An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – Dante's Density

 

 

A German writer seems to have caused a bit of a furore by suggesting that not only do today's Italian students struggle to understand Dante Aligheri but that the 14th-century master poet was left way behind in the immortality stakes by William Shakespeare.

A major difference between the two writers is that Dante was wrapped up in his own times and obsessions, while Shakespeare wrote for all times and left himself out of it.

In my readings of Italian history – inspired by last year's travels on the Odyssean Coast – Dante's Divine Comedy seemed to get so many mentions that I thought I'd better have a go at it.

But, even in Robin Kirkpatrick's slangy translation for Penguin Classics, I have to confess that I've been finding it close to impenetrable – and that's with also reading the footnotes that take up about a quarter of this edition.

Of course, Shakespeare was writing quite a bit later than Dante – things move on. It would, for example, be futile to start comparing the guitar playing of Bert Weedon with that of Eric Clapton.

So let's be honest... Dante's achievement was probably pretty remarkable for its time. But today one wonders if it's really worth the hard work of trying to figure out what he's on about.

Shakespeare can also be hard work... but he's still worth it. 

An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – Homer, Remarque and Dylan

 

It might seem a long stretch from The Odyssey to the First World War but it really isn't... When Bob Dylan put together his Nobel laureate's lecture a few years ago, he cited three works of literature that had had a profound influence on his songwriting.

They were The Odyssey, Moby-Dick and All Quiet On The Western Front. I'd read and marvelled at the first two of these but had only dipped into the third in my school's library many years ago.

So I have just caught up by reading Erich Maria Remarque's classic account of life and gruesome death in the trenches of 1914-18 – which tells just about everything there is to know about the futility and obscenity of war.

But that was just a beginning. Remarque's sequel, The Way Back, is less well known but no less stunning, as it recounts what it was like for surviving – and traumatised – soldiers to return home to a world that could never understand what they had experienced.

And the last part of a Remarque trilogy (for me) has been his unfinished but still tremendously compendious The Promised Land – a story of German immigrants escaping the horrors of Nazi-occupied Europe to begin a precarious existence in the US in 1944.

All three books stand as a testament to a great and thrilling writer who seems never to shy away from the truth – whether it be about the horrors of war, the stresses of life turned upside down or the hard facts of human relationships (in The Promised Land he includes a description of sex which I would guess is unequalled anywhere for its complete and unsparing honesty).

An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – Roadmap To Hell

I thought the picture painted by Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah of corruption, crime and unspeakable awfulness in the Naples area was shocking (see this blog – An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – Gomorrah, 13 January 2021). But much of the content of Roadmap To Hell by Barbie Latza Nadeau surpasses it as an account of the depths to which things have sunk there.

If you have a strong stomach, this is a forensic study of people-trafficking, sex slavery and brutal violence.

Latza Nadeau, like Saviano, writes about the Land of Fires, the area to the east of Naples ravaged by illegal toxic waste disposal and subsequent illnesses among the population.

But much of her book centres on Castel Volturno, the seaside town to the west, which is the "hell" of the title.

The degradation and misery which African women have been led to here is beyond wicked.

As with the stories in Gomorrah, it seems that all this is an open secret but few in authority want – or dare – do anything about it. The heroism of the women who buck the corrupt system – and particularly the nuns of the Casa Ruth refuge for former sex slaves at Caserta – is all the more awe-inspiring for being carried out in the face of such monumental evil.

An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – The Leopard

So much of the reading that I've been doing about southern Italy has pointed to The Leopard... so, a bit late in the day, I've finally got around to reading this classic novel by Tomasi di Lampedusa.

Ostensibly about one noble Sicilian family facing the reality of the upheaval surrounding the unification of Italy in 1861, it is actually a universal story of human beings, their relationships, their lives and their deaths.

It is also, above all, about Sicily... and about everything having to change in order for everything to remain the same...

The Leopard has been hailed as one of the greatest novels ever written – and I certainly wouldn't argue with that.

An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – Midnight in Sicily

Peter Robb's sprawling book Street Fight In Naples (see this blog An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – Street Fight In Naples) provides some wonderful insights into that city's amazing history, but his later Midnight In Sicily is more focused and even better.

The mafia, politics, violence and corruption loom large – it's about southern Italy after all – but, as with the previous book, there is also much about art.

And especially the remarkable Renato Guttuso, a maverick in the Picasso mould, whose life and – especially – death were bound up with those themes of politics, corruption and organised crime.

His relationship (both artistic and intimate) with his muse, Marta Marzotto, is love story, soap opera, scandal and tragedy, all wrapped up together, and Robb's interview with Marzotto herself is a wonderful piece of theatre.

Guttuso's passionate style managed to make La Vucciria (above), his 1974 study of Palermo's market, as much about hunger as about food. And his many erotic studies of Marta Marzotto (below) encompassed a furious desire as well as an appreciation of beauty.