Table Of ContentNotturno
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Notturno
GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO
TRANSLATED AND ANNOTATED BY
STEPHEN SARTARELLI
PREFACE BY
VIRGINIA JEWISS
E
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN & LONDON
A MARGELLOS
WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS BOOK
The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works
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Notturno originally published in 1921 by Fratelli Treves, Milan.
Translation copyright ∫ 2011 by Stephen Sartarelli and Yale University.
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part,
including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections
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Set in Electra type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc., Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 1863–1938.
Notturno / Gabriele D’Annunzio ; translated and annotated by Stephen
Sartarelli ; preface by Virginia Jewiss.
p. cm. -- (Margellos world republic of letters)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-300-15542-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
I. Sartarelli, Stephen, 1954– II. Title.
PQ4803.N6513 2012
853%.8--dc23 2011042667
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library. This paper meets the requirements of
ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Preface by Virginia Jewiss vii
Note on the Translation xiii
Notturno
First Offering 3
Second Offering 63
Third Offering 191
Post Scriptum 289
Appendix 307
Notes 311
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PREFACE
by Virginia Jewiss
Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Notturno offers one of the most extraordi-
nary stories of literary creation ever conceived. On January 16,
1916, D’Annunzio’s plane, a flying-boat on a wartime propaganda
mission over Trieste, was forced to make an emergency landing,
and D’Annunzio suffered a detached retina in his right eye. In an
effort to protect his remaining good eye, his doctors ordered him to
remain immobile, both eyes bandaged, in a dark room in his
house in Venice. Confined to bed and blackness during the damp
Venetian winter, Italy’s most celebrated living author neverthe-
less insisted on writing. To keep his sentences from overlapping
and running together, he invented a ‘‘new art,’’ or rather, revived
an ancient one: ‘‘Then I remembered the way the Sibyls used to
write their brief auguries on leaves scattered by the winds of fate.’’
D’Annunzio recorded his own brief thoughts not on leaves but on
thin strips of paper, each wide enough for just one or two lines
of writing, which his daughter Renata, whom he affectionately
called Sirenetta, prepared for him. Following his three-month
convalescence, the thousands of scraps of paper he’d filled were
gathered and revised, again with the help of Renata, and pub-
lished in book form in November 1921. D’Annunzio chose the
vii
viii Preface
evocative title Notturno, a musical and artistic term that conveys
both the dreamlike, pensive quality of the work and the disturbing
darkness in the author’s soul.
Unlike the ancient Sibyls or blind prophets who peer into the
future, D’Annunzio used his blindness as a prism through which
to view his past hopes and present despair. Burdened with grief for
his comrades and guilt for his infirmity, he ‘‘sees’’ in the recesses of
his deadened eye man’s ravaged flesh and enduring soul, and he
describes death—in all its grotesque glory—with unflinching cold-
ness and heartfelt longing. Fragments of his past surface and re-
shape themselves in his imagination: the loss of comrades, his
mother’s embrace, summers by the sea, travels in Egypt, walks in
mist-enshrouded Venice, fiery Rome, and his home town of Pes-
cara. Notturno is a diary of darkness and light, a labyrinthine jour-
ney through time as memory, fantasy, and hallucination blur in
the searing pain of his eye. In a tone that oscillates between leth-
argy and zeal, he promotes his self-styled myth of the poet as hero,
casting himself as a Nietzschean Übermensch, yet simultaneously
revealing his doubts and fears. D’Annunzio agonizes over his own
living death of inaction—he compares his narrow bed to a coffin—
in contrast to what he considers to be the glorious fates of his fallen
comrades, all while fanning hopes of redemption for himself and
his country.
The work is divided into three ‘‘offerings,’’ and the patriotic and
spiritual notions of sacrifice suggested by that term gather force as
D’Annunzio’s sight is gradually restored with the coming of spring
and Easter. Yet much of the originality of this work lies not in a
unifying theme or redemptive finale but in its tendency to offer up
Preface ix
disparate memories and conflicting sensations. Reminiscing about
a dead friend, D’Annunzio notes that ‘‘there is a place in the soul
where the river of darkness and the river of light flow together.’’ A
hymn of loss and recovery, Notturno unfolds in a fluid space where
hope and despair constantly converge: the book closes with an
image of flames against a night sky, and of dying embers ready to
be rekindled.
The physical limit imposed by the size of the paper strips on
which he writes lends an extraordinary lyrical quality to D’Annun-
zio’s reflections, which together create what can only be defined as
a prose poem, the first of its kind in Italian. The staccato phrases,
with their narrative sparseness, are surprisingly versatile for ex-
pressing grief, mutilated flesh, the chop of the water in the Venice
lagoon. And they stand in stark contrast to the distinctive, highly
wrought style of D’Annunzio’s earlier works. Heralded as a master-
piece when it first appeared, this hauntingly beautiful and highly
experimental composition helped inspire a new mode of writing,
and it remains the most unsettling and timeless of all his prose
works. The first complete English version of Notturno ever to be
published, this volume offers a fresh and startling perspective on
one of the most significant but later somewhat eclipsed figures of
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European literature.
D’Annunzio’s fame during his lifetime can hardly be exagger-
ated. He published his first poetry at age sixteen, marking the
beginning of a long and prolific literary career that also included
novels, plays, and short stories. Sensual, psychological, and rich in
lavish descriptions, his works earned him the informal title of
