«La precisione della Poesiae l'esattezza della Scienza»

Battistini, Andrea

Matematica, cultura e società, Série 1, Tome 4 (2019) no. 3, pp. 259-267

Résumé

The title of this paper comes from a Vladimir Nabokov's claim that aims to underline «the Precision of Poetry and the Exactness of Pure Science». This means that it's no longer possible to oppose Science (and above all Mathematics) to Literature according to the classic dichotomies between the facts of science and the values of literature, objective world and subjective world, deduction and intuition. So, intuition, imagination, phantasy, creative metaphors, rhetoric belong not only to the baggage of the poet, but also of the mathematician. On the other side, as in an electrolitic process, or osmosis, we can see in the poet's work scientific rigor, calculation, exactness, rationality. An example where science can be useful to literature can be seen in the thoughts of Primo Levi, and in the works of Leonardo Sinisgalli, who was at the same time a mathematician and a poet.