Irish in Italy: confluence and influence

Despite a chequered history of conflict, cultural interchange has always been Europe’s defining feature. Until the recent arrival of the accurate genetic tracing of population groups (see Stephen Leslie et al.), the only reliable indicators of their movements have been through the archaeological examination of cultural remnants, the things left behind – a matter enormously complicated by the vagaries of what happens to survive, and profuse evidence of trade, borrowings, crossovers, hybrids, in precisely this kind of widespread cultural interchange. How we tell where and how and by whom a pot was manufactured or a song sung is not a simple matter. So in 1875 Oscar Wilde wrote from Italy to his father with detailed drawings of Etruscan artefacts, knowing that as an antiquarian as well as surgeon, William Wilde would be seriously interested in the bedrock underpinning the overlay of Roman culture. (Oscar, who as a child went on digs in Connemara with his father, seems to have seriously considered an apprenticeship in archaeological research). What this shows is that such cultural confluences have a long history, and tracing them matters up to the present day.

Fig. 1 Oscar Wilde, Letter to William Wilde (May 1875)

Prehistorians have identified cultural interchange as a geographical imperative of topography. Europe is, it is fashionable to say, archipelagic. Cultural interchange is thus made almost inevitable by the variety of landscapes in this sea-girt peninsula spotted with offshore islands, its heart divided by mountain ranges and great rivers, where younger fertile plains alternate with older harder infertile metallic-rich rocks, and navigable waterways make travel attractive. So wine and oil from the sunny south has tended to find its way to the forests and rocks of the north to be exchanged for amber, for furs – and for made artefacts, for technologies and craft techniques, for words and ideas. Such busy exchange through mercantile trade routes has long brought with it remarkable currencies and confluences. So, for instance, the first and fullest description of a Viking ship burial and all its beautiful barbaric ritual, comes to us from a native of Baghdad, the polylingual Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, who travelled all the way up the Volga river to visit the Turkic Bulghar communities living in tents in what is now Russia. As well as writing down in Arabic this extraordinary encounter, as a Muslim Ibn Fadlan came armed with the power of words: with books, with precise verbal forms for ceremonial rituals, with philosophies. Bringing all this he swapped it for remarkable accounts of peoples, practices, gods, sagas, and images – all the stuff of literature, in other words. (Without Fadlan’s initial accounts it might be impossible, say, for self-immolation on funeral pyres to provide the climax of Wagner’s Ring cycle). Which should remind us that with the things and technologies of trade come words, languages, stories, symbols, artworks, cultures. If we believe James Joyce, after all, the history of western literature begins with such crossovers. According to him, Homer’s great epic poems are a by-product of the itch of commerce:

Ulysses didn’t want to go off to Troy; he knew that the official reason for the war, the dissemination of the culture of Hellas, was only a pretext for Greek merchants, who were seeking new markets. When the recruiting officers arrived, he happened to be ploughing. He pretended to be mad.

Joyce himself would evidently identify with Odysseus’s enforced wanderings as well as his skill in mimicry, transnationalism, and pacifism. His own novel Ulysses featured as many cultural interchanges as might be allowed an English-speaking Jewish hero of Hungarian background and Gibraltan wife with a predilection for Italian opera living in a sometimes one-eyed Dublin.

Such contingent cultural interchanges provide the rich material which makes up an exhibition newly arrived at the University of Galway, curated by Antonio Bibbò and hosted by the Moore Institute at the Hardiman Research Building. Called Irish in Italy, its focus on the encounters and travels of works of literature and their makers and transmitters tells the story of a small but significant part of this long history.

Some of Irish writers’ travels to Italy are more familiar than others. Instance James Joyce’s fateful decision not (as Gabriel Conroy imagines in the short story ‘The Dead’) to travel west to Galway and Ireland’s western seaboard, but to begin his Odyssean wanderings by heading east to London, Paris, Zurich, and of course Italy: including Rome, Pola, and Trieste where (with his only-sometimes complaining partner, the Galway-born Nora Barnacle) he brought up a family under the auspices of the Austro-Hungarian rather than the British Empire (though, naturally, retaining for ease of travel a British passport). Still, even the story of this interchange has often been abbreviated. The point of scholarly investigations has often been hardly concerned with the effects of what he brought with him (‘I expound Shakespeare to docile Trieste’ he allows himself drily to note in his erotic notebook novelette Giacomo Joyce), and only slightly more concerned with what he took from Italian shores. Instead the encounter is usually framed more by ironic contrast of the kind he encouraged himself – so thinking about the later stories of Dubliners he writes “Many of the frigidities of ‘The Boarding-House’ and ‘Counterparts’ were written while the sweat streamed down my face on to the handkerchief which protected my collar”. It is a truth I hope by now universally acknowledged that by teaching English to Italian-speaking citizens Joyce gained a renewed awareness of the possibilities of English as a foreign language – and scholars like John McCourt (who called him “an Italianized Irishman”) have noted the effect of his interest in the Triestine dialect and mutually productive friendship with his older pupil Ettore Schmitz, otherwise known as the Italian novelist Italo Svevo. But that Amalia Popper, according to Richard Ellmann the subject of Joyce’s passion in Giacomo Joyce, would in turn become the Italian translator of his Dublin stories of youthful desire, seems even now remarkable.

Fig. 2 James Joyce, Araby (from Dubliners), trans. Amalia Risolo Popper (Trieste: C. Moscheni, 1935)

It is through an exhibition like this we can penetrate these nuances and pursue other stories. I knew, for instance, that Joyce published many essays about Irish subjects in Italian newspapers like Il Piccolo della serra, forming an important conduit for this cultural exchange. That his first creative work to be published in Italy was a poem about singing offstage in a multi-lingual performance by a group of Zurich players including Robert Browning’s play In the Balcony, I did not. Conceiving an Italian Joyce casts a new light on his poetry of the time, which collected modestly in Pomes Penyeach (1927) often arrives with Italian motifs intertwined, borrowing lines from Triestine folk songs, but also modern opera arias, or in other words contemporary pop songs, as sung by Italian rowers in his poem ‘Watching the Needleboats at San Sabba’ which replays lines from Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, The Girl of the Golden West (1910), his gold-rush era American horse opera. How such extraordinary international fusions helped with the creation of Giacomo Joyce, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake is a story that can be only hinted at. Still it is worth remembering the despair of Joyce’s printers and typesetters in having not only to be worried about libel when printing the names of real people and businesses in Dublin, but increasingly to set in type wilder words and sentences revised at the last minute in languages unfamiliar to them, and even to the world. Through his revisions and experiments Joyce, in other words, became a scourge for printers across Europe, and Finnegans Wake, a grab bag pot-pourri fondue of all the stories ever told and retold in Europe in all of its languages, had extracts printed in Italian translation with a bold disclaimer (not quite accurate given its mangling of the title):

The reader is warned that in this excerpt from Finnegan’s Wake [sic] there are no printing errors. Every word, every comma, and every accent have been faithfully reproduced from the original. For anything which might appear to be the fault of the typesetter, Joyce can be blamed or credited.

Strange cultural fusions and the difficulties of translation are not the only things to be discovered through this exhibition’s fascinating tales. Indeed probably its major theme is precisely how Irish writers were translated, interpreted, received, reworked, remade in Italy – and not always in the ways we might expect. For Joyce what is striking is how he arrives in Italy as poet and playwright, thanks to the mediation of Italian figures. Becoming known in Italy for writing plays had a practical reasoning – so at least Joyce records in a letter: “Exiles will come out in an Italian version next month in Milan the translator being Mr Linati who finds that book more suited to introduce my writings than the novel or the stories.” Cost was at the heart of this. As in nearly all his letters Joyce keeps an eye on the money: here he notes that exchange rates being what they are a novel in English costs 24 lire and French novels cost 20 lire. “So”, he concludes, “Italians are now reading only the Italian novels priced at 4.5 lire.” Even if we had happened to chance upon this passage in Joyce’s letters, it is thanks to this exhibition that we can see the wider contexts of presenting Joyce as a playwright. The “Mr Linati” Joyce mentions, translator and editor Carlo Linati, is perhaps just the most influential of so many in-between figures the exhibition does so well to trace.

Two of my favourite objects in the exhibition are presented side-by-side, books of selected comedies by Augusta Lady Gregory and tragedies of WB Yeats, complete with Italian portraits of each by the artist Mancini. Both were translated (alongside a volume of Synge) by Linati in the years leading up to Joyce’s breakthrough, so the idea of publishing Joyce Joyce’s Exiles emerges as part of a direct Irish theatrical sequence.

Fig. 3 WB Yeats, Tragedie irlandesi,ed. and trans. Carlo Linati (Milan: Studio Editoriale Lombardo, 1914)

Like Joyce, then, Gregory and Yeats were first presented to the Italian public as Irish playwrights. In turn this casts new light on this anniversary year 2023. One hundred years ago in 1923 WB Yeats sailed to Sweden to receive the Nobel Prize. In his speech he makes it plain that he accepts the award on behalf of Irish theatre, crediting chiefly fellow playwrights Augusta Gregory and John Synge, a generous act which is sometimes dismissed as propaganda on behalf of the Abbey Theatre and his own allegedly unperformable plays (though in Italy they turned out pretty well as operas). With proof of his presentation as a dramatist in Europe alongside other Irish writers as dramatists, Yeats’s acceptance speech gains considerable weight, especially when we think that Joyce himself with the help of one of his pupils Nicolo Vidacovich had translated Synge’s Riders to the Sea and Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen into Italian, and himself promoted and acted with the Zurich players Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. When you think about it, if (according to Percy Shelley) poems are essentially untranslatable, and novels from abroad can seem long and obscure, plays through the electricity of staging can be put across by enthusiasts in an hour or less to a wide group, finding an immediate audience all at once.  

The scholarly word for this kind of thing, reception, makes it sound like a passive process. In fact what an exhibition like this makes clear is that this was very much an active matter, the work of individuals like Linati, writers, translators, editors, directors, publishers, journalists, all with a gift for cultural transmission. What this activity does is to help to create a series of overlapping audiences, who are then increasingly likely to come back for more, buying, reading, performing, recommending, reviewing, and continuing the work of dissemination. That’s how literary reputations are made and how they cross cultural boundaries. 

On this theme I must mention one of the most surprising objects from the exhibition. This features the Irish-speaking poet O Rafteira, otherwise known as Anthony Raftery, a nineteenth-century Irish-speaking poet of Mayo and South Galway much championed around the turn of the century by Douglas Hyde, Augusta Gregory, and Yeats himself, and the subject of many of their plays, prose works, and poems. I was mildly astonished to find him turn up as the titular figure of a book entitled Raftery Il Cieco e sua Moglie Hilaria. This is an Italian translation, published posthumously, of a musical picaresque novel about the wandering poet, Blind Raftery and his wife Hilaria (1924), by Donn Byrne, who perhaps because of his early death remains a less familiar figure from the literary revival. In one of his earlier prefaces Byrne, who was born Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne in New York and brought up in Armagh, states baldly: “I have written a book of Ireland for Irishmen”. It’s fascinating to discover how easily his novel about Raftery, like so many of these books “of Ireland”, becomes a book for Italians (even now the one available review in goodreads.com is written in Italian). One of the book’s functions here is to show the extraordinary growth in appetite for Irish material in Italy – especially, following Joyce’s European succès de scandale with Ulysses, for Irish prose. Translated by the indefatigable Gian Dauli, it is published with an Irish harp on the cover in a series under the publisher’s heading Modernissima. However romantic and historical the contents, this book, in other words, helped in presenting everything from Ireland as having contemporary resonance. It was a resonance that only grew in the late 1930s and during the Second World War, when English literature was branded a product of the enemy Allies, and British and American writers were generally personae non grata. As a direct consequence, Irish writing in English achieved a remarkable second Renaissance in Italy. All the same there were limits: George Bernard Shaw’s timely Ginevra (1938), featuring pen-portraits of argumentative fascist leaders, was suppressed until after the war. As the curator sagely remarks, “the history of cultural exchanges is filled with missed turnings and dead ends”.

Because of its visual impact (or perhaps just because I like maps) probably my favourite panel in the exhibition is not one that recounts so skilfully the details of the translation, publishing, and reviews of Irish authors and all their receptions in Italy, but simply, a map that displays the routes of their travels across the country. It features Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, James Stephens, and others – and it is probably fair to say that altogether Augusta Gregory (very much of this parish) emerges as the most experienced and well-travelled of the Italian visitors.

So much so that in 1907, as we can observe, she took along to Florence the world-weary forty-something WB Yeats, who wrote letters home recounting his experience as a tourist: “I go every day to the Baptistry or the Duomo or some such place. There is always a hum in the Baptistry – I thought it was mass at first but found it was only people reading out the guide book – the old age of faith.” While gently self-mocking his touristic observances, for Yeats this trip turned out to be the most influential of his life. Recovering from the vitriolic attacks on the theatre after the Abbey’s controversial premiere of The Playboy of the Western World, in Italy he tried to take heart from the aristocratic patronage demonstrated so luxuriously in the artworks of Florence and the court at Urbino – renewing his sense of the importance of independent patronage, and of the artist not playing to the crowd, which would indelibly colour his kind of modernism. But in visiting Urbino he also renewed a vital sense of the craft in simple making, the need for intense skilful labour to seem spontaneous, almost throwaway, learnt from the not-caring sprezzatura nonchalance prized in the Italian nobleman Castiglione’s book, The Courtier – as Yeats put it in ‘Adam’s Curse’, “a line will take us hours maybe / But if it does not seem a moment’s thought / All our stitching and unstitching has been naught”. All at once, then, these Italian ideas allowed modernism’s difficulty in Yeats hands to achieve the simplicity of song.

Fig. 4 Oscar Wilde, Intenzioni (selection of essays), ed. Virgilio Bondois (Milan: Facchi, 1920)

Oscar Wilde was not, at first, routinely characterized as Irish in Italian letters. Instead he was received as part of a European avant-garde. Despite the success of his French-language Salomé in play and opera form, publishers in Catholic Italy were still wary of Joyce’s proposal to translate his scandalous aesthetic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Yet Wilde had stolen productively from Italy too. In fact it was a poem about Italy that kickstarted his career. It emerged from an another Italian trip two years after he had sent drawings of Etruscan pots and sculptures to his father – this one a jaunt to Italy from Oxford with his old Classics tutor from Trinity College Dublin, John Pentland Mahaffy – before Mahaffy whisked him away to Greece, to stop him flirting too closely with Rome and the suspect Roman Catholicism. Wilde was unlucky in that arriving back at university weeks late for his required tutorial courses (as a university teacher naturally not something I endorse) with what he fondly hoped might be the grand excuse of an immersion in Europe’s originary cultures, he was fined and sent down till the following year. He was extraordinarily lucky, though, that the theme for that next year’s Oxford University Newdigate Poetry prize turned out to be ‘Ravenna’, which gong, of course, he won: having explored the Byzantine churches of this Italian city, he was able to open his poem with a picturesque if fanciful entry into the city on horseback (he had actually come by train). The Byzantine relics of Ravenna mattered to Yeats too – on his 1907 trip it was the interiors and mosaics that most floored him – as did those in the Norman churches of Sicily, which, if you look at the map, you can see he visited in 1925 with the American poet Ezra Pound. It sounds unlikely, but these Italian experiences left indelible marks on his poetry. In the opening poem to his 1928 volume The Tower we tend to picture a figure quite a lot like Yeats emphatically leaving a country a fair amount like Ireland:

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees

– Those dying generations – at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas […]

Admittedly, this draws a sexier picture of 1920s Ireland than usual – other depictions are available, especially following the establishment in 1925 of the Evil Publications Committee and the introduction of censorship, against which Yeats argued so passionately in the Senate. But where is this figure, this old man going? In the poem he is forever leaving, heading east, travelling into the past, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, as the title says. But in fact Yeats, who never made it to Istanbul, never mind the historical Byzantium, is not really going to any such place. In part he is sailing to Stockholm and its neo-Byzantine mosaics to receive the Nobel Prize – but, mostly, of course, he is really going to Italy, returning in mind to the spectacular Byzantine mosaics of Palermo and Cefalu, in Sicily, to St Mark’s in Venice, and to those in Ravenna he had first stood before with such awe on his Italian tour with Augusta Gregory. As if spurred by the memory, recovering from illness thereafter he spent a series of winters in the Italian city of Rapallo arguing with Ezra Pound about poetry and Mussolini (encounters partly traced in my ‘Men of Letters: WB Yeats’s A Packet for Ezra Pound’ (2018), and Lauren Arrington’s book The Poets of Rapallo (2021)). (Unlike his wife George Yeats he never learned Italian, and in mind constantly returned to Irish scenes – his invitation by Luigi Pirandello to appear at the 1934 Volta Conference on Theatre in Rome was as a propagandist for Irish theatre, not fascism). What this exhibition does so well above all is to enrich our sense of so much of these cultural interchanges, especially by tracing their previously hidden reverberations in Italy, and we get quite a new picture of Irish writing because of it.  

In Yeats’s poem ‘Adam’s Curse’ he derisively namechecks the genteel occupations of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen – and more sensitively instances the hard graft of those who scrub a kitchen pavement, or of stonebreakers, maybe those laboriously making famine roads here in Galway, or post-famine helping to build the university’s front quad. He concludes that being a poet can actually be tougher:

For to articulate such sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet

Be thought an idler […]

Well I don’t know about that, but I do know that, as William Morris said about trying to fit the right words into poems, producing an exhibition is a devil of a lot of trouble, and to get the thing to fly at all requires vast amounts work from lots of people, and not only the curator Antonio Bibbò, of whose research we see here but a few select flowers (much more is available in book form in his comprehensive Irish Literature in Italy in the Era of the World Wars (2022)). To make it so interesting is a considerable achievement. It is heartily, therefore, that we should salute all those collaborators from across Europe who will have helped in ways large and small in creating it and causing it to arrive here for us to lose ourselves in.