Nella Nobili

Nella Nobili (1926–1985) was an Italian poet and writer. She is considered a representative of proletarian literature.^[1] She wrote in French and Italian, notably about factory work and lesbian love.

Nella Nobili was born in 1926 in Bologna. Coming from a modest background, she left school at the age of twelve to work in a factory,^[2] first in a ceramics workshop, then at fourteen as a glassblower.^[3] It was as a self-taught person that she began to develop a link with writing and poetry. During breaks after work, she wrote her first texts^[4] and avidly read everything she could find: Italian poetry, but also Rainer Maria Rilke and Emily Dickinson.^[2] She met Giorgio Morandi, to whom she dedicated the poem Landscape in 1926.^[5]

After the World War II, she came into contact with the artistic and literary circles of Bologna in the immediate post-war period. She met the painter Aldo Borgonzoni (1913–2004): she assiduously frequented his studio in via Saragozza. She met the director of "Giornale della Sera" Giuseppe Galasso.^[5]

She frequented the house of Renata Viganò and Antonio Meluschi [it] in Via Mascarella, where intellectuals such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Sibilla Aleramo, former partisans and students met.^[5]

At the Caffé Zanarini in Piazza Galvani, then a meeting place for left-wing activists, she met Enrico Berlinguer, the future secretary of the Communist Party.^[5]

In 1949, she moved to Rome. There she met anti-fascist groups, artists and writers and she began to gain recognition and support, notably from Elsa Morante and Michel Ragon.

Working in a workshop in her youth, as a nurse's aide during the war and later as the head of a cufflink company,^[1] Nella Nobili published poems related to the world of the factory (La jeune fille à l'usine, 1978), which earned her recognition as a representative of proletarian literature. But in Rome, she felt that she was being “paraded around like a little monster dressed as a worker-poet” and, disenchanted, she left for France.^[6]

Nobili arrived in Paris in 1953, where she remained for the rest of her life. There she made handicrafts with miniature works of art using the self-invented cold-casting method.^[2]

She began writing in French in the 1960s. She published collections of poems and books, including Les femmes et l'amour homosexuel, with her co-author, Édith Zha, in 1979, which brought together testimonies, reflections and documentation on female homosexual love.^[7] She published in magazines such as Sorcières^[8] and corresponded with figures such as Giorgio Morandi, Michel Ragon, Bernard Noël, Claire Etcherelli and Henri Thomas.^[9] In 1975, Simone de Beauvoir, one of her detractors,^[2] judged her writing to be clumsy, inexperienced and improvised, and this judgement was very painful for Nobili.^[10][11]

She committed suicide at the age of 59, in 1985, in Cachan.^[12]

She left a legacy of poems to be read, for they are a denunciation, a beacon of light on the condition of women and workers in the 1940s, a cry against stigmatising society, factories that are prisons and prejudices about love.

— Marie Potel^[13]

• I quaderni della fabbrica (The factory's notebooks), 1948.
• Nobili, Nella (1949). Poesie: 1946-1948 (in Italian). Tosi e Danzi.
• Nobili, Nella (1978). La jeune fille à l'usine (in French). Paris: Éditions Caractères.
• Nobili, Nella; Zha, Édith (1979). Les femmes et l'amour homosexuel (in French). Hachette littérature. ISBN 978-2-01-006204-9.
• Nobili, Nella (1980). Douze poèmes de deuil (in French). N. Stern.
• Nobili, Nella (1981). "Les immaternelles". Sorcières: Les femmes vivent. 23 (1): 45–47.
• Nobili, Nella (2018-06-22). Ho camminato nel mondo con l'anima aperta (in Italian). RCS MEDIAGROUP (Solferino Libri). ISBN 978-88-282-0083-3.

Her works have been partly translated by Marie-José Tramuta, professor at the University of Caen Normandy.^[3] His archives are kept by the Institut mémoires de l'édition contemporaine.^[14][9]

In September 2018, her compositions were read and performed by Drusilla Foer as part of Il Tempo delle Donne, the event organised by Corriere della Sera at the Milan Triennale.^[15]