Reading Sveva

by Daphne Marlatt

Reading Sveva is award-winning author Daphne Marlatt’s response to the life and paintings of Sveva Caetani, an Italian émigré who grew up in Vernon, B.C. Daughter of an Italian prince, leftist, and scholar of Islam, Sveva grew up with the multilingual and highly cultured European traditions of her parents who moved to Vernon in 1921, when Fascism was on the rise in Italy. At age eighteen, after her father’s death in 1939, Sveva was forced into home-seclusion for twenty-five years with her grieving mother. When her mother died, she entered the community of Vernon and flourished as a high school teacher and respected painter. Her life experiences took the form of an extensive series of dry-brush paintings modelled on the structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy , as well as poems and philosophical commentary. Marlatt’s lasting interest in the lives of immigrants to the West Coast continues in Reading Sveva , a thoughtful collection of ekphrastic and lyric poems that respond to Sveva’s insular life, the late beginnings of her artistic grown in 1960, and the meaning of home. Bringing her own perspective as an immigrant and as a woman, Marlatt illuminates the life of this forgotten female artist whose work is a testament to the struggle of the female artist, and the search for a sense of belonging.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2016

About the author

"Nationality: Canadian (originally Maylasian, immigrated to Canada in 1951). Born: Daphne Shirley Buckle, Melbourne, Australia, 1942.

Education: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1960-64, B.A.; University of Indiana, Bloomington, 1964-67, M.A. 1968. Career: Has taught at University of British Columbia, University of Victoria, University of Saskatchewan, University of Western Ontario, Simon Fraser University, University of Calgary, Mount Royal College, University of Alberta, McMaster University, University of Manitoba; second vice chair of the Writers' Union of Canada, 1987-88.

Awards: MacMillan and Brissenden award for creative writing; Canada Council award. Member: Founding member of West Coast Women and Words Society.

Other Work:

Plays
Radio Plays:
Steveston, 1976.

Other
Zócalo. Toronto, Coach House, 1977.

Readings from the Labyrinth. Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1998.

Editor, Lost Language: Selected Poems of Maxine Gadd. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1982.

Editor, Telling It: Women and Language Across Cultures. Vancouver, Press Gang, 1990.

Editor, Mothertalk: Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka. Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1997.

Translator, Mauve, by Nicole Brossard. Montreal, Nouvelle Barre du Jour/Writing, 1985.

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The National Library of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.

Critical Studies:
Translation A to Z: Notes on Daphne Marlatt's "Ana Historic" by Pamela Banting, Edmonton, NeWest Press, 1991; "I Quote Myself"; or, A Map of Mrs. Reading: Re-siting "Women's Place" in "Anna Historic" by Manina Jones, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993; The Country of Her Own Body: Ana Historic, by Frank Davey, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993.

"Although I think of myself as a poet first, I began writing both fiction and lyric poems in the early 1960s. My collections of poetry have usually had a loose narrative shape as I tend to write in sequences, or "books." As an immigrant, I'd long held the ambition to write an historical novel about Vancouver, but Ana Historic actually critiqued and broke open the genre, as it also increased my fascination with the potential for openness in the novel form. Influenced by the development of "fiction/theory" in Quebec by feminist writers there, I see open structures combined with a folding or echoing of women's experiences in different time periods as a way to convey more of the unwritten or culturally overwritten aspects of what it means to be alive as a woman today.'"

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Read more: "Daphne Marlatt Biography - Daphne Marlatt comments:" - http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4556...

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

For several years now, I have lived with Sveva's thought embroidered in the paintings of her Recapitulation series and in her writing. Although I knew nothing about her while she was alive, her letters and recorded interviews in the Caetani archives in Vernon convey a strong sense of the person she was. My poems address her frequently as "you", a mark of how much my thinking about her work and life became an intimate engagement. In these ond-sided dialogues with her, I have tried to read some of the energy of her questioning, reconsidering, and appraising "self".

- pg. 8

from outside only
seeing, reading

through dislocation
the local or immediate

self-imposed purdah a phase
night of lunar eclipse

various darkness require

dream theatre lights architectural
memory embodies the grand
histrionic elsewhere

was she your dark guide through grief?

love so called

upon, potent in
limitations

- a version, pg. 49

* * *

root hell its hold
on paradise flower

here in civitas ongoing
sidewalk opt-out discard
what labels them

your pietre anonime

needled

forays in doorways
exit signed

each journey in time's
plastic duration

a hedged bet

a private garden paradise
(in memoriam)

neither Earthly nor
Divine

this city's contested ground
a ware?

- just asking, pg. 53

* * *

given linguistic
ebullience

given Italian, French, English
some Hebrew, a little
Arabic

given inner restraint

given laughter, light

given vision's far reach
and care, curious
unorthodox

what it means
this unique, this

intimate link

here in

not after

- gifts, pg. 63

* * *

where words meet paint

two subjectivities meet
tangential stories seep across
discrete lineages, this

keyboard of transmittable memory
language

cognition's shift

fingering alphabet, water colour
dry-brush fusion of hues
results in glow

recognition's ah

if reality is seen as momentum

we speed through
changing perspectives

its drive is to
unceasing erasure as well

that razor line in
finite illusion
infinity's edge

time on your hands
in your eyes on the wheel

never enough

- driving at, pg. 71