Aron Ettore Schmitz (December 19, 1861 – September 13, 1928), better known by the pseudonym Italo Svevo, was an Italian businessmanBorn in Trieste (then in Austria-Hungary) to a Jewish family, Italo Svevo (literally swabian Italian) wrote the classic novel La Coscienza di Zeno (rendered as Confessions of Zeno, or Zeno's Conscience) and self-published it in 1923. The work, showing the author's interest in the theories of Sigmund Freud, is written in the form of the memoirs of one Zeno Cosini, who writes them at the insistence of his psychoanalyst. Schmitz's psychoanalyst was Ottocaro Weiss, who had been trained by Freud in Vienna. Schmitz's novel received almost no attention from Italian readers and critics at the time.
The work might have disappeared altogether if it were not for the efforts of James Joyce. Joyce had met Schmitz in 1907, when Joyce tutored him in English while working for Berlitz in Trieste. Joyce read Schmitz's earlier novel Senilità, which had also been largely ignored when published in 1898.
Joyce championed Confessions of Zeno, helping to have it translated into French and then published in Paris, where critics praised it extravagantly. That led Italian critics, including Eugenio Montale, to discover it. Zeno Cosini, the book's hero, mirrored Schmitz, being a businessman fascinated by Freudian theory.
Schmitz was also a model for Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Joyce's Ulysses.
Schmitz was a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of the First World War. He spoke Italian as a second language (as he usually spoke the Triestine dialect, similar to Venetian) and, according to some critics, wrote it badly - though some have pointed out that it is not bad Italian, but rather the official Tuscan dialect in a Triestino mouth.
Confessions of Zeno never looks outside the narrow confines of Trieste, much like Joyce's work, which rarely left Dublin in the last years of Ireland's time as part of the United Kingdom. Schmitz brings a keenly sardonic wit to his observations of Trieste and, in particular, to his hero, an indifferent man who cheats on his wife and lies to his psychoanalyst and who is trying to explain himself to his psychoanalyst by revisiting his memories.
There is a final connection between Schmitz-Svevo and the character Cosini. Cosini sought psychoanalysis, he said, in order to discover why he was addicted to nicotine. As he reveals in his memoirs, each time he had given up smoking, with the iron resolve that this would be the "ultima sigaretta!!", he experienced the exhilarating feeling that he was now beginning life over without the burden of his old habits and mistakes. That feeling was, however, so strong that he found smoking irresistible, if only so that he could stop smoking again in order to experience that thrill once more.
Svevo likewise smoked for all of his life. After being hit by a car while crossing the street, he was brought into hospital at Motta di Livenza, where his health rapidly failed. As death approached he asked one of his visitors for a cigarette, telling everyone that this really would be the last one (the request was denied).
Svevo lived for part of his life in Charlton, south-east London, while working for a family firm. He documented this period in his letters to his wife which highlighted the cultural differences he encountered in Edwardian England. His old home at 67 Charlton Church Lane now carries a blue plaque.
and author of novels, plays, and short stories.
Biagio Marin (1891–1985) was an Italian poet, best known from his poems in the Venetian language.
He was born in the coastal town of Grado, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian county of Gorizia and Gradisca. He studied in Venice and Florence, and graduated in philosophy under Giovanni Gentile. After World War One, he moved to Trieste. After World War Two, he returned to his native Grado in the nearby Province of Gorizia.
His poems, written in the Grado dialect of Venetian, are about the daily life and simple landscapes of his native land. He his renowned by his cultivated and refined style.
His son Falco Marin was a poet and essayist, who died in World War Two in a fight against the Yugoslav partisans in the Province of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Umberto Saba (9 March 1883 - 26 August 1957) was the pseudonym of Italian poet and novelist Umberto Poli. His creative work was hampered by a life-long struggle with mental illness.
Saba was born in Trieste, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He had Italian citizenship through his father. His mother was Jewish. His father abandoned the family before Umberto was born, and his mother employed a Slovene nanny, Peppa Sabaz, to raise him. He became very attached to her, and revered her memory in his poetry.
From 1903-1904, he attended the University of Pisa, where he studied archaeology, German, and Latin. In was in this period that he began to complain of a nervous disorder, which was to become more severe with time.
Quitting school, Saba worked for a time as an apprentice and was a cabin-boy on a merchant ship. From 1907-1908 he served in the military in Salerno. He married Carolina Wölfler in 1909, and they had a daughter, Lina, the following year.
It was in 1910 that Poli adopted the nom de plume Saba. In Hebrew, "Saba" means bread. This choice of pseudonym on the part of the author is thought to be an homage to his Jewish mother, who raised him without the help of his father. Interestingly, Saba's daughter, Linuccia, took on the pen name, "Annetta Pane," pane meaning "bread" in Italian.In 1911, he went to Florence, where he published his first volume of poetry and used his new name as author. The following year found him in Bologna, where he continued to write poetry, publishing in newspapers and magazines. His first efforts were coldly received by critics. Saba served in the army from 1915-1918, but was never sent to the front.
In 1919 he returned to Trieste and purchased an antiquarian bookstore, the "Ancient and Modern Bookstore." The business produced enough income to support him and his family. He self-published the first edition of his Songbook in 1921 (successive, enlarged editions followed, and eventually it grew to contain over four hundred poems, spanning fifty years).
By 1928, Saba was suffering from depression, and frequently contemplated suicide. A friend advised psychoanalysis, which he began the following year.
In 1938, he was forced to sell his bookstore to a friend and "disappear", due to the adoption of racial laws by Fascist Italy . He frequently moved, and fled clandestinely to Paris for a brief period, and to Florence soon thereafter, where he hid in an attic, and then, in 1939, to Rome, where he hid in the home of fellow-poet Giuseppe Ungaretti.
The first great critical acclaim of Saba's work was the 1946 award of the Viareggio Prize. His stature continued to grow and, in 1953 he received an award from the Lincean Academy, and two honorary degrees from the University of Rome.
Saba's mental state declined from 1950 on. He spent long periods in clinics, and began to use morphine. He died at the age of 74 in Gorizia, nine months after a heart attack, and a year after the death of his wife.
Scipio Slataper (14 July 1888 - 3 December 1915) was an Italian language writer from Trieste, most famous for his lyrical essay My Karst. He is considered, alongside Italo Svevo, as the initiator of the prolific tradition of Italian literature in Trieste.
He was born to a relatively wealthy middle class family the city of Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today in Italy). His family was of Slavic origin (mostly Slovenes from Goriška), but had assimilated to the Venetian-speaking urban environment of Trieste. After completing his high school studies in the native city, he moved to Florence in Italy, where he studied Italian philology. In Florence, he collaborated to the literary journal La Voce, edited by Giuseppe Prezzolini and Giovanni Papini. During his stay in Florence, he started writing essays and articles on the literary and cultural situation in Trieste. He maintained a close contact with his native city, collaborating both with young Italian intellectuals from the Austrian Littoral, both those who lived in Italy and those who remained in their native region. Slataper's circle included the journalist and critic Giulio Caprin, author Giani Stuparich, his wife Elody Oblath and his brother Carlo Stuparich, the emerging literary critic Silvio Benco, and poets Umberto Saba, Virgilio Giotti and Biagio Marin.
After the suicide of his lover in 1910, Slataper retrieved to the village of Ocizla in the Karst plateau above Trieste, where he wrote his most famous work, the lyrical essay My Karst (Italian: Il mio Carso), considered one of the masterpieces of Italian fin-de-siecle prose. The essay, in which Nietzschean influences can be seen, is an assertion of vitalism and primitive life force. The essay also contains political and philosophical reflections. Among other, Slataper was polemical against the superficial business mentality of the Italian merchants of Trieste and criticized their anti-Slavic prejudices. On the other hand, the work contains highly controversial depictions and reflection on the "suppressed brutal and barbaric nature" of the Slovene peasants from the area.
My Karst was published in Florence in 1912, and remained the only book Slataper published during his lifetime. In 1921, the book was translated to French by Benjamin Crémieux, which helped its spread of Slataper's popularity Europe in the 1920s.
After graduation in 1912, Slataper moved to Hamburg in Germany, where he taught Italian language at the local university. When Italy declared war to Austria-Hungary in March 1915, he moved to Italy and volunteered to join the Italian Army. He was sent to the front along the Isonzo river. In December 1915, he was killed in the Fourth Battle of the Isonzo on the hills surrounding the town of Gorizia.
Slataper had a crucial influence in the creation of a distinct literary tradition in Trieste. Authors influenced by him include Giani and Carlo Stuparich, Fulvio Tomizza, Enzo Bettiza, Susanna Tamaro, Claudio Magris and others. He also influenced several Slovene writers, most notably Marjan Rožanc and Igor Škamperle.
Enzo Bettiza (born 1927 in Split, Kingdom of Yugoslavia) is a Dalmatian-born Italian novelist, journalist and politician.
Bettiza was born in Dalmatia, in a rich family of the Italian minority. His mother stemmed from a family of the Croatian isle of Brač. His family owned the most important enterprise in Dalmatia, the Gilardi e Bettiza cement factory, in the town of Split. In 1941 Axis Powers invaded Yugoslavia and in 1944 the city was again joined to Yugoslavia. Italian families were expelled, and their assets were taken by Yugoslavs. Bettiza moved to Gorizia after the end of World War II and the re-annexation of his native land to Yugoslavia, at the age of 18. Later he moved to Trieste, and then to Milan: here he always declared to be living as "an exiled".
Bettiza has been director of several Italian newspaper and author of numerous books. as a journalist he devoted his attention Eastern countries and nationalities, and Yugoslavian area in particular. In 1948 he entered the Italian Communist Party: his political position, however, was usually different from the official one of the party.
In the period 1957-1965 he was foreign corresponder for the newspaper La Stampa, first from Vienna and then from Moscow. Later he moved to Il Corriere della Sera, for which he worked for ten years.
In 1974, together with Indro Montanelli, founded the Milanese newspaper Il Giornale, for which he was co-director until 1983.
Starting from 1976, he was member of the Italian Senate and the European Parliament. He now lives in Rome with his family and has been married a few times. His current wife, Laura Laurenzi, is a renowned Italian writer.
Bettiza's major novel, I fantasmi di Mosca (Phantoms of Moscow) is credited as the most extended novel written in Italian language.
Susanna Tamaro (born 12 December 1957) is an Italian novelist. She has also worked as a scientific documentarist and movie maker direction assistant.
Susanna Tamaro was born in a family of middle class. Her mother is Italo Svevo's relative.
In 1976, Tamaro obtained a diploma with teacher, and she registered with the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, an Italian school of cinema. She obtained a diploma in direction.
In 1978, she wrote a first stories and in 1981 she wrote a first novel: Illmitz, declined by editors and now unpublished.
In 1980s she collaborated with RAI, a public Italian television. She was not employed by Rai Tre, because her diploma in direction not recognised as a degree.
In 1989, her novel La testa fra le nuvole (Head in Clouds) was published by Marsilio Editor. She fell ill with asthmatic bronchitis and she was forced to move from Rome to Orvieto, in Umbria. Her successful second novel Per voce sola (Just For One Voice) (1991) won the International PEN price and was translated into several languages.
In 1991, she wrote a first novel for children Cuore di ciccia.
In 1994, she wrote Va' dove ti porta il cuore (in English Follow your Heart). The book was an international bestseller and it became the "Italian book most sold in XX century".
The plot of Follow Your Heart is very simple: Olga, a elderly woman, decides to write a long letter to her granddaughter in America. Olga reflects on her life and reveals to granddaughter their family's secrets. This novel was translated into more than 35 languages.
In 1996, the Italian director, Cristina Comencini, made a film with the novel's plot. From 1996 to 1998 she wrote on Famiglia Cristiana, a diffused Italian magazine.
In 1997, she published "Anima Mundi", a friendship's story.
In 1998, September 23, her father died in Rome. The media wrote Tamaro's father was killed, but the news was wrong. Tamaro's father died from hemorrhage.
In 2001 she wrote Raccontami, in 2002 Più fuoco, più vento, in 2003 Fuori.
In 2006, she wrote Ascolta la mia voce (Listen to my voice), a sequel of Follow your Heart. This novel was sold in twelve countries.
In this novel, Tamaro revealed her position pro-life, against abortion, euthanasia and scientific research on embryos. She is largely sympathetic to the position taken by the Catholic Church on these topics.
In 2008, she published Luisito- A Love Story.
Josip Ribičič (3 November 1886 - 7 June 1969) was a Slovene writer, mostly famous as an author of popular children literature.
He was born as Josip Ribičić in the town of Baška on the island Krk (now in Croatia, then part of Austria-Hungary). His father Juraj was a Croat from Dalmatia who worked on Krk as an Austro-Hungarian public servant, while his mother Marija Križanič was a Slovene from Gorenja vas near Kanal ob Soči in what was then the County of Gorizia and Gradisca (now in Slovenia). Josip attended elementary school in Lig, and then enrolled to a teacher's college in Koper. Between 1909 and 1911, he worked as teacher in several elementary schools in the Austrian Littoral, before settling in Trieste in 1911, where he worked as a teacher in a private Slovene-language school in the district of San Giacomo (Slovene: Sveti Jakob). He married a local Slovene woman in 1913.
In 1925, he moved to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in order to escape Fascist Italian persecution. He first worked as a teacher in Rakek, and from 1929 in Ljubljana. In 1942, during World War Two, he was arrested by the Italian occupation authorities of the Province of Ljubljana, accuswed of collaboration with the Liberation Front of the Slovenian People and sentenced to 12 years in prison. He was released in 1944 by the Nazi German authorities. After the end of the war, he continued shortly his teaching profession; in 1949, he was employed in the Slovenian Ministry of Education.
He died in Ljubljana. He was the father of the Communits official and Yugoslav statesman Mitja Ribičič, and the grandfather of the Slovenian jurist and politician Ciril Ribičič.
Most of Ribičič's work, written in the fin-de-siecle estheticism, is children literature. An expception is the book Ruins (Razvaline), published in 1917, which is a collection of short stories and humoresques dealing with World War I. In 1976, the publishing house Mladinska knjiga published his collected works in 7 volumes.
Dušan Jelinčič (born in Trieste 1953) is a Italian writer, essayist and mountaineer from Trieste, Italy.
He was born in an influential Slovene intellectual family in Trieste; his father, Zorko Jelinčič, was among the co-founders of the militant anti-fascist organization TIGR, and a close personal friend of prominent authors such as Vladimir Bartol and Klement Jug.
After graduating from modern philology at the University of Trieste, he worked in the Slovene language section of the regional RAI service for Friuli Venezia Giulia.
In 1986, Jelinčič was part of an expedition on the Broad Peak in the Himalayas, becoming the first person from Friuli Venezia Giulia to conquer that peak. In 1990, he climbed the Mount Everest and in 2003 the Gasherbrum II.
He wrote about his experiences in this expedition in the book 'Star Nights' (Zvezdnate noči, 1994), which became a best seller in Italy. The book (translated to Italian as Le notti stellate) was re-published three times, and won four literary prizes, including the international Acerbi Prize. Among Jelinčič's other works, the most famous is 'Night in the Docks' (Tema v pomolu), the Italian translation of which (Scacco nel buio) won the prize Scritture di Frontiera in 2006, ex aequo with Predrag Matvejević.
Jelinčič's writings are part of the tradition of Slovene mountaineer travelogues, which has been an important current within Slovene literature since the fin-de-siecle period. One of the most important centres of this literary production has been Trieste and the nearby areas of the Slovenian Littoral, with authors as Henrik Tuma, Julius Kugy, Klement Jug, Tone Svetina, Igor Škamperle, and Zorko Jelinčič, Dušan's father.
Dušan Jelinčič has also written numerous essays, published in mostly Slovene literary journals, such as Sodobnost and Nova revija.
Robert Hamerling (March 24, 1830 – July 13, 1889) was an Austrian poet.Hamerling was born into a poor family at Kirchberg am Walde in Lower Austria. He displayed an early genius for poetry; his youthful attempts at drama excited the interest and admiration of some influential persons. Owing to their assistance young Hamerling was able to attend the gymnasium in Vienna and afterwards the University of Vienna.
In 1848 he joined the students' legion, which played a large part in the revolutions of the capital, and in 1849 shared in the defence of Vienna against the imperialist troops of Alfred I, Prince of Windisch-Grätz. After the collapse of the revolutionary movement he was obliged to hide for a couple of weeks to escape arrest.
For the next few years he pursued his studies in natural science and philosophy, and in 1855 became master at the Gymnasium at Trieste. For many years he was ill, and in 1866 retired on a pension, which in acknowledgment of his literary works was increased by the government to a sum sufficient to enable him to live carefree until he died at his villa in Stiftingstal near Graz, Austria.
A popular edition of Hamerlings works in four volumes was published by M. M. Rabenlechner (Hamburg, 1900).
The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica characterizes Hamerling as one of the most remarkable poets of the modern Austrian school, describing his imagination as rich and his poems as full of life and colour. What it terms his most popular poem, Ahasver in Rom (1866), of which the emperor Nero is the central figure, is said to show at its best what is alleged to be the author's brilliant talent for description. Among his other works, 1911 Britannica mentions Venus im Exil (1858); Der König von Sion (1869), characterized as a generally recognized masterpiece; Die sieben Todsünden (1872) Blätter im Winde (1887); Homunculus (1888); Amor und Psyche (1882).
The 1911 Britannica goes on to describe his novel, Aspasia (1876), as giving a finely-drawn description of the Periclean age, but like his tragedy Danton und Robespierre (1870), somewhat stilted, which it thought showed that Hamerling's genius, though rich in imagination, was ill-suited for the realistic presentation of character.
Rainer Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926) was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and art critic. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language. His haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety: themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.
He wrote in both verse and a highly lyrical prose. Among English-language readers, his best-known work is the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose works are the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He also wrote more than 400 poems in French, dedicated to his homeland of choice, the canton of Valais in Switzerland.
He was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke in Prague, capital of Bohemia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now the Czech Republic). His childhood and youth in Prague were not especially happy. His father, Josef Rilke (1838-1906), became a railway official after an unsuccessful military career. His mother, Sophie ("Phia") Entz (1851-1931), came from a well-to-do Prague family, the Entz-Kinzelbergers, who lived in a house on the Herrengasse (Panská) 8, where René also spent many of his early years.
The relationship between Phia and her only son was colored by her mourning for a prior child, a daughter, who had died after only a week of life. During Rilke's early years Phia acted as if she sought to recover the lost girl through the boy by dressing him in girl's clothing. The parents' marriage fell apart in 1884.
His parents pressured the poetically and artistically talented youth into entering a military academy, which he attended from 1886 until 1891, when he left due to illness. From 1892 to 1895 he was tutored for the university entrance exam, which he passed in 1895. In 1895 and 1896, he studied literature, art history, and philosophy in Prague and Munich.
In 1897 in Munich, Rainer Maria Rilke met and fell in love with the widely traveled, intellectual woman of letters Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937). (Rilke changed his first name from "René" to the more masculine Rainer at Lou's urging.) His relationship with this married woman, with whom he undertook two extensive trips to Russia, lasted until 1900. But even after their separation, Lou continued to be Rilke's most important confidante until the end of his life. Having trained from 1912 to 1913 as a psychoanalyst with Sigmund Freud, she shared her knowledge of psychoanalysis with Rilke.
In 1898, Rilke undertook a journey lasting several weeks to Italy. In 1899, he traveled with Lou and her husband, Friedrich Andreas, to Moscow where he met the novelist Leo Tolstoy. Between May and August 1900, a second journey to Russia, accompanied only by Lou, again took him to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, where he met the family of Boris Pasternak and Spiridon Drozhzhin, a peasant poet. Later, "Rilke called two places his home: Bohemia and Russia".
In autumn 1900, Rilke stayed at the artists' colony at Worpswede, where his portrait was painted by the proto-expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker (illus. below). It was here that he got to know the sculptor Clara Westhoff (1878-1954), whom he married the following spring. Their daughter Ruth (1901-1972) was born in December 1901. However, Rilke was not one for a middle-class family life; in the summer of 1902, Rilke left home and traveled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). Still, the relationship between Rilke and Clara Westhoff continued for the rest of his life.
At first, Rilke had a difficult time in Paris, an experience that he called on in the first part of his only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. At the same time, his encounter with modernism was very stimulating: Rilke became deeply involved in the sculpture of Rodin, and then with the work of Paul Cézanne. For a time he acted as Rodin's amanuensis, also lecturing and writing a long essay on Rodin and his work. Rodin taught him the value of objective observation, and under this influence Rilke dramatically transformed his poetic style from the subjective and sometimes incantatory language of his earlier work into something quite new in European literature. The result was the New Poems, famous for the 'thing-poems' expressing Rilke's rejuvenated artistic vision. The poems of the New Poems and New Poems: The Other Part are highly wrought, using language and poetic form as a shaped and shaping material; to this extent the poems are often said to be 'things' in themselves. During these years, Paris increasingly became the writer's main residence.
The most important works of the Paris period were Neue Gedichte (New Poems) (1907), Der Neuen Gedichte Anderer Teil (Another Part of the New Poems) (1908), the two "Requiem" poems (1909), and the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, started in 1904 and completed in January 1910.
Between October 1911 and May 1912, Rilke stayed at the Castle Duino, near Trieste, home of Countess Marie of Thurn and Taxis. There, in 1912, he began the poem cycle called the Duino Elegies, which would remain unfinished for a decade because of a long-lasting creativity crisis.
The outbreak of World War I surprised Rilke during a stay in Germany. He was unable to return to Paris, where his property was confiscated and auctioned. He spent the greater part of the war in Munich. From 1914 to 1916 he had a turbulent affair with the painter Lou Albert-Lasard.
Rilke was called up at the beginning of 1916, and he had to undertake basic training in Vienna. Influential friends interceded on his behalf, and he was transferred to the War Records Office and discharged from the military on 9 June 1916. He spent the subsequent time once again in Munich, interrupted by a stay on Hertha Koenig's Gut Bockel in Westphalia. The traumatic experience of military service, a reminder of the horrors of the military academy, almost completely silenced him as a poet.
On 11 June 1919, Rilke traveled from Munich to Switzerland. The outward motive was an invitation to lecture in Zürich, but the real reason was the wish to escape the post-war chaos and take up his work on the Duino Elegies once again. The search for a suitable and affordable place to live proved to be very difficult. Among other places, Rilke lived in Soglio, Locarno, and Berg am Irchel. Only in mid-1921 was he able to find a permanent residence in the Chateau de Muzot in the commune of Veyras, close to Sierre in Valais. In an intense creative period, Rilke completed the Duino Elegies within several weeks in February 1922. Before and after, Rilke rapidly wrote both parts of the poem cycle Sonnets to Orpheus containing 55 entire sonnets. Both works together have often been taken as constituting the high points of Rilke's work. In May 1922, Rilke's patron Werner Reinhart bought and renovated Muzot so that Rilke could live there rent-free.
During this time, Reinhart introduced Rilke to his protégé, the Australian violinist Alma Moodie.Rilke was so impressed with her playing that he wrote in a letter: What a sound, what richness, what determination. That and the "Sonnets to Orpheus", those were two strings of the same voice. And she plays mostly Bach! Muzot has received its musical christening.
From 1923 on, Rilke increasingly had to struggle with health problems that necessitated many long stays at a sanatorium in Territet, near Montreux, on Lake Geneva. His long stay in Paris between January and August 1925 was an attempt to escape his illness through a change in location and living conditions. Despite this, numerous important individual poems appeared in the years 1923-1926 (including Gong and Mausoleum), as well as the abundant lyrical work in French.
Only shortly before his death was Rilke's illness diagnosed as leukemia. The poet died on 29 December 1926 in the Valmont Sanatorium in Switzerland, and was buried on 2 January 1927 in the Raron cemetery to the west of Visp.
Rilke had chosen as his own epitaph this poem:
Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust,
Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel
Lidern.
Rose, oh pure contradiction, delight
of being no one's sleep under so
many lids.
Figures from Greek mythology (e.g. Apollo, Hermes, Orpheus) recur as motifs in his poems and are depicted in original interpretations (e.g. in the poem Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes, Rilke's Eurydice, numbed and dazed by death, does not recognize her lover Orpheus, who descended to hell to recover her). Other recurring figures in Rilke's poems are angels, roses and a character of a poet and his creative work.
Rilke often worked with metaphors, metonymy and contradictions (e.g. in his epitaph, the rose is a symbol of sleep – rose petals are reminiscent of closed eye lids).
Rilke's little-known 1898 poem, "Visions of Christ" depicted Mary Magdalene as the mother to Jesus' child.
Quoting Susan Haskins:
It was Rilke's explicit belief that Christ was not divine, was entirely human, and deified only on Calvary, expressed in an unpublished poem of 1893, and referred to in other poems of the same period, which allowed him to portray Christ's love for Mary Magdalene, though remarkable, as entirely human.
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish writer and poet, widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Along with Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and many others, Joyce was a key figure in the development of the modernist novel. He is best known for his landmark novel Ulysses (1922). Other major works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939).
Although most of his adult life was spent outside the country, Joyce's Irish experiences are essential to his writings and provide all of the settings for his fiction and much of their subject matter. In particular, his rocky early relationship with the Irish Catholic Church is reflected by a similar conflict in his character Stephen Dedalus, who appears in two of his novels. His fictional universe is firmly rooted in Dublin and reflects his family life and the events and friends (and enemies) from his school and college days; Ulysses is set with precision in the real streets and alleyways of the city. As the result of the combination of this attention to one place and his voluntary exile in continental Europe, most notably in Paris, Joyce paradoxically became both one of the most cosmopolitan yet most regionally focused of all the English language writers of his time.
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 to John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane Murray in the Dublin suburb of Rathgar. He was the oldest of ten surviving children; two of his siblings died of typhoid. His father's family, originally from Fermoy in Cork, had once owned a small salt and lime works. Joyce's father and paternal grandfather both married into wealthy families. In 1887, his father was appointed rate (i.e., a local property tax) collector by Dublin Corporation; the family subsequently moved to the fashionable adjacent small town of Bray 12 miles (19 km) from Dublin. Around this time Joyce was attacked by a dog, which engendered in him a lifelong cynophobia. He also suffered from keraunophobia, as his deeply religious aunt had described thunderstorms to him as a sign of God's wrath.
In 1891, Joyce wrote a poem, Et Tu Healy on the death of Charles Stewart Parnell. His father was angry at the treatment of Parnell by the Catholic church and at the resulting failure to secure Home Rule for Ireland. The elder Joyce had the poem printed and even sent a part to the Vatican Library. In November of that same year, John Joyce was entered in Stubbs Gazette (an official register of bankruptcies) and suspended from work. In 1893, John Joyce was dismissed with a pension, beginning the family's slide into poverty due mainly to John's drinking and general financial mismanagement.
James Joyce began his education at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school near Clane in County Kildare, which he entered in 1888 but had to leave in 1892 when his father could no longer pay the fees. Joyce then studied at home and briefly at the Christian Brothers school on North Richmond Street, Dublin, before he was offered a place in the Jesuits', Dublin school, Belvedere College, in 1893. The offer reflected, at least in part, the hope that he would prove to have a vocation and join the Order. Joyce, however, rejected Catholicism by the age of 16, although the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas continued to influence him strongly throughout his life.
He enrolled at the recently established University College Dublin (UCD) in 1898, and studied modern languages, specifically English, French and Italian. He also became active in theatrical and literary circles in the city. His review of Ibsen's New Drama, his first published work, was published in "Fortnightly Review" in 1900 and resulted in a letter of thanks from the Norwegian dramatist himself. Joyce wrote a number of other articles and at least two plays (since lost) during this period. Many of the friends he made at University College Dublin would appear as characters in Joyce's written works.
After graduating from UCD in 1903, Joyce left for Paris to study medicine, but he soon abandoned this after finding the technical lectures in French too difficult. He stayed on for a few months, appealing for finance his family could ill afford and reading late in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. When his mother was diagnosed with cancer, his father sent a telegraph which read, "MOTHER DYING COME HOME FATHER". Joyce returned to Ireland. Fearing for her son's impiety, his mother tried unsuccessfully to get Joyce to make his confession and to take communion. She finally passed into a coma and died on 13 August, James and Stanislaus having refused to kneel with other members of the family praying at her bedside. After her death he continued to drink heavily, and conditions at home grew quite appalling. He scraped a living reviewing books, teaching and singing—he was an accomplished tenor, and won the bronze medal in the 1904 Feis Ceoil.
On 7 January 1904, he attempted to publish A Portrait of the Artist, an essay-story dealing with aesthetics, only to have it rejected from the free-thinking magazine Dana. He decided, on his twenty-second birthday, to revise the story into a novel he called Stephen Hero. It was a fictional rendering of Joyce's youth, but he eventually grew frustrated with its direction and abandoned this work. It was never published in this form, but years later in Trieste Joyce completely rewrote it as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The unfinished Stephen Hero was published after his death.
The same year he met Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Connemara, County Galway who was working as a chambermaid. On 16 June 1904, they first stepped out together, an event which would be commemorated by providing the date for the action of Ulysses.
Joyce remained in Dublin for some time longer, drinking heavily. After one of these drinking binges, he got into a fight over a misunderstanding with a man in Phoenix Park; he was picked up and dusted off by a minor acquaintance of his father's, Alfred H. Hunter, who brought him into his home to tend to his injuries. Hunter was rumored to be a Jew and to have an unfaithful wife, and would serve as one of the models for Leopold Bloom, the main protagonist of Ulysses. He took up with medical student Oliver St John Gogarty, who formed the basis for the character Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. After staying in Gogarty's Martello Tower for six nights he left in the middle of the night following an altercation which involved Gogarty shooting a pistol at some pans hanging directly over Joyce's bed. He walked all the way back to Dublin to stay with relatives for the night, and sent a friend to the tower the next day to pack his trunk. Shortly thereafter he eloped to the continent with Nora.
Joyce and Nora went into self-imposed exile, moving first to Zürich, where he had supposedly acquired a post to teach English at the Berlitz Language School through an agent in England. It turned out that the English agent had been swindled, but the director of the school sent him on to Trieste, which was part of Austria-Hungary until World War I (today part of Italy). Once again, he found there was no position for him, but with the help of Almidano Artifoni, director of the Trieste Berlitz school, he finally secured a teaching position in Pola, then also part of Austria-Hungary (today part of Croatia). He stayed there, teaching English mainly to Austro-Hungarian naval officers stationed at the Pola base, from October 1904 until March 1905, when the Austrians—having discovered an espionage ring in the city—expelled all aliens. With Artifoni's help, he moved back to Trieste and began teaching English there. He would remain in Trieste for most of the next ten years.
Later that year Nora gave birth to their first child, George. Joyce then managed to talk his brother, Stanislaus, into joining him in Trieste, and secured him a position teaching at the school. James's ostensible reasons were desire for Stanislaus's company and the hope of offering him a more interesting life than that of his simple clerking job in Dublin. In truth, though, James hoped to augment his family's meagre income with his brother's earnings. Stanislaus and James had strained relations throughout the time they lived together in Trieste, with most arguments centering on James's drinking habits and frivolity with money.
With the chronic wanderlust of James's early years, he became frustrated with life in Trieste and moved to Rome in late 1906, having secured employment in a bank. He intensely disliked Rome, and moved back to Trieste in early 1907. His daughter Lucia was born in the summer of the same year.
Joyce returned to Dublin in the summer of 1909 with George, in order to visit his father and work on getting Dubliners published. He visited Nora's family in Galway, meeting them for the first time (a successful visit, to his relief). While preparing to return to Trieste he decided to take one of his sisters, Eva, back with him to help Nora run the home. He spent only a month in Trieste before returning to Dublin, this time as a representative of some cinema owners hoping to set up a regular cinema in Dublin. The venture was successful (but quickly fell apart in Joyce's absence), and he returned to Trieste in January 1910 with another sister, Eileen, in tow. Eva became very homesick for Dublin and returned there a few years later, but Eileen spent the rest of her life on the continent, eventually marrying Czech bank cashier Frantisek Schaurek.
Joyce returned to Dublin briefly in the summer of 1912 during his years-long fight with his Dublin publisher, George Roberts, over the publication of Dubliners. His trip was once again fruitless, and on his return he wrote the poem "Gas from a Burner" as an invective against Roberts. After this trip, he never again came closer to Dublin than London, despite many pleas from his father and invitations from fellow Irish writer William Butler Yeats.
One of his students in Trieste was Ettore Schmitz, better known by the pseudonym Italo Svevo. They met in 1907 and became lasting friends and mutual critics. Schmitz was a Catholic of Jewish origin and became the primary model for Leopold Bloom; most of the details about the Jewish faith in Ulysses came from Schmitz's responses to queries from Joyce. While living in Trieste, Joyce was first beset with eye problems that ultimately required over a dozen surgeries.
Joyce concocted a number of money-making schemes during this period, including an attempt to become a cinema magnate in Dublin. He also frequently discussed but ultimately abandoned a plan to import Irish tweeds to Trieste. His skill at borrowing money saved him from indigence. What income he had came partially from his position at the Berlitz school and partially from teaching private students.
In 1915, after most of his students were conscripted in Trieste for World War I, he moved to Zürich. Two influential private students, Baron Ambriogo Railli and Count Francesco Sordina, petitioned officials for an exit permit for the Joyces, who for their part, agreed not to take any action against the emperor of Austria-Hungary during the war. There, he met one of his most enduring and important friends, Frank Budgen, whose opinion Joyce constantly sought through the writing of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. It was also here where Ezra Pound brought him to the attention of English feminist and publisher Harriet Shaw Weaver, who would become Joyce's patron, providing him thousands of pounds over the next 25 years and relieving him of the burden of teaching in order to focus on his writing. While in Zurich he wrote Exiles, published A Portrait..., and began serious work on Ulysses. Zurich during the war was home to exiles and artists from across Europe, and its bohemian, multilingual atmosphere suited him. Nevertheless, after four years he was restless, and after the war he returned to Trieste as he had originally planned. He found the city had changed, and some of his old friends noted his maturing from teacher to full-time artist. His relations with his brother (who had been interned in an Austrian prison camp for most of the war due to his pro-Italian politics) were more strained than ever. Joyce headed to Paris in 1920 at an invitation from Ezra Pound, supposedly for a week, but he ended up living there for the next twenty years.
Joyce set himself to finally finishing Ulysses in Paris, delighted to find that he was gradually gaining fame as an avant-garde writer. A further grant from Miss Shaw Weaver meant he could devote himself full-time to writing again, as well as consort with other literary figures in the city. During this era, Joyce's eyes began to give more and more problems. He was treated by Dr Louis Borsch in Paris, receiving nine surgeries from him until Borsch's death in 1929. Throughout the 1930s he traveled frequently to Switzerland for eye surgeries and treatments for Lucia, who, according to the Joyces, suffered from schizophrenia. Lucia was analysed by Carl Jung at the time, who after reading Ulysses, concluded that her father had schizophrenia.Jung noted that she and her father were two people heading to the bottom of a river, except that he was diving and she was falling.
In Paris, Maria and Eugene Jolas nursed Joyce during his long years of writing Finnegans Wake. Were it not for their unwavering support (along with Harriet Shaw Weaver's constant financial support), there is a good possibility that his books might never have been finished or published. In their now legendary literary magazine "Transition," the Jolases published serially various sections of Joyce's novel under the title Work in Progress. He returned to Zürich in late 1940, fleeing the Nazi occupation of France. On 11 January 1941, he underwent surgery for a perforated ulcer. While at first improved, he relapsed the following day, and despite several transfusions, fell into a coma. He awoke at 2 a.m. on 13 January 1941, and asked for a nurse to call his wife and son before losing consciousness again. They were still on their way, when he died, 15 minutes later. He is buried in the Fluntern Cemetery within earshot of the lions in the Zürich Zoo. Although two senior Irish diplomats were in Switzerland at the time, neither attended Joyce's funeral, and the Irish government subsequently declined Nora's offer to permit the repatriation of Joyce's remains. Nora, whom Joyce had finally married in London in 1931, survived him by 10 years. She is buried now by his side, as is their son George, who died in 1976. Ellmann reports that when the arrangements for Joyce's burial were being made, a Catholic priest tried to convince Nora that there should be a funeral Mass. She replied, "I couldn't do that to him." Swiss tenor Max Meili sang Addio terra, addio cielo from Monteverdi's L'Orfeo at the funeral service.
Joyce's Irish experiences constitute an essential element of his writings, and provide all of the settings for his fiction and much of its subject matter. His early volume of short stories, Dubliners, is a penetrating analysis of the stagnation and paralysis of Dublin society. The stories incorporate epiphanies, a word used particularly by Joyce, by which he meant a sudden consciousness of the "soul" of a thing. The final and most famous story in the collection, "The Dead", was directed by John Huston as his last feature film in 1987.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a nearly complete rewrite of the abandoned novel Stephen Hero. Joyce partially destroyed the original manuscript in a fit of rage during an argument with Nora, who asserted that it would never be published. A Künstlerroman, or story of the personal development of an artist, Portrait is a heavily biographical coming-of-age novel in which Joyce depicts a conflicted young man's gradual growth into artistic self-consciousness. The main character, Stephen Dedalus, is in many ways based upon Joyce himself. Some hints of the techniques Joyce frequently employed in later works, such as stream of consciousness, interior monologue, and references to a character's psychic reality rather than to his external surroundings, are evident throughout this novel. Joseph Strick directed a film of the book in 1977 starring Luke Johnston, Bosco Hogan, T.P. McKenna and John Gielgud.
Despite early interest in the theatre, Joyce published only one play, Exiles, begun shortly after the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and published in 1918. A study of a husband and wife relationship, the play looks back to The Dead (the final story in Dubliners) and forward to Ulysses, which Joyce began around the time of the play's composition.
Joyce also published a number of books of poetry. His first mature published work was the satirical broadside "The Holy Office" (1904), in which he proclaimed himself to be the superior of many prominent members of the Celtic revival. His first full-length poetry collection Chamber Music (referring, Joyce explained, to the sound of urine hitting the side of a chamber pot) consisted of 36 short lyrics. This publication led to his inclusion in the Imagist Anthology, edited by Ezra Pound, who was a champion of Joyce's work. Other poetry Joyce published in his lifetime includes "Gas From A Burner" (1912), Pomes Penyeach (1927) and "Ecce Puer" (written in 1932 to mark the birth of his grandson and the recent death of his father). It was published in Collected Poems (1936).
As he was completing work on Dubliners in 1906, Joyce considered adding another story featuring a Jewish advertising canvasser called Leopold Bloom under the title Ulysses. Although he did not pursue the idea further at the time, he eventually commenced work on a novel using both the title and basic premise in 1914. The writing was completed in October, 1921. Three more months were devoted to working on the proofs of the book before Joyce halted work shortly before his self-imposed deadline, his 40th birthday (2 February 1922).
Thanks to Ezra Pound, serial publication of the novel in the magazine The Little Review began in 1918. This magazine was edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, with the backing of John Quinn, a New York attorney with an interest in contemporary experimental art and literature. Unfortunately, this publication encountered censorship problems in the United States; serialization was halted in 1920 when the editors were convicted of publishing obscenity.The novel was not published in the United States until 1933.
At least partly because of this controversy, Joyce found it difficult to get a publisher to accept the book, but it was published in 1922 by Sylvia Beach from her well-known Rive Gauche bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. An English edition published the same year by Joyce's patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, ran into further difficulties with the United States authorities, and 500 copies that were shipped to the States were seized and possibly destroyed. The following year, John Rodker produced a print run of 500 more intended to replace the missing copies, but these were burned by English customs at Folkestone. A further consequence of the novel's ambiguous legal status as a banned book was that a number of "bootleg" versions appeared, most notably a number of pirate versions from the publisher Samuel Roth. In 1928, a court injunction against Roth was obtained and he ceased publication.
With the appearance of both Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's poem, The Waste Land, 1922 was a key year in the history of English-language literary modernism. In Ulysses, Joyce employs stream of consciousness, parody, jokes, and virtually every other established literary technique to present his characters. The action of the novel, which takes place in a single day, 16 June 1904, sets the characters and incidents of the Odyssey of Homer in modern Dublin and represents Odysseus (Ulysses), Penelope and Telemachus in the characters of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, parodically contrasted with their lofty models. The book explores various areas of Dublin life, dwelling on its squalor and monotony. Nevertheless, the book is also an affectionately detailed study of the city, and Joyce claimed that if Dublin were to be destroyed in some catastrophe it could be rebuilt, brick by brick, using his work as a model. In order to achieve this level of accuracy, Joyce used the 1904 edition of Thom's Directory—a work that listed the owners and/or tenants of every residential and commercial property in the city. He also bombarded friends still living there with requests for information and clarification.
The book consists of 18 chapters, each covering roughly one hour of the day, beginning around 8 a.m. and ending some time after 2 a.m. the following morning. Each chapter employs its own literary style, and parodies a specific episode in Homer's Odyssey. Furthermore, each chapter is associated with a specific colour, art or science, and bodily organ. This combination of kaleidoscopic writing with an extreme formal schematic structure renders the book a major contribution to the development of 20th-century modernist literature. The use of classical mythology as an organizing framework, the near-obsessive focus on external detail, and the occurrence of significant action within the minds of characters have also contributed to the development of literary modernism. Nevertheless, Joyce complained that, "I may have oversystematised Ulysses," and played down the mythic correspondences by eliminating the chapter titles that had been taken from Homer.
Having completed work on Ulysses, Joyce was so exhausted that he did not write a line of prose for a year. On 10 March 1923 he informed a patron, Harriet Weaver: "Yesterday I wrote two pages—the first I have since the final Yes of Ulysses. Having found a pen, with some difficulty I copied them out in a large handwriting on a double sheet of foolscap so that I could read them. Il lupo perde il pelo ma non il vizio, the Italians say. The wolf may lose his skin but not his vice or the leopard cannot change his spots". Thus was born a text that became known, first, as Work in Progress and later Finnegans Wake.
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