All is death on this side - Alfieri's Saul - a marmoreal atmosphere of tragic gloom

The plays of Vittorio Alfieri have not been brought into English effectively.  I say this on the basis of reading one of them – Saul (1784) – twice, meaning I do not know what I am talking about.  Some supporting quotations from Ford Madox Ford, who would have read Alfieri in Italian:

His plays can hardly be considered literature at all.  (655)

… there is hardly a word of poetry in the whole tragedy.

In their baldness – and they are as bald as the plays of Ibsen at their most commonplace – they achieve a sort of marmoreal atmosphere of tragic gloom.  The reader need hardly give time to reading them, but he should certainly not miss any opportunity to see them played, for he will get from them something of the sensation produced by the great Greeks, with an added agitation caused by the lightning flashes of the exclamations.  (all from p. 656, all from The March of Literature)

Yet Ford also quotes an Italian critic who ranks Alfieri with Aeschylus:  “Tragedy, born sublime, terrible, vigorous, heroic.”

To my knowledge there is really just one English translation of Alfieri, the 1876 E. A. Bowring revision of the 1815 Charles Lloyd of Alfieri’s tragedies.  I have just read the revised one.  I doubt they are so different.  Maybe they are.  Lloyd moved Alfieri into a choppy, energetic blank verse that makes him sound like simpler, watery Shakespeare.

For example, see this speech near the end of Saul, where the king is being tormented by ghosts of the prophet Samuel and by another priest he has ordered killed:

SAUL: Incensed, tremendous shade, ah, go thy way!
Leave, leave me ! . . . See: before thy feet I kneel . . .
Where can I fly ? . . . — where can I hide myself?
O fierce, vindictive spectre, be appeased . . .
But to my supplications it is deaf;
And does it spurn me ? . . . Burst asunder, earth,
Swallow me up alive . . .   (Act V, Sc 3, all ellipses in original)

This speech is witnessed by his grieving daughter (and David’s wife) Micah, making Saul resemble King Lear even more, although the Cassandra-like who Saul has rejected figure is David.

The Biblical subject helps, but few English readers will not hear King Lear.  Ford Ford does just what I did – I am ripping him off – with a scene from Alfieri’s Agamemnon that sounds like a rejected speech of Lady Macbeth.

Going by his Memoirs, Alfieri was not imitating Shakespeare at all, but rather modeled himself after Seneca (also a model for Shakespeare)  and Latin translation of Classical Greek tragedies.  He also had a negative model: he rejected the static drama of Racine and Corneille, with their gigantic protagonists declaiming long, intense monologues. My own experience with Saul in translation, though, is that it is most effective when poor, mad King Saul, doomed by his resentment of David and his sense that he has been abandoned by God, takes the stage alone and reveals his fears and humanity:

SAUL: But no; on this side a prodigious stream
Of blood restrains my steps. Atrocious sight!
On both its shores in mountains are up-piled
Great heaps of recent corpses: all is death
On this side: thitherward I then will fly . . .   (same scene, still seeing visions)

Alfieri’s psychology and imagery can rise to a high point in these “exclamations” whatever trouble the English might have.

The ideal translation would involve Percy Shelley not dying, losing his energy for original poems, and turning his attention to translating Italian literature.  His version of Alfieri would have been something to read.

I cannot say how, or why, I was impelled to write these scenes in Italian - Vittorio Alfieri's Memoirs

Now, 18th century Italian tragedy, which I know by one name, Vittorio Alfieri, and by one play, Saul (1782), although he wrote several dozen.  Alfieri was a Count and a wild man, which makes his Memoirs (1806) quite a lot of fun.  He was the most curious mix of his own time and the one to come, an Enlightenment Romantic, systematically driven by passion, an aristocrat but an enemy of all tyrants, past and present, including the revolutionary tyrants who overthrew the tyrannical king and the tyrannical general who overthrew them in turn. 

Alfieri’s book is a portrait of an artist, with the mystery, the driving question, being how a wealthy, lazy, uneducated wastrel ever became a writer.  He learns nothing at boarding school in Turin.  He is not brought up to any sort of duty.  The “eight years of my adolescence comprise a period of sickness, idleness, and ignorance”  (60).  Alfieri in fact advises “my readers not to dwell on it too long, or even to skip it,” which is a funny thing to say at the end of a section, after I have already read it.  He then travels Europe, seeing everything but absorbing nothing, understanding nothing.

So what does happen?  This is the Romantic part.  He is subject to the urge to create:

…  I could behold the sea and sky without interruption.  In the midst of these immensities illumined into still greater beauty by the rays of the sun setting below the waves, I spent delicious hours of fanciful dreaming.  I would have written poetry there had I any knowledge of verse, or even of prose, or indeed of any language whatever.  (80)

First he becomes a reader – Voltaire, Plutarch, Montaigne (I’ll note that he did read Goldoni as a youth; everyone read Goldoni).  Second, he finds a Muse.  This is an odd part of the story, since the woman with whom he falls in love and spends most of his life is a celebrity, the Countess of Albany, the young wife of the no longer Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, angrily drinking his way through his life in exile.  The Chevalier Charles Edward Stuart, forty years younger, is a character in Waverley, which I have been reading.  It was odd to come across him here.

Third – now the Enlightenment side of Alfieri’s character – he works like the devil, working on his language, his style, systematically writing plays twelve at a time.  Why he writes in Italian rather than the more familiar French seems to be a mystery even to him:

When I now reflect on this attempt, it appears to me so much the more extraordinary as for five or six years I had not only never written a single line of Italian, but never even opened an Italian book of any kind except very rarely, and that at long intervals.  Thus, I cannot say how, or why, I was impelled to write these scenes in Italian, and in verse.  (142-3)

Later he calls French (and English) a “tyrant jargon” that sounds like “a detestable bagpipe” compared to the “fine toned harp” of Italian (255).  I guess he just thought Italian was more beautiful, whatever efforts it cost him to learn it as an adult.

Inspiration being what it is, Alfieri would go long stretches without writing anything, even thinking he had ended his career, turning his energy instead to horses or escaping the French revolutionaries or in one strange scene to the design of an elaborate jeweled collar (309), a sort of poet’s crown for himself.  But then out of nowhere, again and again, he needs to write, “tragi-melo-dramas” (278) or sonnets or translations or this memoir, even though “in degenerate Italy it is easier to gain public attention by one’s fine horses than one’s dramatic works” (245).

Page numbers are from the 1961 Oxford University Press edition of the anonymous 1810 translation.

one man unworthy of his cowardly age - Alfieri, Goldoni, and Foscolo - 700 words and I can only cover three writers

What is Italian literature?  I ignored the question; it is an important one for this literature.  These judgments are always retrospective: Italian literature is what people interested in the subject treat as Italian literature.  But I am not only working with a conventional contemporary idea, but a central question going back to Dante, at the least.  What is the Italian language?  What is Italy?

Yesterday I glanced at some of the highlights of almost three hundred years of arguing about these questions, the extraordinary run from Dante Alighieri to the visionary poet Tommaso Campanella, who gets us into the 17th century.  Something happens to the literature then; the life sputters out of it.  My glib explanation is the Counter-Reformation.  But around 1609, Claudio Monteverdi perfected and popularized the form of musical theater we for some reason call opera, and if anything the cultural prestige of Italian music only increased.  There was no obvious lack of, to use a dubious metaphor, cultural energy in northern Italian kingdoms and cities.

I don’t know what happened to Italian literature.  Spanish literature caught the same flu about fifty years later and took two hundred years to recover.

My next Italian landmark is the Venetian comic playwright Carlo Goldoni in the mid-18th century, author of The Servant of Two Masters (1743) and dozens of other comedies.  I read a couple over the weekend, including the recent adaptation by Richard Bean, One Man, Two Guvnors (2011) that was such a big hit in London.  That is one funny play.  I’ll write about these soon.

Then there is the proto-Romantic Count Vittorio Alfieri, founder of Italian tragedy, possibly the only Italian tragedian of consequence.  He is a giant in Italian but not in English, and I can guess why – first, English barely has room for its own tragedies, and second, Alfieri’s almost singular dramatic theme was the overthrow of tyrants, which may have more juice in Italy and France than in England or the United States.

I’ve read his best known  play, Saul (1782), about the overthrow of a tyrant, and am now reading his posthumous (1806) Autobiography, about the triumph of a tyrant.  I have gotten to some good stuff, but not to the good stuff, e.g.:

… claiming to be a democrat because he never struck his servants with anything but his open hand, yet stretching out his valet with a bronze candlestick because the valet pulled his hair slightly while combing it…  and then sleeping – or claiming to sleep – with his bedroom door always open so that the valet might come in and, in revenge, murder him in his sleep.  (Ford Madox Ford on p. 655 of The March of Literature, first ellipses mine, second his)

A big personality.  It might make similar sense to read a couple more autobiographies contemporary with Alfieri, the Memoirs of Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte or more temptingly the massive Story of My Life of Giacomo Casanova, but I doubt that will happen.

Finally, the 19th century.  I plan to revisit to major figures from Italian Romanticism.  One is Ugo Foscolo, a genuine revolutionary and  fine poet although with a lyrical gift that has perhaps defeated his translators.  I remember many years ago running across a website with some lovely versions of Foscolo’s Graces (1803-1822) but I cannot find it now.  Foscolo also wrote The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1802), a novella that is a conceptual politicized Italianization of The Sorrows of Young Werther.  I hope to revisit it and see if it is as clever as I remember.  Or impassioned, or propagandistic, or whatever it is.

And then there is Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi.  The title quotation is again from Leopardi, from the same poem I used yesterday (p. 39), and is a description of Alfieri.

                                           He was the first to go
down into the ring alone, and no one followed,
for idleness and brutal silence now own us most of all.

The idea that Leopardi can be described as idle or silent is hilarious.  But look how long I have gone on.  I will start with Leopardi tomorrow.  I gotta pick up the pace.  At this rate – well, pretty soon I’ll get to books I haven’t read.  My ignorance should constrain the babble.