Non curioso a te de le cosa piccole io vengo,
Chi le farfalle cerca sotto l’arco di Tito?
To be sure, who would pause to chase fire-flies under the Arch of Titus? Who would care what one’s neighbors, what one’s relatives thought, when one could stand beneath that same Arch, and look up at the sky of Italy?
Carducci, like poets of the south, such as Apollinaire, (whose real name I believe savored of the north, being Ostrowsky) liked the romantic, serious minded German poets of long ago. He read and translated some of Klopstock, Platen, while a friend of Carducci’s translated him back again into Latin, where he really belongs.
If your pocketbook refuses a ticket to Italy, do not be unhappy. Read Carducci! Read d’Annunzio! There is usually somewhere an Ersatz, something to set, without discord, in place of the thing desired.
I wished to read English, American books, but they cost too much. They were seldom procurable at a price less than a dollar. There were almost none in the village. The few who owned books would not lend them. I read Shakespeare and Poe first in German. Admirable, adequate translations they were! The cheaply-priced books of the old world, of Italy, France, Germany, are a blessing. They are the well in the desert to them who are thirsty. I recall buying some plays of Alfieri, put out by Georgio Franz, Monaco, bearing the publishing date of 1846; tiny, tiny books they were, printed on grey newspaper paper with no separate outer cover. They cost about four pennies each. And I bought a large cheap Ariosto, on similar unbleached paper, which was priced at a quarter. The Orlando Furioso is a charming fable. I can not commend it too highly. It has delighted me just as Alice in Wonderland delights a child. It is a gracious, bright-hued, arabesque, that has kept color throughout the centuries.
Then I learned northern tongues from printed advertisements sent by a clothing house, for the purpose of selling men’s clothing. A pile of little books they sent; one in English, the others, literal translations into various northern tongues, to sell to untamed Westerners, whom New York’s more untamed imagination had evidently given wild tongues, civilized, conventional clothes. It was of course an incomparable piece of humor. But it was useful to me. It is a poor sail-boat indeed that can not take advantage of an opposing wind or any wind that happens to blow.
I used to hope, every New Year’s Day, to be able to subscribe to Century, or Harper’s, our leading magazines. But I never reached such height of reckless extravagance. I read Dante the oftener instead. I knew pages by heart. Repeating him aloud was all the music there was in the lonely place in which I lived. There was hardly a wheezy asthmatic melodian. Luck, you see, was not wholly absent.
Once an old Italian priest, noble of heart and mind, came to the lonely, white chapel of his faith, that had been erected upon the plains. He used to recite Dante with resonance, and a kind of regretful, tragic fury, in which unuttered homesickness centered. He was very old then. It must have been an half century since he had seen Italy. He could say superbly, too, the sonnets of Petrarch. He said oftenest the one beginning:
La vita fugge e non s’arresta un’ora,