Le 'Metamorfosi' di Giorgio Orelli. Lettura di «Certo d'un merlo il nero», da "Spiracoli", e confronto con una redazione precedente finora inedita

This essay provides an interpretation of Giorgio Orelli's Certo d'un merlo il nero (come out in 1989 as part of the collection of poems Spiracoli) as a modern natural metamorphic myth and offers an edition of his avantextual versions (typewritten with authorial remarks), today lying at the Fondo Manoscritti of Pavia University.Through a re-examination of some key-moments in the development of Orelli's poetry and criticism about other authors (Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, Alessandro Manzoni and Eugenio Montale), the commentary points out the rhythmi- cal and metrical-syntactic structure of Certo d'un merlo il nero as his most evident peculiarity.The avantextual variants show quite definitely the progressive shaping of the text's structure, that could be seen as a "crypto-canzone", i. e. a re-interpretation of the classic form of the Petrar- chan canzone throughout different innovative poetic devices. Under this respect, most signifi- cant is that the Petrarchan epigraph (RVF, CV, vv. 21 ff.) entered the poem only once the struc- ture had reached her last printed form.