Abstract
In this article we will focus on the tension between hope and despair, between resignation and justice, between ethics and mortality that are at the heart of the work of the Italian poet Giuliano Mesa, and that starting from Quattro quaderni (2000) come to be declined through an increasingly close dialogue with Paul Celan’s tragic-utopian tension, which inextricably links the perspective of what is “lost” and what remains “unlost”, starting from the need to come to terms with the horror of the Shoah. The article focuses in particular on Mesa’s last collections, in which the figure and work of Celan repeatedly appear as the central hub of an ethical research that makes the “last saying”, paradoxically, a “saying again”, in the sign of aporia and ethics, for a poetry that relies on the “passio” of the possible, marked by the coexistence of despair and hope, affirmation and negation, apocalypse and resistance.