Welcome to the podcast An Ancient Language for a Modern Soul. Poemi Conviviali by Giovanni Pascoli. I'm here today with Professor Elisa Bizzotto. Elisa is Professor of English Literature at Universita IUAV in Venice, Italy. She works on Victorian and Pre-modernist Literature, and her interests are primarily in Reception Studies, genre and mythography. She specialises in aestheticism, decadence and Anglo-Italian cultural intersections in the long fin de siècle. Today we will talk about a poem called “The Twins” which is the story of a boy and a girl who are turned into flowers. It's a retelling of Narcissus’ story, the story of the boy who fell in love with his own reflection and which we find in Ovid's Metamorphoses. You will hear the poem in the translation by James Ackhurst and myself, published in 2022 by Italica Press. The poem is read by Johanna Strafford. The music is played by Arianna Mornico at the Celtic harp and has been composed by Giovanni Tardini.
ELENA
“The Twins” is Pascoli's rewriting of a well-known myth, the story of Narcissus, which we find in Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 3. In Ovid's book, Narcissus is a handsome young man, so handsome that he falls in love with his own image reflected in the water of a river as he thinks that the image belongs to someone else. Unable to embrace his own reflection, he wastes away and is turned into a flower bearing his name, Narcissus, which in English is a daffodil. It's from this myth, actually, that the term “narcissism” derives as it indicates a self-centred personality style characterised by excessive preoccupation with oneself. But in “The Twins” Pascoli doesn't rewrite the myth as we find it in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Instead, he chooses another version, the one by Pausanias. Pausanias is a Greek author who lived in the second century AD. He did not think that the story of Narcissus in Ovid's version was plausible, so he gave another interpretation, which is the one Pascoli follows. Narcissus had a twin sister who died causing Narcissus to grieve. Narcissus would find comfort in looking at his own image in the water, as he would see the face of his twin sister in his. In Pascoli's version, at the end of the story, both siblings are turned to flowers, but not daffodils. The boy is turned into a spring snowflake and the girl into a snowdrop. But we will get to that later, so let's for now listen to the first stanza.
There are some differences in Pascoli's version of Narcissus story. First of all, the twins are not grown-ups, but they are children. The girl has just reached puberty when she dies. And from the text we can infer that the body of the girl does not withstand growth, which is seen as a force, although feeble. And I would like to focus on the original text, which says: “una molle forza di vita”. Although “feeble” is correct, in Pascoli, molle, “soft”, invariably comes with a sexual connotation, as in the famous poem “Nighttime Blooming Jasmine”, a poem that you should really check out if you have the chance. So it seems that the girl dies before becoming a woman, before the development of her reproductive organs, which is a recurring theme in an author such as Pascoli, who was so obsessed with purity and motherhood. In a way, it's the same concept as in other poems of his, where there's a child or a boy dying prematurely, such as in “The Kite”. That's another great poem translated by poet Seamus Heaney. And here we find the same metaphor of the flower still in its bud, not fully blossomed. So in “The Kite”, for instance, Pascoli declares that it's a good thing for the boy to have died innocent and untouched by experience, and we can assume by pain and disappointment. When instead of a boy, we have a girl, this notion has an added sexual connotation, as experience also comes to mean sex. Well, idea of dying before acquiring experience, dying when still a child, is an idea that is not typical of Pascoli only, but it's a trope in late 19th-century European literature. We also find it in an English author whose influence in late 19th century culture was vast and profound, Walter Pater. Elisa, you have indeed researched the presence of Pater in late 19th century Italy, and in Pascoli as well. Can you tell us a bit about the relationship between the two authors?
ELISA
Oh, yes, of course, Elena. Walter Pater was born in 1839 and died in 1894. He was an English essayist, literary art critic, and a key figure in the Aesthetic movement. He is best known for his work Studies in the History of The Renaissance, which was first published in 1873 and then had three more editions during Walter Pater's life, the Renaissance emphasised the notion of art for our sake and the pursuit of beauty as central to life. Pater's work blends philosophical reflection with rich, evocative prose and explores the relationship between art, life and experience. Pater was an extremely influential author in the late Victorian era and late 19th-century Europe. In Italy as well, his impact on European Decadent writers is undeniable. In fact, I would say his influence is clearly visible in an author like Gabriele D'Annunzio, who is recognised by most critics as the only true Decadent author in Italy. Maybe because Pascoli has not traditionally been included in the list of Decadent authors, as his profile is less clearly aligned with the category of Decadence, his relationship with Pater has not been explored much. What we know, however, is that Pater was widely read among the Italian intellectuals writing for journals such as Il Marzocco and Il Convito because these intellectuals were responsible for the diffusion of the Aesthetic movement in Italy. Il Marzocco and Il Convito were advanced art and literature journals, and Pascoli knew them very well. As a matter of fact, his Poemi Conviviali were published in the latter magazine, in Il Convito. And even if Walter Pater was not translated into Italian until 1912, which is the year in which Pascoli died, Pascoli must have read excerpts from Pater's works in French or discussed Pater's ideas. We also know that Pascoli was a lover of literature in the English language, in particular of Tennyson and Longfellow, and so it's definitely possible that he came across Pater's texts. Although we have no trace of this encounter. What Pater and Pascoli seemed to agree on is the notion of childhood as an exceptional, inspirational phase in the life of a person, and in particular, in the development of one's artistic persona. It is during childhood that one encounters beauty in the form of amazement before nature or the universe, and beauty is just a concept born out of this primeval sense of wonder. On the other hand, childhood is also associated with the first discovery of pain and grief, and both authors seem to derive this idea from from their own biographical experiences. We know of Pascoli's premature loss of his family, his father in particular, which informs his entire poetic production. This theme is also present in Pater's autobiographical works, such as his first fictional story, The Child in the House, published in 1878. He called it an imaginary portrait. This is the definition he gives of this story. The Child in the House is an idealised memory of childhood, in which a young boy's awareness of the world around him blossoms. And this is an awareness of beauty and wonder, but also death, as I said before. Fundamentally we can say that both Pater and Pascoli were aware of the coexistence of childhood and adulthood in life, which is sort of a pre-Freudian definition of the subconscious. Childhood is not only a special phase in a person's development, but persists throughout life, and it becomes the very source from which artistic creativity stems.
ELENA
That's interesting. So you said that awareness of the world blossoms, and you could not have used a more fitting expression, because I really want to go back to the very theme of the poem “The Twins”, which is the association of childhood with death and with flowers.
ELISA
Aha, mmm, indeed, we find this trope in Pater as well. And as I said earlier, in both Pater and Pascoli, the notion of artistic genesis is associated to the belief in the universality and inevitability of suffering, whose consciousness occurs very early in life and is amplified by the child's inexperienced perceptions. Examples of this ontological and aesthetic principle are especially present in the fourth chapter of Pascoli's prose, The Little Child, Il Fanciullino, where the autobiographical speaker alludes to the grief that has always characterised his uneventful life. It is then developed in the seventh chapter, and this is one of the two sessions to be written in verse, in which the poet delivers lugubrious omens to the child that he was and still is. And here I quote: “ and as a deathbed, do you know what I will preserve for you? Oh, roses, as a deathbed fallen from the black thorn, the sweet pain that used to be”. End of quote. It is rather difficult, I find, not to perceive the stylistic and thematic contiguity of these lines to the epilogue of another story by Pater, which is called Emerald Uthwart and was published in 1892. Emerald Uthwart is a story in which the young protagonist’s corpse lies, and I quote, “in a coffin almost hidden under very rich scented cut flowers”, end of quote. White rose bushes merge with the overarching presence of death in the country churchyard where Emerald is being buried. There are indeed close analogies between this scene and the passage in The Child in the House, in which the protagonist evokes the deaths of his childhood companions by use using floral imagery. So I quote a longer passage from The Child in the House. He would think he is the protagonist called Florian de Lisle. So we can see that the name itself, Florian, evokes floral imagery. “He would think of Julian, fallen into incurable sickness, as spoiled in the sweet blossom of his skin, like pale amber and his honey like hair of Cecil, early dead, as cut off from the lilies from golden summer days, from women's voices. And then what comforted him a little was the thought of the turning of the child's flesh to violets in the turf above him.” End of quote. So my idea is that Pater's descriptions from The Child in the House and Emerald Uthwart are foundational for the creation of the trans European decadent topos of the pale, fragile or dead child often associated to dying flowers. Flowers in both Pater and Pascoli are part of a Decadent botanical vocabulary, we could say, that originates in Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil and views nature as both the harbinger of life and beauty and of death.
ELENA
Thank you very much, Elisa. This is fascinating. Let's now go back to the story. After the girl dies, the boy looks for her and he finds her in his own reflection in the river, in a forest. Every day he goes there and seemingly talks to the girl in the water, who answers back with the same words. So the second difference with the source of the story in Pausanias' book is that Pascoli preserves the element of Narcissus’ illusion, at least in the first part of the poem them. Let's listen to another few stanzas.
So it's the mother who reveals the illusion. The girl is not among us, she says, but she is in heaven. And the heaven depicted by the mother takes the form of a garden, an image that derives from classical literature and Greek mythology, where the Elysian Fields were depicted as fields of flowers. But more specifically, in Pascoli's poetry, the afterlife is depicted as the comforting garden, though nothing changes, a place shielded from pain. We can now listen to the poem's finale.
So in the last stanza, the narration seems to take place in a mythical past that is common for all mankind. And it's back to this universal past that now Pascoli brings the narration as if it was a foundational myth that is now revealing to narrate the myth behind the existence of two, two very similar flowers, the snowflake and the snowdrop. Both are white flowers, as indicated by their Greek names, leukoios, the white flower, and galanthos, the milky flower. What these flowers have in common, besides the white colour, is that they both blossom in early spring or at the end of winter. So they're early flowers, and so is the narcissus. And since I'm now based in England, one of the first signs of spring, to everyone's joy, is that sight of daffodils blossoming everywhere in March, dotting the fields and popping out at the side of the road.
ELISA
Oh so beautiful!
ELENA
So here Pascoli lists other foundational myths having to do with young people who died and were turned to flowers or birds. The crocus in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book 4 was originally a boy in love with a nymph who didn't love him back, so he pined for her and died, the hyacinth who was a boy accidentally killed by his lover, Apollo, in Metamorphoses, Book 10. And the birds mentioned there also come from Metamorphoses, Book 6. This is actually a gruesome story. I'm not sure I should be telling it as it is, but, well, Philomela had a sister named Procne who was married to the king of Thrace. And while this myth has several variations, the general storyline is that Philomela, after being raped and mutilated by her sister’s husband, obtains her revenge and is transformed into a nightingale, a bird famous for its song. And because of the violence in this myth, the song of the nightingale is often depicted or interpreted as a sorrowful lament. So these are all stories in which the experience of pain is so strong that it dehumanises people. Some are turned to flowers, some to birds. So poetry or art is steeped in the early experience of pain. In this poem, pain causes a premature death, which sort of imprisons the twins in an eternal childhood, preventing the development of adulthood, and especially in the case of the girl of womanhood and sexuality. So this eternal childhood is also the quintessential condition for creativity, which remains throughout life, providing a balm to soothe the pain of existence. Well, thank you very much, Elisa, for being our guest today.
ELISA
Thanks to you, Elena. It was my pleasure. And it was all very, very interesting, thank you again.
ELENA
Thank you. We're gonna now let the listeners enjoy the full poem. Thank you all for listening.