The strength and valor of Italianness - early modern Italian literature, a reading list

In 2015, I am concentrating on Italian literature.  Unlike some other reading projects I have pursued here – Yiddish, Scottish, and Austrian, and to some arguable extent Portuguese and Scandinavian – there is a substantial and, why deny it, superior early modern literature available in English that I have already explored and do not plan to reread right now.

I decided to make a list of the Italian books I think of as the best, or most instructive, from the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, when Italian literature was the glory of Europe, the literature that writers in other languages imitated.  I have made a vague resolution to make more lists.  I love lists.

1.  Dante Alighieri, Inferno (c. 1320).  I have read this book several times in several translations, but the entire Divine Comedy only once.  Inferno is so rich, in characters, imagination, and ideas.

2.  Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere (complete by Petrarch’s death in 1374), a selection, not necessarily a long one.  Many of Europe’s greatest poets will spend the next three hundred years modifying Petrarch.  It is hard to imagine what English, French, or Spanish poetry would have been like in his absence.  Perhaps this is a bad thing, but it is what happened.

3.  Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (c. 1353 – 14th century dating is an aggravation).  My Musa and Bondanella translation has a page describing possible abridgments, but I say read it all.  A hundred little stories, plus that extraordinary prologue about the Black Plague.

4.  Ludivico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (1532 for the final version).  A crazy fantasy epic in eight-line stanzas, “a poem that refuses to begin and refuses to end” as Italo Calvino wrote*, but despite its length who would want less of it?

5.  Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (c. 1532).  A great piece of satire, the foundation of political science, and more.  The Norton Critical Edition put together by Robert M. Adams is the greatest critical edition I have ever come across.  Stated so baldly, that sounds like a silly thing about which to have an opinion.

6.  Niccolò Machiavelli, The Mandrake (1524).  A play, a comedy, not the sort of thing associated with Machiavelli now, but a little masterpiece.

7.  Gaspara Stampa, Poems (complete by 1554).  The greatest woman poet in Italian, perhaps; a Petrarchan; in her best poems as good as Petrarch.

8.  Michelangelo Buonnaroti, Poems (complete by 1564), a selection.  In a handful of poems, another rival of Petrarch (and Stampa); in bulk, rough and repetitive, although he does have the advantage of original subject matter, since who else could write a credible poem about painting the Sistine Chapel?  The ideal translation of Michelangelo’s poems would be an anthology by many different translators.

9.  Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters (1568), some reasonable selection of the best parts, which by chance or design would include the most famous artists.  I believe Penguin Classics publishes a good one.

10.  Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography (1558-63).  A crazy genius tells his crazy adventures.  Astounding, funny, ridiculous, irritating.  I’m not sure why this book is not more commonly encountered on book blogs.  I understand that for many readers, poetry is akin to poison, and half of this list is poetry.  That I get.  But Cellini’s book is so much fun.

It is by chance that this list has ten entries.  The next set of books I would list (Castiglione, Tasso, more Dante, etc.) are more – not more advanced – more work, or are helped by more context.  I have not read all that many more Italian books from the Renaissance than I am listing – another dozen – which makes this list absurd.  But that’s all right.

As usual, I plan to invite those interested to read along with me, but, honestly anyone who has not read the above should read the above, which I am not planning to read, and not, with a couple of exceptions, what I do plan to read, lists of which are forthcoming.

The post’s title is from “To Angelo Mai on His Finding the Manuscript of Cicero’s De re publica,” the third poem of Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti, lines 24 and 25 of Jonathan Galassi’s 2010 translation.  Leopardi is one of the exceptions.

*  “The Structure of Orlando Furioso” in The Uses of Literature (1980), tr. Patrick Creagh, p. 162.

A semi-barbarian in a civilized community - Thomas Love Peacock mocks what he loves

Another bad to terrible idea* from Wuthering Expectations:  a week or so writing about Thomas Love Peacock, friend of Percy Shelley, author of satirical novels, poems, and whatsits.  Not a forgotten author – I have evidence to the contrary – but one who is sliding in that direction.  I read three of his novels recently, Nightmare Abbey (1818), Crotchet Castle (1831), and Gryll Grange (1860) and enjoyed them all quite a lot, but I have some doubts about the, what shall I call it, universality of their appeal.

Fortunately, I can point to a brief exception, a well-prepared, clove-encrusted taste of Peacock, his 1829 poem “The War Song of Dinas Vawr”:

The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter.
We made an expedition;
We met a host, and quelled it;
We forced a strong position,
And killed the men who held it.

“The War Song” continues for four more stanzas; Peacock wisely wrote short.  In some sense, the poem is topically satirical, parodying the crude but sanitized blood-thirstiness of the flood of fake Border ballads and “historical” poems inspired by the success of Walter Scott and Thomas Moore and so on.  Peacock’s satire has outlived the poems it mocks, and I hope the reason is clear enough.  Contemporary writers and readers have switched to prose, but we have plenty of equivalents.

Anna Saikin, a PhD student specializing in British Romanticism, has kindly posted her Comprehensive Exam reading list.  Among a long list of books and I have read and books I hope I never read, Peacock is present, not under Fiction or Poetry, but rather as the author of “The Four Ages of Poetry” (1820), another sly piece of mockery, this time hitting the Romantic poets right where they live, which is not in the Golden or Silver or even the Bronze Age of poetry, but in the Age of Brass, a time of cheap knockoffs, tinny sentiments, and muddled thinking:

A poet in our time is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community.  He lives in the days that are past.  His ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions.  The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward.

Peacock, I should point out, loved Romantic poetry and was a Romantic poet himself.  Mockery can be an expression of love.

Why, I wonder, is Nightmare Abbey not on Anna’s list?  It is a short little thing, just ninety pages.  Shelley, Byron, and Coleridge are actually characters in the novel, not even thinly disguised.  It features Shelley communing with owls and drinking Madeira from a human skull.  My doubt about much of Peacock’s work is that its virtues might be too obscure for a reader not immersed in Peacock’s time.  For the reader who is immersed, the reader who has prowled around that British Romanticism reading list, Peacock is a relief, and a reward.

The entirety of “The War Song of Dinas Vawr” and “The Four Ages of Poetry,” as well as a fine little introduction to Peacock can be found here (PDF).  That’s Peacock’s section of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume 2; I will bet you eight dollars that the intro is written by the great Robert M. Adams.

*  In the sense that obscure writer = skimmed and skipped posts.  Maybe I am wrong about that.

An appreciation of Robert M. Adams - an April Fools' Day post (I am the fool)

I have never written an April Fools’ Day sort of blog post, and do not plan to start now.   Wuthering Expectations is an intrinsically foolish pursuit.  Plus, I don’t have any ideas.  On an entirely unrelated note, I cannot wait to get my hands on Duty, Esther, Duty: Or, Esther Summerson, Vampire Killer.  The new Ian Rankin novel also sounds like keen fun.

Instead, I will write more Robert M. Adams, the critic who wrote the wonderful nonsense about Milton that I wrote about yesterday.  I know nothing about Adams, nothing not on this Norton page.  I first encountered him, without knowing it, in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume 1, fifth edition, and have since read five or six of the Norton Critical Editions which he edited – The Prince, The Egoist, Candide, The Red and the Black (he titles it Red and Black), and Ben Jonson’s Plays and Masques.*   Candide and The Prince are in his own translations.  The Prince, in particular, holds the peculiar distinction of Greatest Critical Edition I have ever read.

How strange, to pay so much attention to the editor of the edition I am reading.  But how strange, also, to encounter a critic, a scholar, adept at the reading and study of Milton, Voltaire, Ben Jonson, Machiavelli, etc.  Thus, my interest – I, too, want to be a person who reads Milton, Meredith, and Machiavelli well, who can hop from era to era and country to country, who can write clearly, without reverence, without jargon.**  Adams seems to be something of a fellow Appreciationist. 

The beginning of “On the Bulk of Ben”:

He was a heavy man.  Everyone felt it, and he said so himself, heavily.  What other lover, in the course of recommending himself to his mistress, ever took occasion to remind her of his mountain belly and rocky face?  Earth and the earthy are always close at hand in Jonson’s work…  The impulses of the gut and groin, if generally subject to some limit of correction, are given voice throughout his work to a degree unparalleled. (482)

From “Getting the Point,” on Candide:

Our hero is, of course, indestructible.  Like one of those toy soldiers with a lead weight in his round foot, he pops upright no matter how many times he is knocked down. (177, 2nd edition)

A bit on The Egoist:

The characteristic action of Meredith’s style is a sting – a small, unobtrusive puncture is made, a bit of acid is silently injected – and only after a while does a large, itchy red patch appear to remind us of something actively at work which our complacencies don’t gladly tolerate. (557)

To aspire to the insights and quality of Adams’ writing, without his training, concentration, languages, or intelligence, is a sufficiently foolish idea, one that should keep me busy for a while.

* The second edition of Jonson’s plays, not edited by Adams, has been, why be polite, ruined by faddish nonsense.

** Not that obscurity, reverence, and jargon don’t have their place.

It's a pack of nonsense - misreading with heart and energy

“Creative misreading” is a polite term for what I was trying to do with The Immoralist yesterday.  I succeeded at misreading, and will defer to others regarding the creativity.  I was following a train of references that are in the novel, right there on the page, but that seem to lead somewhere that fits strangely with the rest of the book.  With its surface, at least.  I do not really believe that The Immoralist is a spy novel.  Yet Gide scattered these scraps throughout his own book.  He meant something by it.

My favorite act of creative misreading, an all-time great, is Maurice Morgann’s An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777), in which Morgann brilliantly defends Falstaff, the greatest coward in literature, from the charge of cowardice.  He uses nothing but the evidence of Shakespeare’s own words, and his own crackpot ingenuity, to demonstrate Falstaff’s great bravery.   Samuel Johnson laughingly suggested that “as he has proved Falstaff to be no coward, he may prove Iago to be a very good character” (Boswell, Life of Johnson, somewhere in 1783).  Yes, that’s the spirit, exactly!

I unfortunately do not have a copy of Morgann’s book, so I will advance to my second favorite pack of nonsense, “A Little Look into Chaos” (1975) by Robert M. Adams, which I know from the Norton Critical Edition of Paradise Lost (2^nd edition).   Milton’s poem shifts between Heaven, Hell, and Earth, but Adams investigates the fourth location, Chaos, which is both between and outside of the realm of devils, angels, and men.

In Book II, Satan pays a visit to the ruler, or anti-ruler, of Chaos, the Anarch and his court.  The Anarch complains that the recently created Earth, and Hell, and, weirdest of all, even Heaven have been created from, taken from, his domain.  Adams discovers a second war concealed under the war between Heaven and Hell, a battle between God and Chaos.  Satan appears to be an ally of God in this conflict, although he might not realize it.  Or Chaos is cleverly using Satan as his own weapon.  Or, or, or - keep 'em coming.

Veterans of Dungeons & Dragons will understand all of this immediately; more orthodox readers may invoke the pack of nonsense in my title.  That line is from the essay (p. 629); Adams is also one of the orthodox readers:

“I’ve overstated the case for his [Chaos’s] presence, and traced out the implications of his logic as vigorously as I could – too vigorously for the good of the poem.  We must suppress Chaos a little bit, mute him, sit (maybe) on his head, so that the poem as a whole may maintain its intended balance.” (630)

But Adams, a true scholar, is not simply playing with ideas.  Every reference to Chaos is there in the text.  The interpreter of Milton needs to find his own way through the material, but not brush it aside as inconsequential simply because its fit with received ideas of the meaning of the poem is askew.

Adams begins his article with a uniquely modest preface: his paper is “poor, sparse, speculative”; he would like to “inscribe a spectacular and gigantic question mark” over it “[b]ut as we don’t know what a question can do till we put some heart and energy into asking it, I’ve chosen to take my chances.” (617)

Now, that right there could be the motto of Wuthering Expectations (and I take the giant question mark as given).  I recommend it to other amateur critics.  We have less to lose than the professionals.  Read well, but also misread well, with heart and energy.