The single portrait of a Black Sea Pirate is superb. Dramatically poised; brutal. It keeps wise contrast of pale blue and angry red, between which the brown, naked body rises; strong, muscled, slender. There is hint of Greece in this Black Sea body.
Repin has a brownish-yellow that is his. It is a dream of the deserts of his ill-fated Eastern forbears, under some slanting, despairing sun of desert autumn. His other Black Sea Pirate has a different face, one of Mongol type, with controlled, still, ill-concealed ferocity of Asia. Past ages speak dazzlingly here.
The Bandoura Player is gorgeous! A noble bit of color, with strength of some sublime, some savage past. There is red in it which totals the cruel splendor of a century of lost Black Sea sunsets. It fires muscular edge of arms, shoulders. It blazes, a sun which can not set, upon the head. There is something in form of the standing musician that is tantamount to defiance of death, destiny. There is, too, the flash of white teeth in song! The line of youth, and lift of love. Behind, a sky troubled, indeterminate; a sky with something of the sweet souplesse of sound. A figure of glorious daring, unequalled spontaneity. Proud! Resentful! There is redoubling of rose-hues at end of the bandoura. It is echo of his song. With the brush Repin is a profound historian. History, perhaps, is written most weakly with words.
It is not easy to estimate what the poetry of such a technician, such a powerful virtuoso in words as d’Annunzio, was to me in an isolated village upon the plains, where everything was ugly, cheap, except the magnificent land-levels, and the sunsets. And it is not easy to estimate either how hard it was to get money to buy the books. New Italian writers came high. They were not procurable in the inexpensive outputs of older men. And then the long waiting for books to come. I ordered from Italy. When they did come, I literally wore out the pages of Canto Novo, Intermezzo.
I went around like a sleep walker for days. I forgot to eat. I sat up at night. I increased, if possible, the disapproval, the ill-concealed hatred of my relatives. It burst upon my thirsty, surprised senses like stars at midnight. The beating beauty of broken worlds was flung about me. It dazzled me. I published in obscure newspapers, the first translations from d’Annunzio to be printed in English.
My money reached only to buy one more verse-book—Isottea, and one novel: Le Vergini della Rocce. To read, where I lived, in the daytime, was one shade less criminal than stealing. I was a convicted culprit of long standing. The neighbors looked at me with untranslatable expressions in depths of their eyes, just as you look at people who have recently served a prison term.
I bought Leopardi (his verse), next. He was an older writer. He did not cost so much. I could procure a copy for a few lire. I waited all one long hot summer for that book to come. I read his magnificent Ode to the Moon by light of a prairie moon no whit less lovely, in a sky no less purple tinged and cloudless, than that of Italy.
Dove vai silenziosa luna?
When I read it over again today, and the Hymn to an Asiatic Shepherd, I see the superb, languid moons of autumn above the plains, as they looked long ago. I sweep back the years; I become young again, and happy. That is one of the great poems of the world. And written by one of the world’s exquisite artists.