Nago's style: indecent poems by Giorgio Buffa. An evening with Shlomo Krol. Offline.

The poems of Giorgio Baffo (1694–1768), a respected Venetian senator and an older friend and mentor of Giacomo Casanova, are one of the most vivid expressions of libertinism: an 18th-century intellectual and cultural movement that rejected Church doctrine, parodied the courtly conventions of earlier centuries, and advocated sexual freedom. Other famous representatives of the movement included Alexis Piron and the Marquis de Sade in France, John Wilmot and Aphra Behn in England, and Ivan Barkov in Russia. While in Barkov’s poetry we enjoy its rough forcefulness, the eroticism in Giorgio Baffo’s poetry, despite its frankness and deliberate obscenity, is refined.

“Without Baffo, it would be impossible to imagine the lustful decadence of the Most Serene Republic. Thanks to him, we know the details of Venice’s sexual life, with its festivals, taverns, casinos, ballerinas, and licentious nuns. There is not a single event in Venetian life that Baffo did not celebrate with elevated obscenity, whether it was the arrival of the Duke of York, the election of a pope, an actress’s debut, or the misfortunes of the Jesuits,” wrote Guillaume Apollinaire.

Baffo insists that his obscenity is nothing other than the truth of life; and yet it is impossible not to admire the way his work resolves the eternal conflict between nature and culture, between sexual tension and the entire complexity of human sexuality, through laughter: his poems are extremely indecent and extremely funny.

Giorgio Baffo’s book Selected Erotic Poems was published this year by Jaromir Hladik, translated by Irina Tessaro and Shlomo Krol.

Irina Tessaro lives in Venice; this is her first book.

Shlomo Krol lives in Tel Aviv. His translations include Yehuda Halevi, Songs of Zion; Poems by Guido Cavalcanti and Other Italian Poets of the 13th–14th Centuries; Immanuel the Roman: Selected Works; and Shlomo ibn Gabirol, The Crown of Kingship. His poetic translations have been published in the journals Mirror, Colon, Foreign Literature, and many other online and print periodicals.

On October 11, we invite you to Babel Jerusalem for an evening with Shlomo Krol.

Copies of the book will be available.

October 11
19:30
Babel Jerusalem
31 King George Street
Admission free.