Massimo Bontempelli,Watching the Moon and Other Plays

Abstract

Massimo Bontempelli, Watching the Moon and Other Plays, translation and introduction by Patricia Gaborik, Italica Press: New York, 2013; 127 pp.: 9781599102795, $35.00

Reviewed by: Marella Feltrin-Morris, Ithaca College, USA

While a few plays, novels, and short stories by Massimo Bontempelli (1878–1960) have been translated over the last 20 years, Bontempelli’s oeuvre remains largely inaccessible to the English-speaking world. For scholars of Italian modernism this is indeed a serious gap, since Bontempelli was a prolific and influential writer who was not just responsible for introducing and developing the concept of magic realism in an Italian context, but was quite present and well known in the intellectual scene of the 1920s and 1930s, and tied by friendship and elective affinities to other major literary and artistic figures such as Giorgio De Chirico, Alberto Savinio, and Luigi Pirandello. Therefore this volume, which features the translation of three of Bontempelli’s plays (Watching the Moon, Stormcloud, and Cinderella) and an extensive introduction by translator and theater historian Patricia Gaborik, serves as a timely sample of what Bontempelli’s eclectic genius has to offer.

For readers not acquainted with Bontempelli’s works but interested in Futurism and the avant-garde, or even for readers fascinated with Latin-American magic realism and curious to explore its connections with its European antecedent, Gaborik’s 54-page introduction could not be more exhaustive. Starting from a rarely mentioned aspect of Bontempelli’s biography – his passion for modern transportation, most likely derived from his father’s work as a railroad engineer – Gaborik meticulously lays out the tiles that will serve to shape the complex mosaic of Bontempelli’s personality: his experimentation with Futurism, which he later rejected along with several works he had penned in the course of several years; his controversial involvement with fascism; and the provocative speech he delivered commemorating Italian writer and fascist enthusiast Gabriele D’Annunzio, a speech that has often been cited as the mark of Bontempelli’s break with the fascist regime but that, according to Gaborik, may not have been intended to sound so critical nor may it have immediately caused his fall from grace with Mussolini. Two additional elements discussed by Gaborik are Bontempelli’s attempt to create ‘new myths for the modern age’ (p. xv) by means of what has been called a ‘secret gaze’ which allows the writer to recognize and portray magic in ordinary events; and Bontempelli’s relationship with Luigi Pirandello, a relationship that has too often been simplified as a one-way influence but which, as Gaborik shows, was mutually enriching as both writers shared a peculiar trait that made its way into their writings: candore. Gaborik explains that:

In candore, sincerity is the natural result of an innocence or naivety, which, while they may contain an ounce of gullibility, don’t at all imply a dullness or stupidity. On the contrary, as Bontempelli would describe, the person with candore possessed an elementary intelligence, where we should understand elementary as elemental, even primordial. (p. lii)

Even readers already familiar with Bontempelli and some of his works cannot fail to be impressed by the wealth of information – not just about Bontempelli but about the various facets of the Italian avant-garde – presented in the introduction. Gaborik appears to anticipate and address many of the questions that might be raised by such readers: what was the extent of Bontempelli’s involvement with fascism, and just when and how did he break away from it? Why did he become dissatisfied with Futurism? And how is his magic realism different from the one(s) that developed in Latin America? Gaborik succeeds in adding interesting nuances even to some of the statements that tend to become clichés when talking about Bontempelli, for example his ‘moderate’ position in contrast to the extremism of the Futurists. Gaborik argues that:

Held up to the most radical pieces, much futurist production would be considered as ‘moderate’ as Bontempelli’s. More importantly, Bontempelli-critic – the Bontempelli of the ‘manifesto’– was anything but mild or non-combative. He wrote that art needed toward ‘virile ugliness,’ literati were ‘pseudo-men,’ fascism had taught that sometimes ‘the only good thing to do is use the cudgel.’ (pp. xxxii–xxxiii)

Not every argument made in the introduction is entirely convincing: for instance, despite the doubts raised by Gaborik, it is hard to interpret Bontempelli’s depiction of a time of transition (‘dal vanitoso individualismo a una smania di obbedienza militaresca, dalla pace creduta inalterabile alla guerra sempre pronta,’ which Gaborik translates, somewhat more mildly, as ‘[from] vain individualism to a hankering for military obedience, from a presumed inalterable peace to war ever-ready,’ p. xxiii) as anything but a criticism of the fascist regime. Moreover, the plethora of footnotes risks overwhelming even the most dedicated reader, especially since it is unlikely that anyone who picks up this volume will be so clueless with regards to Italian literature as to need explanatory references regarding writers as prominent as Italo Calvino and Luigi Pirandello. Instead, perhaps a more thorough discussion of the three plays featured in the volume would have been more welcome, particularly given the potential for comparison offered by the three women protagonists: Maria, Regina, and Cinderella. To be fair, Gaborik does compare them on the basis of their candore. However, despite Bontempelli’s intentions, the primordial simplicity of his candidi characters, with their seeming fragility and childlike way of speaking does not always come off as entirely convincing even in Italian:

CENERENTOLA: Quando è venuta la gente mi sono molto molto spaventata, e anche quando mi ha parlato lui avevo gran paura, ma ero anche molto contenta dentro perché non m’ha riconosciuta in questo modo, e lo so che rispondevo male, un po’ per davvero ma un po’ anche per finta.

[When the people came I was really, really scared, and when he talked to me, too, I was very afraid, but I was also very happy inside because he didn’t recognize me like this. And I know I responded badly, but it was a little bit for real and a little bit pretending.] (p. 113)

Therefore, although not every play that features women protagonists necessarily demands a feminist reading, an interpretation that highlights more clearly the strengths of these characters would perhaps have been appropriate. Still, there is an intrinsic value in allowing readers a direct encounter with the text without forcing one’s perspective on it.

Overall, the three plays selected are quite intriguing and their translation almost always accurate. Admittedly, certain foreignizing choices produce awkward effects and occasionally remind the audience that they are in the presence of a translation: in Watching the Moon, for instance, Maria says: ‘It’s years and years that I’ve been traveling to find a place’ (p. 20), oddly mirroring the original ‘Sono anni e anni che viaggio.’ In Stormcloud, the tone of gentle disapproval expressed by ‘Ma no’ is translated literally, though not with an equivalent effect, as ‘But, no,’ and the repetition of the affirmative or negative particles ‘Sì, sì’ and ‘No, no’ – very common in Italian but not in English – is also consistently reproduced verbatim. While in ‘A Note on the Translations’ Gaborik prepares the audience for translations that ‘at times read more “smoothly” than the originals do’ and ‘in this demonstrate an attention to “speakability” analogous to Bontempelli’s’ (p. lxv), such choices and many others suggest that the opposite may also be true. Nevertheless, there is no benefit in systematically picking apart a translation, since any translation is made up of countless decisions that need to be considered as a whole rather than separately. And, as a whole, each of these translations does convey the complexity of Bontempelli’s theater, including some utterly lyrical moments, such as the translation of the Chorus of the Earth in Cinderella:

Life, another day / extinguished, another night / comes to light. / One by one the stars come. / One missing still. / That star / forever will be missing, / until the last of nights. / When that star appears / alone in the sky it will dwell. / The entire sky will be that single star. (pp. 70–71)

Or the philosophical musings of the Innkeeper in Watching the Moon, in a scene that Bontempelli considered quite problematic but that fortunately he decided to keep and that Gaborik translates masterfully:

Jupiter savior! In thirty years of dwelling in this corner of the atom, everyone has taken me for an innkeeper. You are the first passer-by in these turbid places who realizes that I am the sediment of a philosopher, who understands this animal species. When I was still a man, and I was living far away from here, everyone mistook me for a philosopher, and no one had realized that the base of my destiny was to be an innkeeper. (p. 17)

Or, in Stormcloud, the highly evocative translation of ‘nascere o morire è la stessa cosa’ as ‘passing into life or passing on to death is the same thing’ (p. 54).

More than anything else, what stands out in this volume is Bontempelli’s ability to concoct situations (such as that of a woman who engages in a deadly struggle against a cruel moonlight, or that of a cloud that kills children) which, while they break through the confines of the ‘real,’ still retain the power to move us deeply. And as Gaborik maintains, these plays do ‘contain exciting performance possibilities,’ as expressed also by the excellent choice to include archival material (stage designs and scenarios). This volume is sure to spark interest not only among Bontempelli and Futurism enthusiasts, but among theater artists as well.