CELSO MACOR. A Voice from Friuli for Us All

Presentation of the new edition of the poetry collection "Impiâ Peraulis" with editors Renate Lunzer and Gabriele Zanello.

Musical interludes by Giorgio Marcossi (flute) and Giulio Chiandetti (guitar). The event is sponsored by the Friulian Philological Society in collaboration with the Autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, the Austrian Forum in Rome, the Slovenian Embassy in Italy, the Fogolâr Furlan in Rome, and the Friuli nel Mondo Foundation.

Impiâ peraulis (Lighting up words) is a 1980 cycle of poems, written in a variety of the author's native Eastern Friulian, accompanied by an Italian translation by Macor himself.

It is a heartfelt, yet entirely unsentimental, hymn to the unstoppable disappearance of the old Friulian peasant world, with its cosmos of moral and aesthetic values—a process accelerated by the terrible earthquake of 1976.

It is also the resistance of an intellectual, sometimes discouraged, sometimes angry, against the excesses of blind nationalism, the development of irrational consumerism, and the ruthless homogenization of every cultural and ethnic difference that threatens the identity of Friuli and its Slovenian neighbors.

The new quadrilingual edition of this now standard collection of poems was created to mark the centenary of the author's birth and the European Cultural Year shared between Gorizia and Nova Gorica, long separated by the Iron Curtain.

Macor never saw his vision of borderless dialogue realized. This book is a tribute to his voice.