Requiems & Nightmares: Selected Short Fiction of Guido Gozzano

                                                    Translated by Brendan & Anna Connell

Guido Gozzano, was born in Turin in 1883, his father was a successful engineer and his mother was the daughter of Massimo Mautino, a Senator, patriot and supporter of Giuseppe Mazzini and Massimo D'Azeglio. Guido spent his life in Turin and in Agliè (in the Canavese area), where his family owned several buildings and a large estate: Villa Il Meleto. As a young man he read widely from Emile Zola to St Catherine of Siena, knew St Francis 0f Assisi’s Canticle of the sun by heart and also was well read in the works of Petrarch, Leopardi, da Vinci, Wilde & Goethe. As a young writer of poetry he started out heavily influenced by the writing of Gabriele D'Annunzio, publishing poetry in the Il venerdi della Contessa (The Fridays of the Contessa) in this style. Whilst  studying law at Turin university, he became interested in the literature courses run by Arturo Graf, a professor, poet and short story writer. Graf, an exponent of rather dark, fantastic themes in literature (Il Diavolo, Trans: The Story of the Devil) whose writing style was the direct opposite of D’Annunzio’s, where D’Annunzio was full of bombast, Graf’s was simple. Graf would exhibit a major influence on Gozzano, by directing him “back to the sources" and to a thorough study of the poetry of Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca, which helped refine his poetic sensibility, although his work would still to be flavoured by D’Annunzio, creating a strange hybrid of the exotic & mundane. He, together with a group of likeminded students, would form the The Crepuscolari (the poets of the Twilight) * whose work was a reaction against the content-poetry and rhetorical style of (Nobel Prize winning poet) Giosue Carducci and Gabriele D'Annunzio, preferring to write in a more direct unadorned style.

Gozzano swapped law for literature, associating with many writers/intellectuals of his day, reading the symbolist French poetry and studying the writings of Schopenhauer & Nietzsche, in 1907 his poetry collection La via del rifugio (Road to Shelter) was published and sold out in three months. At this time his health took a turn for the worse, a long time sufferer of tuberculosis this now reached a point where he was forced to travel to the mountains and seaside, having to wear an inhaler mask day and night. This, with his mother suffering a stroke, curtailed plans he had to to travel to America, Japan & Tierra del Fuego, although he did travel to India in 1912 with a fellow sufferer in the hope of better health (on return there was no improvement). He died in Turin (1916)  at the age of thirty two, having published two of collections of poetry - La via del rifugio and I colloqui  ("Conversations") which quickly became renown for their quietly perfect evocations of nature, melancholy, tenderness and nostalgia and on which his reputation in Italy is built.

Although during his lifetime he also wrote articles and short stories for several newspapers, the only book of  prose published was Il tre talismani (The three talismans), a volume of children's fables, all his other work remained scattered in various places until they began to be collected and published posthumously. This has led to Guido Gozzano being known more for his poetry than his fiction in his homeland and outside Italy even that isn’t as well known as it should be.

Requiems & Nightmares, is a collection of his short stories that whilst showing the influence of writers such as Poe, Maupassant and Wilde, ably demonstrate why he was considered the finest representative of the Crepuscolari, as both a poet and a now hopefully as a short story writer. Tales such as The soul of the Instrument, a fabulous and haunting fairy tale described by the translators as “a Symbolist fairy tale after the manner of Lorrain and Wilde” or A Romantic Story, this melancholic tale has a charm that will win you over and then break your heart with its tragic beauty. Then there’s A Spiteful Day, which is the tale of an individual whose day is ruined by an insignificant event & now feels the need to spite others, this was a short, sharp and amusing tale of melancholia.

I recently exchanged comments with a fellow blogger concerning Poets who also write fiction, she was of the opinion that poets should stick to their art and not write fiction, Guido Gozzano’s tales are a perfect example of why I don’t personally follow that belief. His direct, deceptively simple prose style perfectly evoke the tragic, the melancholic. They have that absurdist sense of the tragic and encapsulate Baudelaire’s ideal

“Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness.” *

Requiems & Nightmares: Selected Short Fiction of Guido Gozzano, was translated by Brendan and Anna Connell, who have an obvious love of this writers work & want to see it acknowledged as “amongst the best in the Italian language” hence their reasoning to raise the profile of a writer relatively unknown outside his homeland and whose short stories deserve as much recognition as his poetry. Hopefully with this book now out, published by Hieroglyphic Press, this situation will change raising all Gozzano’s writings to a greater world wide appreciation.

Contents

Introduction

The Real Face
A Spiteful Day
The Altar of the Past
The Handsome Hound

Pamela Films
The Benefits of Zarathustra
Alcina
A Romantic Story
The Soul of the Instrument
La Bela Madamin
A Dream

* Dedication of Le Spleen de Paris

*crepuscolari torinesi (Twilight Turin)

crepuscolarismo (Italian: “twilight school”), a group of early 20th-century Italian poets whose work was characterized by disillusion, nostalgia, a taste for simple things, and a direct, unadorned style. Like Futurism, a contemporaneous movement, crepuscolarismo reflected the influence of European Decadence and was a reaction to the florid ornamental rhetoric of the Italian author Gabriele D’Annunzio. It differed from the militant Futurist movement in its passivity, but both movements expressed the same spirit of desolation, and many crepuscolari later became futuris

The Art of Haiku

Its History through Poems and

Paintings by Japanese Masters  - Stephen Addiss.

To most people haiku is a three line poem, following a 5-7-5 syllable formula,  but Stephen Addiss argues that this does no more than prick the surface of this fascinating poetic form. He goes on to state that, rather than constrain with rigid definitions, it may be more useful to discuss guidelines that the majority of haiku follow. Haiku in Japan are generally written or printed in a single column. Nevertheless, until the twentieth century, most traditional Japanese haiku fell into the 5-7-5 formula, although this wasn’t always adhered to by some of the great masters, when it suited their  purpose to ignore it. Another  reason that this syllable count often got ignored, was when haiku transcended the Japanese language, for example haiku written in English often have fewer than seventeen syllables because English is a more compact language than Japanese, this often is the case of haiku in other Languages.

So if we take away the constraints of the 5-7-5 syllable count, what are the characteristics that we can use to define haiku? The obvious one is a closeness to the natural world, from which the poet tends to draw the majority of the images that the poem relies on to convey it’s meaning. This usually involves concrete observations, expressed briefly through the use of everyday language and syntax that is natural rather than poetic .

garden in winter -

the moon also becomes a thread

in the insect’s song

(Matsuo Basho 1644-94)

Traditional haiku often include pause marks called kireji (cutting words), that serve to mark rhythmic divisions, as a kind of verbal punctuation mark, for example at the end of the first or second segment there may be an extra syllable such as ya, indicating a pause or signalling a moment of separation (change of theme or meaning). In fact you could state that kireji serve primarily as sonic punctuation or as intensifiers of mood and meaning and as they have, or seldom have, meaning are there purely to contribute rhythm and sounds. Many Japanese haiku can have fewer than seventeen (active) syllables.

 

kanashisa ya tsuri no ito fuku                                                                                                             

aki no kaze

sadness -

a fishing line blown

in the autumn wind

Yosa Buson (1716–1783)

 

The third major characteristic of haiku are the seasonal references, the Kigo, the great majority  of traditional haiku indicate a particular season, sometimes directly (as in the Basho poem above) or through a specific image that has come to signify a season for example:

Spring (haru) Early spring: 4 February–5 March, Mid-spring: 6 March–4 April, Late spring: 5 April–5 May.

Ume blossoms, Japanese bush warbler, Cherry blossoms, Frogs, Skylarks.

Summer (natsu) Early summer: 6 May–5 June, Mid-summer: 6 June–6 July, Late summer: 7 July–7 August.

Wisteria, Wild Orange blossoms, Iris, Lotus, Cicada, Little Cuckoo.

Autumn (aki) Early autumn: 8 August–7 September, Mid-autumn: 8 September–7 October, Late autumn: 8 October–6 November

Typhoon, Thunder, Milky Way, Moon, Insects, Crickets, Nashi pear, peach, Coloured leaves, Scarecrow.

Winter (fuyu) Early winter: 7 November–6 December, Mid-winter: 7 December–4 January, Late winter: 5 January–3 February.

Cold, Fallen leaves, Snow-viewing (first snow), Ice, Owls, Ducks, bare trees.

 

By the use of one of these specific images the poet suggests to the reader which season the poem is  referring to, and as this adds to the mood and meaning of the haiku, these references are significant. This leads me perfectly on to the fourth and possibly most important element of haiku, a haiku suggests rather than defines its meaning, leaving the reader or listener to complete much of the process, to join the writer in the completion of the haiku, and as a haiku can have multiple meaning, this allows for individual interpretation as opposed to one concrete view.

This is also helped by the brevity of the form, the fewer the words the more potential for multiple implications.

This piece is merely a brief overview of the form that is haiku, which has become a worldwide phenomenon and yet is only one half of the story, haiga, the other half is almost unknown and yet as an art form was practised by all the great masters, Yosa Buson (1716–1783) was a talented painter, but even those with more modest skills such as Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827) created haiga esteemed by those that viewed them. In fact having too much technique can be seen as much a liability as having too little, since sincerity and suggestion matter more than obvious mastery and specificity. This aesthetic haiga shares with haiku, along with brevity, naturalness, and the idea of suggestion to create a bond with the viewer as they participate in the haiku/haiga creation.

*********************

Japanese haiga, the word-image relationship developed into three main patterns/ forms.

1. An informal portrait of poet with one of their haiku

2. Interaction (most common)

3. Text-image relationship.

******************

The first is the most simple and is normally just an informal picture of the poet with one of their haiku. This follows on from an earlier Japanese tradition of portraits of aristocratic tanka masters, although the brushwork in haiga portraits appear less sharp and precise and can seem close to caricature. The second haiga form, Interaction, supports the haiku and by this I mean that an image is represented in both words and painting, for example if the haiku mentions Ume blossoms an image of said blossoms will be in the picture, however in good haiga, the one is not there merely to represent the other, but to add to the overall effect, working in a kind of symbiosis, reinforcing and contributing to a multi-layered view of the work. The third form, the text-image relationship is the most intriguing of the three, in this the painted images and the words do not appear to have a direct relationship with the idea of adding  further meanings to the poem and image creating a resonance that expands the overall expression.

***************************

In The Art of Haiku, Stephen Addiss, one of the foremost experts on this art form traces the history of Japanese haiku, starting with the earlier poetic traditions from which it was born through to the twentieth century and its position as possibly one of the best known poetic forms in the world. His approach to this subject is to highlight the work of the leading masters such as Bashō, Buson, Issa and Shiki,  and by focussing on “the Great Four” he uses these as points in history allowing him to highlight other fine but lesser known poets. In the process tracing the evolution of haiku from its roots in Tanka (Waka) from the earliest anthology, Man'yōshū  (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, compiled 686 - 784) through to the modern era covering all the major names from  both haiku and haiga, with the aim of demonstrating the relationship between the forms which were composed to “create a spontaneous interconnection with the readers who play a vital part in the expressive process.”  and their development  into the poetic form loved and admired the whole world over, with haiku societies in most nations on this planet.

*******************

Stephen Addiss has created a wonderful and fascinating  book that is part history, part poetry anthology, and part art book, presenting a cornucopia of examples in both poetry (original & translations) and painting. It was a pleasure reading this book, which although a thorough in-depth study of its subject matter, managed to be informative, instructive & educational without being dry and dull. If you have an interest in haiku, haiga, in Japanese history and culture, even if your interest is in the Japanese aesthetic of Wabi sabi, this book has something to offer and delight you

******************

I would like to add a proviso, I got this book through Netgalley, in an E-book format and although reading it was fine I didn’t feel it showed the art work to their best, so I would suggest that if you were to purchase this choose a physical copy and be in the admirable position of being able to read the haiku whilst viewing the haiga in all its glory, that is my only reservation as this is a book that I will be revisiting with pleasure and with the knowledge that I will learn more about what is a fascinating subject with each new visit.

Some facts about haiku, I probably should have mentioned

Haiku was originally called hokku, haiku was given its current name by the Japanese writer Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902)).

Hokku was the opening stanza of an orthodox collaborative linked poem, or renga, and of its later derivative, renku (or haikai no renga).

By the time of Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), the hokku had begun to appear as an independent poem, and was also incorporated in haibun

Haibun is a combination of prose and haiku, often autobiographical or written in the form of a travel journal.

In Japanese, haiku are traditionally printed in a single vertical line whilst in English it normally appears in three lines to parallel the three phrases of Japanese haiku.

The Great Four are Matsuo Basho 1644-94, Yosa Buson (1716–1783), Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827), and Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902)).

For More Info’

Major Nature images by Season (PDF)

Haiku Poems and Poetry

haiku (Basho)

haiku (Yosa Buson)

haiku ( Issa)

haiku (Masaoka Shiki)

The Importance of Haiku

Haiku Society

Japanese Arts (Painting)

Haiga online

Haiku, Haibun, Haiga

Daily Haiga

A Brief History of Haiga by Stephen Addiss

 

 

A Scandinavian Whydunit?

This book starts with the murder of Halland, who is gunned down yards from his home. The police turn up to arrest his wife Bess, as it appears with his dying words he had accused her of the crime. If you, like myself, are going “Ok, another Nordic crime thriller”, check out the publisher’s name. Yep Peirene Press, and past experience has taught me that this won’t follow the usual genre rules, that at the very least there will be an interesting twist and I’m pleased to say they haven’t yet let me down.

Although there’s a murder, a gun and a dour seeming inspector, this book focuses on Bess and how the bereavement acts as a catalyst  causing her to reassess her friends, family and ultimately her life. We follow Bess as she careens from pillar to post, sometimes drunk, sometimes bemused, whilst attempting to understand, to come to terms with Halland’s death and all that has come to light because of it.

Last year I read a book by Shuichi Yoshida and this reminds me of that, although both tales differ considerably, in both there’s a murder at it’s centre, a black hole around which everything turns and yet it is the effect of this crime on the individual that becomes the focus of the story, the crime is merely the matrix that allows this focus. As with the other book The murder of Halland is the type of thriller that gives the genre a great name, it’s intelligent, thought provoking, it asks questions, whilst doing so in a manner that doesn’t give you a list of pat, generic answers, leaving you to ponder any answers for yourself.

Why Peirene chose to publish this book:

“If you like crime you won’t be disappointed. The book has all the right ingredients. A murder, a gun, an inspector, suspense. But I love the story because it strays far beyond the whodunit norm. In beautifully stark language Pia Juul manages to chart the phases of bereavement.” Meike Ziervogel

Pia Juul, born 1962, claims her place as one of Denmark’s foremost literary authors. She has published five books of poetry, two short story collections and two novels. The Murder of Halland was published in Danish in 2009 and has won Denmark’s most important literary prize, Den Danske Banks litteraturpris. Pia is the translator of Ali Smith and Alain de Botton into Danish.

Pia Juul (Wiki)

Pia on Peirene

Martin Aitken (Translator) holds a PhD in Linguistics and gave up university tenure to listen to The Fall and translate literature. His work has appeared in book form and in literary journals. He lives in rural Denmark.

Martin on The Murder of Halland:

“What I find striking about Pia Juul’s novel is its intense exploration of a human mind at the mercy of emotion. In modern society we tend to pride ourselves on our propensity to analyse and acquire new knowledge and insight. Yet Juul’s gripping portrayal of a woman striving to find a place in her own life reveals so clearly that human emotion is by no means wholly amenable to rational dissection and understanding. We learn to live for better or worse with the choices we make in our lives, often uncomprehending of how we ever got there. Bess reminds us that life is not a roadmap to rational insight, but a complex of entangled emotion.”

Society of Authors (Martin Aitken)

Peirene Catalogue (Contemporary European Literature)

my name on his tongue: poems - Laila Halaby

Laila Halaby was born in Lebanon to a Jordanian father and American mother, she grew up mostly in Arizona. She is the author of two novels, West of Jordan (2003; winner of a Pen Beyond Margins Award) and Once in a Promised Land (2007). She holds an undergraduate degree in Italian and Arabic from Washington University (St Louis), she was also a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship for the study of Jordanian folklore, which resulted in a collection of Palestinian folktales for children. In addition, she also writes poetry which is highly personal, reflecting the disparity between the places and cultures she grew up within.

The Journey (1)

born

    out of place

a single mother’s only child fatherless

blanketed in foreignness

         my mother ran

from one desert to another until she found home

      alone

we were opposites in a small house me, loud and

moving

wild with a longing

I didn’t speak fluently

she, quiet and still,

stashing her multilingual sorrows in the tool shed

out back

       she tried to teach me in American how to be

an Arab

but didn’t quite get it right

left stuff out

left me uncomfortable

in my shoes

always searching

for the right pair

(excerpt from The Journey )

In this, her first collection of poetry, she uses a narrative style to explore what it means to be an outsider within your own culture, of trying to navigate between the two identities of Arab and American, and how this reflects on her as as women and as a writer. The poems in this collection span about twenty years, giving it almost the appearance of a memoir, detailing the heartaches and struggles, the dilemmas that have confronted & puzzled her, the experiences that she faced as an individual viewed as “Arab” in a post 9/11 world with all the grief and anger, all the hope  that things could be better / different that went with living through such times. “My name on his tongue”, is about identity; found or lost, is about relationships; those that made it and those that fell by the wayside, it’s about war & peace and the murky wasteland that divides the two. “My name on his tongue” is a beautiful lyrical reflection, that is both personal and political as are all stories that highlight an individual’s identity and how it relates to a geographical line on a map.

 

After a reading by Khaled Mattawa (a Libyan poet living in the US).

Your place in the world is solid

         my place in the world moves without a

schedule

is based on mishaps

unwanted affairs

political discord

       my place drifts

between Here and There West and East

sometimes gets lodged In-Between

          my place is a Somewhere that cannot be found

on any map

was detached

as I was Born

in a place that belonged to neither of my parents

        can’t be an immigrant

if you haven’t left somewhere can’t be a native

if you’re from somewhere else which is why I'm

fluent in the language of exiled souls

(Excerpt from: After a reading by Khaled Mattawa)

Laila Halaby.net

Author Spotlight: Laila Halaby

Laila Halaby: Poetry

Mediterranean poetry(Laila Halaby)

Syracuse University Press

light boxes–Shane Jones.

Thaddeus Lowe, lives with his wife, Selah, and their daughter, Bianca, in a small  town that appears to be unnamed. For some reason an individual called February has decreed that it should remain winter for all time, so for the last three hundred days this demiurge has imposed a perpetual February upon this town and it’s environs, everything is dull, dark & grey, highlighted only by the frigid white of the snow as it drops from the leaden clouds that circle like crows overhead. On top of this he has also banned “Flight”, that means anything that can – Balloons, Flying machines, Kites, in fact he goes further anything, ANYTHING that has or possesses the ability to fly will be destroyed. His priests “for whenever  such a  being appears, instantaneously followers sprout from the soil they walk on”, haunt the town,  stopping off at the school & library  “They confiscated textbooks, tore out pages about birds, flying machines, Zeppelins, witches on brooms, balloons, kites, winged mythical creatures. They crumpled up paper airplanes the children had folded and they dumped the pages into a burning pit in the woods”. Any reference to flight is NOT allowed in February’s world as proclaimed by the Great man himself. Also Children are vanishing.

Thaddeus and his family, silently protest. Filling their home with images of flight hidden inside cupboards and on the undersides of crockery, even easily covered body parts are hennaed with complex kite patterns, their tails forming an  intricate constellation as though an armour to ward off February’s onslaught. His wife makes concoctions of mint tea, salves, fill their bath with this herb, and make a soup.

Selah’s Mint Soup

8 cups chicken stock,
2 cups mint leaves
3 large eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper

Hoping that this herb will protect them, and for a while it seems to work. At some point Thaddeus meets The Solution, a group of former balloonists who wear strange bird masks and who are planning to revolt against February, they  have chosen Thaddeus to be their leader, to assist them in their war against the demiurge for the sake of his family, Thaddeus dreamt of “two miniature suns. I set one each upon their foreheads I dreamed a waterfall and a calm lake of my arms below to catch them” As The Solution then leave “walking, dreaming of flying in separate directions”. Shortly after agreeing to lead the rebellion, his daughter Bianca, disappears,
“Before daybreak, Thaddeus smells smoke and honey coming from Bianca’s bedroom. In her room he notices the window is open and snow is blowing in.

He throws the covers off the bed

He looks around the room.
He looks under the bed.
He looks in the closet.
He looks in the hallway.
He looks at his feet.
He looks at the bed. He looks at the bed.
Bianca's bed is a mound of snow and teeth.
Bianca is gone.

Apparently kidnapped from her bed. Now on a total war footing, Thaddeus & The Solution, try different tactics to defeat February, these range from pretending spring has arrived & ignoring the freezing conditions, hoisting poles to destroy the clouds & creating this elaborate system to carry boiling water to melt the snow – all fail in the end & anger February.

This is a book that is strange, beautiful, quirky, that is absurd, eccentric, that I could plough through a multitude of thesauri and still only offer you morsels, an amuse-bouche from a fine dining experience. Light Boxes is a book of poems, chants, and notes, of  mantras & magic, of lists, of love & hate. This is also a book that will divide, some will love its use of different fonts, font-sizes, lists  & formats, the fact that some pages contain merely a sentence & others a catalogue of names, others these same devices will annoy. For me this was wonderful, the look, the feel of the book, everything from the artwork to the poetry inside, enchanted and beguiled me. Lee Rourke in his fantastic book “A Brief History of Fables” described it as a contemporary fable & as such it has the  ability to “ Shed light on whatever it is we look at, because it speaks to us in the same way that all good fables do, no matter how far-fetched or magical and hallucinatory they at first may seem: in a language  we can truly understand” .
I’ll leave the last word on this beautiful and heart-rending poetic fable, myth, novel (?) to February.

“I wanted to write you a story about magic. I wanted rabbits appearing from hats. I wanted balloons lifting you into the sky. It turned out to be nothing  but sadness, war, heartbreak. You never saw it, but there’s a garden inside me.”

Shane Jones was born 1980 in Albany, New York and is a novelist, short story writer, and poet. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in numerous literary journals, including New York Tyrant, Unsaid, Typo, and Pindeldyboz. He lives in upstate New York.
Shane Jones(Wiki)
Shane Jones(Penguin Books)