27 January 2016
Crossing European Borders with Diego Marani’s ‘The Interpreter’
As in previous years, the British Library will host 2016’s European Literature Night on 11 May. As a taster, we look at a newly-translated work by an author who featured in 2014’s event.
Diego Marani’s The Interpreter (original Italian L’interprete, Milan, 2004y YF.2004.a.24136) begins in Geneva at the United Nations where an interpreter has developed a strange malady and starts speaking gibberish while claiming he has discovered the primordial language of mankind. Before he can be sacked he disappears, then his boss develops the same illness and goes to a sanatorium in Munich for a language cure. While at the sanatorium he decides his only chance of being cured is to find the missing interpreter and find out about the mysterious illness which has taken over his life. There now begins a journey through Europe which takes him as far as the Crimea. This is no travelogue but an exploration of cultural diversity, language, identity and crime.
It is a very entertaining novel with a lot of humour but also dark and frightening. It shows how easily all the certainties of life can disappear and how an individual can be left defenceless to the buffetings of external forces beyond his control. The narrator in the novel loses everything but the power of the human spirit keeps him alive and he fights back. For him life is an obstacle race where the obstacles can change from day to day, and where you must adapt to survive.
As with Marani’s earlier novels, New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs, the importance of language and identity are at the heart of the novel:
Languages are like toothbrushes: the only one you should put in your mouth is your own. It's a question of hygiene... it's dangerous to let yourself be contaminated by the germs of another tongue.
It is your language and your culture which give you your identity and make you what you are. When times get tough it is a bulwark against chaos and adversity. Your language and culture help you belong in society and connect you to both the past and the future. Whatever journeys we undertake, we take with us our language and culture and we do not lose them however much our life changes. We can learn new languages and immerse ourselves in new cultures, but we still retain the language and culture which surrounded us in our formative years and in which we were educated. This is why exile is so painful for most adults. Indeed, people who have left their homes for work in foreign countries remain truer to the traditions that they grew up with than people who remain behind in a changing society. For the exile, a country can’t change as it exists only in his mind, frozen in aspic, and it is to this country of the mind that he wants to return. Indeed, as many returning immigrants discover, the country they left behind no longer exists and they can’t readjust to the country which has taken its place.
The themes of the novel are carefully embedded in a thriller plot and do not interfere with a cracking yarn rich in event and the unexpected. Diego Marani shows that he is at home with the detective story, so it is not a surprise that he has gone on to write detective fiction with God’s Dog. The issues raised in The Interpreter are answered, but what the narrator has learnt does not seem worth the price that he has paid and will continue to pay.
Books by Diego Marani from the British Library's collections
Eric Lane, Dedalus Books
21 September 2015
Joannes Stradanus and his Hunting Scenes
The Flemish artist Jan van der Straet, also known as Joannes Stradanus (1523- 1605), spent most of his working life in Florence where his enormous output included religious paintings, frescoes in the Palazzo Vecchio, tapestry cartoons, and also designs for various series of prints.
Portrait of Johannes Stradanus ca 1580. Print made by Johannes Wierix after J. Stradanus. British Museum 1879,0510.428 (©Trustees of the British Museum. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Between 1566 and 1577 Stradanus executed preparatory drawings for a series of hunting scenes for tapestries to decorate the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano near Florence. The success of these led Flemish publishers to commission hunting scenes by Stradanus for engravings, an indication that the artist’s fame had by then spread north of the Alps. Six large-format engravings with scenes representing the tapestries at Poggio a Caiano were published by the renowned print publisher Hieronymus Cock in 1570, and in 1574 and 1576 Volxcken Diericx, Cock’s widow, published two series prints based on the same designs but without their ornamental borders.
Wild Boar Hunt with Nets. 1570 (Series of hunting scenes with borders). Engraving. Published by Hieronymus Cock, after Jan van der Straet. British Museum 1870,0514.1233 (©Trustees of the British Museum. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Stradanus had by then begun his collaboration with Philips Galle (1537-1612), another engraver and print dealer who had earlier worked in Cock’s workshop. This resulted in two new series of hunting scenes. The first, which numbered 44 prints, was published in 1578-80 and some 15 years later an additional 61 prints were produced, providing a greater variety of scenes. Both series were combined into a single collection published in 1596 as Venationes, ferarum, arium, piscium [Hunts of wild animals, birds and fish]. Several engravers were engaged on this ambitious publication which was reprinted several times during the 17th century by Galle’s heirs.
Title page of Venationes Ferarum, Avium, Piscium. British Library C.107.k.7
The British Library has two copies of the work, 1899.cc.71 and C.107.k.7. Both have the same engraved title page, on which the name of Joannes Galle has replaced that of his father Philips, as it does on all the plates. This edition was first published in 1634 but as the date does not appear on the title page of either of our copies, perhaps they are later reissues. Judging by the quality of the plates, 1899.cc.71 is the earlier of the two. It is incomplete – a selection of 38 plates – whereas C.107.k.7 has all 104 plates.
The prints are approximately 20 x 26.5 cm. They are grouped into thematically related depictions of animal and bird hunts, fishing, scenes from history or legend, fights between animals, or between wild animals and men in arenas. At the bottom of each picture there are verses explaining its subject. The examples below give an idea of the great variety of subjects and their treatment, and of Stradanus’s inventiveness and exuberance. The landscapes, drawn following Flemish and Italian pictorial traditions, are a reminder both of the artist’s country of origin and of his adopted country.
Scenes from history and legend
Whale Hunt by the Emperor Claudius at Ostia. Engraved by Adriaen Collaert [Plate 86]. Claudius fought a killer whale which was trapped in the harbour, an event witnessed by Pliny the Elder. The whale sinks a boat with a gush of water from its mouth.
Animal hunts
Hunting panthers using mirrors. Engraved by Jan Collaert II [Plate 16]. In the foreground panthers are lured into traps which contain mirrors; on a wooded outcrop above, huntsmen wait to spring the traps; to right, other panthers are caught in nets; a group of hunstmen, with spears, approach along a riverbank.
Gazelle hunt. Engraved by Joannes Galle [Plate 51]. One of the most spectacular engravings in the collection. At right foreground a group of hunters are preparing for the hunt, two of them putting on their climbing shoes. At left mid-ground, hunters armed with spears, accompanied by dogs, chase gazelles up cliffs; on the opposite side of the ravine, men drive the gazelles off the cliff.
Bird hunts
Hunting of reed warblers with owls. Engraved by Jan Collaert II [Plate 68]. Three owls perch on poles tethered with cords and a fourth stands on a cage. They attract the warblers which fly down to mock them. Lying on the ground are hunters camouflaged as bushes (their hands and faces can be seen) holding lime-twigs on which the birds land and become trapped. In the foreground, a couple is handing dead birds to an older woman who is putting them in a basket; a little boy observes the hunt.
Catching swallows from rooftops using discs. Engraved by Joannes Galle [Plate 85]. One of the rare cityscapes in the series. In the foreground, boys catch swallows from the roofs and balconies of buildings using circular discs suspended from long sticks; groups of figures watch them from an Italianate square.
Beekeeping. Engraved by Joannes Galle [Plate 83]. Beekeeping is curiously included as an example of bird hunting. A man on a ladder scrapes bees from the trunk of a tree into a hive; another figure supports the base of the ladder; two figures beat pans with sticks , and a third watches a swarm of bees flying above. A row of hives can be seen to right.
Fishing
Fishing with dip nets in the river Arno. Engraved by Joannes Galle [Plate 96]. In the right foreground a river god, holding a cornucopia, is seated upon a lion representing Florence; fishermen wade in the river Arno with dip nets; to left and right, the city of Florence flanks the river.
Chris Michaelides, Curator Romance Studies
References/further reading
Jan van der Straet, Philippus Gallæus, Cornelis van Kiel Venationes Ferarum, avium, piscium, pugnæ bestiariorum et mutuæ bestiarum. … . ([Antwerp, after 1634?]). 1899.cc.71.
Jan van der Straet, Joannes Gallæus, Cornelis van Kiel, Venationes ferarum, auium, piscium…. (Antwerp, [after 1634?]). C.107.k.7.
Alessandra Baroni & Manfred Sellink, Stradanus, 1523-1605 : court artist of the Medici (Turnhout, 2012). LD.31.b.3160
Alessandra Baroni Vannucci, Jan Van der Straet detto Giovanni Stradano: flandrus pictor et inventor. (Milan, 1997). LB.31.b.19393
Manfred Sellink, Philips Galle (1537-1612): engraver and print publisher in Haarlem and Antwerp. ([Amsterdam?], 1997). YA. 1999.b.4195.
Johannes Stradanus, compiled by Marjolein Leesberg; edited by Huigen Leeflang. (Amsterdam, 2008). YF.2009.b.2177
Yvonne Bleyerveld, Albert J. Elen, Judith Niessen, Bosch to Bloemaert : early Netherlandish drawings in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (Paris, [2014]). YF.2014.b.1669.
15 June 2015
Pasolini and St Paul
Roger Fry, the Bloomsbury art critic, thought that Caravaggio would make a superb “cinema impresario”. With his dramatic use of light and dark, the Italian painter pretty well invented cinematic lighting. His great altarpiece of 1601, The Conversion of St Paul, glowed with such a photographic sharpness that contemporaries suspected some trick.In a revolutionary re-telling of the scriptures, Paul lies prone beneath his horse on a dirt road to Damascus, his arms outstretched in proto-filmic shafts of light. There are no heavenly visions in Caravaggio, only humans on the long, grubby pilgrimage of life.
Caravaggio ‘The Conversion on the Way to Damascus’, 1600-01. Rome, Santa Maria del Popolo (image from Wikimedia Commons)
Much has been made of Caravaggio’s influence on the fierce pauperist Catholicism of Pier Paolo Pasolini. At the end of his film Mamma Roma (1962), staring Anna Magnani, the working-class hero lies dying on a prison bed like a sanctified Jesus, a stark image that also refers to Mantegna’s Dead Christ. The implied blasphemy of Caravaggio’s low-life Christs and Virgin Marys thrilled the iconoclast in the Italian film-maker, whose miserable death was somehow foretold in his own work.
On the morning of 2 November 1975, in slumlands outside Rome, Pasolini was found beaten beyond recognition and run over by his Alfa Romeo Giulia. A 17-year-old rent boy was charged with the killing – a homosexual tryst gone murderously wrong. Or was Pasolini the victim of a political hit? His presumed killer turned out to be affiliated to Italy’s neo-fascist party; the verdict is still open. Pasolini was 53.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, from La Rabbia. (Photograph by Mario Dondero, ©1963. With the kind assistance of the Ccentro Studi Pier Paolo Pasolini di Casarsa delle Delizie, Pordenone)
Saint Paul, published posthumously in 1977 and presented for the first time in English in 2014 (translated by Elizabeth A. Castelli, British Library. YC.2015.a.592), is Pasolini’s screenplay for the life of the apostle Paul. Drafted in 1966 and re-written subsequently, it was intended to form a sequel to his film The Gospel According to Matthew (1964), shot in the lunar landscape of Italy’s remote Basilicata region. The screenplay, with its New Testament voiceover, typically mingles an intellectual Leftism with a Franciscan Catholicism: blessed are the poor, for they are exempt from the unholy Trinity of materialism, money and property. The film was never made for lack of funds.
Pasolini’s solidarity with the Italian poor was at heart romantic. La Ricotta, his 35-minute episode in the collaborative movie RoGoPag (1963), features Orson Welles as an American director shooting a film in Rome about the Passion of Christ. Stracci (“Rags”), the sub-proletarian actor who plays the part of the good thief, dies on set from a case of real-life starvation. For all its manifest compassion, the film led to a suspended prison sentence for Pasolini on blasphemy charges. Over a tableau vivant inspired by Rosso Fiorentino’s painting of the Deposition Welles cries out sacrilegiously: “Get those crucified bastards out of here!”
The deposition tableau from Pasolini’s La Ricotta (left) and Rosso Fiorentino’s painting (right).
Like La Ricotta, Saint Paul champions those who have been disinherited by capitalism and the “scourge of money”. The consumerist “miracle” of 1960s Italy had undermined the semi-rural peasant values of l’Italietta (Italy’s little homelands), Pasolini believed. In his retelling of the Bible, St Paul stands as a bulwark against the “corruption” brought to Italy by the trappings of American-style consumerism.
Nevertheless, as a Pharisee and former persecutor of Christianity, Paul was an ambivalent figure for Pasolini. After his conversion Paul took his mission round the world and became the founding father of the Christian Church in Rome with its hierarchy of prelates and pontiffs. In some measure, then, Paul lay behind the Catholic church that Pasolini had come to know in 1960s Rome, with its Mafia-infiltrated Christian Democrat Party and pursuit of power and political favours. In the screenplay, Paul is by turns arrogant and slyly watchful of his mission.
The saint’s story is updated, cleverly, to the 20th century. Cohorts of SS and Vichy French military collaborationists stand in for the Pharisees of the first-century Mediterranean. With a fanatic’s heart, Paul oversees the killing and mass deportation of Christians. The action then fast-forwards to 1960s New York, where the post-Damascus Paul is preaching to Greenwich Village “beats”, “hippies”, “blacks” and other outcasts from conformist America. His attempts to overturn capitalist values in Lyndon Johnson-era America are met with hostility by FBI operatives and White House flunkies. In the end he is murdered on the same hotel balcony where Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. Pasolini’s approximation of the apostle of black liberation to the apostle of Orthodox Christianity just about works.
Though fascinating, Saint Paul is not the “literary work of the first magnitude” that the French philosopher Alain Badiou would have in his foreword to the screenplay. (Rather, it reads like a preliminary sketch for something to be coloured in later.) Inevitably one scans the screenplay for clues to Pasolini’s murder. The novelist Italo Calvino believed that Pasolini was killed from a “D’Annunzian” hankering after redemption through violence. The scene of the film-maker’s murder, the shanty town of Idroscalo near Fiumicino airport, presents a typically Pasolinian pasticcio of the poetic and the squalid: shacks lie scattered across a filthy, blackened beach and in the distance rise the tenement slums of Nuova Ostia. At best, Pasolini’s was a sleazy kind of martyrdom; at worst, it was a bludgeoning out of tabloid crime-sheet.
Ian Thomson, University of East Anglia
References
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mamma Roma. (Milan, 1962) X24/8626.
Pier Paolo Pasolini Per il cinema. (Milan, 2001). YA.2002.a.5985.
Ian Thomson will deliver the Italian Studies Library Group Annual Lecture ‘Pasolini and Rome’ at the British Library on 29 June 2015.
24 May 2015
The War Poet who wasn’t: Simon Gregorčič and the Soča Front
May 24th marks the centenary of Italy’s entry into the Great War. In previous blog entries related to this event, I have focussed on the Isonzo/Soča Front, which bore the brunt of the first Italian military operations. For today’s entry, I return there again, to write about a character who played a significant role in that action, but who had died almost a decade before war broke out.
Portrait of Simon Gregorčič from Anton Burgar, Simon Gregorčič: življenjepis (Ljubljana, 1907) X.989/6888.
Simon Gregorčič is one of Slovenia’s best-loved poets, and a significant figure in the 19th-century struggle for national rights. He was born in 1844 in the village of Vrsno, nestling beneath Mount Krn very close to the then Austro-Italian border, and the local landscape and lifestyle imprinted itself profoundly on his work. His family were peasant farmers who raised sheep in the pastures of the Soča valley, but young Simon had been born at a time of fast-rising literacy. He went to the grammar school in the regional capital Görz/Gorica (now Gorizia, in Italy), and then studied to become a priest; yet, apart from a brief period at the University of Vienna, he never really went far from his beloved Valley.
He worked as a chaplain in Kobarid, not far from his birthplace, where he had a formative love affair with a young teacher and promoted the cultural life of the little town. During subsequent appointments, Gregorčič began to publish poetry, each of his four books called “Poezije”, with its number. For these, which he promoted in public readings, he became a local celebrity in his own lifetime. His style was profoundly musical, full of feeling and even sensuality – for this Catholic priest had quite a number of intense relationships with women. He wrote about social injustice, Slovene rights, the landscape that surrounded him. Among his best-known poems – and one of the few which have been translated into English - was ‘Ash Wednesday Eve’, in which he warned the rich and proud among his congregation of their mortality while inviting the poor and dispossessed, including his relatives, to take their place in the Church and celebrate “Resurrection morn.” Its theme may sound gloomy and didactic, but the poem is so beautifully written that it evokes the twilight falling over his native Valley, its little churches lit up amid the dark peaks, spilling smells of incense into the night air as the people hurry in from near and far.
Gregorčič’s most famous poem of all is ‘Soči’ – ‘To the Soča’- describing the river’s progress from its mountain source to the plains of Trieste. At the beginning the turquoise water (it really is!) is fast and vigorous, “like the walk of the highland girls”, and its refrain runs, “You are splendid, daughter of the heights!” (“Krasnà si, hči planin!”). But when the river reaches the exposed plain it grows sluggish, sensing its vulnerability. Gregorčič foresaw a day when it would be filled with blood, surrounded by a “hail of lead”, and would need to burst its own banks to “draw the foreigners ravenous for lands to the bottom of your foaming waves.”
Postcard, reproduced in Mihael Glavan, Simon Gregorčič na Soški fronti (Nova Gorica, 2012) YF.2014.a.12826
Simon Gregorčič suffered lifelong ill-health (probably tuberculosis) and died in Gorizia in 1906. His funeral procession from the city to his grave in the village Smast was a huge public event. Nine years later, Gorizia, along with Trieste and the whole Soča Valley, would be among Italy’s chief targets in its attack on the Austrian Empire. Simon Gregorčič was summoned from the grave to spur on the Slovene troops in defence of their homeland: he was shown on postcards greeting the Emperors Franz Joseph or Karl when they visited the battle-torn region, or looking protectively down upon the river with the military commanders Archduke Eugen or Svetozar Boroević von Bojna alongside him in the sky (pictures above). Sadly prophetic, the words of ‘Soči’ featured widely, particularly the verse urging the river to drown the foreign invader.
Funeral of Simon Gregorčič un 1906 (From Wikimedia Commons)
Austria’s one major victory in the awful stalemate was 1917’s infamous Caporetto (the Italian name for Kobarid). The town which lay so close to the poet’s heart was symbolically the site of a total rout of the Italian invaders. A bust of his friend, the composer Hraboslav Volarić, symbolically watched from a corner of the square.
They would, however, return victorious a year later, and Kobarid stayed under Italian rule until 1945. Volarić’s bust, along with other symbols of Slovene culture, was badly damaged by fascists, but in 1945 the town became part of Yugoslavia. The bust was replaced, and a full-length statue to Gregorčič erected in 1959 on the opposite side of the main square.
Naturally, Simon Gregorčič’s birthplace is now a tourist site, and hikers can follow his route and inspiration through the villages and meadows around.
Janet Ashton, WEL Cataloguing Team Manager
With particular thanks to Jože Šerbec of the Kobarid Museum.
Bibliography:
Mihail Glavan. Simon Gregorčič na Soški fronti. (Nova Gorica , 2012). YF.2014.a.12826
Simon Gregorčič. Poezije. (Ljubljana, 1885-1908). 11530.a.26
W.A. Morison (translator). “Ash Wednesday Eve”, in The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 23, No. 62 (Jan., 1945), pp. 23-25, Ac.2669.e. (also available online via JSTOR).
Translation of Soči by an unknown author at http://spinnet.eu/wiki-anthology/index.php/Soca_River
20 April 2015
Educating Italians in 19th-century London
The recently acquired journal Il Pellegrino: giornale istruttivo, morale e piacevole ad uso della Scuola Italiana Gratuita di Greville Street, Hatton Garden, represents a remarkable and unique addition to the British Library’s Italian collections. Launched on 4 June 1842 with a clear pedagogical intent, the journal was an initiative of the Italian exile Giuseppe Mazzini. It became the official publication of the Free Italian School set up by Mazzini in the previous year in the heart of London’s Little Italy.
The first issue of Il Pellegrino, London, 4 June 1842. British Library RB.23.b.7515.
Mazzini first arrived in London on 12 January 1837. To the Italian patriot, England offered the opportunity to leave behind a life spent in hiding and on the run, whilst still remaining actively involved in revolutionary and conspiratorial activities. Although he died in Pisa, Mazzini spent most of his adult life in London, moving from one cheap boarding house to another. In England he acquired several eminent admirers who appreciated his moral principles and unfaltering dedication to the cause of Italian unity. Dickens, George Meredith and Swinburne openly declared their esteem. Mazzini became a personal acquaintance of the Carlyles and was welcomed as a honoured guest by John Stuart Mill.
Giuseppe Mazzini, portrait from vol. XVI of Scritti editi ed inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini (Imola, 1913). 012226.d.1.
Mazzini first mentioned his idea of setting up a school for the many illiterate Italian immigrants in London in a letter to his mother, dated 3 September 1841. The school would be free and open to “workers, young organ-grinders, those selling plaster figurines, etc.” The daily classes would be held in the evening to encourage attendance. Subjects taught included Italian grammar, history, geography, arithmetic, geometry, mechanics and, at the students’ request, English, with general lectures on moral principles or Italian history every Sunday. Students would be provided with all necessary materials, including paper and ink.
Mazzini at first remained prudently in the shadows to avoid any possible association between the School and the revolutionary political organisation of which he was the leader. The teachers were unpaid volunteers. Among them were such prominent figures as Antonio Gallega, Carlo Pepoli, Gabriele Rossetti, and Joseph and George Toynbee. The famous American writer and journalist Margaret Fuller addressed the students on more than one occasion. Mazzini himself did a share of teaching, primarily history and geography, which he considered vital in cementing and reinforcing the students’ feeling of being Italian.
Mazzini teaching at the Free Italian School, image from Jessie White Mario, Della vita di Giuseppe Mazzini. (Milan, 1886) 10630.i.5.
The popularity and success of the school surpassed all expectations. 51 students enrolled on the first evening, rising to 65 on the second. Mazzini was struck by this enthusiasm; he acknowledged that for “[these] poor souls [who] work or carry street-organs about all day … it cost a lot to devote two hours to studying”, adding that “if they come of their own will, this shows their typically good Italian character”. The number of students increased to 230 in the following year, including a few female pupils. Following the example of the Free Italian School, similar institutes were established by Italian exiles in Boston, New York and Montevideo.
The School in London, however, had many opponents and detractors too. Antonio Panizzi expressed his disapproval and grave concern. Thomas Carlyle cautioned his wife not to get involved with what he called “a nest of young conspirators”. Many saw the School and the courses it provided as an excuse to teach children the ‘four Rs’: reading,’riting,’rithmetic, and revolution. Even stronger opposition came, as Mazzini had foreseen, from the students’ employers, the Piedmontese authorities in London and the Catholic Church. In Mazzini’s mind, however, the School never had a political agenda. Its primary purpose was to educate and ameliorate the conditions of Italian immigrants in London.
Edited and published by Luigi Bucalossi at 5 Greville Street, Hatton Garden, Il Pellegrino (‘The Pilgrim’) was printed by H. Court of 14 Brooke Street, in Holborn, and appeared every Saturday. The price was set at ‘three half pennies’, but the journal was distributed free of charge to pupils attending the school. Each issue consisted of four pages, printed in double columns; the pagination was continuous from issue to issue. The journal survived for just over a year, with the last issue, no. 52, published on 17 June 1843.
Issue 24 of Il Pellegrino (10 November 1842)
The content of Il Pellegrino – the title refers both to the journey of learning and to the exiled condition of many Italian émigrés – is inspired by pedagogical motives. Various subjects are covered, including scientific ones, but the emphasis is on Italian history and literature. The paucity of details relating to the journal’s administration makes it difficult to establish how many copies were printed of each issue and how widely they were distributed. It is, however, probable that just enough copies were printed to cover the number of students in the school. This would explain the extreme rarity of the British Library’s copy, so far the only one known to have survived.
Il Pellegrino and the other journals that Mazzini published in London, the Italian School, and the Union of Italian Working Men (which he set up in 1840), were all part of a single moral, educational and philanthropic project. Though not a systematic thinker, Mazzini, was a brilliant and acute interpreter of his times and of the political passions which eventually led to a unified Italy, although as a monarchy rather than the republic he had fought for. He saw education for the lower classes as an inalienable right and a way – perhaps the only way – to achieve emancipation and acquire full consciousness of belonging to a spiritual community, transcending geographical borders – a Nation.
The discovery of this apparently unique run of Il Pellegrino casts additional light on Mazzini’s ideas about schooling and education for the ‘prezioso elemento’ (‘precious element’), as he described the Italian working classes, who were to be the cornerstone of a future nation. Now available for consultation at the British Library, it should prove of singular importance to scholars and historians and to anyone interested in Victorian newspapers and foreign-language or foreign-edited journalism in London.
Andrea Del Cornò, The London Library
Further reading
Andrea Del Cornò, ‘Un ritrovato giornale mazziniano: “Il Pellegrino”’, in Le fusa del gatto: libri, librai e molto altro (Torrita di Siena, 2013)
Franco Della Peruta, Il giornalismo italiano del Risorgimento (Milan, 2011) YF.2011.a.12906
Michele Finelli, Il prezioso elemento: Giuseppe Mazzini e gli emigrati italiani nell’esperienza della Scuola italiana di Londra (Verrucchio, 1999) YA.2000.a.10829
Denis Mack Smith , Mazzini (New Haven, 1994) YC.1994.b.4150
Lucio Sponza, Italian Immigrants in Nineteenth-century Britain: Realities and Images (Leicester, 1988) YC.1988.b.8035
Margaret Campbell Walker Wicks, The Italian Exiles in London, 1816-1848 (Manchester, 1937) Ac.2671/35.
The blue plaque commemorating Mazzini at 183 Gower Street, London
12 January 2015
Collecting the Renaissance: Aldus Manutius and his legacy
2015 is the 500th anniversary of the death of Aldo Manuzio (or Aldus Manutius in the equally familiar Latinised form which he himself used), one of the most important figures in the history of printing and publishing. When he was active, these trades were still in their infancy (the new technology of printing with moveable type had spread to Italy by the 1460s, within two decades of its first appearance in Germany) and Aldus did much to shape their development not only in Venice, where he set up his publishing house, but across the continent more generally.
Aldo Manuzio / Aldus Manutius, from Antoine Augustin Renouard, Annales de l'imprimerie des Alde (Paris, 1834). British Library 11917.f.34.
In what promises to be a crowded schedule of exhibitions, conferences and other events taking place all over the world to mark the occasion (see the Manutius Network 2015), the British Library has entered the field early with a small display drawing on its incomparable collections of Aldine editions in the Ritblat Gallery: Collecting the Renaissance: the Aldine Press 1494-1598. The display is open to the public until Sunday 25 January.
What makes Aldus so lastingly significant in the annals of printing and publishing in Italy and beyond? He started his career as a typical Renaissance humanist, passionately dedicated, like so many in 15th-century Italy, to the study and recovery of the classical tradition – in Aldus’s case especially Greek – and, as a teacher, with its transmission. It is possible that he first moved in the late 1480s or early 1490s to Venice, the home of many Greek scholars in exile after the fall of Constantinople, in order to pursue the study of the language more intensively. His interest in publishing was sparked off there, in the city which was already – and would remain for the best part of the 16th century – the hub of the European booktrade, and grew directly out of his scholarly interests, as part of a wider cultural project to disseminate books in Greek and promote the study of major authors such as Aristotle. His first edition, published in 1494 and included in the display, was the Erotemata, a Greek grammar by Constantine Lascaris.
Aldus maintained his scholarly interests and his standing as a scholar: his printing house became a celebrated meeting point for learned men from all over Europe, some of whom contributed directly to the firm’s editions, and his last book published in the year of his death 1515, also in the display, was his own Greek grammar on which he had been working all his life. But printing in Greek was not for the faint-hearted (or impractical); it presented significant technical and editorial challenges which Aldus seems to have relished and it is his natural flair for all the aspects of the profession which was the foundation of his enduring success. One of the most striking aspects of his activity is his appetite for innovation and experiment with books as material artefacts, with formats, typefaces and page design. Many of these innovations – for example, the pocket-sized and enormously successful series of Latin and Italian classics he began to produce round the turn of the century, the quintessential ‘Aldine book’ – proved to be turning-points which shaped the subsequent development of book production and of the book trade all over Europe.
Petrarch, Le cose volgari (Venice, 1501) G.10714.
Dante Alighieri, Le terze rime (Venice, 1502) 1071.f.3.
The British Library display includes copies of some of the most celebrated editions produced by Aldus, as well as a few books published by his descendants – his son Paolo and grandson Aldus junior – who carried on the firm after his death, with only intermittent success; while sharing his scholarly interests, they lacked his business flair and acumen.
The celebrated and enigmatic Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499 could not of course be omitted: it is perhaps the iconic Aldine edition, despite its being in almost every way an unclassifiable one-off and certainly uncharacteristic of his overall production (most famously for being copiously illustrated with elegant and densely allusive woodcuts). But the Hypnerotomachia is shown here for its ornate sixteenth-century binding, indicating how much its French owner, Thomas Mahieu (Maiolus), prized it, just as the small-format editions of Italian and classical texts are exemplified by copies – of Martial, Virgil and Petrarch – personalised by their purchasers with richly illuminated title-pages. These features show the parallel focus of this small display – on Aldus and his dynasty but also on his collectors, both in Aldus’s time and much later, whose bibliophilic passion for his editions did so much to preserve his fame. It is their libraries, dispersed over the centuries, which have gone to enrich the Aldine resources of the UK’s national library and to make them into the comprehensive, various and multiple collection the current display allows us to glimpse.
Thomas Mahieu's binding (top) and a typical page-opening (above) from Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice,1499) C.24.c.19.
The display has been curated jointly with the Warburg Institute in the University of London, which will be hosting a one-day colloquium in February on the similar theme of Aldus and his cultural legacy seen from the perspective of bibliophilia and its connections with the antiquarian book trade. It is hoped that a permanent record of the display, with images, will be included in one of the 2015 issues of the Bibliographical Society’s journal The Library.
Stephen Parkin, Curator Italian Studies
24 November 2014
When Cavafy met Marinetti
Constantine Cavafy (1866-1933) is the best-loved modern Greek poet whose life and work has inspired a legion of artists, men of letters, and film-makers. Already a legend during his lifetime, friends and admirers held regular literary gatherings in his apartment in Alexandria, where foreign visitors also paid their respects. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) was one of those visitors and his meeting with Cavafy must count as one of the most surprising encounters in literary history, comparable to the friendship between T.S. Eliot and Groucho Marx or the encounter between Guy de Maupassant and Algernon Charles Swinburne.
Marinetti (top) and Cavafy (bottom) ca. 1930
The two men were temperamentally very different. Cavafy was retiring, patient and gentle, Marinetti brash, ebullient, theatrical. They were both united, however, in their love for Alexandria, their shared birthplace. Marinetti was introduced to Cavafy by Atanasio Catraro, the scion of a distinguished Triestine family (he was a great-grandson of Ciriaco Catraro, the founder of the Stock exchange in Trieste). A friend of Cavafy and an habitué of his salon, Catraro translated some of Cavafy’s poems into Italian and in the 1960s wrote a memoir about Cavafy, published only in a Greek translation in 1970.
The meeting with Cavafy came about in 1930 during Marinetti’s visit Alexandria to give a series of lectures on Futurism to the city’s Italian community. Marinetti’s account of the meeting was first published in the Gazzetta del popolo in Turin on 2 May 1930 and was included in the volume Il fascino dell’Egitto, a collection of articles about his visit to Egypt, first published in 1933. Another account is given in Catraro’s book and it was probably Catraro who provided Marinetti with information about the Greek writers discussed.
In his article Marinetti evokes, with a few deft strokes, the atmosphere of Cavafy’s salon. The head of the poet is maliciously described as that of “the small, grey head of a sweet and intelligent tortoise whose slim arms are rowing out of its immense Greco-Roman shell of learned shadow”; the room has dark red velvet walls and is hung with paintings encrusted with “the dust of centuries”. After whisky and soda and the traditional cheese meze are served, conversation begins with Cavafy praising Futurism and the merits of free verse. Marinetti points out that Futurist poetry goes much further than free verse, into the simultaneism of words-in-freedom which are the expression of “our great mechanical civilization of speed.”
The ensuing discussion about modern Greek literature shows how French literature, especially poetry, was, at the time, the yardstick used in assessing the merits or otherwise of all literary works. Kostēs Palamas, the great rival of Cavafy, is deemed to be verbose like Victor Hugo and sentimental like Lamartine, Miltiadēs Malakasēs a cross between Alfred de Musset and Sully-Prudhomme, Lampros Porfiras a cross between Baudelaire and Verlaine, the sonnets of Giannēs Gryparēs like those of José Maria de Heredia. Contemporary Greek playwrights like Grēgorēs Xenopoulos and Paulos Nirvanas are deemed to be under the spell of Ibsen. By contrast, Spyros Melas and his “Scena libera” (Eleutherē Skēnē), headed by Marika Kotopoulē (“the Greek Eleonora Duse”), are praised for their performances of French avant-garde plays.
The conversation also touches on the merits of Demotic language in poetry, the language of Giannēs Psycharēs, its dynamism and its use of foreign words, especially Italian ones. Cavafy recites, for the benefit of Marinetti, some verses where Italian words like ‘porta’, ‘cappello’, ‘calze’, ‘guanti’, ‘carriera’ are harmoniously incorporated into the Greek text as necessary neologisms whereas English, French or Spanish words would have a jarring effect.
The assembly then asks Cavafy to recite one of his new poems. He finally obliges with “God abandons Antony”, his slow recitation accompanied by gestures tracing minute arabesques in the air.
In Catraro’s account Marinetti, pacing up and down and gesticulating, filled the room with his presence, like an actor on stage. He suddenly declared Cavafy a Futurist, an honour the poet gently declined, remarking that the little he knew about Futurism made him think that he would be considered a passéist. Marinetti conceded that Cavafy was, to a certain extent, a passéist in that he was not impressed by the beauty of machines and he still used verbs and punctuation: a passéist in form but intellectually a Futurist, like Michelangelo, Leonardo, Wagner and all other artists who revolted against tradition.
Marinetti’s article omits his unsuccessful attempt to proselytise Cavafy and it ends on an unexpectedly lyrical and wistful note. After leaving Cavafy he drives to the beautiful gardens of the Villa Antoniadis. In the full moon, he hears the song of nightingales which are, however, interrupted by the noise of machines demolishing the old villa to erect in its place a modern one destined for visiting foreign sovereigns. In a typical Marinetti simile, the funereal crash of demolitions is likened to the sound of exploding grenades. When the noise finally dies out, Marinetti movingly concludes his article by assimilating the landscape of Alexandria to the poetry of its great poet: “the Mahmoudieh Canal is full of liquid nostalgia-inducing moons, like the free verses – modern and at the same time ancient – of Cavafy, the Greek poet of Alexandria.”
The Gardens of the Villa Antoniadis in the 1920s, from Alec R. Cury, Alexandria: how to see it (4th edition; Alexandria, 1925) British Library 10094.b.7.
The Villa Antoniadis, where Marinetti had his nocturnal reverie, was built in 1860, as a miniature Palace of Versailles, by Sir John Antoniadis (1818-1895), a wealthy Alexandrian of Greek origins, and in 1918 was bequeathed to the city of Alexandria by his son together with the family’s collection of Egyptian and Graeco-Roman antiquities. At the time of Marinetti’s visit its gardens formed part of a green area which also included zoological and botanical gardens. In antiquity this area was a suburb of the city, the residents of which included Callimachus, the librarian of of the ancient Library of Alexandria. Appropriately, the villa and its gardens now form part of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Cavafy's apartment is now a Cavafy museum.
Chris Michaelides, Curator Italian and Modern Greek Studies
References:
Atanazio Katraro, Ho philos mou ho Kavaphēs (Athens, 1970). Awaiting shelfmark
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Il fascino dell’Egitto. (Milano, 1981) X. 809/66786
29 October 2014
Language and the making of nations
On 14 November the British Library will be hosting a study day ‘Language and the Making of Nations’, organised by the Library's European Studies Department and examining the relationship between majority and minority languages in the countries of Europe and the creation of national literary languages
The creation of a unified language has been significant in the formation of the nations of Europe. Part of the process has been the compilation of standard grammars and dictionaries, an initiative often followed by linguistic minorities, determined to reinforce their own identity. This seminar will look at the relationship between majority and minority languages in the countries of Europe, the role of language in national histories, and the creation of national literary languages. Specialists in the history of the languages of Europe will explore these issues in relation to Czech, Georgian, Italian, Serbian and Ukrainian, as well as Catalan, Dutch, Frisian, Silesian and the Norman French of Jersey.
Programme:
10:30 Registration; coffee
10:50 Welcome
11:00-12:00 Donald Rayfield (Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian, Queen Mary, University of London), ‘The tongue in which God will examine all other tongues — how Georgians have viewed their language.’
Marta Jenkala (Senior Teaching Fellow in Ukrainian, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies), ‘Ukrainian language and nation: a cultural perspective’.
Break
12:10-13:10 Mari Jones (Reader in French Linguistics, Cambridge University), ‘Identity planning and Jersey Norman French.’
Peter Bush (Literary translator), ‘Josep Pla and the making of contemporary literary Catalan.’
Lunch
14:10-15:40 Giulio Lepschy (Hon. Professor, UCL, London, School of European Languages, Culture and Society), ‘The invention of standard Italian.’
Prvoslav Radić (Professor, Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade), ‘The language reform of Vuk St. Karadžić and the national question among the Serbs.’
Rajendra Chitnis (Senior Lecturer, School of Modern Languages, Bristol University), 'We are what we speak. Characterizations of the Czech language during the Czech National Revival.’
Break
16:00-17:30 Roland Willemyns (Emeritus Professor of Dutch, Free University, Brussels), ‘The Dutch Congress of 1849 and the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal.’
Tomasz Kamusella (School of History, University of St Andrews), ‘Silesian: a language or a dialect?’
Alastair Walker (Emeritus Research Associate, Department of Frisian Studies, University of Kiel), ‘North and West Frisian: Two beautiful sisters, so much alike, but yet so different.’
The event has received most generous support from NISE (National Movements and Intermediary Structures in Europe), the Polish Cultural Institute, and the international publishing house Brill
Attendance is £25.00 Full Price; £15.00 for under 18s. To book please email [email protected] or call +44 (0)1937 546546
There is an additional free event, following the study day, from 18:15-20:00. Maclehose Press and the Institut Ramon Llull will be launching Joan Sales’ novel of the Spanish Civil War, Uncertain Glory, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush. Professor Paul Preston (Historian, Director of the Catalan Observatory at the LSE) will be in conversation with Peter Bush. A wine reception will follow courtesy of Freixenet.
As places are limited, please RSVP to [email protected] if you would like to attend the evening event.
27 August 2014
Remembering the Isonzo Front
On August 10th, while looking at the daily headlines online, I spotted one commemorating the centenary of the first death on the “forgotten” Austro-Italian Front.
This was the strange death by “friendly fire” of Countess Lucy Christalnigg, a Red Cross volunteer and amateur racing driver who was shot by nervous border guards when she apparently ignored a request to stop. She was driving along the winding valley road which still runs the length of the river Soča in what was southern Austria and is now western Slovenia, very close to the Italian border. It was 13 days since the Austro-Hungarian Empire had declared war on Serbia; just a week since Italy had announced its intention to remain neutral.
The valley road where Lucy Christalnigg was killed (photo: Janet Ashton)
The Countess’s death is still something of a mystery: which enemy, on the border with a neutral country far from the action, might she have been mistaken for?
If the sentries wrongly took her for an Italian insurgent, they were prescient at least in their suspicions of their neighbour. In April 1915, Italy entered the war on the side of the Allied powers, who promised large swathes of Austrian territory from the Alps to the Adriatic ports in return. This led to the opening a long mountain front that ran the length of their mutual border, and saw some of the most terrible battles of the First World War, a bloodbath of ice and fire.
Map of the Italian Front, 1915-1917, from the History Department of the US Military Academy West Point (Image from Wikimedia Commons)
In the UK, this has been called the “forgotten” front, perhaps known only as the backdrop to Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, but it is far from forgotten in the countries affected. The most infamous battle was 1917’s Caporetto, whose name entered Italian idiom as a byword for disaster. Caporetto is the Italian name for the tiny town of Kobarid in Slovenia, very few miles down the same valley road from the spot where Lucy Christalnigg was killed. It was then also known by the German name Karfreit, underscoring the complexity of the area’s history. In Austria, Karfreit was the “miracle” battle.
This war cost the mainly Slovene-speaking civilian population of the area very dearly. Many were displaced to refugee camps, or fell victim to hunger, cold and disease. Once praised by the Austrian Emperor as “the most loyal subjects”, Slovene-speakers were regarded with suspicion as Slavs and subject to heavy censorship from 1914 onwards, even as they fought alongside their German-speaking compatriots to preserve the Habsburg Empire.
Italians in turn soon learned the cost of the expansionist ambitions of their government. Military discipline was homicidally brutal, and the ill-equipped invading troops suffered constant military setbacks at the hands of Austria-Hungary and its German Allies, including one young commander named Erwin Rommel. Ultimately, Italy was on the victorious side, but did not receive everything it expected at the Peace Conference, which remained a source of great bitterness to nationalists and the bereaved.
Italy did take possession of the Soča Valley (Isonzo in Italian) between the wars, subjecting the area to a relentless policy of Italianization. In Kobarid, Mussolini ordered construction of a charnel house (photograph above, by Janet Ashton) for the remains of the innumerable Italian victims of their 1917 defeat, the awful price of a few miles of mountain valley. After 1945 the area went to Yugoslavia and from 1991 has been part of the newly-independent Slovenia. It is now known as a peaceful destination for outdoor sports, popular for hiking or for kayaking the turquoise rapids of the Soča. Where there were gun placements there are campsites today, but amid the wild flower meadows and snowy peaks lie numerous reminders of the War. Kobarid is home to an excellent, non-partisan museum devoted to the victims of the battles of the Soča/Isonzo Front. From it, the Kobarid Historical Trail runs up into the mountains, taking in the charnel house and the remains of war-time fortifications. This is part of a longer way-marked trail called the Pot Miru, the Walk of Peace, which has been receiving a lot of attention in tourist publications this year, and follows the route of the Front down to the Adriatic near Trieste. It passes the open air museums of trenches and dugouts which punctuate the landscape, and the graveyards for troops on both sides. Many of the graves have no names, as the remains of the man or boy inside could not be identified. In the village of Srpenica, a stone cross marks the spot where Lucy Christalnigg was shot.
The remains of First World War fortifications in the Soča Valley (photo: Janet Ashton)
Slovenia, Austria and Italy are all participating in the Europeana 1914-1918 project, digitising objects from library collections and from the families of ordinary participants in the war to record its impact for posterity.
Janet Ashton, WEL Cataloguing Team Manager
References/further reading:
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. (London, 1929). C.131.c.2.
Koren, Tadej. The First World War Outdoor Museums: the Isonzo Front, 1915-1917. (Kobarid, 2009.)
Krauss, Alfred. Das “Wunder von Karfreit,” im besonderen der Durchbruch bei Flitsch und die Bezwingung des Tagliamento. (Munchen, 1926). 09084.c.30.
Monticone, Alberto. La Battaglia di Caporetto. (Udine, 1999). YA.2001.a.34735
Thompson, Mark. The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919. (London, 2009). YC.2010.a.6941
An Austro Hungarian war cemetery for the dead of the Italian Front (photo: Janet Ashton)
20 August 2014
The Drama of Marinetti by Mikhail Karasik
The British Library has recently acquired the rare Russian artist’s book Drama Marinetti v odinnadt︠s︡ati kartinakh (‘The Drama of Marinetti in eleven pictures’) by Mikhail Karasik (St. Petersburg, 2008; shelfmark HS.74/2177).
Russian title page as a post card (Sheet 0). Reproduced with kind permission of Mikhail Karasik.
The book is one of a limited edition of 15 signed copies and consists of 12 sheets in the form of large postcards. On one side of each appears a lithographic illustration made with reworked old photographs. On the reverse side appears the offset text of the drama composed from contemporary newspaper and literary sources. The text inside the book is printed in Russian; an English version is designed as a newspaper – The Drama of Marinetti, special issue – and inserted into the book. For a full description see Mikhail Karasik: catalogue raisonné 1987-2010 (Nijmegen, 2010), p.157.
Marinetti is met (Sheet 4)
Bearing the sub-title “The Story of How the Leader of World Futurism Flopped in Russia”, it graphically evaluates Marinetti’s legendary visit to Russia in 1914. Highlighting the differences between Italian Futurism which as Karasik suggests “promoted urbanism, the cult of technology and machines, the destruction of tradition and old culture”, and Russian Futurism which “focused on folk culture, and the Russian icon”, it will complement the British Library’s outstanding collection of Italian and Russian Futurist books.
At the Barber's (Sheet 3)
One particularly interesting feature of the book’s graphics is the way in which works of Russian Futurists are referenced in the collaged lithographs. For example sheet no 3 At the Barber’s clearly refers to Larionov’s painting The Officer’s Barber (1910) with the heads of the officer and barber being replaced by those of Marinetti and Larionov; and later in sheet no 5 Marinetti and Venus, Marinetti appears in his car with a figure of Venus familiar from Larionov’s painting of Venus from 1910.
Marinetti and Venus (Sheet 5)
There are several heated debates in the Drama of Marinetti about the nature of Futurist poetry. The Italian approach embodied in Marinetti’s idea of “Words in Freedom” is contrasted with the Russian idea of Zaum’ (transrational or trans-sense language). Whereas Marinetti in scene 7 sees them as essentially the same, Benedikt Livshits sees the Italian approach as maximizing chaos “so as to minimize the intermediary role played by reason” and tries to explain the experiments of Russian Futurists, in particular Khlebnikov.
The Studio of Kulbin (Sheet 8)
Marinetti finally, in an aside in the same scene, concludes that “Russian Futurism has little in common with Western Futurism” though he does admit that “when it comes to Futurist music then Russia has to be recognized as taking the lead”. He continues: “In 1910 Kulbin was the first to proclaim the principle of free ‘music of noises’ and now we Italians are merely following in his footsteps”. In recognition of this remark sheet no. 9 Soundnoises (see picture below) is based on a photograph of the Italian Futurist composer Russolo and some of his sound and noise machines or Intonarumori out of which emerge the heads of Kulbin, Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh and Marinetti. Kulbin’s theories on Free music, Colour music (synaesthesia) etc are set out in Studio of the Impressionists [Studiya Impressionistov, 1910], the cover of which is used as a backround for the superimposed heads of Russian Futurists in sheet no. 8 The Studio of Kulbin (see picture above). For a description of Kulbin’s theories on music see my article on Studiya Impressionistov in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol. III, Part II, pp.1260-4. (Oxford, 2013; YC.2013.b.1128)
Soundnoises (Sheet 9)
Karasik’s book will be an invaluable addition to an already large number of his works held by the British Library. A list of works written and illustrated by him as well as works of others published by him are included in Hellyer, Peter, A catalogue of Russian Avant-Garde Books 1912-1934 and 1969-2003 (London, 2006; YC.2006.b.2068 ). More recent items can be found on the webpage for Russian Avant-Garde Artists’ Books 1969-2010 in the British Library.
Peter Hellyer, Curator Russian Studies
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