Dino Campana: Buenos Aires

Dino Campana

 
The impressions of Dino Campana on his trip- alongside other Italian emigrants- to Buenos Aires at the age of 23.

Buenos Aires

The vessel advances slowly 
In the morning greyness through the fog
Upon the yellow waters of a fluvial sea.
The city emerges- ashen and veiled
Past the threshold of a strange port.
Thronging in the harsh elation of impending battle
The emigrants rage and rampage.
Oranges are tossed by a group of Italians
Clothed in the absurd fashion of the portenos
To the wild-eyed and shrieking villagers.
A boy, of slight frame,
An offspring of liberty, surges forth,
A colourful ribbon in his hand.
And makes as if to greet them.
But the Italians snarl savagely.

Buenos Aires

Il bastimento avanza lentamente
Nel grigio del mattino tra le nebbia
sull'acqua gialla d'un mare fluviale
Appare la citta' girgia e velata.
Si entra in un porto strano. Gli emigranti
Impazzano e inferocian accalcandosi
Nell'aspra ebbrezza d'imminente lotta.
Da un gruppo d'italiani ch'e' vestito
In un modo ridicolo alla moda
Bonarense si gettano arance
Ai paesani stralunati e urlanti.
Un ragazzo dal porto legerissimo
Prole di liberta', pronto allo slancio
Li guarda colle mani nelle fascia
Variopinta ed accenna ad un saluto.
Ma ringhiano feroci gli italiani.

Odessa's Potemkin Steps Built from Triestine Sandstone.

"In addition to its palaces, churches, hotels, shops, museums, library, and schools, the city built a monument that has since become its best-known symbol: the giant stairway now known as the Potemkin steps. This city on a hill needed direct access to the harbour below it. Winding paths and rude wooden stairs served until the decision was made in 1837 to construct a 'monstrous staircase'. Using sandstone from Trieste, the Russian architects A.I.Mel'nikov and Pot'e laid 220 stairs. A man by the name of Upton executed the project... Through Eisenstein's famous film of the 1920s, the 'Battleship Potemkin' the stairs were made familiar to movie-gores all over the world. Koch commented: 'A flight of steps unequalled in magnificence, leads down the declivity to the shore and harbour'"

( from Patrick Herlihy, Odessa: A History 1794-1914 p 140)

Herlihy does go on to note that the Trieste sandstone was gradually replaced by granite from the Boh region. G. Sperandeo claims that it was two Italian architects, Rossi and Toricelli, who designed the staircase. 

Erwin Piscator, Lotte Lenya and others in Odessa (1931) for shooting 'The Revolt of the Fishermen'

Erwin Piscator

"Piscator's task ... was to make a film of Anna Seghers' novella The Revolt of the Fishermen. Originally the idea was that it should be produced in two versions, German and Russian, and to this end a German cast was engaged, including Lotte Lenya, Paul Wegener and Leo Reuss, and brought to Odessa on the Black Sea where shooting was supposed to start around the beginning of November. Not much seems to have got done during the three months of their stay there; according to Asja Lacis, who acted as Piscator's interpreter throughout the making of the film, there were weeks of delays as they waited for a lens hood; then Piscator replanned the fishing town which the art director had built him (for which he roped in John Heartfield, who had come to show his work in Moscow); they had to wait again finally for the whole thing to be rebuilt after a storm had blown it down. As a result the German version had to be scrapped; since Wegener for one was due to play Mephisto in Darmstadt in January; none of the footage remains. The Russian version however went forward, though the seeming intention that Wegener should play the part of Kedennek in both versions had to be abandoned. Part was shot on trawlers in Murmansk on the Arctic, most of the rest once more in Odessa; little was done in the studio. Piscator felt that he was keeping close to the form of the book, which describes a lone agitator's arrival in a semi-mythical fishing village and his desperate, almost fatalistic, leadership of a broken strike. But much of its almost classical compactness was lost, and there was a general enlargement and intensification, not only in the severe expressiveness of the photography, but also in the introduction of such episodes as a storm at sea, the burning of the trawler company's offices and Kedennek's funeral procession with its hundreds of mourning fishermen whose top hats (specially dispatched from Moscow) were symbolically blown off by the storm. 1200 fishermen were involved in the strike episodes, which became near-revolutionary crowd series."

(from John Willett The Theatre of Erwin Piscator: Half a Century of Politics in the Theatre pp.128-9)

As the German version never got made, viewers have been deprived of seeing Lotte Lenya's playing the role of Maria in the film). 

Chekhov's final travel plans (Trieste to Odessa)

In Anton Chekhov's last letter to his sister Masha we hear of the author's final travel plans. Complaining of the heat which he wishes to get away from, he states that he would like to go to Como but that everyone is running away from the heat there. And then he states that:

"I should like to go from Trieste to Odessa by steamer, but I don't know how far it is possible now, in June and July... If it should be rather hot it doesn't matter; I should have a flannel suit. I confess I dread the railway journey. It is stifling in the train now, particularly with my asthma, which is made worse by the slightest thing. Besides, there are no sleeping carriages from Vienna right up to Odessa; it would be uncomfortable. And we should get home by railway sooner than we need, and I have not had enough holiday yet. ..."

He had visited Trieste ten years earlier in the autumn of 1894.

Pier Paolo Pasolini : Il di da la me muart (The Day of My Death). A Triestine Prophesy.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

The Day of My Death

In a city, Trieste or Udine,
along an avenue of lindens
when the leaves change
colour in spring,
I shall fall down dead
under a sun burning
blond and high
and close my eyes,
leaving the sky to its light.


Under a linden warm with green
I shall fall into the black
of death, which the sun
and lindens will dispel.
Beautiful boys
will run in the light
that I've just left,
flying out of schools,
curls falling onto their brows.


I shall still be young
in a bright shirt
my sweet hair streaming
in the bitter dust.
I shall be still warm
and a boy running down
the asphalt avenue
shall lay a hand upon
my crystal lap.

(Translation Stephen Sartarelli)

Il dì da la me muàrt.

Ta na sitàt, Trièst o Udin, 
ju par un viàl di tèjs, 
di vierta, quan' ch'a múdin 
il colòur li fuèjs, 
i colarài muàrt 
sot il soreli ch'al art 
biondu e alt 
e i sierarài li sèjs, 
lassànlu lusi, il sèil. 

Sot di un tèj clípid di vert 
i colarài tal neri 
da la me muàrt ch'a dispièrt 
i tèjs e il soreli. 
I bièj zuvinús 
a coraràn ta chè lus 
ch'i ài pena pierdút, 
svualànt fòur da li scuelis 
cui ris tal sorneli. 


Jo i sarài 'ciamò zòvin 
cu na blusa clara 
e i dols ciavièj ch'a plòvin 
tal pòlvar amàr. 
Sarài 'ciamò cialt 
e un frut curínt pal sfalt 
clípit dal viàl 
mi pojarà na man 
tal grin di cristàl. 

Tomaž Šalamun: Acquedotto (or A Birth in Trieste Rescheduled)

Tomaž Šalamun

ACQUEDOTTO

I should've been born in Trieste in 1884
on the acquedotto, but it didn't turn out that way.
I remember the three-storied reddish house,
the ground floor with its furnished living room,
my great-grandfather (my father)
nervously studying the stock market reports,
blowing cigar smoke and calculating quickly.
When I was already for months inside my great-
grandmother, there was a family council,
the result of which was the postponement
of my arrival for two generations.
The decision was written down, the sheet stuffed
into an envelope, sealed and sent to an archive in Vienna.
I remember traveling back toward the light
on my belly, and watching an old man
fusing as he measured the shelf, taking another body from the 
shelf
and shoving it by the head down the air shaft.
I had the impression I was seven years old,
and that my substitute, my grandfather,
was a bit older, nine or ten.
I was composed. At the same time these events disturbed me.
I remember that for a time I withered,
most likely because of a strong light,
and then my lungs flattened like a bag.
When I reached the proper tonus I fell asleep.
I knew my body was down below,
and in my dream I saw it many times.
It was that of a slow-moving man with mustaches,
a dreamer and banker his whole life. 

(Tomaž Šalamun translated by Charles Simic)

Srečko Kosovel : The heart, Trieste, is sick.

Srečko Kosovel

BLIZU POLNOCI

Blizu polnoci

Muhe v casi umirajo.

Ogenj je ugasnil.

Lepa Vida, bridkost je

v tvojem spominu.

Stravinski v avtomobilu.

Bucanje morja.

O biti 5 minut sam.

Srce- Trst je bolno.

Zato je Trst lep.

Bolecina cvete v lepoti.

ROUND MIDNIGHT.

It is near midnight.

Flies die in a glass.

The fire extinguished.

Fair Vida, there is torment

in your memory.

Stravinsky is in his car.

The sea roars.

Oh to be alone for five minutes.

The heart, Trieste, is sick.

And so Trieste is beautiful.

Agony flowers in beauty.

"I am Rifka Bronfman!" Edgardo Cozarinsky's The Bride from Odessa

Edgardo Cozarinsky

"When she speaks at last, it is not to comment on the tale she has listened to so attentively.
'When do you embark?'
'Tomorrow. The ship leaves at six in the vening, but the third-class passengeres have to be on board by noon.'
She stares ar him, expecting words that do not come. After a moments pause, she insists.
'Are you intending to travel alone?'
He stares back at her, catching her meaning but scarcely daring to believe he has properly understood.
'Alone... Why, what other choice do I have...?'
She seizes him by the arms, blocking his path. Daniel can sense that these small hands can grip and perhaps even hit out, that they are not made simply to wield a needle.
'Take me with you! I could pass for blonde, I have light eyes even if they are not blue, I am only just under a metre sixty-five, and I am eighteen! is there a photograph in that safe-conduct of yours?'
'But...' he manages to stammer out, 'we're not married...'
Her peal of laughter rings out across the deserted square, seems to roll down the steps and echo out over the harbour.
'How could we be married if I'm an Orthodox Russian and you're a Jew! It would take months before a rabbi accepted my conversion... and anyway, didn't you say that in this new country of yours, nothing of what keeps us slaves here has any importance? Let's go together!'
As Daniel looks on dumbfounded, she starts spinning round, arms outstretched, like an Anatoliab dervish. Laughter all the while, she repeats like an incantation the names she has hear mentioned only a few moments before. 
'Buenos Aires! Rosario! Entre Rios! Santa Fe! Argentina!'
She laughs louder and louder, and spins on and on.
I am Rifka Bronfman!'"

(Edgardo Cozarinsky, The Bride From Odessa)

Video of Panaït Istrati (and his partner Marie-Louise Baud-Bovy known as Bilili) arriving in Odessa, March 1928.

Danilo Kiš: The Nearly Fruitless Journey to Trieste

Danilo Kiš

"And his journey to Trieste ended as ingloriously as his trip to Rovinj.
It was, in his sixty-sixth year, his first border crossing, and it, too, took a great deal of pushing and pulling. Nor were his arguments any easier to counter: an intelligent person did not go to a country whose language he did not know; he had no intention of making a fortune on the black market; he had no craving for macaroni or Chianti and would much prefer an everyday Mostar Zhilavka or a Prokuplje white, at home. 
Nevertheless, we persuaded him to apply for a passport.
He came back ill-humored, ill-tempered, crushed: He had a falling out with Mother (the shoes she had bought him leaked and pinched) and the police had searched them and ransacked their luggage on the return trip to Belgrade.
Need I mention that the visit to Trieste- the downpour, with Father under the awning of the Hotel Adriatico without an umbrella, lost, like a bedraggled old dog, while Mother rummaged through shoes by the Ponte Rosso- recieves in the Encyclopedia the coverage an episode of the sort deserves? His only consolation during the whole wretched excursion came from buying some flower seeds outside a shop there. (Fortuntaley, the packets had pictures of the flowers on there and clearly marked prices, so he did not need to haggle with the saleswoman. By then D.M. had been an inventory of the flowers in pots and window boxes on the front and rear balconies)."

(Danilo Kiš, The Encyclopedia of the Dead)

Eric Hobsbawm: Trieste as Pre-Conscious

"Egypt thus does not belong in my life. I do not know when the life of memory begins, but not much of it goes back to the age of two. I have never gone there since the steamer Helouan left Alexandria for Trieste, then just transferred from Austria to Italy. I do not remember anything about our arrival in Trieste, meeting-point of languages and races, a place of opulent cafes, sea captains and the headquarters of the giant insurance company, Assicurazioni Generali, whose business empire probably defines the concept of 'Mitteleuropa' better than any other. Eighty years later I had the occasion to discover it in the company of Triestine friends, and especially Claudio Magris, that marvellous memorializer of central Europe and the Adriatic corner where German, Italian, Slav and Hungarian cultures converge. My grandfather, who had come to meet us, accompanied us on the Southern Railway to Vienna. This is where my conscious life began."

(Eric Hobsbawm: Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, pp3-4)

Albert Londres on the Beginning (Trieste) and the End (La Boca, Buenos Aires) of the Sea

Albert Londres

"I have seen many many ports and I shall see many others. In the name of the respect I sometimes feel for truth; in the name of my favourite stars which were shining that night; in the name of the fair hair of my beloved, I assert that if you have seen La Boca you have indeed seen something. ...
You have heard of the end of the world. La Boca is the end of the sea.
Andre' Tudesq would have it that the sea began at a certain place, and that place was Trieste. On one occasion he kept me for a long time at that Adriatic port, and tried to prove by a series of the most cogent arguments that his statement was in no way fantastic. And at the sight of an eddy which he noticed in a small bay, he shouted:
'There you are, there's the spring: look at it boiling up'.
If he had not left me, his old friend, at Saigon, and gone away to die, I would have taken him that evening to La Boca: 'You have told me a secret, you revealed to me where the sea began, and I thank you. If the sea begins it must likewise end, and I have found its end. Don't tell anyone, I don't want to be robbed of my secret: look, here we are.'
La Boca reminds one of a conscienxe which, loaded with all the mortal sins and driven ashore here, survives amid the execrations of the world. The spectacle it presents has all the dreadful power of Michael Angelo's Last Judgment.

(Albert Londres The Road to Buenos Ayres, pp.121-2)

Andre' Tudesq