Μοσκαρντίνο

by Enrico Pea, Αγγελική Ξύδη (Translator)

Ένα μικρό αριστούργημα, το λυρικό αυτοβιογραφικό μυθιστόρημα του Pea ζωγραφίζει ένα φλογερό και οικείο πορτρέτο ενός γέρου μέσα από τις τολμηρές πινελιές του εγγονού του.

Τα πάθη και οι εντάσεις ανάμεσα στον γέρο εκκεντρικό και τα αδέρφια του διαδραματίζονται σε μυθικά σκίτσα μπροστά σε ένα ζωντανό φόντο των λόφων της Lunigiana. Ο Moscardino, η πρώτη νουβέλα της τετραλογίας του, Il romanzo di Moscardino, είναι άναρχη και στοιχειωτική.

Ο Pound διευθύνει το δημοτικό τραγούδι του Pea, επιτρέποντας στις εικόνες του να ρέουν πέρα από τη γη και τη σάρκα

Genres: Italian Literature, Fiction

101 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1922

About the author

شاعر إيطالى عاش فى الاسكندرية فى مصر، معاصرا للشاعر الإيطالى أونجاريتى

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up.

A minor masterpiece, this is one of those books that you don't necessarily read for the story but for the language. There truly are some poetic lines in which you can see how Pea appealed to Pound. I think my favorite is "The night leaned its hairy stomach against the windows, the panes were warm and opaque, beaded with sweat" (27). The blending of family, environment, and mental states is interesting and refreshingly anarchic. The tension of understanding the fraught nature of one's lineage is certainly felt as it simmers throughout. I would only recommend this title to a certain type of reader, be they esoteric, poetic, pretentious, aesthetically inclined, or a blend of these attributes.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moscardino (1921) is a small wonder. A thin volume of 70 pages, it is the first movement of an autobiographical trilogy and is a gorgeous piece of work. Opening with the death of the paterfamilias (ca. 1850s?), it follows the widow and three grown sons who now must take up the responsibilities of their "high lineage" and extensive estates. Unfortunately none are quite sane, especially when there is a beautiful servant girl to arouse passions, jealousies and despair; devastations follow. It is only in the coda, decades later, that we meet Moscardino ("Buck") being raised by his grandfather, the youngest of the three sons, on a rugged farm in the Tuscan hills, growing up in the aftermath of the earlier generation's long train wreck.

Ezra Pound translated Moscardino in 1941; it wasn't published until 1956 (in a limited edition) and then not again until 2005. (His work on the sequels is unfinished and will probably never be published.) This translation will be a revelation for those who know EP only for his literary manifestos and elliptically allusive poetry. Here are phrases and images that startle but are absolutely apt, sentences with whiplash endings, crystalline storytelling (and yet I did lose my way more than once, had to back up and recover the thread of the story). But have I just read Enrico Pea or Ezra Pound? That perennial question about translation is especially pointed with an Ezra Pound, notorious less for transparency than for idiosyncrasy. Even if I can't answer it I feel lucky to have been introduced to Pea and to a facet of Pound that I hadn't known existed.

[Gail · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was really captivated by the introduction, about how Ezra Pound discovered Enrico Pea's work and wrote to him to offer to translate it, and how they met up - how Pound had somehow felt something he could relate to in Pea's work, but also recognised it wouldn't be a financial success for either of them.

The story itself was a poetic portrait of a family, and to be honest, I sometimes got a bit confused as to the actual details of what was going on! At one point I was thinking I didn't really like it as a book and I wasn't getting anything from it, but now as I think about it in retrospect, the scenes and the characters are vivid in my mind. A book I would like to reread, to gain more from it.

[Haramar Kandola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you Vince

[Darryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Moscardino, the first novella of the Il romazo di Moscardino tetralogy, was published by the Italian writer Enrico Pea (1881-1958) in 1922. Pea's good friend, Ezra Pound, translated this work into English, and it was eventually published by New Directions Press in 1955. The Pound translation was re-released by Archipelago Books in 2005.

The story is narrated by Moscardino's grandson, toward the end of his grandfather's life. Moscardino lives an idyllic and privileged existence in Lunigiana in the mid-19th century. The boys are incredibly spoiled, and their parents are impossibly demanding, so much so that their servants stay only long enough to receive their monthly wages before quitting. Cleofe, a beautiful young woman from the hills overlooking the town, is hired to care for the household. Don Moscardino falls hopelessly in love with Cleofe, as he is mesmerized by her milky skin and "chestnut rind" colored eyes, as he views her nakedness through the keyhole of her room. He is savagely jealous of her, and tells her that the only way out of his misery will be to kill her. He pulls out a knife but cannot bring himself to take her life. Instead, he falls on the knife and disembowels himself. He is committed to a lunatic asylum, where he regains his sense of sanity, along with his tender love for Cleofe.

This was a beautifully written and translated novella. However, I found the story to be quite dull and aimless, with too many diversions. Several pages toward the end were spent discussing a neighbor's dog, with an additional lengthy description of Moscardino's pet rooster. Some may like this novella better than I did, so I will only marginally recommend it.

[Alexander Asay · Rating 4 out of 5]

A small book with a long aftertaste. Moscardino is Pea’s lyrical novella, told through the grandson’s brushstrokes as he paints the old man, eccentric, combustible, tender when he is not cruel, against the rugged hills of Lunigiana. The family passions and frictions do not resolve; they flare and recede in short, myth-tinged scenes. The form fits the subject as memory does not argue; it sketches.

Pea writes from the ground up. Landscape and body do the carrying so that character rises out of place rather than psychology. The result is an intimate portrait that never turns confessional. The old man is seen, not explained. He is legend and relative at once.

Pound’s translation conducts the vernacular without flattening it. He keeps the quick pivots, the pared syntax, the image-led cadence that lets sense arrive by accumulation. When the prose risks rapture, it stays exact; when it dips into song, it does so on the strength of things named. It is anarchic in temperament and haunting in effect, a book that refuses to domesticate its subject or its place.

[zan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I actually have no idea what this book was about, so I must not have read it very carefully. But it gets three stars for the following line: "The night leaned its hairy stomach against the windows, the panes were warm and opaque, beaded with sweat."

[Jonathan yates · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure if this book was really about much, but it had some really great sentences.