Multiple influences
From the outset, the region's literature has been an invitation to reverie, as one of its earliest works is an account of the voyage of Odoric de Porderone (c. 1286-1331), a Franciscan missionary who criss-crossed the Far East, visiting China and Sumatra just a few decades after Marco Polo. The 17th century saw the birth of Friulian literature thanks to the man who is considered its father, Ermes di Colloredo di Montalbano, who used it extensively in over 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 real heritage value. Last but not least, in 1861, Trieste had the honor of witnessing the birth of Italo Svevo, the man who, like no other, would take his voice to the international stage. His family tree and the pseudonym he chose for himself (his birth name was Aronne Ettore Shmitz) bear witness to the importance he attached to his dual cultural heritage: his father was a German Jew who sent him to study in Bavaria as a teenager (Svevo means "Swabian"), and his mother a native Italian. Nevertheless, his literary career is just as interesting.
Although he had embarked on a career as a banker, he published his first short story in 1890(L'Assassinio di via Belpoggio), followed by two self-published novels(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 intervened in 1903 with James Joyce (1882-1974), the man who would spend many years in Trieste, the future author of the immense monument Ulysses (in which, incidentally, Italo Svevo provided the model for the character of Leopold Bloom). Joyce encouraged him to continue writing, and he eventually published La Coscienza di Zeno(Zeno's Conscience, Folio editions) to great acclaim, from Valery Larbaud and Benjamin Crémieux in France, and the future Nobel Prize winner Eugenio Montale in Italy. Strongly autobiographical, but also imbued with his admiration for the research of Sigmund Freud, this psychological novel portrays a man who wonders far 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, Zeno Cosini is revealed, not without a certain humor, as a man of contradictions and misgivings, the 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 achieved a degree of fame in his own lifetime, his posterity would not be assured until after his death, and although this writer marked a turning point in Triestine literature, he was only a precursor, as others soon followed in his footsteps.
Effervescence, despite everything
Trieste saw the birth of Silvio Benco in 1874, Umberto Saba in 1883 and Virgilio Giotti in 1885. We are certainly not fortunate enough to discover the protean work of the journalist turned librettist, playwright and novelist who was the first of these three men. A friend of Joyce and Svevo, his influence was so notable that the powers that be tried to put a stop to it. On the other hand, Umberto Saba (born Umberto Poli) is fortunately heard in our language, for his poetry has survived the ravages of the racial laws he had to endure. Having endured exile and a dark game of hide-and-seek with the authorities, he received the support of some of the greatest, including once again Eugenio Montale and Carlo Levi. After the war, however, his talent was recognized, as evidenced by the prestigious awards he received. Today, it is possible to discover his poems written during his flight and published at the time in Lugano, Switzerland, thanks to the magnificent Ypsilon publishing house, which reissued Choses dernières: 1935-1943 in 2020, as well as to savor his autobiographical stories set in Trieste in Comme un vieillard qui rêve (Le Bruit du temps). Seuil also offers a translation of his posthumous novel Ernesto, the story of an adolescent's sexual initiation in the early 20th century. Last but not least, the poet Virgilio Giotti, who used the Triestine dialect in part of his work, is back in the limelight with Éclat publishing a bilingual version of his collection Petit chansonnier amoureux, a celebration of everyday life with a strong autobiographical content, originally published in Florence in 1914, in 2022.
Then there's Carlo Michelstaedter, whose birthplace, Goritz (Gorizia), belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1887, the year he was born. This historical and geographical border-city situation influenced his work as a philosopher, and undoubtedly says a great deal about the souls of those born on the edge of blurred identities. Michelstaedter took his own life on October 17, 1910, the day after he had completed what is considered his great work, La Persuasion et la rhétorique (Éditions Éclat). It was also not far from Goritz that the Triestine Scipio Slataper, author of Il mio carso, died 5 years later in combat. Gallimard has translated this work in its L'Arpenteur collection, under the splendid title Années de jeunesse qui vous ouvrez tremblantes ... By turns shady and luminous, this " book of time lost and found ", as the back cover announces, is certainly one of the most seminal 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. Finally, the global conflict left its mark on the work of Giani Stuparich (1891-1961), whose Verdier publishing house has published L' Année 15, his war diary, in addition to his novel L'Île, featuring a father and son.
In 2021, the fine publisher La Baconnière has published a completely different diary, just as essential in (re)discovering a somewhat forgotten woman of letters who played a fundamental role in the intellectual milieu of post-war Trieste. Her work consists of a collection of poetic prose, Les Saisons (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 bombardment between October 18, 1944 and August 5, 1945. Contrary to what this might have suggested, it is nonetheless filled with great sensuality. Anita Pittoni kept up a long correspondence with her fellow citizen Roberto Balzen (1902-1965) who, like her, became a publisher when he co-founded Adelphi. He also wrote a short text for Allia, Trieste, a rigorous description, in all its apparent contradictions, of a city where languages and nationalities mingled, bourgeois and provincial milieus, cultural exigency and happy rurality. Allia also presents Comment faire carrière dans les grandes 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 body of work that also includes the novel Notre Maîtresse la mort (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 oeuvre.
Very large feathers
From then on, a succession of writers would quickly achieve immense renown. The first of these was certainly Boris Pahor, who was also a product of the history of his native region, in the sense that he became a Slovene-speaking Italian writer born in Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His long life - he died aged 108 on May 30, 2022! - was marked by this sometimes violent clash of cultures, by his imprisonment in Dachau and then Bergen-Belsen, and by the illnesses from which he suffered. His abundant, infinitely rich body of work makes him one of the best-known Slovenian writers, despite his nationality, and includes several must-read novels, from La Porte dorée (Rocher) to Printemps difficile (Libretto), from Jours obscurs (Phébus) to Pèlerin parmi les ombres : nécropole, the story of his deportation published by La Table ronde. His fate is not unlike that of Mario Rigoni Stern (1921-2008), who also drew inspiration from his captivity to write an equally dense body of work. A writer of the frontier, which he evokes in Histoire de Tönle (Verdier), Stern is also a cantor 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 murdered in Rome in 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini cannot be overlooked, for he spent many summers in Casarsa della Delizia, his mother's hometown, and, above all, became so passionate about Friulian that he wrote in the language(Poèmes oubliés published by Actes Sud, La Nouvelle jeunesse by Gallimard, and the short stories collected in Douce et autres textes by Actes Sud). It was also thanks to him and one of the magazines he founded(Quaderno Romanzo) that Novella Cantarutti was able to begin publicizing her Friulian poetry(Ultima stella, in a trilingual edition published 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 former with a scholarly body of work that regularly makes him a future Nobel Literature Prize winner, the latter with his spiritually-infused travel stories.
