PENGUIN CLASSICS
PLEASURE
GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO (1863–1938) was the most influential and controversial Italian author of the twentieth century and a prominent figure in European Decadent literature. Born in Pescara, Abruzzo, to a wealthy bourgeois family, he was a brilliant student who acquired a solid humanistic cultural base—Latin, Greek, ancient literature, Italian, French, German, and English. He published his first book, a collection of poems, at the age of sixteen, and over the course of his life he wrote several novels, collections of poetry, and plays.
During his long public career, D’Annunzio played a central role in many of the major historical events of his day, working not only as a writer but also as a journalist, a fighter pilot, and a politician. His nationalistic rhetoric and charismatic leadership of the Italian Regency of Carnaro helped set the stage for Mussolini’s fascism. D’Annunzio died in Gardone Riviera, at his estate on Lake Garda, having greatly influenced the literature and politics of his time.
LARA GOCHIN RAFFAELLI is an honorary research associate at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
ALEXANDER STILLE is a frequent contributor on Italy to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and The New Yorker and the author of several books, including The Sack of Rome. He lives in New York.
GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO
Pleasure
Translated with a Foreword and Notes by LARA GOCHIN RAFFAELLI
Introduction by ALEXANDER STILLE
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This translation first published in Penguin Books 2013
Translation, foreword, and notes copyright © Lara Gochin Raffaelli, 2013
Introduction copyright © Alexander Stille, 2013
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Questo libro è stato tradotto grazie a un contributo alla traduzione assegnato dal Ministero
degli Affari Esteri italiano.
This book has been translated thanks to a contribution to the translation awarded by
the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 1863–1938.
[Piacere. English]
Pleasure / Gabriele D’Annunzio ; Translated with a Foreword and Notes by Lara Gochin Raffaelli ; Introduction by Alexander Stille.
pages cm.—(Penguin classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-101-61677-2
I. Title.
PQ4803.P513 2013
853'.912—dc23 2013006549
Dedicated with love, appreciation, and respect to the memory of Professor Nelia (Cornelia) Cacace Saxby, who taught, mentored, and unceasingly inspired me from 1986 to 2010 and died far too young, long before I could learn a fraction of what she knew
Contents
About the Authors
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword by LARA GOCHIN RAFFAELLI
Introduction by ALEXANDER STILLE
PLEASURE
First Book
Second Book
Third Book
Fourth Book
Translator’s Acknowledgments
Notes
Foreword
This translation project began in April 2009,1 when I decided to teach Gabriele D’Annunzio’s novel Il piacere in translation, for a module of the “Aspects of Eros from Sappho to Cyber” course offered by the Classics section of the School of Languages and Literatures at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Set mainly in Rome, Il piacere was published in 1889 and found great success with the Roman public, despite the publisher’s initial alarm at the many scandalous passages in the book.2 It is considered the first Italian Decadent novel and to this day is regarded as a classic of Italian literature.
It was translated into English in 1898 with the title The Child of Pleasure by Georgina Harding, who followed the example of the French translation, L’enfant de volupté, carried out by Georges Hérelle under D’Annunzio’s supervision and published the year before.
With only a few days left to the beginning of lectures, I discovered that the English version had been heavily bowdlerized by Miss Harding, who cut out any allusions of a sexual nature or indeed of any nature that could offend Victorian sensibilities. It was clear that I could not teach, in a course commonly referred to as “Sex,” a book with no sex in it. I had no alternative but to begin translating all the “sexy bits” from the original Italian, and to give these to my students on a separate document to integrate into Harding’s version. At the end of the course, since I had compiled a substantial mass of translated text, and because of the interest students had shown in the book, I thought it would be a good idea to republish the book with my sexy bits added. At that stage, my idea was simply to take Harding’s text and reintegrate my translated sections where they were missing.
In translating Il piacere into English, Georgina Harding was advised by Arthur Symons to follow the structure of the French translation. This radically changed the structure of the original novel in Italian. Symons wrote the introduction to the translation and also translated all the sonnets into English. But, John Woodhouse notes, it was Harding who made all the decisions to excise aspects of the text on her own. Woodhouse and George Schoolfield have dedicated much attention to the extensive changes Harding made in her translation. Schoolfield counts twenty-five major omissions3 and writes, “The English translation omits a great many passages that would have shocked a late Victorian reader’s sensibilities; on the flyleaf of the copy in Yale’s Sterling Library, an unknown hand has written: “Beware of translations by Victorian ladies.”4 Woodhouse points out that it was understandable that “the sanitized version offered to the Victorian reading public would omit voyeuristic descriptions of the naked Elena being seduced by the libidinous Andrea; also understandably excised was any characterization of the sadistic and perverted tastes in literature and art of the noble Englishman, Heathfield.”5 Woodhouse ascribes some of the cuts to the translator’s “usual modesty”;6 others he sees as being amusing examples of the “bourgeois manner” with which she renders the Italian. But beyond the sensibilities of the Victorian mentality, why would it be so important for Georgina Harding to make these cuts? There are numerous articles that discuss the strength of the censor’s office in Britain (and the United States) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which prevented many literary and theatrical works from being published or performed.7 Without the cuts Harding made, the novel would not have met with the approval of the British censor, and hence would not have been permitted to be published.8
So what did the book look like without the sex? And how was it perceived in Britain and the United States in the form to which Harding reduced it? While removing any reference to anything lubricious, Harding also removed much or most of the analytical and philosophical contemplation of poetry, art, and other intellectual notion
s from the novel. Woodhouse observes that The Child of Pleasure, “heavily bowdlerized,” “omits any kind of serious reflection on serious subjects” and hence reduces the novel to the level of “sentimental fiction.”9 While this brought D’Annunzio’s work into line with the “literary fashions favoured by the majority at the time,”10 it inevitably conditioned the way it was rated by literary critics of the era.
One critic, G. B. Rose, who was able to read Il piacere in Italian, underscores the attitude that prevailed toward foreign authors such as Zola and Balzac, as well as indigenous ones such as Bernard Shaw, who were subject to the same degree of censorship. That Rose read D’Annunzio in Italian is significant; it allowed him to fully appreciate the beauty of D’Annunzio’s style. Having read the complete, unexpurgated version of the novels, however, he is well aware of the dynamics among the literary establishment in the English-speaking world:
By reason of his immodesty as well as because the graces of his style cannot be reproduced in another language, he can be understood and appreciated only in his own tongue. Imagination fails to depict the indignation of Mr. Comstock11 should one of these books fall into his hands. Some of d’Annunzio’s novels have been translated into English, but the reader need not imagine that he gets in them the brilliant colors, the graceful forms or the subtle perfume of these poisonous flowers.12
Of Il piacere, Rose observes: “That he had no superior among his fellows became apparent upon the publication when a very young man of his ‘Piacere’ (Pleasure).”13
The republication by so many publishing houses of Miss Harding’s original text during the 1990s and after has not been met with approval by the literary establishment. John Woodhouse, one of the foremost Anglophone scholars of D’Annunzio, said: “His merits as a creative writer were being judged by critics and littérateurs in Britain only from what they were able to read of him in translation. Very few could read him in Italian. That problem has continued until the present day, compounded most recently by the unscrupulous actions of the publishing house Daedalus,”14 which reissued The Child of Pleasure unchanged as soon as its copyright expired in 1988. At least three other publishing houses currently reproduce and republish Harding’s excised version.
The decision I finally made regarding the translation was a result of reflection on The Child of Pleasure in its present form. Given how much D’Annunzio’s novel had been changed by Miss Harding, simply reintegrating my translations would not contribute in any effective way to scholars without Italian who might wish to read Il piacere in English. The Child of Pleasure is not simply Il piacere in English with bits missing. Harding’s changes altered the character, the content, and the significance of the original novel, so that it could no longer be seen as an exemplar of psychological introspection and analysis, representing a dichotomy between art and sexuality, salvation and perdition. It is D’Annunzio’s urtext that is of value, not Georgina Harding’s sanitized and purged version. If Italians have the privilege of being able to read Il piacere in its original form, why should those who do not speak Italian be deprived of this possibility? For this reason, I decided to produce a new translation of Il piacere that faithfully followed the original in every detail. I chose the title Pleasure, which is a direct and accurate translation of the title, succinctly expressing the essence of the novel, which is centered entirely on the quest to experience ever greater and more transcendent forms of pleasure, whether as an aesthetic principle or a physical sensation. It is this pursuit of pleasure, of attempting to move beyond pleasure, that ultimately leads to ruin, exemplifying the Decadent theme of ultimate moral dissolution.
I also decided to make this translation an annotated critical edition, which explains the abundance of endnotes. There are several scholarly critical editions of Il piacere in Italian, but these are inaccessible to readers who do not know the language. In my translation, I have retained text in Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, German, and so on in the original language and provided translations thereof in endnotes. Where text that is originally Latin, Greek, French, or another foreign language has been translated into English within the body of the work, that is because D’Annunzio himself translated it into Italian. I have attempted to remain true to D’Annunzio’s rendering of names, such as where he Italianized first names. Where there are misinterpretations of the text or of meaning, I take full responsibility. I did not annotate every cryptic term or classical allusion; I felt I should leave some homework to those wishing to explore the abundant classical and mythological, cultural and literary background from which D’Annunzio drew so heavily.
Readers will note that there is an abundance of words beginning with capital letters in this translation (such as “Soul,” “Spirit,” “Good,” “Autumn,” and “Talisman”), which may seem superfluous to the modern eye. I have attempted to follow D’Annunzio’s original text closely and therefore have retained the majority of his capitalizations, because they generally indicate lofty ideals, personifications, words expressed in ode or with irony, or deeply symbolic words denoting layers of meaning.
In 1897, not long after the beginning of D’Annunzio’s literary career, G. B. Rose wrote of him:
The harmony of his verse has continually gained in richness, while its meaning has become clearer as he has won a fuller mastery over the instrument that makes his music. His prose has gained in strength, in flexibility, in warmth and brilliancy of coloring . . . Whether he is to be merely a baleful comet or a fixed star in the literary heavens cannot yet be determined; but if he continues his progress toward higher ideals and perfection of form his position must soon be established.15
D’Annunzio’s unflagging popularity and influence in the twenty-first century, as his novels are taught in universities around the world, are a testament to his skill as a poet and a novelist. Pleasure, the first of his novels, remains to this day the object of debate, study, and discussion among scholars, students, and critics. A translation is never the equal of the original, but it is hoped that this new one will be of value to English-speaking followers and lovers of D’Annunzio, that it affords pleasure in the reading, that it allows understanding and insight into this seminal Decadent work, and that it in some small way permits readers an intimation of the literary and poetic skill of this great writer.
LARA GOCHIN RAFFAELLI
Introduction
Gabriele D’Annunzio was among the first authors to consciously fashion himself into a media celebrity. When he published his first book of poems, at the age of sixteen, in 1879, he sent in a false account of his own death to a local newspaper in order to generate publicity and create the image of tragic youth.
The creation of his persona was D’Annunzio’s principal vocation in life and art. He regarded life itself as a work of art, a credo he shared with some of his late-nineteeth-century contemporaries. “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” wrote Oscar Wilde, with whom D’Annunzio had much in common. In his first novel, Pleasure, published in 1889 when D’Annunzio was only twenty-six, he created an exceptionally complex game of life and art imitating each other in infinite regression, like a pair of opposing mirrors in which it is impossible to distinguish the object from the reflection.
While still a teenager, D’Annunzio moved from a Tuscan boarding school to Rome and set about taking the new capital of Italy by storm. He was eager to assert himself as a brilliant young poet, to win a place of renown among the wealthy noble families of Rome, to seduce its most beautiful women and scandalize its public. The protagonist of Pleasure, Andrea Sperelli, is an alter ego of the young D’Annunzio: a poet and refined aesthete, a dandy, a seducer, a slave to beauty and pleasure, utterly immoral and yet curiously appealing. And in the wake of Pleasure’s spectacular and scandalous success, Sperelli became for an entire generation a type that many chose to imitate—as Goethe’s Werther was for readers of the Romantic era, or Jay Gatsby for the Jazz Age. Modeled on the real D’Annunzio, Sperelli in turn became a mode
l for others as well as for D’Annunzio himself, since others saw D’Annunzio through the lens of his fictional creation, who conferred stature and erotic allure on the young writer.
Having imbibed some Nietzsche, D’Annunzio saw himself as a kind of superman and was not content with mere literary fame. Observing the growth of modern democracy (which began in Italy with unification in 1870) and mass politics, he saw politics as a natural theater for the projection of his personality and the expression of his greatness. “The world . . . must be persuaded that I am capable of anything,” he wrote during his first electoral campaign in 1897, in which he presented himself as “the candidate of beauty.” D’Annunzio later played a crucial role in whipping up public support for Italy’s intervention in World War I, haranguing crowds in Rome and urging them to storm the palaces of the cowardly politicians who were hesitating to commit Italy to the path of war and greatness. During the war effort, D’Annunzio, although now well into middle age, participated actively in combat, specializing in spectacular acts of derring-do, including flying over the enemy capital of Vienna to drop leaflets from a small propeller plane. In another mission, he lost an eye and was nearly killed. These exploits were accompanied by the simultaneous chronicle of countless love affairs—tragic stories of countesses and princesses leaving their husbands and children only to be abandoned by D’Annunzio when he tired of them, of women risking and losing everything, and attempting suicide for the great poet.
D’Annunzio published his last novel in 1910 and issued relatively little in the remaining twenty-eight years of his life, having become consumed increasingly by his role as a public figure and national hero. He emerged from World War I a major leader of Italian nationalism. Referring to Italy’s “Mutilated Victory,” he led public opposition to the Treaty of Versailles, which awarded Italy less territory than many had hoped. In 1919 he led several thousand veterans on an illegal military mission to occupy the port of Fiume, a city on the Dalmatian coast that had been part of Austria-Hungary but was designated an independent city because of its multicultural and multilingual population. The occupation of Fiume, in defiance of international treaties, represents the first breach in the peace that was supposed to have followed the war to end all wars. D’Annunzio’s legionaries were a mix of nationalists, patriotic-minded socialists, syndicalists—the same unstable mix of left and right that filled the ranks of the early fascist movement, which was starting at about the same time. In fact, during the Fiume occupation, which lasted about a year, D’Annunzio invented a lot of the pageantry and rituals that later became part of fascism. Some have referred to D’Annunzio as the John the Baptist of fascism, paving the way for Mussolini. He had a genius for political rhetoric and theater but none of Mussolini’s tactical abilities. Mussolini appears to have feared D’Annunzio, recognizing him as one of the few figures charismatic enough to challenge his leadership. As a result, Mussolini helped support his extravagant lifestyle in his princely villa on Lake Garda. D’Annunzio was simultaneously honored as a kind of unofficial poet laureate of fascism and spied upon. He lived out his declining years still pursuing his erotic fantasies, but now with the help of drugs and prostitutes.
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