Pleasure
Authors: Gabriele D'annunzio
PENGUIN
CLASSICS
PLEASURE
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO
(1863â1938) 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 baseâLatin, 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, 1863â1938.
[Piacere. English]
Pleasure / Gabriele D'Annunzio ; Translated with a Foreword and Notes by Lara Gochin Raffaelli ; Introduction by Alexander Stille.
pages cm.â(Penguin classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-101-61677-2
I. Title.
PQ4803.P513 2013
853'.912âdc23 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
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 omissions
3
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 notions 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. Comstock
11
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 âPiacere' (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