Showing papers in "The Romanic Review in 2006"

Translator’s Introduction: “Italy in Translation”

Abstract: The publication of Germaine de Stall's "De l'Esprit des traductions" in the Milanese journal Biblioteca italiana in 1816 was the most dramatic event in the saga of Italian Romanticism The essay exhorts Italians to free themselves from their pedantic isolation by translating northern European literature, specifically "the new poetry of the Germans and the English" In de Stall's view, cultural exchange of this nature would connect Italians to the intellectual currents that, throughout Europe, were transforming the dated mythological and neoclassical forms treasured in Italy into a suitably Romantic idiom De Stall's contribution drew responses from the principal voices in the so-called Question of Italian Romanticism, including Giovanni Berchet, Pietro Borsieri, Ludovico Di Breme, and a precocious adolescent from Recanati who became modern Italy's most acclaimed lyric poet, Giacomo Leopardi The subsequent years of national and cultural soul-searching occasioned by this quest to define an "Italian" brand of Romanticism proved to be as energetic as they were inconclusive Summarizing the debates stimulated by de Stael, Alessandro Manzoni writes that, though the word "Romanticism" came to mean "an unimaginable muddle of witches, specters, systemic disorder, [] and abuses of common sense," the ideas Romanticism suggested became no less than the basis of nineteenth-century European aesthetic theory (1) It is tempting to view the cataclysmic effect of de Stall's essay as further proof of a French hegemony over Italian thought stretching back to the Enlightenment, which in Italy was a tenuous, fragmented affair limited mostly to Milan and the philosophes associated with the journal Il Caffe (1764-66) Such an interpretation, however, does justice neither to de Stall's intentions nor the context in which her work appeared In reality, both de Stall and the Italians were victims of the Napoleonic upheavals, and she had no wish to impose a French accent on Italian cultural expression France had controlled parts of the Peninsula as early as the Norman stronghold on southern Italy in the eleventh century, and Napoleon's invasion in the late 1790s had a notorious precedent in many Italian minds: the French occupation of Italy after Charles VIII's incursion in 1494 Politically, the Napoleonic presence in Italy combined with other foreign occupiers, especially Austria, to keep Italy a mere "geographical expression" (Metternich) that did not achieve national unity--and then a most fragile one--until 1861 The opening sentence of a popular novel of the age, Ugo Foscolo's Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1798), sums up the desperation felt by many of Italy's public intellectuals, a great number of whom (including Foscolo) faced imprisonment or exile for their controversial writings "Il sacrificio della patria nostra e consumato" ("The sacrifice of our nation is complete" [11 October 1797]), the fictional Ortis writes to his friend Lorenzo after learning of Napoleon's ceding control of Venice to the Austrians in the Treaty of Campoformio in 1797 (2) The surprise and anger Italians felt after Campoformio stemmed from the misplaced hopes they had placed in Napoleon, who had led many to believe that he would be the great Italian liberator Like much other contemporary Italian literature, Foscolo's novel oscillates between, on the one hand, a burning desire to forge the nation free from the foreign yoke; and, on the other, the anxious sense that, without these foreigners, Italians would struggle to define their identity and run their country This unease reached its apotheosis in the celebrated remark by the Italian patriot Massimo d'Azeglio just after the unification: "We have created Italy, now we must create Italians" Perhaps nowhere is the Italian quest for a national culture responsive to progressive international trends--yet also respectful of Italy's centuries' worth of creative, linguistic, and scientific traditions--more prominent than in the heated polemics inspired by the publication of "De l'Esprit des traductions" by de Stall …

The Italian Redemption of Cinema: Neorealism from Bazin to Godard

Abstract: In 1952, the Parisian journal Films et Documents codified the "ten points of neorealism" and, with this definitive gesture, pronounced neorealism a school. (1) By contrast, Italian critics have always seemed reluctant to acknowledge neorealism as a movement and so have never produced a manifesto or program for an ideological faction. Neorealism in Italy may be said rather to encompass two somewhat different meanings. The term comes to be associated, on the one hand, with the project of reformulating the nation's identity in the period immediately after World War II and, on the other, with the notion of a privileged instrument for the recuperation of reality either in its immediacy (Zavattini) or in a critically mediated form (Aristarco). (2) Cesare Zavattini and Guido Aristarco may be regarded as the two chief Italian expositors of neorealism. Zavattini worked as the screenwriter for Vittorio De Sica and authored several of the masterpieces of neorealist cinema including Ladri di biciclette (1948) and Mira colo a Milano (1950). Aristarco founded the journal Cinema Nuovo and encouraged the idea of Italian cinema as a natural progression fron neorealism to what might be called critical realism. Interested in promoting a realist agenda reminiscent of Lukacs's throughout the arts, Aristarco contended that the descriptive approach of early neorealism was too simplistic and ought to be replaced by a more critical method. In Visconti's Senso (1954) he identified the exemplary expression of a realist poetics informed by historical criticism. With respect to periodization, neorealism generally is supposed to start with Visconti's Ossessione (1942), to culminate in Rossellini's Roma citta aperta (1945) and De Sica's Ladri di biciclette, and to begin to decay after De Sica's Umberto D (1952), which Guglielmo Monetti has portrayed as the last neorealist masterpiece. (3) Whereas French critics such as Bazin and Deleuze have ascribed to neorealism the achievement of a unifying paradigm, Italian critics by and large have always attributed to neorealism a composite condition. Brunetta, for example, imagines neorealism as a "quadrilatero" that places De Sica and Zavattini at one vertex and positions Visconti, Rossellini, and De Santis at the other three. From Zavattini's own perspective, neorealism acquires an exemplary value in its epistemological rather than ontological dimensions. One of his main creative principles was "conoscere per provvedere" [to know in order to provide], an imperative that in his opinion neorealism fulfills by way of a "pedinamento" or "stalking" of reality that proceeds not in the manner of a work of mimesis, but of a simultaneous exploration and construction of reality. (4) In a certain sense, Zavattini may be said to bring to light the pragmatic character of neorealism, an almost utilitarian philosophical outlook that takes knowledge as its ultimate aim: "No means of expression besides cinema has this ordinary and congenital ability to photograph things that according to us deserve to be shown in their everyday quality, which means in their longest, truest duration. No expressive means besides cinema has the possibility to convey knowledge to the greatest number of people" (5) (Neo, 98). After initial, reductive efforts to interpret neorealism as a sign of sociopolitical redemption, historians of Italian cinema have tended to downplay the importance or cogency of neorealism, as have many directors such as Fellini, Visconti, and Antonioni who in their early careers came under neorealism's sway, only to disavow the influence in later years. (6) Already in 1948, Bazin could remark the fate of the concept in Italy: "I think there is not a single Italian director, including the most neorealist, who does not insist that they must get away from it" (WIC, 2:48). The resistance of Italian critics to the canonization of the neorealist phenomenon was made manifest at the Pesaro conference in 1974, where no consensus was reached on a definition of neorealist cinema. …

Translatio Galliae: Effects of Early Franco-Italian Literary Exchange

Abstract: In the sixteenth century, French writers adopted Italian models, translated and plagiarized Italian works, and even wrote in the Italian language Italy, it seemed, had introduced France to antiquity, but Italianism was seen as a disease that infected French culture, in particular with its taste for rhetoric, and its privileging of form over content Jean Balsamo has characterized French translation of Italian works in this period as a kind of conquest, a literary will to power, when French military domination of the peninsula had become impossible (1) If Italy was an irresistible influence in sixteenth-century France, when, for example, Ariosto's Orlando furioso, based ultimately on the Chanson de Roland and its derivatives, was translated into French, this was only reversing the tide of French culture over the Alps some three hundred years before, when Italian writers adopted French models, translated and plagiarized French works, and even wrote in French Carlo Dionisotti claimed that whatever was known of ancient Rome in the mid-Duecento was known through French sources (2) There were far more translations made from French than from Latin Yet Italian volgarizzamenti of French works are rarely seen as a sign of "conquest," but rather of submission to dominant cultural models Italian literature is thought to begin only as it disengages from Provencal and French influences and Italian authors who deserve the name are expected to challenge or suppress the hegemony of those northern cultures (3) In view of its later reversal, one wonders whether the story of French in Italy need always be told as if it were the drama of Oedipus, in which French is the vernacular cultural "father" to be gotten out of the way In 1895, Henri Hauvette saw the rise of Italian literature in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as a fortunate continuation of French literature at the start of what he called "notre decadence" The culture in decadence at the time Hauvette was writing, however, was Italy's, for which he expressed warm wishes for a speedy revival, on the heels of its only recently acquired political independence (4) Like the portrait of national literary rivalries, this vision of an amicable passing of the baton also depends upon a concept of native genius that did not exist in the thirteenth century, when linguistic difference between some dialects of France and Italy would have been smaller than between those on the peninsula itself, and no standard had been established for any of the vernaculars Because there was a literature in French a good hundred and fifty years before there was one in Italian, for a long time, French literature was vernacular literature To adopt it was not to steal it, nor to be dominated by it, but to use it as if it were one's own French was a literary (and performative) instrument, not a birthright When Italian starts to be a literary language--in large part thanks to numerous translations made of French texts--gallicisms remain, and French texts continue to be read and even written by Italians Do French texts written by Italians belong to French literature or Italian literature? Certainly Dante, who shapes our notion of the earliest Italian literature, had a competitive spirit, and was not above making invidious comparisons between romance vernaculars in favor, ultimately, of his own In the Convivio he attacks those who disdain Italian speech and praise others, particularly Provencal Mossimi ancora per difendere lui [ie, il volgare] da molti suoi accusatori, li quali dispregiano esso e commendano li altri, massimamente quello di lingua d'oco, dicendo che e piu bello e migliore quello che questo; partendose in cio da la veritade (5) (I was also moved to defend it [ie, the vernacular] from its many detractors, who disdain it and praise others, especially the langue d'oc, saying that it is more beautiful and better than this one, departing thereby from the truth …

Metaphors of Modernity: Prostitutes, Bankers, and Other Jews in Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes

Abstract: Why are the brothels of modern French literature filled with Jewish prostitutes? From Vanda in Huysmans's A Rebours, "qui remplissait chez Madame Laure l'indispensable role de la belle Juive" (119), to Rachel in Maupassant's "Mademoiselle Fifi," who kills a Prussian officer out of patriotic devotion, Jewish women seduce men powerless to resist their fatal attractions. Not do the walls of the bordello confine their numbers, which include both the glamorous actress Josepha in Balzac's Cousine Bette, whose deadly charm destroys respectable families, as well as the "affreuse Juive" of Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal, whose "corps vendu" inspires the poet with both lust and horror. Tapping into fantasies of the oriental exotic, fictional Jewish prostitutes, like "Rachel quand du seigneur" in Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu, perform a part that is always already a fiction, a sexual and racial masquerade designed to arouse mysterious passions: "C'est une Juive! ca ne vous dit rien?" tempts Rachel's procuress in Proust's novel, hoping to whet the appetite of the narrator; "Pensez donc, mon petit, une Juive, il me semble que ca doit etre affolant! Rah!" (556). Prostitution has emerged in recent years as a critical locus for investigations into the imbrication of the social and the symbolic in modern French culture. Following Alain Corbin's pathbreaking history of prostitution and its regulation in nineteenth-century France, T.J. Clark, Peter Brooks, Charles Bernheimer, and Jann Matlock have all pointed to the importance of the prostitute in the cultural imagination of the time, showing how the prostitute's body inscribes class as well as gender hierarchies. (1) Building on their work, I want to explore the ways in which this body becomes still more marked in certain narratives. How do the vexed categories of race and religion further inflect our understanding of an already overdetermined figure? And what does this figure have to tell us about modernity? My discussion will focus on perhaps the first, and certainly the paradigmatic, literary representation of the Jewish prostitute, Balzac's Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes, published between 1838 and 1847. The Jewish prostitute surfaces in French literature at just the moment (the July Monarchy) that significant numbers of French Jews rose to positions of prominence. (2) The decades of the 1830s and 40s also saw the transformations associated with modernity--by which I mean the economic, social, and cultural effects of industrial capitalism--begin to take root in French culture, especially in Paris. In what follows, I argue that the Jew comes to serve as a privileged screen for the projection of anxieties about modernity in both literature and other discourses from the time. But whereas the male Jew tends to incarnate the negative aspects of modernity, the Jewish prostitute embodies a far wider range of associations. A counterpoint to the scorned figure of the Jewish banker or usurer, the Jewish prostitute elicits desire as well as disgust, lust as well as loathing. She thus provides Balzac as well as later writers with a means of registering the complex affective ambivalence at the heart of modernity--an ambivalence that many theorists have tended to overlook. Balzac's ambivalent handling of the Jewish prostitute in Splendeurs et miseres, brings into focus the realist novel's conflicted relation to the culture of capitalism, which it simultaneously criticizes and mythologizes. Before turning to the novel, a historical question arises: was the Jewish prostitute actually a myth? Might this literary obsession have sprung from empirical rather than merely fantasmatic sources? Given that historical documents on nineteenth-century prostitution were themselves not immune to fantasmatic projections, such a question is difficult to answer with certainty. Anecdotes provide some evidence. We know, for example, that there were Jews among the upper crust of the capital's courtesans, who may have provided models for Balzac's Esther or Josepha: the Russian-born Therese Lachmann (known as La Paiva), as well as the Dutch-born mother of the legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt, achieved fame as professional demi-mondaines in Paris during the July Monarchy. …

The Love That Dares Not Speak Its Name: Displacing and Silencing the Shame of Adultery in le Chevalier De la Charrete

Abstract: For some, Lancelot, the hero of Chretien de Troy's Chevalier de la Charrete, is a noble lover, a fin amant performing deeds of valor inspired by his amour courtois, (1) but for many other readers, including some of the earliest, Lancelot is an adulterer and a traitor, who is violating his bond to his liege lord. (2) The issue remains central to much of the recent scholarship and criticism on Chretien's most famous romance, but is it a valid issue? Should we concern ourselves with a value judgment of Lancelot and of his love, and is it inherent in the text itself? Not surprisingly, given the variety of opinions on this romance, on even the question of whether there is a question we get equivocal answers. While the text never puts the issue so explicitly or in such clear and black-and-white terms as I just have, the narrator does report varied and conflicting views of Lancelot. On the one hand, while Lancelot wins much honor and fame for his chivalric deeds, he is never praised for his love (courtly or otherwise) for the queen. On the other hand, even his courage and prowess are not infrequently called into question: he is often mocked, insulted, and scorned, and not just by his enemies. Moreover, Lancelot's outstanding act of chivalry, the valorous freeing of the queen, receives less than its just due: Guinevere's initial response is to refuse to speak to him, and King Arthur and his court try to give the credit to Gawain, whom they welcome proclaiming that he "la reine a ramenee / et mainte dame escheitevee / et maint prison nos a randu" ["rescued the queen and many other captive ladies / and returned many prisoners to us"] (5317-19; trans. Staines 235). (3) Many of us have long accepted that Lancelot is King Arthur's best knight or, in the 1995 movie's terms the "first knight" (although in the medieval tradition Gawain would seem more deserving of this epithet), (4) and we have often viewed Lancelot's love for the queen as noble and ennobling. What we have done less frequently is to confront the inherent contradiction in these judgments--how the king's best knight can also be his cuckolder; and what has, as far as I can tell, never been addressed is the startling fact that Chretien de Troyes never deals directly with the conflict either. (5) Yet surely this is a central issue in the romance, not just for us today, but even for the earliest readings and retellings of Lancelot's story. If we can neither simply exalt Lancelot for his valor and his unswerving love nor wholeheartedly condemn him for traitorous adultery, then at the very least it should be legitimate to point to the contradiction in these two views. In fact, the issue and the conflict are embedded in Chretien de Troyes' romance, although the compulsion to resolve the contradiction lies primarily outside the text and runs counter to what takes place within the narrative of Le Chevalier de la Charrete. (6) Unlike the more rationalized later views of the love affair, neither Chretien de Troyes nor his putative continuator, Godefroy de Leigni, shows us Lancelot regretting his affair, let alone abjuring it. How the narrative manages to avoid any explicit engagement with the problem of a valorous knight in love with his liege's queen and at the same time can keep reminding us of the insoluble ethical problem of Lancelot's behavior is what I will address in this essay. Chretien's principal strategy for both showing and avoiding Lancelot's dishonorable behavior is displacement. As Matilda Bruckner points out Chretien "displaces and relocates through displacement" the way adultery constitutes "treason to the King" (Shaping Romance 96). We can therefore read the romance's silence on the subject as a deliberate suppression, a suppression that Chretien underscores in several ways: by displacing the shame of adultery onto other actions and other characters; by drawing attention to the suppression through various strategies, such as narrative inconsistencies and gaps; and by adducing and displacing allusions to other legendary adulterers known to his audience. …

Dyspepsia* as Dystopia? F. T. Marinetti’s Le Roi Bombance

Abstract: La Grande Dypepsie eclatera tout a coup, coincidant avec le refroidissement de la terre sterile! (Quatrieme acte, p. 230) You have stripped off the old self ... and have clothed yourself with the new self (Colossians 3: 9-10) It seems fair to say that even out of F. T. Marinetti's French, pre-futurist and thus already less popular literary production, his tragedie satirique (or, tragedie hilare) Le Roi Bombance (LRB), (1) published by the editions of Mercure de France in 1905 and subsequently staged in 1909 at Paris' Theatre de l'Oeuvre, stands out as a text still very much at the margins of both editorial and critical attention. Two simple considerations immediately confirm that Marinetti's theatrical piece has generally (and, given its 'un-theatricality,' one could perhaps add 'understandably') failed to find its audience in both the publishing and scholarly fields. (2) As of today, the only available editions of the text are either the rare original 1905 French, or the even more elusive 1909 (and 1920) Italian translation. (3) The second consideration is that--if I did my homework properly--only three or four full-length scholarly articles have dealt with Le Roi Bombance in recent times. (4) Although from different methodological perspectives, all of these essays invariably discuss Marinetti's work by observing its satirical, socio-political message delivered through the culinary allegory and by underlining in particular the intertextual relationship it establishes with one of Alfred Jarry's most popular texts, Ubu roi (1896). A synthetic glance at the plot of Le Roi Bombance may immediately illuminate both the pervasiveness of such an allegory and, in general terms, the nature of the frequent comparison with Jarry's text: The cook (Ripaille) of the imaginary kingdom of Bourdes, who was able to prepare delicious food for his king, has died and his death has initiated a political crisis. The people protest, and the three royal cooks, in order to calm the situation down, promise to organize a banquet. However, their real goal is just to barricade themselves into the royal kitchens and stuff themselves with food. The 'starving' crowd discovers that it has been fooled and, increasingly mad, eats the king (Roi Bombance), his cooks, his servants and also the court poet (L'Idiot), the one who, telling his stories, had vainly attempted to direct the appetites of the people towards more idealistic objectives. In the end, the characters of Sainte Pourriture (Saint Putrefaction) the eternal force of transformation, accompanied by the vampire Ptiokaroum, resuscitates the characters, who are then 'vomited out' by the same people who had previously ingurgitated them. (see also Eruli 1970, 261) Antipodal observations may easily arise after reading this play. On the one hand, it is hard to deny that we are dealing with an almost illegible (and almost 'un-stageable') text, characterized by 'lunghissime tirate, linguaggio enfatico e molto tradizionale, azioni macchinose' (Eruli 1992, 152), which rightly deserves to have slipped into oblivion. On the other, however, one also has the impression that the wealth of implications simultaneously elicited and hidden in its verbal and visual 'overflow' may have not yet been explored in its totality. The fairy-like quality of the play and its suggestive force, for example, does not seem to have been stressed enough by scholars. The plot, after all, also tells the story of how one of the 'king's two bodies' (the royal/historical one) is degraded into the other (the natural/pathetic one) until it overlaps with the 'classic,' fairy-like figure of an 'ogre' (Bombance is described as having a 'vaste nez bourgeonnant [ ... ] une houppe de cheveux blonds enfarines [ ... ] la bedaine qui surplombe les cuisses' etc., p. 1). (5) Such a visual coincidence may well anticipate and make evident in a deceivingly elementary fashion--as the 'curtain rises'--not only that 'eating and incorporation' shall be the true protagonists of the piece and that, consequently, the borders of human subjectivity are potentially at stake, but also that the problematic relationship between the 'corporeal' and the 'temporal' (or, in other words, the 'body' and 'history') not to mention the one between the 'beast' and the 'god,' already constitute central preoccupations for Marinetti (and the dynamics between Mafarka and Gazurmah in Mafarka le futuriste (1909) could arguably be a soon to be example of the latter). …

‘Nor do I want your interpretation’: Suicide, Surrealism, and the Site of Illegibility in Amelia Rosselli’s Sleep

Abstract: Suicide and Sleep Sleep, Amelia Rosselli's collection of English language poems, written between 1953 and 1966, presents a commentary on the poet's critical reception; or, more precisely, on being read and interpreted. It is frequently considered a precursor to her 'more mature' Italian language poetry, (1) a kind of poetic calisthenics in preparation for the 'real' event. One might argue that such a view does a disservice both to poet and critic, insofar as it dismisses the value of the collection (whatever it may be) and invites accusations of parochialism (deliberate or otherwise). But we may also read Sleep as a metapoetics, a text to run parallel to her Italian poetry and thereby to present observations on the ways her poetry has been understood, or misunderstood, by her Italian critics: the voice of Sleep is that of a poet commenting, not in private but in a nonetheless protected way, on how her poetry has been and might in future be received. (Thus her poetic interlocutors are not necessarily or exclusively the standard ones--a lover, or God, for example--insofar as they also address the reader him-or herself and double back to engage the poet.) The relevance of such an assertion goes beyond the hermeneutical skirmish with which this paper begins; it has relevance for much of Rosselli's work, as well as for our understanding of her construction as a public persona, because much of that persona is made visible by way of her poetics of self-examination. In my reading, Rosselli's English language poetry elucidates a presumptive relationship with her readers, her critics, and with a series of other poets, whose works and (equally importantly) whose lives function as psychobiographical touchstones for Rosselli. To that end, this paper is part of a larger project on authorial suicide, a project in which Amelia Rosselli figures prominently, having jumped to her death from the balcony of her Rome apartment on February 11, 1996. (2) In that study I read Rosselli's suicide as a text alongside her writings, a text that defies us to read her poetry independent of it, and independent of the dialogue it creates with another poet, Sylvia Plath, by virtue of the fact that it is on the anniversary of Plath's death that Rosselli chose to die. I am interested in suicide in this paper in a much more literary and much less literal way, thus its presence in the title indicates a form of poetic prolepsis. Likewise, when considered in light of the poet's suicide, we may call Sleep an explanatory text, designed to accompany another explanatory text: namely, Sylvia Plath's suicide. Both of these texts--Plath's suicide anniversary and the text of Sleep--are themselves acts of reading, acts to be read by others, and acts to be read by the poet herself. Put in different terms, the text of Sleep represents Rosselli's move to the other side of the divide, as it were. By writing a poetic commentary on her critical reception, Rosselli establishes herself not only as someone to be read, identified with, and/or gazed upon, but also as herself part of the gaze. Indeed, visual metaphors compose an integral part of the collection. It is precisely this identification of I and eye, of poetic subject and object, that has 'pathologized' Rosselli's writings (and the poet herself, by extension), stripping them bare of their genealogical roots and imposing a discourse of disease alongside that of irreducible alterity. (3) It is this conflation of life, text, and authorship (in which we may include her death) that this paper aims to explore from two distinct directions. First, I address the critical interventions of two of Rosselli's readers to understand the ways her work has been untethered from the poet as a writing subject and offer as a counterargument the connections between Rosselli's poetic techniques and those of the French Surrealists. Second, I examine visual metaphors in Sleep in order to elucidate the forces that conspire to confirm her 'illegibility' in the understanding of her readers on the grounds that the hermeneutical challenge she seems to pose stems not so much from the difficulty of her writings as from the subject position that produced them. …

The Spirit of Translation

Abstract: The greatest service we can render literature is to transport the masterpieces of the human intellect from one language to another. So few truly great works exist, and genius of any kind whatsoever is so rare a phenomenon that each modern nation would always remain impoverished if it were reduced to its own treasures. Besides, more than any other form of exchange, the circulation of ideas is the one most likely to prove advantageous. During the Renaissance, scholars and even poets had thought to write in the same language, Latin, so that they would not need to be translated to be understood. This could have been advantageous for the sciences, whose development does not depend upon the charms of style. But the result was that many of Italy's scientific riches were lost upon the Italians themselves, for the majority of Italian readers understood only their native idiom. It is moreover necessary for authors to invent words that do not exist in ancient literature when they write about science and philosophy. The learned who wrote in Latin availed themselves of a language that was at once dead and artificial, while the poets stuck to purely classical expressions. Renaissance Italy, where Latin still echoed on the banks of the Tiber, possessed writers--including Fracastoro, Poliziano, and Sannazaro--who were close to Horace and Virgil in style. (1) But if their reputations endure, their works find no readers today outside of erudite circles. The literary glory based on imitation is, after all, a sad one. These Latin poets of the Middle Ages were translated into Italian by their countrymen, for it is much more natural to prefer a language that refers to the emotions of real life rather than one that can only be recreated through study! I admit that the best way to avoid translation would be to know all those languages in which the works of the great poets were composed: Greek, Latin, Italian, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, and German. But such work would require a great deal of time and assistance, and we can never flatter ourselves into believing that erudition this difficult to attain can be universal. If we wish to benefit humankind, however, it is toward the universal that we must aspire. I would add that even if one were to understand the foreign languages, one might still experience a more familiar and intimate pleasure thanks to a fine translation done in one's own language. These naturalized beauties imbue a national literary style with new turns of phrase and original expressions. More efficiently than anything else, translations of foreign poets can protect a nation's literature from those banal modes of expression that are the most obvious signs of its decline. In order to gain the most from this practice, however, we must not follow the French and impose our national style upon all that we translate. Even if, in so doing, we were to change all that we touch into gold, the ensuing results would provide little nourishment. Translating in the French manner would not produce new food for thought; it would only allow us to see the same face decorated with slightly different adornment. This rebuke, justly merited by the French, has its origins in all the manner of obstacles in their language in the art of writing verse. The rarity of rhyme, the uniformity of the verse, and the difficulty of the inversions trap the poet in a kind of circle, which necessarily brings back--if not the same thoughts--at least the same hemistiches and all kinds of poetic monotony that genius escapes when it reaches high, but that it cannot avoid in the transition, developments, and in sum all that prepares and reunites the great effects. With the exception of the Abbe Delille's translation of the Georgics, one would be hard pressed to find a good verse translation in French literature. (2) The literary works of France contain some beautiful imitations and conquests that will always be confused with the nation's treasures. …

Italo Calvino and Georges Perec: the Multiple and Contrasting Emotions of Cities and Puzzles

Abstract: If the question of estrangement is emblematic and inescapable in the literary criticism of Italo Calvino, (1) for Georges Perec the question is that of the 'infra-ordinaire' and of the 'contrainte du reel.' (2) I will try, beginning with these two poles (estrangement and infra-ordinaire) to demonstrate the connections and the disjunctions that pass between Calvino's Le citta invisibili and Perec's La Vie mode d'emploi as regards the way in which they articulate and dislocate space and imaginary geography. The title of OuLiPo's second collection, Atlas de litterature potentielle (1981), was suggested by Calvino. (3) The words atlas and potential are placed together and in relation to literature, which means that we are dealing with a collection of literature and with geographical maps not yet drawn, but rather atlases and literatures to come, yet to be discovered by the emotions. Giuliana Bruno, in Atlas of Emotion, (4) develops an interdisciplinary research project at the heart of which she places la Carte du pays du Tendre (1654), a map designed by Madeleine de Scudery to accompany her story Clelie. Bruno proposes this text as inaugural of a new genre of narrative in which geography is not a cold scientific discipline but rather is in a relationship with psychology and emotion; the voyage and the space of the map open paths to narrative, in a movement both real and emotional, in the relationship between image and text. The map incarnates a narrative voyage for which, writes Bruno, "it visualizes, in the form of the landscape, an itinerary of emotions which is, in turn, the topos of the novel." (2) On the subject of tendre or tender, the author reminds us that this word in romance languages recalls, if not a romantic attachment, at least an affectionate tie between people. In ways that turn out to be near opposites, the texts that I analyze are pervaded by this emotive connotation of the map, and furthermore, as we will see, il y a du tendre, there is tenderness between these texts. On one hand is Calvino with the glare of cities both potential and surreal, on the other hand Perec, who plays at blowing up maps and their universes of sense, yet both touch on themes which, thanks to the elaboration and construction of the narrative space, lose their analytical coldness. Nevertheless, if there's tenderness, geographical tenderness, between the texts, there's also tension, the tension between singularity and the complexity of the modern metropolis, a tension not unlike that which Walter Benjamin describes in his unfinished Arcades Project. In comparing them, I will show the strong echo of tension inherent in modernity, as described by Benjamin, in which the city becomes an ambiguous space, somewhere between a room and a landscape. Regarding the experience of the flaneur, Benjamin writes: "Landscape--that, in fact, is what Paris becomes for the flaneur. Or, more precisely, the city splits for him into its dialectical poles. It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room." (5) Considering modernity, Benjamin develops a mode of thought according to which the vast open space of the landscape or the cityscape and the closed space of a room are confused, or rather, alter and alternate with each other; such an interchange takes place between the texts of Calvino and Perec. Italo Calvino and Le citta invisibili: Interdisciplinary Geography among Dialogical and Descriptive Illuminations The theme of travel and that of the map are one of the foci of Calvino's poetics. In the period of the drafting of Le citta invisibili, Calvino is interested in the map and travel: in "Com'era nuovo il mondo" (6) he speaks about the relationship between them as the tracing of a route, in fieri, and also as the opening of a landscape and a way of giving coordinates to a new one which has just begun to make itself known. In "Il viandante e la mappa" (7) Calvino writes that: "il primo bisogno di fissare sulla carta i luoghi e legato al viaggio: e il promemoria della successione di tappe, il tracciato di un percorso (426)," and adds that a map always presupposes the idea of an itinerary and of a narrative. …

Staging Memory and Trauma in French and Italian Holocaust Film

Abstract: Reading Memory in the French Documentary and the Italian Fiction Film The memory lapses of trauma are conjoined with the tendency compulsively to repeat, relive, be possessed by, or act out traumatic scenes of the past ... In this sense, what is denied or repressed in a lapse of memory does not disappear; it returns in a transformed, at times disfigured and disguised manner. (10) --Dominick LaCapra History and Memory after Auschwitz This essay is about the enactment of memory and trauma in !our films on the Holocaust, two French documentaries--Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1955) and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1984)--and two Italian fiction films--Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful (1997) and Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1973). A comparison between French and Italian Holocaust cinema is not an obvious one in that filmmakers from both countries have approached the subject in quite disparate fashions. In such films as Shoah, Night and Fog, The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophuls, 1969), Weapons of the Spirit (Pierre Sauvage, 1988) and Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (Marcel Ophuls, 1988), France is well-known for its documentary treatment of the Shoah, representing at times the banal or bureaucratic side of evil. (1) Italian directors, however, have produced various fiction films centered on the grey areas of survival. This is the case of Kapo (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1959), Seven Beauties (Lina Wertmuller, 1976), The Night Porter and The Damned (Luchino Visconti, 1969), in which survival is often connected with sexual deviance. (2) Despite their apparent differences, both genres deal profoundly with staging trauma and memory; that is, representing protagonists who relive the past event, thereby accentuating the impossible gap between narrative present and past. In History and Memory after Auschwitz Dominick LaCapra discusses "memory sites"--Pierre Nora's well known "lieux de memoire"--in terms of their connection to trauma. LaCapra contends that memory sites are usually also trauma sites, and the degree to which trauma affects the individual is marked by "the extent to which memory has not been effective in coming to terms with [trauma], notably through modes of mourning" (10). Mourning, however, came with difficulty, as post-war European society "appeared" to obtain a certain mask of normality. The economic booms all over Europe were of course one crucial factor in these delayed reactions to Holocaust experiences. Many survivors, it seemed, were not ready to enter into the trying course of remembering, reliving and commemorating their pasts. Memory came later, and, as argued by Henry Rousso in The Haunting Past: History, Memory and Justice in Contemporary France, we are now living in an "age of memory" as the relationship with the painful past has been repeatedly fore-grounded in survivor's accounts, fictional films and novels, historical works, and so on. The basic premise of this article is that, in these four films, remembering the Holocaust recalls the original trauma, as the wound is by no means healed. Trauma does not belong exclusively to the past, and these films make explicit how trauma perpetually re-represents itself in the present. Dori Laub in "Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening" discusses the incomplete nature of traumatic response. She argues that, as the event never came to completion, survivors perpetually live with truncated versions of their past, and for survivors, trauma "continues into the present and is current in every respect" (69). Traumatic response is also connected to how several characters or interviewees in these films assess their own survival in that many, both historical (Shoah) and fictional (Life is Beautiful and The Night Porter), have yet to come to terms with the machinations of their continued existence. Cathy Caruth points out a critical parallel between trauma and survival in the introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory. …

The Mirror of Modernity: Marinetti’s Early Criticism between Decadence and “Renaissance latine”

Abstract: While the name of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti is indissolubly tied with futurism, the movement which he founded in 1909 and of which he remained the undisputed leader, theorist and impresario until his death in 1944, his pre-futurist poetic production in French has also been the object of a certain amount of critical attention since the beginning of the renaissance of futurist studies in the late 1960s. If Gaetano Mariani's Il primo Marinetti, published in 1970, still remains the fundamental monograph on the subject, more recently several scholars, Brunella Eruli, Giovanni Lista, Cinzia Sartini Blum, Gunter Berghaus, to name only a few, have further articulated both the networks of connections and literary debts linking Marinetti to the "symbolist masters" later repudiated in 1911 in a famous manifesto, (1) and the elements of continuity, ideological as well as thematic, between this initial period of his poetic career and the later avant-gardist phase. On the contrary, the critical and essayistic production that accompanied Marinetti's first poetic exercises has received significantly less attention. In this essay, I am interested in the very beginning of Marinetti's critical and poetological reflection, and in particular in a series of reviews and essays published between 1898 and 1901 in which the artist, entering the debate on the cultural decadence or renaissance of the Latin nations, began to delineate his own theory of modernity. In his memoir La grande Milano tradizionale e futurista, Marinetti, usually an indefatigable mythographer of his own life and times, recalled with an uncharacteristic tone of self-deprecation the episode that led to his literary debut. Unlike the achievement, in 1898, of the first prize in the poetic competition in the Samedis Populaires organized by Gustave Kahn and Catulle Mendes, which Marinetti identified as the moment of international recognition and consecration of his talent, and which he was fond of recollecting with some choice embellishments, (2) the publication of his first poem is described as having come about almost by chance, on the advice of Emilio Gavirati, an acquaintance from the Circolo Filologico in Milan. Indeed, in Marinetti's account, Gavirati, "impiegato alla Cassa di Risparmio filosofo misogino" [clerk at the Cassa di Risparmio and mysoginist philosopher], appears to have played a fairly important role in introducing the young poet to the intellectual and social life of the city where he had come to reside upon his family's return to Italy from his native Egypt. In exchange for tales of Marinetti's "per nulla positive ma allettanti" [not at all positive but enticing] erotic adventures (Grande Milano 50), Gavirati for instance introduced him to the salon of Anna Kuliscioff, where he met some of the leading figures of Italian Socialism, including Filippo Turati and Claudio Treves. It was also Gavirati who, with an almost offhand remark partly in Milanese dialect, suggested to Marinetti: "Ti che te se anche un poet fraces te devet andar a truve in Via Garibaldi 83 Orland e Lebrun che hanno fondato questa piccola rivista" [you who are also a French poet should go to Via Garibaldi 83 and see Orland and Lebrun who founded this little magazine] (51). The "piccola rivista" was the Anthologie-Revue de France et d'Italie, where Marinetti finally published the sonnet "L'Echanson" [The Cup-Bearer] in the issue of March 1898. (3) The circumstances surrounding the foundation of the Anthologie-Revue, one of the many literary periodicals to emerge in Italy at the turn of the century, remain rather obscure. Little is known about its two French founders, Edward Sansot-Orland, who held the post of director, and Roger Le Brun. The Catalogue general de la Librairie Francaise reports their place and date of birth--Aignan (Gers), 1868 and Paris, 1877, respectively--but offers no further information. They are described much more vividly by Marinetti himself in La grande Milano tradizionale e futurista, although it is difficult to determine to what extent the scene of his first encounter with them is in fact a post facto romanticization, a kind of Milanese version of the Vie de Boheme: [C]onstato la poverta della casetta di Via Garibaldi 83 con la sensibilita di un artista parigino e per le scale su su al 7. …

Theorizing the Haitian Fragment and Fragmenting Caribbeanist Theory in Emile Ollivier's Passages

Abstract: In a critical domain that privileges and promotes hybridity, metissage, and creolization as favored models of contemporary identity, the Caribbean subject finds itself thrown center stage, paraded before the world as the ideal postmodern being. A brutal, hellish history of deracination, slavery, colonialism, and (for some) independence has apparently been recuperated and reinterpreted as the ideal context for the Caribbean subject's movement into fluid, non-originary, and relational identity. Indeed, without this violent history, such a movement would have been impossible, as the latter has been interpreted as the unintended yet endlessly auspicious product of the former (Bongie, Islands and Exiles 15). Much of this critical work has drawn on and been driven by edouard Glissant's theories; his highly persuasive, brilliantly-argued vision of the Caribbean as an open-ended, outward-looking, inherently relational time-space has chimed with the concerns and theoretical perspectives of critics on the "outside," tired of the perceived essentialisms and reductivism of humanist thought, and its related concept of the subject as unitary, autonomous, and "full." The recuperation and reinterpretation of one particular prevalent trope of Caribbean culture exemplifies this critical shift from humanist modernism to anti-humanist postmodernism. The trope of the fragment, the splintered, disconnected cultural and existential remnant has recurred throughout the relatively short history of Caribbean literature. For example, this sense of fragmentation, of the loss of a previous plenitude, structures and drives Aime Cesaire's poetry. From the opening lines of Cahier d'un retour au pays natal images of a negatively--experienced rupturing and fragmentation are used to characterize the Caribbean situation: At the end of the daybreak, the extreme, deceptive desolate eschar on the wound of the waters ... the flowers of blood that fade and scatter in the empty wind ... an aged silence bursting with tepid pustules ... this squalling throng so astonishingly detoured from its cry as this town has been from its movement, from its meaning" (1-2). Cesaire moreover draws a parallel between these cultural and existential ruptures and the physical fragmentation of Caribbean space in his view of the islands as "scars of the water ... evidence of wounds ... crumbs ... unformed" (42). Such a deeply-felt sense of fragmentation has now been widely reinterpreted as the raw material of hybrid identities, the divergent threads of culture and subjectivity that can be "braided" together by (or for) the Caribbean subject in a new dynamic of identity creation. Francoise Lionnet, for example, recuperates Caribbean fragmentation, and sees it as the source of a new energy for positive change, saying that: "The postcolonial subject ... becomes quite adept at ... using the fragments that constitute it in order to participate fully in a dynamic process of transformation" (5). This recuperation of cultural and identitary fragmentation fits neatly into the dominant contemporary model of postcolonial, postmodern Caribbean identity as a "free floating, carnivalesque version of plurality, which ... constitutes a kind of abundance" (Britton, "The (De)Construction of Subjectivity" 45). Such celebratory reinterpretations of Caribbean fragmentation may sit well with prevailing global theories of culture, and indeed promote the Caribbean to the very forefront of the world stage "as a metaphor for the human condition, characterized by unceasing change and creative discontinuity" (Dash, The Other America 6). (1) Not for nothing did James Clifford famously state that in the postmodern world "We are all Caribbeans now in our urban archipelagos" (6). These celebratory readings fall apart, however, when applied to the context of Haiti, the Caribbean's troubling, troubled, and often forgotten forefather. Contemporary Haitian narratives stand apart from those of the other islands, and indeed challenge much current Caribbeanist criticism, in that they often express more nuanced, less celebratory interpretations of Caribbean existence. …

The Open Secret: Hiding and Revealing Sexuality in the Roman De Moeurs (1880-1905)

Abstract: Beginning with the sole literary text that does figure at any length in the first volume of Foucault's history--Diderot's Les Bijoux indiscrets, which dates from 1748--Cryle examines some semiotic routines involved in that telling of secrets, and to understand more about scientia sexualis through its literary development. He tries to show that narratives of the time tended to gather the mysterious, the unknown, and the generally inscrutable in the same functional place, holding them close to a thematics of the sexual. And returns to eighteenth-century texts from time to time in order to mark this as a fundamental shift in the literary constitution of sexual knowledge.