2007 / 14 Prospero. Rivista di Letterature Straniere, Comparatistica e Studi Culturali

Augustin Ujevic has been regarded as one of the greatest poets in the south Slavic area, but is still unknown in Italy, except for a few translations of his works published in Italy or in the Croatian Italian speaking community. One of the favourite themes of his poetry was his native Dalmatia, but he was convinced that Dalmatians owed to Italy and the Italian heritage great part of their humanistic culture. In 1914 he published the sonnet “Il Commiato” in a collective volume, along with poems written by Ivo Andrić, future Nobel Laureate, and other young Croatian authors, and added to it a humoristic autobiography. The essay discusses the sonnet “Il Commiato”, with its particular three versions and their different orthographies following first the Italian and later the modern Croatian and Serbian rules. The analysis concerns as well the lexical and the metrical choices and finally the “young boat” of the poem, defined as the beginning of a poetic and human experience which will bring the author to a peculiar solitude in his withdrawal from common social life and from literary contemporary life, while being still able to maintain a lively and productive dialogue with interpreters and readers.

Henry Bauchau is one of the greatest Belgian contemporary writers. He started his literary career only in 1958 after having resorted to psychoanalysis to solve some issues. He later became a psychoanalyst himself. His 'cycle grec' novels, "Œdipe sur la route" (1990) and "Antigone" (1997) were followed by the 'journaux intimes', "Jour après jour, journal 1983-1989" (1992) and "Journal d’Antigone" (1997) all written about the same main characters, just as the short stories collected in "Les Vallées du bonheur profond", that could be seen as an important tool to understand the previous works. Bauchau re-writes Oedipus’s and Antigone’s myths, re-elaborates them following a 20th-century logic of destruction and resurrection, and then makes them the paradigm of lives that are guilty of their own existence. The essay reflects on the marine soul of Oedipus, on the sculpting of the 'barque' as a process of transformation and phenomenological representation, and on the theme of the 'vague', which establishes itself in the artistic realm since the 19th Century as the study and the representation of the blind and awesome force of the sea.

Pascal D’Angelo and Francesco Ventresca were among the many Italians who passed through Ellis Island at the beginning of the 20th Century, and wrote about their experience in the autobiographies "Son of Italy" (1924) and "Personal Reminiscences" (1936). Cynthia Wong underlines that in those same years the phenomenon of ethnic autobiographies began. The ‘autobiographies of Americanisation’ were written by emigrants to reaffirm their identities while showing at the same time the struggle to reconcile the need to preserve one’s heritage with the desire to assimilate into the mainstream American culture. Both authors hail from the village of Introdacqua in Abruzzo, and both follow a linear path in their text: the life before emigration, the travel to America, and the conflict between the life the emigrants hoped for and reality. The essay examines the two narratives by following their similar approaches towards a shared history of loss, voyage, hard work, disillusionment, difficulties, but especially (and differently from other emigrants) of desire to be acknowledged in their openness towards ‘alterity’, trying, as both authors are, to acquire the new language, its poetics and culture. Both autobiographies become then the expression of a real cultural transition and of the capability of their authors to build bridges between different cultures and different versions of themselves.

Quite differently from what we might expect, for the 16th-century Spanish subjects the most momentous event was the Reconquista and the fall of Granada, not the discovery of the New World. Surely enough the Spanish people read eagerly the adventures of the conquistadores, but there are not many literary works about the New World, while the Reconquista had much greater appeal. The essay wants to analyse one of the few texts dedicated to the theme, "La famosa comedia del Nuevo Mundo Descubierto por Cristòbal Colòn" by Lope de Vega, in order to investigate the reasons behind this conspicuous void. The main aim of Lope de Vega is to certify the ‘buen nascimiento’ of the main character and the fact that his enterprise received the blessing of the Lord, in addition to the help of the Reyes Catòlicos. At the beginning of the 16th Century, the Conquista of the New Continent did not represent the ground for adventure and for heroic and chivalric deeds, which was still to be found, instead, in the Mediterranean area and in the war against the Ottoman Empire. Apparently, in America heroic deeds were too contaminated by the gold rush to be interesting and become matter for mythology.

Fabienne Kanor’s works, "D’eaux douces" and "Humus", deal with the comparison between a past lived in faraway countries, like Martinique or the Africa of the origins, and a present in metropolitan France, and uses the themes of water, sailing, and the permanence of slavery in the collective mind to explore the effects of this displacement. Kanor was born in Martinique but raised in France, and defined herself as a ‘negropolitaine’. In her first novel, "D’eaux douces", the focus of the narration lays on the initiatory journey to France made by a young French speaking Antillean girl. The journey will help the girl in the discovery of her identity and sexuality. Slavery is a very marginal theme here, barely mentioned as a metaphor of young Frida’s present condition. The second novel, "Humus", is completely devoted to the description of the journey undertaken by the slave ship 'Le Soleil' that left Nantes in 1774 to collect slaves along the African coasts in order to deport them to the French Antilles, and the decision of a dozen slaves to throw themselves at sea to avoid a life in captivity. The essay investigates the postcolonial poetics of the two novels and focuses in particular on the isotopy of water and the image of the ship.

The ship and the sea have always held an important place in literature, with their powerful imagery. Ships are constantly central and have become the symbol of the proximity of “here and elsewhere”, the proximity of real, ruled places, and the boundless space which contains imagined places. The title of the interdisciplinary conference “Transatlantici ed altri bastimenti: Transiti, desideri, memorie” (“Ocean Liners and Other Ships: Passages, Desires, Memories”), evokes the sea as supreme boundary and as object of desire and fear, but also as the crossing of oceanic distances, thus foregrounding the crucial theme of wandering, a motif which underlays the various contributions and is declined in a multitude of significations, historical and social concretions. Beside that of the journey, many are the issues, the figures, and the topoi connected with the ship within the antique and the modern imagery. The articles are grouped in three sections: “From Legends to Scenes”, “Europe and Beyond”, “From the Empire to the Global World”.

In Herman Melville’s last novel, "The Confidence Man", space is completely absent: the action is set on a steamboat sailing down the Mississippi on Fools’ Day from Saint Louis to New Orleans, but ends without an explanation nearby Cairo. The scenario is never described, and this detail is more striking because space has always played a peculiar role in Melville’s work. Scholars have agreed upon the idea that Melville was trying to create a structure and a language that reflected his disillusionment towards the United States’ society, and, perhaps, the disappearance of the landscape from the narration is just another telling sign of the author’s set of mind. "The Confidence-Man" is Melville’s attempt to explore space and its meaning – that of the archetypical, symbolic core of the nation, rather than merely the geographical one. The archetypical significance of the ship and the river is what is explored in this analysis of "The Confidence-Man". Melville deconstructs space as he deconstructs the Con-Man: both are the sign of an American identity that is definitely lost, the signs of a broken confidence in American future.

The article considers the theme of the ship in Chateaubriand’s "Les Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe". It includes three thematic sections: the first focuses on the poet’s great sea-voyages, the second and third foreground the many symbolic implications suggested by the 'navire'. Like a foreign country endowed with a language of its own, the ship is the object in which the intellectual and artist identifies himself, as the symbol of his existential vagrancy.

The first known ship without sails is the Ark, and the absence of the sails makes it clear that it can float only because of divine intervention: Noah’s family trusted God’s commands and boarded the Ark without questioning its capacity of floating over the waters during the deluge. The second reference to this image in the Bible, albeit as an allegory, is in the tale of Moses: he was abandoned in a basket floating on the river’s waters until he was found. The basket could be seen as a little ‘sail-less boat’ and Moses’s rescue is clearly due to divine intervention. During the Middle Ages the iconography of the ‘sail-less ship’ was very popular, and it was used in prayer books and church paintings as a sign of supernatural situations. People were frequently forced to board one of such vessels as a punishment or as a death sentence. In some tales there were corpses abandoned in ‘sail-less vessels’ for various reasons. In Medieval literature, several cases of the ‘sail-less’ or ‘captain-less ship’ can be found. Various characters and ‘special’ objects (obviously with very different fates) board on such a ship: Mary Magdalene, James the Great, the Holy Face of Lucca, knights and dames from England and Catalonia, even the Holy Grail. Examples of these journeys are presented and discussed.

Derek Walcott wrote that “History is sea”: sailing, as a movement, goes beyond the borders and in the postcolonial narratives the transatlantic is a powerful symbol of the transnational space. The essay wants to analyse the images of the marine world, of the ocean and especially of the ship, the transatlantic as the fundamental and chronotopic figure of the postcolonial theories, particularly in relation to the delineation of a contemporary cultural and global reality as a transnational space in which take shape political and aesthetical expressions that challenge the modern conceptions on nationality, ethnicity and on cultural authenticity. The theories on postcolonialism by Paul Gilroy and Édouard Glissant are here examined. Gilroy considers the ship that moves through the archipelagos as the representation of the instability and the mutability of identities that are in perpetual development, since the ship’s movement is transversal, not linear, and it crosses the “Black Atlantic”, transmitting multicultural, hybrid ideas during its journey. Édouard Glissant is the theorist of the ‘Antillanité’ as the place of choice for the crossing of different cultures in the French-speaking Caribbean, and moves from his vision of the American and Caribbean landscape towards a broader, global identity.

One of the first best sellers in Croatian literature has been "Korabljica" (“The Ship”) written by Andrjia Kačić Miošić in 1760. The book narrates the events that took place in the south of the Slavic territories from Jesus’ birth to contemporary times, but features no maritime narrative nor any adventurous tale. The reason for its name is due to the fact that the text contains “every kind of thing and event”, just as Noah’s Ark did. Literature uses the image of the vessel as a metaphor for riches because of the wide variety of objects it can store: Serbo-Croatian had many words to define vessels of any kind because the idea of the ship was fascinating and evocative. The representation on the stage of such an all-encompassing idea, however, was not that easy. The essay proposes the reading of three dramas written in what was once called Serbo-Croatian: "Cristobal Colon" by Miroslav Krleža, "Amerikanska jahta u splitskoj luci" by Milan Begović, and "My name is Mitar" by Vida Ognjenović. The three plays take all place (entirely or partially) on a ship and they are all characterised as a sociological study of the period in which they were written. This sociological element is here analysed.

Traditionally, ships were linked to the underworld and water was seen as the border between the world of the living and the one of the dead. This symbology dates back to the Egyptians, when the boat was a symbol of the passing of time and of the soul’s journey to the afterlife. For Christians, the boat was the image of safety amidst perils, hence its identification with the Church. In 1150 the Norman amanuensis Robert Wace translated "De Conceptione Mariae" into his dialect. The text, written by St. Anselm of Canterbury, narrates the troubles monk Helsin had to face before going back to William the Conqueror’s court after a difficult mission in Denmark. The ship was about to sink, when Helsin had the vision of an angel promising to save him and his crew in exchange for a vow: Helsin had to add the fest of the Immaculate Conception to the other festivals dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The essay discusses the political implications of the text by Wace, since the author added a real event (the White Ship tragedy, a shipwreck in which the heirs of Henry Beauclerc, son of William Rufus, died) to the legend. Over time, the motif of the ship in a storm at sea became a literary scheme. In the essay, the case of the “Puys” of Northern France with their poetic competitions in which the theme of the Immaculate Conception was compulsory, is mentioned – along with some examples centred on the image of the sea and navigation.

Peter Hektorović was born in 1487 in Stari Grad on the island of Hvar, where he spent most of his life. He was born into a noble family and had the kind of life expected by a man of his station, mixing the care of his family’s wealth with the study of literature, philosophy and architecture. Hektorović was a learned man: schooled in Latin and Italian, he knew also the local Croatian vernacular and his main work "Ribanje I ribrasko prigovaranje" ("Fishing and Fishermen’s Talk") was written in 1557 during one of the most fecund periods of Croatian literature. According to Hektorović, the text is the result of a boat trip to the islands of Hvar, Brač and Šolta, together with two fishermen. Sailing and fishing were the main industries of the time in that area, and Hektorović had a genuine interest in them: his fascination with the sea brought him to describe the surroundings in great detail, to the point that modern scholars could exactly re-trace the route of his peregrinations, since the places’ names have not changed during the centuries. The essay examines the three days of the journey narrated in the text and focuses as well on the bugarštica, two of which are accompanied by their melody: it is the first musical notation of Dalmatian popular songs.

The essay proposes a reading of Baudelaire’s oeuvre by focussing the attention on the terms related to the voyage at sea in order to delineate their modalities, values and meanings. The analysis will include in its corpus the works "Fleurs du Mal", "Les Paradis artificiels" and especially "Le Spleen de Paris". Jean-Marie Viprey already examined the main themes of the "Fleur du Mal" and designed a kind of ‘cartography’ of the poet’s vocabulary, underlining the dynamism of Baudelaire’s lexicon. Elettra Bordino Zorzi observed how the nautical terms were associated to the soul, as it happens in "Les Sept Vieillards"’s final strophe, where the reason is unable to steer the ship of the soul, leaving it at the mercy of the waves in the middle of the raging sea. The essay investigates the vocabulary and the recurrent theme of the sea, which gives rhythm to the oeuvre of Baudelaire.

America is evoked as a destination in this essay which pictures a Neapolitan version of the popular perception of big steamships, as it is represented in the play "Scalo marittimo" by Raffaele Viviani. In this comedy, Viviani deals for the first time with a social, economic, and political problem: emigration. By describing the life of the Neapolitan harbour, Viviani can limit himself to a photography of it, letting this world explain and partly condemn itself. Beside the theme of emigration, on which the play is focused, the conflict between social classes is also foregrounded: on the one side, there are wealthy people going on a cruise in first class, on the other, there is the working class, forced to leave its country in order to produce riches in America. Moreover, Naples lives through another image, that of tourists who see places described to them in marvellous stories, who fall in love with the enchanted setting, rather than with the reality they are directly experiencing. What emerges is finally a clear judgement on a reality characterised by misery, on parasitic wealth, and on pernicious forms of speculation.

The essay analyses the marine metaphors of Enzensberger’s poetry. In the poems prevails the evocation of a primary and elementary relationship with nature, undisturbed by technique and civilisation. The first phase of this relationship is distinguished by an utopian character which, from the mid-Sixties, starts to be reduced by the consolidation of an argumentative line with a ‘kulturkritisch’ character centred on the images of shipwreck and death by water. During the Eighties, the initial utopian enthusiasm regains strength and the use of marine metaphors is accompanied by the evocation of a European and transnational community as an opportunity of civil regeneration.

Georges Simenon did a long journey through Africa with his spouse Tigy, a voyage that took them from Marseille to Egypt, Sudan, Congo and then back home on the West African route with a cargo ship. After that, Simenon wrote a reportage, three novels and four short stories, all set in Africa, and often referred to that journey to criticise the colonial system. The first book written after the African tour was "Coup de Lune", an important literary undertaking since it harbours many of the most significant themes that Simenon will develop during his future literary career. The journey is the focus of the narration, especially as a passage from quietness to unquietness, from clarity to obscurity. The main character, Joseph Timar, travels to Africa with his head filled by exotic fantasies which later abruptly dissolve against the difficult and corrupt situation of the continent. The journey ends up in a failure on the professional and personal side, and it reveals the colonial society in all its decline. The motif of the journey on a ship is pivotal in the first of the “romans durs” by Simenon. It carries different and multiple aspects (the condemnation of the colonial system, the inflexibility of the newly arrived French man, the love for the world of 'bateliers') but concentrates especially on the need to represent human beings as victims of their own anxiety and as incapable of finding a positive answer to their uninterrupted questions on acts and events.