What is in Umberto Bossi’s collection of poems in Lombard
Umberto Bossi, founder of the Northern League, has published a collection of verses in Lombard on social commitment, ecology and the condition of women
That "the barbarian of Gemonio" is actually a bookworm, since he was a boy, much more cultured than he, who called himself a "commoner", has always wanted to appear, is something that the old legologist chroniclers have always known . Sometimes he displaced them with a few lines from Shakespeare or Leopardi. But that he himself composed poems is a recent discovery.
During Covid, in his traditional letter, with a card painted by a "Padano painter", of Christmas greetings to politics and institutions, he had published Na mameta , a grandmother who had escaped from a hospice to return to see the house from afar native. Now the founder of the Northern League, a deputy, lands on social media with a collection of verses on social commitment, ecology, the condition of women. Texts in “Lumbard” dialect written before founding the League in the '70s and '80s have been published on the blog.
There is a lot of social commitment, writes the Adnkronos agency, but also an unsuspected environmentalist vein. There are family, love, women. This and more can be found in the collection of poems written by Bossi before founding the League and entering the political arena. Between the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, the future leader of the Carroccio and minister delighted in writing poems full of feeling, pain and death, real life stories.
Memories left in the drawer and now published for the first time on social networks, with the translation into Italian. But the Bossian artistic vein had emerged in the 60s when he was a singer-songwriter with the stage name of Donato. Most of the texts date back to the autonomist period of the future Senatùr who in 1979 gave birth to the first autonomous political entity in Lombardy, the North Western Lombard Union for Autonomy.
Born in Cassano Magnago, in the province of Varese, Bossi has never forgotten his origins (the first son of the textile worker Ambrogio Bossi and the concierge Ida Valentina Mauri) and has always been very attached to his land of farmers. Indeed, in Tera ( Earth ), he speaks of the destruction of nature, which was the essence of the agricultural world, and of the degradation of modern society: 'Once green and full of words, earth, that you heard the mole squeak and the roses curse . I have seen the sirens of factories become syringes…'.
In Ul Lach Mort ( The dead lake ) the environmentalist Bossi: “They killed the lake, our water…”. In the Strike in dul Baset ( Strike to Bassetti ) the former Minister of Reforms recalls his grandmother Celeste, a socialist and trade unionist, who, discovered by the fascists, was tortured to the point of breaking both knees: "They also took Celeste, and Angiolino has already arrived…”. The protagonists are always the women in the verses of Na Mameta ( A grandmother ) and of Sciura Maria , in the latter the figure of Signora Maria relives, consumed by breast cancer. Evident memory of Bossi, a young medical student who practiced in the hospital.
Who knows what verses may have come to mind a week ago, in the Duomo of Milan, where he wanted to be present to give a final farewell to "Silvio", for him "like a brother". He said that "the principles of Berlusconi, founder of the centre-right, were the beautiful, the good and the right". He explained: "They are the principles that the Steiner school teaches: it is the first thing I noticed when I met him". "Silvio was very different from how he was described," underlined the Senatùr. And certainly very different, compared to how the mainstream media have described him, is also the poet Umberto.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/umberto-bossi-raccolta-poesie-lombardo/ on Tue, 20 Jun 2023 06:29:26 +0000.