4 posts tagged “italy”

This cheered me up— from the Cambridge Companion to Dante, 2nd Edition, in "Dante and the lyric past" by Teodolinda Barolini (p. 27):

The Rime contains the traces of Dante's stylistic and ideological experimentation.  The tenzone of scurrilous sonnets exchanged between Dante and his friend Forese Donati, for instance, was long denied a place among Dante's works because of its base content, considered inappropriate for the refined poet of the Vita nuova; and yet, without it, we would be hard put to trace the passage from the tightly circumscribed world of the Vita nuova to the all-inclusive cosmos of the Commedia.  Nor does the tenzone's lowly content obscure the archetypal signs of Dante's poetic mastery, evidenced by the compact vigor and concise force of his diction, and the effortless energy with which one insult springs from another.  Whereas Forese requires a full sonnet to accuse Dante of being a bounder who lives off the charity of others, Dante characteristically packs an insult into each verse of the opening quatrain of "Bicci novel," which tells Forese that (1) he is a bastard, (2) his mother is dishonored, (3) he is a glutton, and (4) to support his gluttony he is a thief:

Bicci novel, figliuol di non so cui
(s'i' non ne domandasse monna Tessa),
giù per la gola tanta roba hai messa
ch'a forza ti convien tòrre l'altrui.

(Young Bicci, son of I don't know who [short of asking my lady Tessa], you've stuffed so much down your gorge that you're driven to take from others.) (Foster and Boyde, Dante's Lyric Poetry, 1, p. 153)

Also good was David Wallace's "Dante in English," from which I kept reading aloud to P, z.B.:

In [1782], however, William Hayley translated three cantos of the Inferno as a footnote to his Essay on Epic Poetry, and William Rogers published a blank verse translation of the entire Inferno.  Rogers' work is neither accurate nor poetically accomplished; the quality and tenor of Hayley's work may be gauged from an earlier rendition of the famous Hell-gate inscription in his The Triumphs of Temper (1781): "Thro' me ye pass to Spleen's terrific dome" (DEL 1, p. 361). [...]  It was not until 1814... that H.F. Cary, an Anglican clergyman, brought the English-speaking world face to face with a powerful, accurate, and poetically moving translation of Dante.  (289-90)

That was the one Keats hauled around the Lake District and Blake illustrated.  On Wallace's account, with only a few exceptions (Chaucer, Milton, Shelley) the height of Dante's reception in English was the 20th century, although he doesn't speculate on the implications.  I leave this exercise to you readers!  Why would Dante have gone over so well in the age of modernism-and-after, at least in English?  Is it just too upsetting in a less secular world, perhaps?

I just learned from a New Yorker ad that the Israel Ministry of Tourism's present slogan is "Israel: No One Belongs Here More Than You."

The same issue (I regret to say that I spent a lot of time reading it) attacks a newly-published life of Garibaldi:

Riall eventually asks, “How special was Garibaldi?” That, she says, “is an especially tricky question to answer.” But, basically, the answer is not at all. “We no longer believe in ‘Great Men,’ ” she reminds us.

Much is at stake here. Men killed and went to their deaths for an ideal of national unity that came to be personified in Garibaldi. Present-day Italy was born from their blood. Are we to think of those men as victims of a clever propaganda campaign? Do we think the same about those who are killing and dying for national causes today, or about the founders of our own national communities?

Having deployed a vocabulary that constantly suggests falsification, Riall makes no attempt to establish “the truth” about Garibaldi. To do so, she tells us on the last page of her overlong book, would be “to miss completely the point about his life,” which was one where “image and reality were effectively indistinguishable.” Why insist, then, on the notion that the man was inauthentic, as if he would rather have been wearing a dinner jacket in downtown Turin than a poncho on lonely Caprera? And is there really no distinction to be made between obviously mendacious propaganda campaigns, such as the papal pamphlets telling stories of Garibaldi atrocities, and the letters home from Garibaldi’s volunteers in Sicily, all bubbling with idealism and excitement, of which Riall ungenerously remarks, “The epistolary evidence suggests a general consensus to construct . . . an exemplary Risorgimento narrative[”?]

Hey now, mister critic, those are awfully sharp little darts: not very sporting to throw them at a defenseless, tweedy semi-caricature.

One imagines the young men and women who sit in Professor Riall’s classes at the University of London. One wonders if she finishes her lectures as she does the chapters of this book, with a section headed “Conclusion,” in which she wearily repeats what was said in the previous pages, in case you weren’t paying attention. Perhaps, in the busy city outside the window, there is a call to arms, there are people urging us to take up a struggle. Perhaps a young man’s head lifts. He wants to be involved in the world. Should he answer the call? Should he submit to the enchantment of the embattled community? Is the struggle ugly? Is it beautiful? Is it worth a life? These questions are not resolved by deciding that all communication is propaganda.

Hmm.  Maybe I'll stand outside the window holding up a banner that reads, YOU CANNOT BE MORAL.  But as this humble site has established before [private post], we don't get a Nietzsche, we just get nightmares.  I don't think this reviewer is particularly sharp, but he does get at one problem with Riall's sort of critique: it raises questions that are, famously, handled much better by literature, because the critic ends up having to try and occupy a vacant ground in order to adjudicate.  That occupied ground often looks like a metropolis in a large developed Western democracy, in which mass movements are more or less physically impossible and armed insurgency is hilarious even to contemplate.  It seems eternal, but it's not the historical, or geopolitical, norm; on the whole, though, it's a much better place to write and teach anything than sites of insurgency.

Is skepticism always a political virtue?  What do you think?  It's damned easy to naturalize.

Morning: Go to a café and order a cappuccino, ideally with real milk.  Let pieces by Scelsci and Nono drown out conversation.  Stare at wall.  Write.

Noon: Approach a pine tree.  Observe starlings.

Afternoon: Walk uphill in boots.  Enter bookstore; pick up book in Italian, most likely by Calvino.  Read first page.

Evening: Go to nice Italian restaurant.  Stare at wall.  Reflect on mild exhaustion and loneliness, yet simultaneous contentment and self-containedness.  Look around at clientele: the place is full of Americans.  But you're not obsessed with "authenticity," anyway, and the food's not bad.  Really a good trip so far: what you wrote this morning holds real promise.  Stay at the restaurant as late as you want.

Night: Lie awake in bed, full of excitement and apprehension.  The liminal space of travel; the edge of the world!  At home it's... night.

I'm going to be here all summer, but past experience suggests that my activities abroad are easily domesticated.

I have always associated the word "Lombard" closely— inextricably— with the word "pine."  This gave me a strange image of the Lombard invasion of the Italian peninsula, which Paul succinctly summed up by saying: "You're picturing the Ents taking over Italy, aren't you?"  A coniferous band of them, but yes.  Now it's become even harder to shake the association.