays Bellezza’s observations and intonations in another language with a type of white-glove service to the reader. This care comes through and helps the reader understand why Bellezza’s poems are so prescient. For example, Covino is able to showcase Bellezza’s tenacity as it fires through stanzas of poems such as “Glamour.” In one of the poem’s most memorable lines, Bellezza poses this rather caustic question to his readers: “who will tremble as the world trembles if they don’t feel the fascination of a beloved?” In Italian, the line is: “Ma chi tremerà come trema il mondo se non sente il fascino della persona amata?” and could easily be botched to sound filtered or paltry. Covino’s translation feels like it unravels rather than unearths, as it offers English readers a refined and well-explored text that mirrors Bellezza’s complicated output.
Yet most of Covino’s choice of poems for What Sex Is Death – which span from 1971-1996 – rarely feel lighter than the original. In “Marilyn,” a poem dedicated to the late actress Marilyn Monroe, the English version reads as much more unswerving than the original. Lines from this, which reflect on the American star’s passing on August 4, 1962, feel much more harsh and powerful in English. This is best seen in Bellezza’s line about Monroe’s demise: “she escaped the stupid fairy tale that was her life.” This level of drama and intensity continue in the poem, as it presents Marilyn as a symbol of mass cowardice rather than what she was painted as in the media: a woman with many personal weaknesses. This is illuminated in the poem with lines such as: “and our beguilement of you is a mystery / testament and legend of the bewildered / of the sleazy cowards of eroticism.” What is interesting here is how Bellezza directly speaks for and with the queer community, moving from “I” in the opening stanza to the communal “We” in the ending stanza. The poet tries to connect how the burden placed on Marilyn and gay life were both microscoped. In Covino’s translation of Bellezza’s “Marilyn,” a brighter, hotter spotlight is thrown on the paradoxes of gay men placing pressures on all-star, Diva-like saviours poised for iconhood. Some of these insights can be found in the following stanza of Bellezza’s “Marilyn.”
We needed more steeled nerves,
and you didn’t have them to endure
the challenges of the day. For this
we love you: because you were
a victim, a conquest
of the times and our ominous history
of our sinful days.
Certain words like “sinful” are obviously sarcastic (Bellezza did not believe that queer love or lust went against any god), but there are moments in What Sex Is Death? where the message is so direct and sparse that one feels like the poems are messages coming out of a séance conjuring or a Ouija board. In an untitled poem, near the end of the book, Bellezza’s translated words present as more of a prophecy and less of a legacy. This is especially true in the following brief verse:
You would be dead of AIDS
murdered poet
if you still remained
among the uncertain living
whomever mourns you is lost
to memory and to past.
Peter Covino
In this untitled poem, Bellezza is telling us how to remember him, and Covino has listened to the poet’s wishes. An easy first impulse for critics and admirers of Bellezza’s work and life is to find the gaps and discrepancies in What Sex Is Death? While there are many to find – it will prove quite a difficult task. The book’s only major fault is that it should have cut some of Bellezza’s forgettable Cat poems to make room for the work in his posthumous collection of 1996, Proclama sul fascino, aka Proclamation on Glamour. The work in Bellezza’s last official grouping of poems is biting, sensual and tender (sometimes all at once). Those who have followed Bellezza’s career closely would never dare to assume what the poet would want out of his readers, yet he did leave his cult a few clues in a letter he wrote to Massimo Consoli, Italy’s historic LGBTQ+ activist who is often crowned as the “father of the Italian gay movement.” In the correspondence, Bellezza – who could be as sharp and acute with his friends as he is with his stanzas – wrote this lasting impression which may help us discuss Bellezza further: “every time I criticize and hate, there is always a constant of love.”
Elio Iannacci is an award-winning writer, poet and a long-time arts reporter for The Globe and Mail. He has contributed to 80 publications worldwide, including Vogue Italia, The Hollywood Reporter, Maclean’s, The Toronto Star, The National Post and The Toronto Review of Books. His Master’s thesis, Queer-Diva Collaboration in 20th Century Popular Music, was nominated for a Governor General’s Gold Medal.
Poet-translator-editor Peter Covino is an associate professor in the English and Creative Writing PhD Program at the University of Rhode Island. He is the author of five books. His What Sex Is Death? Dario Bellezza Selected Poems recently won the Wisconsin Press Prize for Poetry in Translation. He is the founding editor and faculty advisor of the Ocean State Review and a founding editor-trustee of the nonprofit press Barrow Street Inc.
