‘“Maybe Nothing is an Elegy”: On the Impossibility of Elegy and Transnational Criticism in Victoria Chang and Valerio Magrelli

Abstract

This article investigates two central aspects of contemporary elegy: (1) the plausible and tempting assumption of it being disentangled from formal constraints, something that might have generated a major historical shift from poetry as a poetic form to an elegiac mode of discourse (Bardazzi, Giusti, and Tandello 2022); (2) the formal glitch it creates and, at times, reconciles via the lyric and its generative tension between personal and collective, narrative and non-narrative dimensions, linear and non-linear temporalities. This study does so by focusing on two authors who have weaved together a poetics of mourning the paternal figure: OBIT (2020) by the Asian American poet Victoria Chang and Geologia di una padre [Geology of a father] (2013) by the Italian poet Valerio Magrelli.