Internet: Emilio Villa passed away on 14th January 2003. He had been born at Affori, near Milan in 1914. He spent his life in Milan, Florence, Sao Paolo (Brazil) and most of all in Rome, engaging in studies of Semitic - he was an exile from the Vatican Institute of Biblical Studies "“ and early Greek philology and working actively with avant-garde artists both Italian and foreign. He carried out a remarkable prose translation of the Odyssey (1964) and he also translated some cuneiform tablets of the Accadic poem "Enuma Eli" (1939). Moreover he carried out a long labour of interpretation of some passages of the Bible, of the Pentateuch in particular. He contributed to several cultural reviews, such as "Frontispizio", "Letteratura", "Arti visive" (1953-56), to avant-garde magazines, such as "Ex" (1961-65) and "Tau/ma" (1980). Some of his most significant writings on contemporary art are collected in "Attributi dell'arte odierna" (1947-67) reedited by Aldo Tagliaferri (Feltrinelli, 1970). For a long time his poetry was ignored by critics mainly because Villa was always indifferent to the fortune of his poetic work, which he preferred to publish in very limited editions or on catalogues of his artist friends or on half-clandestine reviews, thus purposefully achieving a maximum of dispersion. In 1989, however, for the publisher Coliseum (Milan) the greatest expert of Villa's work, Aldo Tagliaferri, edited the first part of his poetic works, collecting texts of the period 1934-1958. The anticipated second part has not yet appeared. Villa writes also in Italian, a language which, however, he has never loved because, according to him it is "a language of slavery" of a pompously academic "Ytaglya". He chose to write in the dialect of Milan, but above all in a very fanciful latin of his own creation, with piquant branching off into ancient Greek, Provençal and with Semitic inserts, to land finally into a French of his own that will bewilder the native speakers of that language. The twisting about to which he submits the language distorts its ordinary usage though never having recourse to wayward fancies, but delving into the innermost core of the language, where he created and experimented unheard of situations. With Villa there came to light the event of a poetry which is both a philological draft and a work of hermeneutics in a "magmatic and enigmatic" blend (Tagliaferri in "Parole silenziose", (Silent Words) "Opera Poetica" I, already quoted). This is not yet the case with the collection "Oramai"(By Now) of 1947, written in Italian with slang and dialect inlets and in crepuscular tones alluded to in the title of the collections, of irretrievable loss, tones which will later tend to rise in more and more ardent tones where that "oramai" (by now) will take the shape of nostalgia for the lost innocence of Eden. In this vision of the world history is refused: " Even at the pub we believe we are at the pub, and instead we are all of us in history, see Pascarella. On the contrary history is all a continuous mistake that never stops and is never tired of going wrong, of doing things all over again, of revising, of changing its mind, of stating one thing today only to take it all back tomorrow" (see his review of "Stalin, zar di tutte le Russie" by E. Lyons on "L'Italia che scrive", December 1941). With his refusal of history is connected his criticism of the relationship between things and words: who what expects to hear words/hey you/ are you expecting to hear things among things? Every guy expects to hear things and words? But who what. and the words he says, where are they?" ("Sì, ma lentamente",-Yes but slowly- 1954) and Villa will finally choose to speak words and no longer things. But of things he will speak once more in "La tenzone" a mock Provençal form of an exchange of alternating stanzas, composed in a mixture of Lombard and Roman Dialects, with invented words and an invective against post-war "Ytaglya". In the fifties Villa got to work to merge together his experiences as glottologist, philologist, translator and poet to create a language of his own, which Tagliaferri describes as "a very personal expression of the neo-alexandrine vocation of our age" (in "Parole silenziose", op. cit.), aimed at the co-existence of experiences originating from multifarious cultures and above all "bound for a very remote past, for the mystery of the origins of language, far beyond the syncretism between Hellenism and Judaism", so far as to ask oneself if " a cromlech might not be more intense and spasmodic than the Parthenon or Bernini's colonnade" ( from "Ciò che è primitivo" in Arti visive" may 1953). Into this channel there flowed the two years' experience (1950-52) in Brazil, where literary culture, especially on the part of the "Noigandres" group of concrete poets took as its models Pound, Joyce and Cummings. One of the techniques he acquired is the collage of fragments of lyrical situations, a means of expression which originated from Blaise Cendrars' "Découpage poétique" and was to have an enormous success with Apollinaire, Pound, Eliot, Gide, to say nothing of the dada experiments and the recent Anglo- American "cut up" of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs. Besides collage, there puts in an appearance a singular variant of glossolalia, which is that "odd speaking" already mentioned by St Paul in a letter to the Corinthians, a form present under certain situations of mystic frenzy with many religious communities. Villa's glossolalia stems from the ferment of a linguistic material teeming with phonic puns, etymologic conjectures, of unexpected juxtapositions, where the sound generates the sense, constantly risking nonsense. And Villa is always willing to free euphony from meaning: certain passages are altogether obscure, even though something phosphorescent is perceived as among abysmal phantom essences : Here is the voice of a Sybil: "Sibilla spuria sibillina discissa per os/"¦sibilla umbra sedumbrans ad umbris"¦umbrarumque mysticantia sibilla sexus" (in Sibilla Burri") or again "Sibilla labialis, alis labi queas, limine clam/sigillata, sillaba labyrinthia, labilis labi lilium" ( in "Sibilla labia", 1980-84). Thus an area is created where the highest degree of semantic ambiguity reigns in an everlasting transformation. It goes without saying that Villa's glossolalia is the apotheosis of philological multilinguism "“ in Semitic languages etymological puns are frequent "“ as well as of neologism elected as method of composing: the poet acts on the physicality of the word, in the underground of linguistic sedimentation. To give an example, taken from the collection "Verboracula" (on the review "Tau/ma", 1981) the name Artemis is made to derive from Akkadic and Sumerian phonic sequences. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.