Sing of the needs / Of this our century; sing our ripe hope. - questions, scraps, oddities, and more books - an Italian hodgepodge

The title is ironically misappropriated from Leopardi’s Canto XXXII, “Palinode to the Marchese Gino Capponi,” in the J. G. Nichols version.  This final post on Italian literature will be un guazzabuglio.  More questions than answers.  I plan to, as the year goes on, drop in random Italian words that I have looked up on the internet, to add sapore and give l'impressione that I know some Italian, which I do not.

Would it be worthwhile to do something with opera?  Rossini, Verdi, Puccini, composers for the popular musical theater, were better known and are arguably greater artists than any of the writers I will be reading.  Yet their librettists are obscurities, even the one whose name I know, Arrigo Boito, author of librettos for several of Verdi’s late works.  If there a literary approach to the operas, which are, among other things, plays?  Do I know what I am doing?  Is it worth the effort?

A couple of writers are puzzling to me, too.  Gabriele D’Annunzio was for a time a giant, rich and famous and wild, author of a huge number of books in numerous styles and forms.  He was, at least in his later life, a fascist loon.  He and his followers, for example, seized a Croatian city in 1919 in order to do who knows what – the Italian Regency of Carnaro, with D’Annunzio as Il Duce.  “The charter designated ‘music’ to be one of the fundamental principles of the Fiume State,” (from previous link).  This sort of thing damages a writer’s reputation, it turns out, but the bad result for me is not that I have anything against reading the works of crazy people with bad ideas – oh no, quite the contrary – but rather that I have no idea which books are thought to be good (and are available in English, and are available to me).

Another fascist, the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, presents a similar problem, but in his case I suspect a little more that his writings have become more interesting as intellectual history than as art.  Ford Madox Ford says I should read King Bombance and Mafarka the Futurist, which have better titles than D’Annunzio novels like The Flame of Life and The Triumph of Death.

Does anybody remember me mentioning the series of adventure novels about a Malaysian pirate by Emilio Salgari, “without whom there would be no Italian, French, Spanish, or Latin American Literature” says Carlos Fuentes.  An unlikely claim, but how could I not be curious?

A friendly reader has emailed to suggest I try Edmondo De Amici’s Cuore (1886), a hugely popular novel about a schoolboy; Ford Ford likes it, too.  Another De Amici novella available in English is titled Love and Gymnastics (1892).  Its library catalog classifications are “Women Gymnasts – Fiction” and “Love Stories,” so the title might be accurate.  This does not sound promising, but it has a foreword by Italo Calvino!

Also recommended by this thoughtful reader: more Sicilian fiction, including The Viceroys (1894) by Federico De Roberto, a Sicilian epic, and stories by Maria Messina, an adept of Giovanni Verga who specialized in tales about Sicilian women.  Verga, De Roberto, Messina, and then Giuseppe Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958), which is set during the same period – that could be an interesting chain of books.  Cuore and The Viceroys seem to follow that gigantic Nievo novel.  There are lots of stories to tell with books.

There is no way I will read all of this, everything I have mentioned over the past few days, not this year and not ever, but I have a lot to play with.  Please feel free to give me more, more titles and writers and paths.  The ideal solution is that someone else reads Emilio Salgari and King Bombance and so on and writes them up for me.  Thanks in advance.

Finally, I have been clear enough, I hope, about what I am not reading, an important limit because as usual I want to invite you to join me on a book if something seems to fit into whatever path you are following, if you just moments ago were thinking “I have been meaning to read Love and Gymnastics!”  Let me know; we will find a time; it will all work out somehow.