Larkin is a master of metaphor.

In Cut Grass, the poem below, the grass is a breathing creature sacrificed to the Gods of a new season.

Nature is a town criss-crossed by streets of flowers.

And the cloud is a tall mammal moving at a leisurely rhythm to take it all in.

From above.


Alberico Collina




Cut Grass by Philip Larkin

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer's pace.

"You have to accept the fact that sometimes you are the pigeon, and sometimes you are the statue" Claude Chabrol

Ennio Flaiano uses humour and language to catch us off guard, and to poke fun at our pretensiousness.


He's the master of the backhanded compliment. Few people are so versatile at disguising an insult as praise, as the two following phrases show:


"He is afflicted by a parity complex, he doesn’t feel inferior to anyone." Ennio Flaiano

"Italians always rush to the aid of the victor." Ennio Flaiano

But he doesn't limit himself to insulting others, since he's also an expert in self-deprecation:
"My motto is: few ideas, but confused." Ennio Flaiano (apparently stolen from his friend Mino Maccari)

And every now and again, he makes us smile by forging such gems as this eloquent chiasmus:
"Success is to have what you desire. Happiness is to desire what you have." Ennio Flaiano




Alberico Collina

Note: the quotations above are my translations of the Italian original. I hope I did them justice :-)

Ennio Flaiano was so talented that he could write plays, filmscripts, novels, newspaper articles, art reviews, you name it.

To him the word is sacred. In his own words:

"I believe only in words. Words can wound us, words can convince us, words can placate us. This, for me, is the meaning of writing." Ennio Flaiano (my translation).

Although Flaiano wrote for various media, and employed different forms of communication, his style is evident in all of them.

In this quote about Summer, Flaiano personifies seasons, lending new meaning to each of them.

And after reading it, it's diffcult to think of seasons in quite the same way again.


"There is but one season, and that is Summer. It's so beautiful that the others rotate around her. Autumn remembers her, Winter invokes her, while Spring envies her, and childishly attempts to spoil her." Ennio Flaiano (my translation)



Alberico Collina

Ennio Flaiano (1910-1972) was an Italian writer and journalist, who is famous for having written, together with filmmaker Fellini, the script to many of the director's best known movies. Unfortunately, he is not well-known abroad, and I've never seen a collection of his aphorisms or quotes in English. Here are just a few I translated myself:


"In Italy, the shortest line between two points is an arabesque." Ennio Flaiano


"Stupidity fascinates me, but I prefer my own." Ennio Flaiano


"A book dreams. It is the only inanimate object that can do so." Ennio Flaiano


"A dreamer is someone whose feet are firmly grounded into clouds." Ennio Flaiano



"In thirty years' time, Italy will not have been shaped by government, but by TV." Ennio Flaiano


"We only have five or six unforgettable days in our lives, the others just take up space." Ennio Flaiano


"Today, the cretin is full of ideas." Ennio Flaiano


Flaiano is not politically correct, but there is an honesty to his words that is refreshing and often even prophetic.

And when I read him, I can't help but smile at his educated insolence.






Alberico Collina