Multiple influences
From the very beginning, the literature of the region has been an invitation to reverie, since one of the first works it produced was an account of the journey of Odoric of Porderone (ca. 1286-1331), a Franciscan missionary who travelled to the Far East, particularly China and Sumatra, which he visited only a few decades after Marco Polo. The 17th century saw the birth of Friulian literature thanks to Ermes di Colloredo di Montalbano, who is considered the father of Friulian literature. He used it extensively in more than 200 sonnets, with such sensitivity and eloquence that he laid the foundations for today's Friulian. His attachment to his land, not devoid of a certain realism, gives his work a true patrimonial value. Finally, in 1861, Trieste had the honor of witnessing the birth of Italo Svevo, the man who would carry his voice internationally like no other. His family tree and the pseudonym he chose for himself (his birth name was Aronne Ettore Shmitz) testify to the importance he gave to his dual cultural heritage: his father was a German Jew who sent him to study in Bavaria when he was a teenager (Svevo means "Swabian"), and his mother was Italian by birth. Nevertheless, his literary career is just as interesting
In fact, although he had embarked on a career as a banker, he published his first short story in 1890(L'Assassinio di via Belpoggio) and then had two novels published on a self-publishing basis(Un Inetto in 1892 and Selilità in 1898), which met with neither public nor critical acclaim. Discouraged, he gave up all literary pretensions, until fate put in his path in 1903 a man who would spend many years in Trieste, James Joyce (1882-1974), the future author of the immense monument that is Ulysses (in which, moreover, Italo Svevo would serve as a model for the character of Leopold Bloom). Joyce encouraged him to continue writing, and he eventually published La Coscienza di Zeno(Zeno's Consciousness, Folio editions), which was highly praised by Valery Larbaud and Benjamin Crémieux in France, and by the future Nobel Prize winner Eugenio Montale in Italy. With a strong autobiographical accent, but also marked by his admiration for the research of Sigmund Freud, this psychological novel portrays a man who wonders much more about his supposed Oedipus complex than about Italy's entry into the war against the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the year in which the action takes place. In the form of a diary, and under the guise of the "stream of consciousness" invented by Joyce, a Zeno Cosini is revealed, not without a certain amount of humor, as a man full of contradictions and desires, an incessant victim of misunderstandings and imbroglios. Italo Svevo died in 1928 as a result of the smoking habit he shared with his character. Although he had acquired a certain celebrity during his lifetime, posterity would not be assured until after his death, and even if this writer marked a turning point in Triestine literature, he was only the precursor, since others soon followed in his footsteps.
Effervescence, despite everything
Thus, Trieste saw the birth of Silvio Benco in 1874, Umberto Saba in 1883 and Virgilio Giotti in 1885. We do not have the chance to discover the protean work of the journalist turned librettist, playwright and novelist that was the first of these three men, a friend of Joyce and Svevo, his influence was however so notable that the government tried to put a stop to it. On the other hand, Umberto Saba (born Umberto Poli) is fortunately heard in our language because his poetry survives the passage of time as it survived the torments of the racial laws that he had to endure. Having suffered exile and then a dark game of hide-and-seek with the authorities, he will receive the support of the greatest, among whom are once again Eugenio Montale but also Carlo Levi. After the war, his talent was nevertheless recognized, as evidenced by the prestigious awards he received. Nowadays, it is possible to discover his poems written during his escape and published at the time in Lugano, Switzerland, thanks to the magnificent Ypsilon publishing house, which reissued Choses dernières: 1935-1943 in 2020, but also to enjoy his autobiographical stories using Trieste as a setting in Comme un vieillard qui rêve (Le Bruit du temps). Finally, Seuil offers a translation of his posthumously published novel Ernesto, the story of the sexual initiation of a teenager at the beginning of the 20th century. Finally, the poet Virgilio Giotti, who used the Triestine dialect in part of his work, is honored by Éclat Editions, which published in 2022, in a bilingual version, his collection Petit chansonnier amoureux
, a celebration of daily life with a strong autobiographical content, originally published in Florence in 1914.Carlo Michelstaedter should not be overlooked because his birthplace, Goritz (Gorizia), belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1887, the year he was born. This situation as a border town, from a historical and geographical point of view, will influence his work as a philosopher and undoubtedly says a lot about the soul of those who were born on the edge of blurred identities. Michelstaedter will kill himself on October 17, 1910, the day after he had completed what is considered his great work, Persuasion and Rhetoric (Éclat editions). It was also not far from Goritz that the Triestino Scipio Slataper, author of Il mio carso, died five years later in combat. Gallimard has translated this work in its collection L'Arpenteur under the splendid title Années de jeunesse qui vous ouvrez tremblantes ... By turns shady and luminous, this " book of lost and found time ", as announced on the back cover, is certainly one of the most seminal works of the Friuli Venezia Giulia region. It is prefaced by Biagio Marin (1891-1985), a poet who was the first to put the Venetian dialect into writing. The world conflict will finally mark the work of Giani Stuparich (1891-1961) whose Verdier editions have published, in addition to his novel The Island featuring a father and his son, The Year 15
, his war diary. It is a completely different diary that was published in 2021 by the beautiful publisher La Baconnière, which is just as essential because it allows us to (re)discover a woman of letters who was somewhat forgotten even though she played a fundamental role in the intellectual milieu of post-war Trieste. Her work consists of a collection of poetic prose, The Seasons (1950), which has been reunited with the later Promenade sous les armes in Confession téméraire (La Baconnière, 2019). His famous Diary 1944-1945 was kept under the bombings between October 18, 1944 and August 5, 1945. Contrary to what this might have suggested, it is nevertheless filled with great sensuality. Anita Pittoni had a long correspondence with her fellow citizen Roberto Balzen (1902-1965) who, like her, became a publisher by co-founding Adelphi. A short text of hers, Trieste, a rigorous description, in its apparent contradictions, of a city where languages and nationalities, bourgeois and provincial milieus, cultural exigency and happy rurality mingled, has also remained. Allia also presents How to make a career in the big administrations by Giorgio Voghera (1908-1999), one of his friends, as an overview, in the form of an essay on post-war management, of a literary work that also includes the novel Our Mistress Death (Circé). Because of his Jewishness, Giorgio Voghera, like some of his peers, was a victim of the racial laws that forced him to retire to a kibbutz near Jaffa, an experience from which he brought back material for other texts that would complete his eclectic work.Very large feathers
From then on, several writers followed one another who would quickly achieve immense fame. The first of them was certainly Boris Pahor, who was also a product of the history of his native region, in the sense that he became an Italian writer of Slovene language born in Trieste, which was then part of the Empire of Austria-Hungary. His long life - he died at 108 on May 30, 2022! - was marked by this sometimes violent clash of cultures, by his imprisonment in Dachau and then in Bergen-Belsen, and by the illnesses from which he suffered. He left an abundant and infinitely rich body of work, which makes him one of the best known Slovenian writers, despite his nationality, and which includes several essential novels, from La Porte dorée (The Golden Gate ) published by Le Rocher to Printemps difficile (Difficult Spring ) published by Libretto, from Jours obscurs (Dark Days ) published by Phébus to Pèlerin parmi les ombres : nécropole (Pilgrim among the Shadows: Necropolis), the story of his deportation published by La Table ronde. His fate is not without similarities to that of Mario Rigoni Stern (1921-2008) who was also inspired by his captivity to write a work just as dense. A writer of the frontier, which he evokes in Histoire de Tönle (Verdier), Stern is also the bard of his beloved mountains, as confirmed by Requiem pour un alpiniste (Les Belles Lettres), in which he recounts his memories as an alpine hunter during the Second World War
Although he was born in Bologna in 1922 and was murdered in Rome in 1975, it is impossible not to mention Pier Paolo Pasolini because he spent many summers in Casarsa della Delizia, his mother's birthplace, and above all became so passionate about Friulian that he wrote in this language(Poèmes oubliés published by Actes Sud, La Nouvelle jeunesse published by Gallimard, or the short stories collected in Douce et autres textes by Actes Sud). It is also thanks to him and to one of the magazines he created(Quaderno Romanzo) that Novella Cantarutti could start to make her Friulian poetry known(Ultima stella, in trilingual edition by Fario). In conclusion, Claudio Magris and Paolo Rumiz, both born in Trieste in 1939 and 1947 respectively, continue to conquer the hearts of readers around the world, the first with a scholarly work that regularly makes him a future recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the second with his travel stories full of spirituality
