The Barbarian Odes - Carducci on the Appian Way - Drive from here the new men and their trivial works

Giosuè Carducci’s best book is Odi barbare (1877+), The Barbarian Odes, inspired in part by his first visit to the city of Rome and its ruins at age 42, several years after Italian unification.

It is his best title, at least.  A rich title. 

The ruined tombs stand in the drab winter scene, clad still with their ivy
and laurel, along the Appian Way.

Shining white clouds scud across the pale blue sky, which gleams
still with the rain when the sun catches it.

Egle stands there, and gazes up at that clear promise of Spring.
watching clouds and sun.

She watches; and the clouds above the ancient tombs reflect more the light
of her pure brow than of the sun itself.  (“Egle,” 1889)

“Egle” is a naiad, and the embodiment of spring, and also a young woman who is acting as Carducci’s muse – I said the ruins were part of Carducci’s inspiration.

Put simply, the heritage of Rome (ancient Rome) is the heritage of Italy, but are we not also the barbarians?  Sometimes the ruins are just piles of stone.  Perhaps they have no significance at all.

As he aged, Carducci’s hatred of the Catholic Church eased.  Still a champion of reason and enemy of superstition, he began to  see it more as an imperfect carrier of culture, a vessel that preserved some part of Roman culture for his own time, part of the path from ancient Rome to Dante and Petrarch and then on to himself, the Classicist.

Febris [a minor Roman divinity], hear me.  Drive from here the new men
and their trivial works: they outrage
my religious sense: the goddess
Rome sleeps here.  (“By the Baths of Caracalla”)

The younger Carducci would not have admitted to any kind of religious sense.  It is strange to see Carducci imagine the death of the sun, previously his symbol of Reason, observed by

a single
woman and man,

who palely standing in the middle of flattened mountains
and dead forests, will numbly watch you,
O Sun, as you set for the last time over one
interminable icefield.  (“On Monte Mario” – this poem begins with a view of Rome)

Or to see Carducci treat the railroad, his Satanic symbol of progress, more skeptically as it carries away his muse (“At the Station, One Autumn Morning”).

Rome even reconciles Carducci with Romanticism, most movingly in “By the Funeral Urn of Percy Bysshe Shelley,” when, after  a tedious invocation of too many relevant mythic figures ranging from Homer to Wagner,  the poet collapses back into the scene in front of him, into Rome, into nature or some simulacrum of it:

O heart of hearts, the sun, our divine father, enwraps
that poor silent heart of yours [Shelley’s] in the radiance of his love.

The pine-trees coolly tremble in the broad-blowing winds of Rome:
Where are you now, O poet of the free world?

Where are you?  Do you hear me?  With welling tears I gaze
beyond the Aurelian walls, towards the mournful plain.

I do not know how much of the narrative I have built on top of Carducci’s poems is an artifact of the selection, translation and notes of David Higgins, but I will work with the text I have.  There is a translation of The Barbarian Odes, complete, from 1950 that I read several years ago along with the Higgins Selected Verse.  That book is one of the two worst books of translated poetry I have ever read.  The English poems were quite bad.  But in some thin, weak sense, I have read the entire book.

Giosuè Carducci hated the moon yet won the Nobel Prize

Giosuè Carducci may not be the best Italian poet of the 19th century – he might be the fourth best – Leopardi, Foscolo, Belli, Carducci; how does that sound – as if I have read any others, as if I have any idea – but my point is that he is the one who lived at the right time and barely long enough to be awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906.

There are a number of English translations of Carducci from around that time, but there has only been one in the last 65 years, the 1994 Selected Verse of David H. Higgins.  I have read it a couple of times.  It is pretty good: functional, informative, and at times even poetic.  Sometimes functional is enough:

Un bello e orrible                            Both beautiful and awful
Mostro si sferra,                              a monster is unleashed,
Corre gli oceani,                              it scours the oceans,
Corre la terra:                                   it scours the land:

Corusco e fumido                           Glittering and belching smoke
Come i vulcani,                                like a volcano,
I monti supera,                                it conquers the hills,
Divora i piani                                    it devours the plains.

We are approaching the end of “A Satana / To Satan” (1865).  Those punchy little Italian lines fly along like a steam train, which is what the “it” is.  The train is also Satan, which here is meant as a compliment.  Satan is reason, anti-clericalism, technology, and progress, everything that will defeat superstition and drag poor, backwards Italy into the 19th century.  Carducci’s is the least Satanic Satanism I have ever encountered, but still, he was thirty years old making what we now might call a punk gesture with his toast to Satan.

That Carducci was a classicist who believed in progress may give a hint as to why he died off in English once the Modernists arrived.  Even in Italian, he seems to have become a figure like Longfellow, Tennyson, or Hugo, someone for later advanced poets to reject and fight.  In a poem from the 1887 Rime nuove Carducci is so anti-Romantic that he criticizes the moon:

Ma tu, luna, abellir goli co ‘l raggio
Le ruine ed i lutti;
Maturar nel fantastico viaggio
Non sai né fior né frutti.

But they delight, O moon, is adorning ruins
and tombs with thy rays;
yet in thy fabled voyage thou art helpless
to ripen either flower or fruit.
…
Then thou fallest upon graveyards where vaingloriously
thou rekindlest
thy tired light, competing in the cold glow
with shinbones and skulls.

I hate thy idiotic, rounded face,
thy starched white petticoats,
thou lewd, prudish, impotent,
hevaenly hypocrite.   (“Classicism and Romanticism”)

Carducci favors the useful sun.  The poet is a craftsman, like a blacksmith.  What, though, is this if not a great Romantic gesture?

But for himself the poor craftsman
fashions a golden shaft,
and hurls it towards the sun:
he watches as it flashes upwards;
he watches and rejoices;
nothing more is his desire.  (“Congedo / Envoi” from Rime nuove)

As Carducci ages, he deepens, or so the selection fooled me into thinking.  The punk mellows.  He tempers his rejection of the Catholic Church, withdraws a bit from immediate political concerns, discovers nature, and discovers Rome, which is what I want to look at tomorrow.

Now every heart is glad, and far and wide / Rises once more the rumour / of work as it once did - when Italian literature acquired an Italy

I have switched to the J. G. Nichols translation of Leopardi.  The title is from Canto XXIV, “The Calm after the Storm.”  I have finally gotten to the point where there is a united Italy.  And Italian literature expands.

Giovanni Verga – I want to revisit and read more of his stories of hard times in Sicily, like those in Little Novels of Sicily (1883), and I also want to try at least one of his novels, either The House by the Medlar Tree (1881) or Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889) or both.

Luigi Pirandello was also from Sicily.  The major plays for which he is best known are from the 1920s and 1930s, too late for me – as  usual I want to choke off my reading somewhere around World War I – but The Late Mattia Pascal, a novel, is early, from 1904.  Somebody will have to tell me what else is especially good.  I like the sound of Shoot: The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator (1915).  Pirandello is the first Nobelist I will mention in this post.

Grazia Deledda (she’s the second) is Sardinian.  I would likely enjoy her novels just for their unusual setting, but I assume they have more to offer than that.  After the Divorce (1902) and Elias Portulu (1903) are in my local library, which is encouraging.  Deledda is another reason my attention had turned to Italy.

Matilde Serao is associated with Rome and Naples – I’m back on the boot – where she was a journalist and novelist.  The fairly recent short story collection Unmarried Women looks most promising to me, but there are a large number of novels in English published a hundred years ago.  Ford Madox Ford, whose taste is eccentric but who seems to have read everything, recommends Conquest of Rome, Desire of Life, and In the Country of Jesus (see The March of Literature. p. 859).  Unlikely, but life is full of surprises.

I think of Italo Svevo as a 20th century writer because of Zeno’s Conscience (1923), but his first two novels, A Life (1892) and As a Man Grows Older (1898), are much earlier.  I have read the latter but remember nothing more than that I thought it was pretty good.  I would appreciate advice on the former.  Svevo at this point was not actually in Italy, since Trieste was part of Austria.  Another marginal region raising its voice.

Back to Tuscany, the old center of Italy, to remind anyone interested of the Pinocchio (1883) readalong at Simpler Pastimes scheduled for later this month.  Just 200 pages, including illustrations, written for tiny little children.  So easy to join in.

The poets are more of a problem.  20th century Italian poetry strikes me as very strong – Italian fiction, too – but the period before the war is either weaker or poorly represented in English.

The great figure is Giosuè Carducci (Nobel #3), but even in Italian he seems to have lost some of his status, as if squeezed between the great 20th century poets and Leopardi.  The 1994 Selected Poems shows off Carducci well.  It includes his long ode Hymn to Satan (1865), which is not what the title suggests.  One of Carducci’s major collections, The Barbarian Odes (1877-89), is also available in English, but it is one of the worst translations I have ever come across.

A number of poets began publishing during or just after the war.  I hope to read Dino Campana, who wrote just one wild visionary book, Orphic Songs (1914), then, sadly, spent the rest of his life in mental hospitals.  I have my eye on Umberto Saba, too.  Move the cutoff just a bit later and lots of interesting writers pop up.

Look how efficient I was today.  Tomorrow I will end with the hard cases.  If you have advice on Gabrielle D’Annunzio or Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, let’s save it for a day – I do want it.  Then I will browse through some books I won’t read and take a glance at the 20th century.

Five days for all of this.  In my defense, it is an exciting literature.  Even in the 19th century, exciting.