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Halcyon

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Gabriele D'annunzio is touted as an indispensable litrerary jewel in the crown of decadent letters. As pointed out by the reviewer there has been a political bent to the neglect that has denied much of his ouvre to the English public, but I cannot let this claim stand on its own. In fact we still widely read Knut Hamsun and Heidegger, both Nazi enthusiasts and if only we were able to understand him, we'd read Ezra Pound as well, who would not allow for the demise of fascism in Italy and lost his wits or as some impute, pretended to. All are widely available. Another Hitler cheerleader, Gottfried Benn's exquisite Primal Vision is now out of print but circulated extensively in the 80s.
Why then has D'Annunzio been neglected? Aside from The Flame of Life (translated as The Flame, by Eridanos Press) and Il Piacere, both of which are entrancing, intense, sublime and sensual expressions of an artist who lived the Nietzschean ideal, as he understood it, of living beauty and art as a poetic transcendence that elevated the mean and ordinary of humans unto a pantheon of cultural mythos. Most of the poems here translated wield language as the means of an erotic dialogue with the landscape and the emotional sinews of every experience fleshed out in passionate lyrical lushness. D'Annunzio is regarded as the man of letters that together with Huysman and Wilde best defined the fin-de-siecle decadent literary indulgence. However he remains far behind the other two when it comes to the English public. A literary giant in Europe regaled from the likes of Henry James and Nikos Kazantzakis, who expounded at length on the merits of his art. I regret in saying this but the primary reason why D'Annunzio has been relegated to the erudition of the literary conneuseurs is because he wrote in Italian as compared to English or French. The same can be said of Carducci and Foscolo.
Of Italian literature is receiveing renewed interest it is because of the success of great translations. This one by JG Nichols is effective, but regrettably the work of a translator and a scholar and not a poet. The lush lyricism and the blushing seductive delicacy of the original is rendered in conceptual efforts that merit our gratitude, and at times succeed in lulling the mind into a dreamy trance as does most all of D'Annunzio's poetry, most similar to a Tennyson and a Keats rather than the robust impressions of a WH Auden or a Dylan Thomas. Gabriele D'Annunzio would be the fourth poet maudit in addition to Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine had he written in French, in fact his style is consonent with the French counterparts. He stands as one of the greatest lyricists of all time, and must receive a greater global audience if we are to reclaim the distilled intoxicating beauty of poetry. But we are in a different world today and a revival comes only through academic interest and not to experience the pleasures of language and its emotional exultation. An understated genius. Today the best place to start, however, for the novice to D'Annnunzio is not The Halcyon but The Flame as translated by Susan Bassnet in 1991. The novel is a work of artistry that reads like an abridged version of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu of Proust. A pleasure to treasure.

For too long D'Annunzio's works have been neglected - both in Italian and in English. Why? Because he was a proto-fascist? Pound was even more questionable in his involvement with Italian politics but we all (or at least we all should) acknowledge him as the master of the modern word that he was ..... We need to get over our reverse-propagandist reading, to stop ostracizing the work of authors with whom our modern tastes do not agree, and simply acknowledge the beauty of a work of art where such an acknowledgement is due - regardless of the artist's own politics. If people can do it for Sade, people can do it for authors with talent too!
D'Annunzio's work, both in prose and poetry, is one of the benchmarks of a literature emerging into Modernism (note, not just Italian Literature - but, rather, WORLD literature). He stands side by side with the Decadents writing in France at the time - and his influence on Joyce was very deep. That this work, his master-stroke of verse, is finally available in English is a huge event for the world of letters. While the richness and complexity of his style of diction and allusion is nearly impossible to capture outside of the original, Nichols has done an amazing job here. Thank you, Nichols - its long overdue! Now, if someone would just translate the last of his novels (PERHAPS YES, PERHAPS NO) ...