[In the following essay, Cambon explains how Foscolo's increasing distance from his original homeland of Greece created a strong mythos in his poetry that reflects not just nostalgia but an urge to transcend the present.]

For our Western tradition, the literature of exile begins with two very different sources: the Old Testament on the one hand, and Ovid's Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto on the other. Interdiction of his Roman aqua et ignis wrought a metamorphosis on the jolly author of Ars Amatoria; he now wrote letter upon letter in verse from the ice-caked harbor of Tomis on the Black Sea, from the winter of his life, reiterating both his guilt and his innocence in turn, in desperate flattery of Augustus and desperate entreaty, from among the shaggy, breech-clad, dagger-happy barbarians of Sarmathian and Gothic extraction who made him feel like the barbarian because his Latin was incomprehensible to them. To this day his obsessive plea echoes in our mind as the voice of one who has faced a destructive cultural situation and, to survive, has mobilized his extreme resources—in the terror that they too (language, imagination, tradition) might fail him.¹ It is a very personal voice, at times endearingly petulant, in turn wily, peevish, hopeful and dejected, and instinct throughout with the diplomacy of despair—the true, and poetically redeeming note, that rings out from his repeated gestures of abject confession, from the self-abasement of his flatteries to Augustus, the unresponsive demigod.

If after reading Fustel de Coulanges one wants a final illustration of what the ancient city meant to its children, one should turn to exilic Ovid, who struggles so hard not to lose twice the city he has already lost once. It has become for him an invisible city, a city of the mind, a memory and an exchange of signs across an otherwise unbridgeable distance; and his raison d'être is to reaffirm his fidelity to it. In the last resort, it is of course literature, the written word, that saves Ovid and makes him, the unrecalled exile, a hero of language. His values, those that make him humane rather than just human, have been put to the supreme test by the predicament of exile, and he has to keep the City alive in himself if he wants to live. Hence the inextricable nexus between absent City and rejected citizen, between community and individual, from the individual's own side; language makes the nexus reciprocal because it is Ovid's one inalienable possession, the gift of the City he has lost:

ne tamen Ausoniae perdam commercia linguae,
          et fiat patrio vox mea muta sono,
ipse loquor mecum desuetaque verba retracto,
          et studii repeto signa sinistra mei.
sic animum tempusque traho, sic meque reduco
          a contemplatu summoveoque mali.
carminibus quaero miserarum oblivia rerum:
          praemia si studio consequar ista, sat est.(2)

As the preceding part of this poem makes clear, fear of losing his very language after losing his city springs from the daily spectacle of those descendants of Greek colonists who have given up both speech and fashions of Hellas.

How paramount the city values are to civilized man we also know from so many pages of the Bible, where the lamentations by the waters of Babylon convey the predicament of a whole community uprooted from its Jerusalem. Once the nomadic people has been chosen for sedentary civilization, collective exile becomes to the enslaved Jews what removal from Rome means to one gifted individual, Ovid. Both are radical situations, both impose a grim existential challenge: will you preserve your identity? The poetry elicited by this predicament amounts to a kind of victory in defeat, and it countervails, if it does not justify, the doom visited upon the respective protagonists. Something of each paradigmatic situation, and of the correlative literary response, reappears in Dante's medieval career, which would be unthinkable apart from the wound of unjust banishment and without the Biblical and classical models that went into the imaginative reshaping of his singular experience. Once the Tuscan poet saw himself struck by the same fate that had hounded the Hebrews and afflicted the once carefree Ovid, he recognized in the sudden blow an affinity of election. The persona he projected in the Divine Comedy, a sinning wanderer in the wilderness, took on the traits of the peculiar people, Jacob's people, chosen because peculiar, and the penitential stance went hand in hand with the vatic. But from Ovid, temperamentally alien though he was, Dante inherited the individual emphasis, the vindication of self as a center of experience, which he was the first and possibly the only poet to weave with striking results into the large pattern of a cosmic epos. St. Augustine mediated between classical and Scriptural sources, to be sure; and as a result, the prophet and the penitent, the communal spokesman invested with a sacred mission and the citizen of human contingency, the type and the individual make themselves heard in the semantic chords of Dante's music, consonant as it proved with David's harp as well as with Ovid's or Virgil's lyre. And—again like Ovid—our Florentine exile turns to language as his sacred trust. Whether we read his major poem, or his treatises, or his letters, we can hardly miss this note. The fury, of course, was neither Ovidian nor Virgilian; for that, he had the Biblical prophets at hand; but most of all his own eagle-gnawed liver and his heart, love-devoured. Dante's Florence, a creation of love and hate, is neither Ovid's Rome nor the Bible's Jerusalem, though it has something of both, and much more. It is both everyday city and Holy City, both Egypt and Promised Land.

Even in the sketchiest bird's-eye view, the landscape of Western literary history unfolds as one defined by certain rare landmarks which prove ultimately essential to the total apprehensible shape of the terrain. To translate into less metaphoric terms: the literature of exile reflects an exceptional experience, but without it our literary heritage would be vastly different and immeasurably poorer. Whether this flies in the face of any comfortable theory of gradual continuity or homogeneous quality in literary tradition is not my present concern. I am quite prepared to entertain the paradox that, in literature as well as in other cultural domains, exceptions in the last resort determine the norm—any “norm” of course having to be periodically redefined by either upheavals or cumulative erosions. Anthropologically speaking, the collective experience of the Jewish people is the exception: nomadism, Covenant, Promised Land, exile, diaspora—and through the literary vehicle of the Bible it has become exemplary to a huge part of mankind. Artistically and biographically, we do not expect every writer to go through the ordeal of exile, in fact we insist on the necessity of cultural roots, of close contact between writer and community; but the phenomena which contradict or at east qualify this symbiotic ecology of art—like those I have been surveying so far—do give us pause. At this writing (Summer 1974) it is impossible to say whether the exile imposed on Solzhenitsyn by the Soviet bureaucrats will blight or enhance his creative vein. Several decades ago, political banishment failed to dry up Thomas Mann's vein; and the American expatriates (first Henry James, then Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, along with Irishman Joyce)³ successfully passed the test of self-uprooting. Here let us marginally note how, not unaccountably, Pound and Eliot pioneered in the conversational style which has in Ovid's epistolary poetry its remote fountainhead;⁴ how, again, they and Joyce looked up to Dante's example; and how questions of language, of the meeting or attrition of cultures, are intrinsic to their preoccupation and accomplishment. Vatic utterance, stimulated by their Biblical and Dantesque affinities, sooner or later came to characterize the work of Eliot and Pound.

Perhaps it is unfair to equate the condition of freely chosen expatriation with exile under duress—which was the lot of the three classical prototypes I touched upon to begin with. Neither the Old-Testament Jews, nor Ovid or Dante had a choice. Jerusalem, Rome and Florence respectively were taken away from them by unappealable fiat. Nor would it do justice to Ovid's Grenzsituation (to say it in Karl Jaspers' word)⁵ to compare his actual way of life as an outcast among barbarians to Pound's and Joyce's wanderings and residences among civilized peoples who shared with them the basic European tradition, and to James' or Eliot's privilege of taking up residence in what was the original homeland of their own native language? Yet an uprooting is still an uprooting, no matter how circumstantially muffled the trauma may be; James and Eliot never forgot their native land, and Joyce and Pound looked upon it with fierce ambivalence to the end. Besides, Pound's spontaneous expatriation became a forced exile in 1941 when he was denied return to America, and this aggravation was compounded in 1945 when American military authorities put him in the notorious cage at the Detention Training Camp near Pisa—the Pisan Cantos being the unpremeditated literary upshot. Here it seems fair to observe that forced exile has reappeared elsewhere in twentieth century society as a consequence of ideological fanaticism, to judge from Nazi and Stalinist or neo-Stalinist actions. We thought that we had left the Dark Ages far behind in our dim historical past, but history has a way of being unpredictable, even though in retrospect some of its unplanned byproducts—like exilic poetry—may seem providential. And so they are in a way, but this kind of providence can hardly make anyone feel comfortable. Least of all the likes of Pope Boniface VIII.

If Pound leads us back to Dante and the Bible and the Latin or Greek classics, he also reminds us of the post-Enlightenment conditions that have confronted the countless many and the gifted and articulate few in our disconcerting time to make a new “medieval” literature possible. Up to now it would have been sensible to say that while the ancient and medieval writers were sometimes chosen by exile, against their wish, modern writers from Romanticism on tended quite often to choose exile as a vital act and a theme; but cases like Mann or Mandelstam or Singer or Solzhenitsyn have reversed the trend. At any rate there can be little doubt that the “lost generation” had its direct ancestry in the Romantic generation of Byron, Keats and Shelley, to whose obvious names I now claim the privilege of adding the less widely known one of their contemporary, Ugo Foscolo.⁶ He was somehow, as E. R. Vincent has said,⁷ a Byron in reverse, starting his existential itinerary from the Greek island of Zante (the Homeric Zacynthos, still under Venetian rule in 1778, when Foscolo was born to an Italian father and a Greek mother) to pursue it through a progression of exiles which was to end with his death at Turnham Green near London in 1827.

The Hellas Byron went to die for became Foscolo's lifelong myth—in an Italian version, to be sure, because apart from the fact that his father was an Italian, Italy provided the longest and decisive station of his earthly pilgrimage. He was still a child of ten when his father died and the family moved from the Dalmatian town of Spalato (now Split) to Venice. Here Ugo grew up to be a learned, fiery young man with radical ideas nurtured by such disparate sources as Alfieri and Rousseau. He greeted Napoleon as a liberator in 1796, but suffered a bitter disappointment a year later when the Corsican general, after putting a forcible end to the thousand-year old Venetian Republic, handed over its territories to the Austrian Empire at the bargaining table of Campoformido. Now the former citizen of the “Most Serene Republic” had to leave his adoptive city and ancestral homeland, to avoid political persecution at the hands of the counterrevolutionary pro-Austrian police. This second exile differed from the first, which took place in 1784 when his father left Zante for Spalato; it was consummated in full adult consciousness, it entailed leaving mother and siblings behind, namely his whole remaining family, and it left him to his own devices in Napoleon-dominated Lombardy, not a culturally foreign country of course, but still a new land in every other way. The Cisalpine Republic that came into being there under French sponsorship drew Foscolo to itself, like many other Italian liberal patriots, as the only hope for nationwide political emancipation, and he brilliantly served as an officer of the Cisalpine army in many a hard campaign. Meanwhile, as the French Republic turned into the Napoleonic Empire and the Cisalpine Republic accordingly changed into the Italian kingdom under a French Viceroy, Milan its capital became another Venice for Foscolo, who now enjoyed a rising reputation as the author of the Wertherian epistolary novel The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1798) (written in the aftermath of departure from enslaved Venice) and of the terse Odes and Sonnets (1802, 1803), then of The Sepulchers (1806). This singular protest poem was sparked by the author's reaction against French sanitary regulations on burial practices (Edict of St. Cloud, 1804), but his poetic temper submerged the polemical occasion in wave after wave of prophetic vision, culminating in the scene of blind Homer groping his way into the Trojan necropolis to awaken the voice of the dead heroes there for his deathless song.

The first fifteen years of the new century, which correspond to the span of Napoleon's empire, are the time of full fruition for Ugo Foscolo the poet and the man. He goes from love to intense love; he fights in Napoleon's armies because Napoleon is the lesser of two evils, but openly criticizes the Emperor's political impositions on democratic ideals; he takes an active interest in public life, and briefly teaches at Pavia University (1809), only to become a casualty of his own refusal to compromise with political expediency; he follows up the success of his fiction and verse with the unfinished rhapsody, The Graces, and an equally unfinished translation of the Iliad; he pioneers in literary criticism. All of this helps us to appreciate what it must have meant for our Greco-Venetian refugee to face a third exile when the Empire fell in 1815 and once again he had to leave a whole world behind—since he, an officer in Viceroy Beauharnais' Italian army, turned down the option of swearing allegiance to the reinstated Austrian occupying power after Waterloo.

After a short stay in Switzerland, he found a new home in hospitable England, thanks to the good offices of an English Italophile littérateur, W. S. Rose, whom he had known in Florence. The story of Foscolo's eleven years in England has been beautifully told by E. R. Vincent, and one can do no better than refer to that biography here. Those were in effect the years of Foscolo's decline, despite the heartening welcome he had from literate and affluent English society. No new poetry to speak of came from his pen, though he kept tinkering with The Graces and the Iliad translation.⁸ At the same time, his vein flowed forth in a different direction—he freelanced as literary critic and historian in journals like The Edinburgh Review, The Westminster Review, The Quarterly Review, The European Review, to illustrate the Italian heritage for an eager English readership. So this, the third main period of his life, was not altogether sterile; on the contrary, we owe to it the fine essays on Petrarch and Dante, among others, and they would be enough to insure a niche in the nation's memory for the man of whom later Risorgimento patriots (many of whom were to follow him to England during the ups and downs of Italy's struggle for liberty and unification) said that he had “given his country a new institution: exile.”

The political implications of that expression do have a clear counterpart in tone and themes of Foscolo's work, yet, as I hope to show further on, there are deeper resonances to be overheard in his writing. His youthful persona, Jacopo Ortis, opens his fictional self-portrait by saying that he is now a man without a country (“senza patria”), and he ends a suicide for political as well as sentimental reasons à la Werther. Shortly after, the death by suicide of Foscolo's brother, Giovanni, inspires one of his greatest sonnets, In morte del fratello Giovanni (1803), where the desperate option is implicitly exorcised by the Stoic persona. A later tragedy on Ajax likewise turns on suicide as the inevitable conclusion for a certain type of man in a certain situation. Another sonnet, “Che stai?” (Why do you tarry?), the twelfth and last of the series, styles its self-addressing author a “senza patria, and the same epithet applies to the fictional mask of Didimo Chierico, Didymus the Clergyman, whom Foscolo projected as the translator of Sterne's Sentimental Journey (1805), a work clearly meant, in our writer's inner economy, to offset the Sturm-und-Drang extremism of Jacopo Ortis:

“As a boy, circumstances led to my being trained in a seminary; then nature stopped me from becoming a priest: it would have caused me remorse to go on, and shame to go back: and since I practically despise whoever changes his way of life, I peacefully wear this tonsure and this black suit: this way I can either take a wife, or seek a bishopric.” I asked him which solution he would choose. He answered: “I haven't thought of it; a man without a country cannot decently be either a priest, or a father.”⁹

Self-irony and humor, worn as a mask by the death-haunted poet, counter-balanced his self-destructive tendencies and helped to enrich his literary gamut. The predicament of being “without a country,” which destroys the fictional Jacopo Ortis, is accepted by Didymus and enables Ugo to dissociate exile from inevitable death; he now lives in a delicate balance which allows him to face his own uprootings without flinching—as witness the Stoic Sonnets—or even (it's the case of The Sepulchers) to place his individual destiny within the objective framework of mankind's historical instability—for history viewed without a transcendent guarantee is a cumulation of exiles, a parade of cemeteries. Plus the reiterated struggle to wrest precarious life from perennial death, the heroic continuity of civilization, a human thing, a feat of memory, memory (Mnemosyne) banking on tombs as testimonials:

Siedon custodi de' sepolcri e quando
Il tempo con sue fredde ali vi spazza
Fin le rovine, le Pimplée fan lieti
Di lor canto i deserti, e l'armonia
Vince di mille secoli il silenzio.
They sit to watch the sepulchers, and when
Time with its cold wings there brushes off
Even the last ruins, the Pierian sisters gladden
The desert wastes with their singing, and harmony
Overwhelms the silence of a thousand ages.

(The Sepulchers, 230-34)¹⁰

These are neither the conventional Muses of rococo or neoclassical décor, nor the Disquieting Muses of De Chirico, but they are closer to the latter—they radiate a halo of weird, numinous hilarity over the frightening void to which the landscape of human history (as Ozymandias knows) periodically returns. Old Rocky Face, instructed in Vico's theory of cycles, looks forth and listens—and Hyperion's Schicksalslied fills the space. Contemplation of man's collective fate reconciles man to individual calamity—especially if, like Hölderlin or Foscolo, he feels invested with the mission of song, that sole possible victory over ravaging time:

E me che i tempi ed il desìo d'onore
Fan per diversa gente ir fuggitivo,
Me ad evocar gli eroi chiamin le Muse
Del mortale pensiero animatrici.
And me, whom the complexion of the times
And steadfastness in honor drive to flee
Through alien peoples, me may the Muses summon
To evoke all heroes, for the Muses only
Forever breathe life into human thought.

(The Sepulchers, 226-29)

Personal reality, the self as such, is far from denied in The Sepulchers; the self is not submerged without a trace in the vistas of history; on the contrary, he is very much there when surfacing in the waves of the epic hymn to reaffirm his commitment to his own hopeless-hopeful destiny—which is more a matter of moral choice than of external imposition, as the above lines show with their variation in a new key on Dante's topical “l'essilio che m'è dato, onor mi tegno” (the exile imposed on me I hold as an honor). The passage quoted here initially recalls the opening lines of the Sonnet on the death of Foscolo's brother:

Un dì, s'io non andrò sempre fuggendo
di gente in gente, mi vedrai seduto
su la tua tomba, o fratel mio, gemendo
il fior de' tuoi gentili anni caduto.
One day, should I stop wandering forever
from one nation to another, you will see me seated
at your tomb, O my brother, there to mourn
over your gentle youth cut down in its prime.

The chord set up by this juxtaposition contains a dissonance: in the sonnet, written a few years earlier, the self appears as “I,” whereas in the Sepulchers he is an objectified “Me,” first as the victim of fate and of his own resolution and independence, then as the hopefully chosen vehicle of the goddesses of poetry. The “I” of the sonnet holds private conversation with the victim of self-inflicted, untimely death; the self of The Sepulchers summarizes all his private woes to purge them in the catharsis of poetry, which is conceived as a communal mission, as the commemoration and redemption of mankind's woes. In the sonnet, conversation with the beloved shade takes place as a parenthesis in the restlessness of exile; in the Sepulchers, the condition of poetry is directly connected with the condition of exile, which seems to be necessary to the poetical investiture, and which, anyhow, is felt to be something that brings the individual man, as singer, closer to the rest of mankind. The vicissitudes of mankind are themselves a sort of perennial exile, a perpetual loss of the ubi consistam, of the sacred grounds and roots to be restored by collective effort, by communal memory—through the proper single vessel, the rhapsode.

Homer's figure, the archetypal poet in his civilizing mission, is evoked at the end by prophetess Cassandra and thereby placed in a perennial future, out of a mythical past, to resolve in himself all the poets, Foscolo included, who have made themselves heard in this concentrated epos of civilization. Exiled Dante, wandering Petrarch and roving Alfieri were among them; and even in this regard does Homer recapitulate (or forecast) an essential trait of theirs, for he appears in Foscolo's grand evocation as a wandering beggar:

                                                                                 … Un di vedrete
Mendico un cieco errar intra le vostre
Antichissime ombre, e brancolando
Penetrar negli avelli, e abbracciar l'urne
E interrogarle. Gemeranno gli antri
Secreti, e tutta narrerà la tomba
Ilio raso due volte e due risorto …
                                                                       … One day you will see
A blind beggar roam among your ancient shades,
And grope his way into the burial chambers,
And embrace the urns, and interrogate them.
At this, a moan will issue from the secret
Vaults, and the whole tomb will tell the story
Of Ilion twice razed and twice rebuilt …

(The Sepulchers, 279-285)

The poet, as an exile, is a marked man, and therefore sacred:

                                                                       … Il sacro vate,
Placando quelle afflitte alme col canto,
I prenci Argivi eternerà per quante
Abbraccia terre il gran padre Oceàno.
E tu onore di pianti, Ettore, avrai
Ove fia santo e lacrimato il sangue
Per la patria versato, e finché il Sole
Risplenderà su le sciagure umane.
                                                             … The sacred bard,
Soothing the hurt of those souls with his song,
Will make Greek princes immortal through all
The lands that father Ocean embraces.
And you, Hector, will be honored by tears
Wherever blood shed for one's homeland is
Holy and revered, and as long as the sun
Keeps shining on the disasters of mankind.

(The Sepulchers, 288-295, the end)

The adjective “sacro,” so climactically used by the dramatis persona (Cassandra) in this finale which reconciles patriotism, the religion of motherland, with the religion of mankind at large, has the same ring its German equivalent heilig acquires in Hölderlin's likewise Hellenizing (and Pindaric) odes.

The poet, as a marked man, begins in the role of a scapegoat, and if he has the strength to resist the temptation of Werther, of Jacopo Ortis, of Giovanni Foscolo, he becomes Ugo Foscolo, who survives to tell the story because he has accepted the branding mark of his destiny as an initiation. In ancient Latin the word sacer could refer either to the criminal set apart by his crime (Law of the Twelve Tables) or to the privileged person or object marked for cult and reverence. In Foscolo's myth, the haunted romantic persona undergoes a consecration precisely by choosing his fate as an outcast to convert it into an election: vatic poetry. Hence the vatic stance, which goes with the solemn diction, in a style quite germane to Keats as well as Milton (the latter writer being acknowledged by Foscolo as his own stylistic counterpart).¹¹ Fate in the form of repeated exile has stripped him bare as he, going forth from country to country, shed a world each time; now he reaps his reward, by donning the robe of the poet-prophet. Like Didymus' ironic garb, this mantle emblazons a liberating distance—but also a passionate lucidity vis-à-vis the turmoil of experience.

According to Mario Fubini, who has written the best study of Foscolo's poetry to date,¹² this vatic persona appears only in The Sepulchers, while in the great sonnets, deeply inspired by exile though they may be, it would be only the private lyrical persona that speaks. They, according to Fubini, are the harvest of Foscolo's youth, while The Sepulchers expresses his full ripening. The statement needs qualification if we keep in mind the sonnet to Zante, where already the persona dons the cursed-sacred garments of the vates. This shows not only in the description of himself as singer (with an implicit linkage to Homer), but also in the striking styleme of the last line which applies to the persona a solemn plurale majestatis (“noi,” us) superseding the first person singular that prevailed earlier (“toccherò,” I shall touch; “il mio corpo,” my body):

Né più mai toccherò le sacre sponde
ove il mio corpo fanciulletto giacque,
Zacinto mia, che te specchi nell'acque
del greco mar da cui vergine nacque
Venere, e fea quell'isole feconde
col suo primo sorriso, onde non tacque
le tue limpide nubi e le tue fronde
l'inclito verso di colui che l'acque
cantò fatali, ed il diverso esiglio
per cui bello di fama e di sventura
baciò la sua petrosa Itaca Ulisse.
Tu non altro che il canto avrai del figlio,
o materna mia terra; a noi prescrisse
il fato illacrimata sepoltura.
Nor shall I touch again the sacred shores
wherein my body lay in blissful childhood,
O my Zacynthos, mirrored in the waves
of the Greek sea from which in virgin splendor
Venus arose to make those islands fruitful
with her first smile, so that your sunbright clouds
and your groves found their proper celebration
in the undying verse of the man who sang
the fatal waters and the manifold exile
that was Ulysses' lot, who, burdened with fame
and sorrow, finally kissed his stony Ithaca.
Of your son, you will get nothing but the song,
O my motherland; fate decreed for us
only an unmourned burial in the end.

Needless to say, no translation can approximate, let alone duplicate, the unique musical effect Foscolo extracts from cumulative syntactical progression coupled with the cannily exploited vocalic melody and consonantal harmony of the Italian language. It is something else than commonplace bel canto mellifluousness. The phrasing, overflowing metrical boundaries, has a wiry resilience which helps to create a kind of inexhaustible rhythm within the absolute circumscription of the sonnet form. Eloquence sustains, instead of mortifies, pure vision. One breathless sentence, in wave after wave of subordinate clauses, sweeps through the first eleven lines of the sonnet, subverting its classical structure (and indeed this imbalance created by the Foscolian wavelength puzzled some early readers, presumably the same kind of readers that resented the Pindaric flights of The Sepulchers),¹³ where narrative ellipse keeps short-circuiting the logic of ideas, to the advantage of dramatic imagery. The semantic space thus ranged matches that noteworthy hypotactical cumulation whereby clause generates clause (mostly in a straight descending order, but with some lateral ramification of syntax to avert monotony) and image sparks image. To be specific: the governing clause (line 1), after begetting one directly dependent clause in Line 2, resumes with the pivotal vocative at Line 3, which promptly sprouts into another directly dependent clause overflowing into Line 4, and that clause in turn engenders five more in quick succession. Of these, the first and the second one (from the midst of Line 4 to the midst of Line 5) stay on the same syntactical level, being mutually coordinated, as if to suspend for a moment the relentless rush that will come to a head in Line 11 with the finality of

baciò la sua petrosa Itaca Ulisse.

The headlong waters of eloquence spring at the outset from a subterranean source (as indicated by the initial “Né …,” Nor …, which marks the transition from silent inner monologue to open utterance) to cataract through five successive ledges of rock; but on the second ledge they deviate part of their mass into a placid pool:

ove il mio corpo fanciulletto giacque,

and on the third ledge they find an even more spacious basin to gather in:

                                                                                 … da cui vergine nacque
Venere, e fea quell'isole feconde
col suo primo sorriso, …

The first pool reflects the privileged image of the speaker's own divinely favored childhood. Foscolo's equivalent of Hölderlin's “Da ich ein Knabe war, / Rettet'ein Gott mich oft”;¹⁴ the second, and larger, pool mirrors the correspondingly privileged image of Venus-Aphrodite rising from the sea to quicken the Ionian archipelago (and implicitly the whole world) into verdant life. In other words, the tempo of the cumulative hypotactic movement—which allusively encompasses no less than the origins and fatal course of history, through the topical vicissitudes of Homeric Greece—relaxes twice in mid course to let the voice longingly dwell on two mythical beginnings: the speaker's prehistorical innocence in his paradisal island, and Nature's intact origins, Aphrodite's “first smile,” this side of history yet ushering history in with all its devastations as weathered by the typical hero, Ulysses.

What we have here is a cosmogony, poles apart from any mere rehash of classical commonplaces; Foscolo, as Mario Fubini has remarked, found his gods in himself rather than in books¹⁵—and in this he again paralleled or anticipated the mythopoeia of those two kindred spirits, John Keats and Friederich Hölderlin, for whom Hellas was the lost homeland, never actually known except through Lord Elgin's marbles or Homer's and Pindar's pages, and forever dreamed as the only possible release from the burden of history. To Foscolo, however, Hellas was both a never-never dreamland and a concrete personal experience, the unrenounceable bond of birth. As repeated exile pushed that experience farther and farther back into the recesses of memory, it blossomed into a myth whose nomenclature was naturally re-appropriated from the seemingly worn-out stock of Greek fables once mandatory to the literary trade and now increasingly optional, or even suspect, with the advent of the romantic dispensation. A cruel distance in time and space widened between Ugo Foscolo of Zante and his lost insular Eden, and then also between himself and his mother Diamantina, the living testimonial of his Hellenic identity. But once the Edenic origin receded to the threshold of dimness, individual memory could bridge the gap by broadening into racial memory, and the carnal beginnings of Ugo became consubstantial to the cosmic beginnings of Greece, that epitome of the whole meaningful world.

Zacynthos happens to be an island. In the poem, its earth and rock is retranslated into flesh and bone, its surrounding waters into the womb's amniotic fluid. Within its “sacred shores” the poetic persona's “body in his first childhood” “lay” safely sheltered. The mythical equation island-womb-bosom parallels the equation Zacynthos-Diamantina-Venus, to be sensed in the progression of images from “sacred shores” to “body in his first childhood” to Zacynthos “mirroring” herself in the “waves of the Greek sea” from which the birth of Venus is reenacted as if the goddess rising from those waters were the transfigured specular image of Zacynthos-Mother. And indeed Aphrodite appears as a sublimated mother figure, with the attributes of virgin fertility and beauty.¹⁶ In this regard it pays to consider the syntactical bivalence of the epithet “vergine” (virgin) in Line 4. At first the reader may doubt whether it proleptically refers to Venus (“Venere,” in the subsequent line) or postpositionally modifies “Greek sea” (“greco mar,” preceding “vergine” in the same line). Then the latter option is favored by semantic plausibility, since it seems pleonastic to emphasize the goddess' virginity at birth, and it makes sense to ascribe that inviolate quality to the living ocean that bore Aphrodite as the first of its creatures. On the other hand, excluding Venus in this context from the moot predicate, to the sole benefit of “the Greek sea,” would force us to break the effortless line

del greco mar da cui vergine nacque

with a grating caesura between “vergine” and “nacque,” thereby crippling the momentum of utterance, which also banks on a masterly enjambment. Beyond metric partitions and commonsense logic, the impulsion of the voice catapults “vergine” into the semantic field radiating from “Venere,” a word that happens to echo “vergine” by initial alliteration, syllabic structure, stress placement and vocalic chromatism. It is another internal “mirroring,” like the cosmic event connecting Zacynthos with Venus, and like the self-reflection of the exiled poet persona in bardic Homer and roaming Ulysses. Virginity, then, becomes a mystical quality enveloping Venus herself and permeating her cosmic matrix, as witness the goddess' “first smile.” Since this is not the cold and hateful virginity of Hérodiade, it does not surprise us to find it endowed with the magical power of fecundity:

                                                                                 … vergine nacque
Venere, e fea quell'isole feconde
col suo primo sorriso, …

Whether we listen to the chant of Italian e vowels, a kind of bass counterpointed by the trilling Italian i of “ìsole,” “prìmo,” “sorrìso,” or to the alliterative echoes whereby “Vénere” projects “fea” (made), and “fea” generates “feconde,” with a memorable etymological improvisation, we experience an expansion of breath and inner vision. This in turn is aided by the strong stress on the first syllable of the line in the word “Vénere,” which opens up a cosmogonic vista. The hendecasyllable prolongs itself, helped by strategic enjambments, into ecstatic duration.

The expansive movement of self-regenerating syntax which took over the two quatrains and the first tercet is brought up short by the strong pause after “Ulisse.” Then what is left for the second tercet but to seal the whole exuberant utterance with a dry prophetic epitaph which sharply offsets the previous release of personal and mythic memory. The voice had expanded, now it contracts; so does the vision, which comes to rest, after so much exciting amplitude, on a derelict tombstone looming in the future. Yet from such shrinkage what liberation!

                                                                       … a noi prescrisse
il fato illacrimata sepoltura.

The exile persona who had recognized a similarity between his fate and Ulysses' must now deny it, because his own “manifold exile” will not end up in a homecoming. His lot is exile outlasting death. And in that last line the poet sings his own dirge, with the fullness of vowels—all five of them—sustaining the voice in hieratic slowness (an Adagio after the Allegro of the first part) as it ranges the chromatic scale from the openness of luminous ah sounds down to the progressively occlusive, dark notes in sepoltura. Only the song will be left, nothing else; but it is already to be heard here, and we now understand why the implicit claim of kinship with antonomastically introduced Homer. Foscolo the singer, last of a great lineage, will survive Ugo the wanderer; he has mirrored himself both in Ulysses and in Homer, no small feat of self-dramatization but no hybris either, since it really amounts to an act of allegiance toward the cultural source from which the validating types emerge for personal use. In a kindred spirit, Melville, another authority on exile, at least of the inner kind, was to speak of “reverence for archetype.”

If the final line sounds like a matchless climax, the whole last tercet lays claim on our attention. It both contrasts and summarizes the long preceding part of the sonnet. Where the contrasting traits are, we have seen; we might actually add a further one, namely, the prevalence of the future tense, the tense of prophecy, as against the prevalence of the past, the tense of personal and ethnic memory. The “prescrisse” (prescribed, decreed) of the last line but one, though a grammatical past, works as a function of the future in “Tu non altro che il canto avrai del figlio” (Of your son, you will get nothing but the song); Karl Kroeber aptly spoke of “commemorative prophecy” apropos of Foscolo and other Romantic poets. The “pre-scribing” of Fate is, even etymologically, a future in the past, and a past prolonged into the actual future; moreover, not a datable past, like the milestones of individual and collective history, but an indefinite past, one and the same thing with the hidden force that actuates and consummates one's own existence. In using the classical word, Fate, the modern poet acknowledged his restlessness as the vocation of exile, and once again personalized the classical vocabulary. But to go on with the structural relationship of our sonnet's last tercet to the rest of the lyric, we must see how dialectical that relationship is, since the traits shared by the two syntactical units that make up the sonnet seem to counterbalance the striking difference in relative length and complexity between those units. Parataxis supersedes hypotaxis as prophecy supersedes reminiscence in this conclusive part, yet that negative prophecy had already loomed in the opening line of the sonnet,

Né più mai toccherò le sacre sponde
Nor shall I touch again the sacred shores,

thus paving the way for a reiterated negation that brings out the elegiac essence of the tone. Just as in the first three lines of Quatrain 1 the dependent clause describing the persona's island-sheltered childhood is literally cradled between two segments of the governing clause which addresses the insular motherland, Venus-like Zacynthos, just so the clause addressing Motherland in the last tercet expressively encases the object of its verb, “the song … of your son” (il canto … del figlio), between the Thou (Tu) that replaces the direct name of the island as governing pronoun, and the vocative apposition that defines that pronoun to emphasize the maternal quality, “o materna mia terra” (O my motherland). In the quick review of his earthly destiny from remembered protection within the remote native shores to anticipated exposure and dereliction in exile-ridden death, the poet persona still expects one kind of return to the sheltering bosom of the island which is Mother—through his song, a posthumous gift, a disembodied visit. Analogously, though on a more literal level, he concludes the sonnet on his brother's death with the imploration to render his “bones” to “the sad bosom of Mother.” There are ways and ways to go home again.

Yet one must lose home and mother and one's version of earthly paradise if one wants to find it all again—in memory and song. One must go forth from the enveloping bosom, into the threatening-enticing waters and wastes, into the pitiless light of the sun. Foscolo's vocation of exile, stronger than nostalgia, is the urge to grow, to know and see, to “experience the world and human vices and virtues,” as Dante's Ulysses has it, a congenial figure no doubt. Insofar as this urge, aided by circumstance (“Fate”), takes on hyperbolic proportions with Foscolo, it marks his personal destiny as singular yet utterly representative of man's deep drives and conflicts; hence the poetry he wrung from his suffering can still speak to us, beyond any change of epochal styles, as no period piece could.

If at a first reading one might mistake its vatic stance for rhetorical decorativeness, a closer look and a more intent ear will grasp its essential spareness, along with its driving energy. No concession is made to the picturesque or the merely descriptive, as witness the lack of color modifiers, for one thing, in the sonnets. Green is suggested by the bare noun “fronde” (fronds); white as the color of unthreatening clouds is implied by “limpide,” an adjective which transcends color to catch the essence of light in a serene climate; and as for the sea, it is defined by its cultural, mythical connotations: “Greek”—rather than by a sensory epithet like “deep blue” or “winedark.” Everything is caught in motion, or in some kind of essential action that pinpoints its identity; verbs carry the burden of expression. Rhymes enhance meaning, as the Zacynthos sonnet shows with its marked transition from the joyful resonance of the -onde … -acque pattern in the octet to the plaintive -iglio, the moaning -ura and the hissing -isse combination of the sextet; this chromatic transition underscores the shift from vocal diastole to systole I noticed before both in the global syntactical configuration and in the chromatic physiognomy of the last line. Furthermore, the amenable semantic implications of -onde (waves) and -acque (waters) are dominant in the octet, in contrast to the refractory stoniness of “petrosa Itaca,” “prescrisse,” and “sepoltura” in the sextet; sound, imagery, syntax and connotative logic conspire to effect the crucial passage from a liquid, generative, sheltering world to a hardened, sterile, ineluctable one. The movement hinges on the semantic permutation of “acque fatali” at lines 8-9, which signals a change in the very quality of the so far trustworthy marine ambience: it was enveloping, protective, womblike; now it is estranging and fraught with a dangerous challenge, a call to menacing openness. The self is challenged to leave the indefiniteness of his matrix for the ordeal of self-definition—a process entailing the confrontation of death, from which the root meaning of exile emerges: the dying away from one's intact source, toward a possible rebirth. If we experimentally isolate the rhyme words we shall be sketching a skeletal diagram of the whole poem's semantic itinerary along those very lines: sponde-giacque - onde - nacque - feconde - tacque - fronde - acque - esiglio - sventura - Ulisse - figlio - prescrisse - sepoltura (shores - lay - waves - was born - fruitful - hushed - fronds - waters - exile - calamity - Ulysses - son - prescribed - burial). Even this, however, would fail to clinch the point without the help of prolepsis, an element of utterance which does its part to activate the whole structure.

The conspicuous recurrence of this rhetorical module in Foscolo's best poetry warrants some close consideration. In the sonnet to Zante, it operates with focal pervasiveness. To begin with, the climactic vocative “Zacinto mia” (O my Zacynthos) rings out long after the essential completion of its relevant clause (Line 1) and after a whole dependent clause (Line 2) has had a chance to intervene. The vocative itself comes as a surprise, in a way, because the governing and the relative clause preceding it could very well stand on their own feet grammatically and semantically; they would make sense by themselves. Yet when the in-voked name appears, it changes everything; it refocuses on itself the whole syntactic structure completed so far: everything now points to Zacynthos, everything gravitates on “my” Zacynthos, and only Zacynthos, as a supervening grace, can make sense of the seemingly self-contained world where she has appeared. The delayed action effect amounts to an epiphany in the given context, and epiphany will elicit a theophany in turn when, shortly after, the goddess Venus surfaces from the remembered waters of Zacynthos. The proleptic pattern may be defined as inversion compounded with retardation of some kind and the attribution of climactic importance to the member accordingly shifted to last position in a clause or syntagm. It is intrinsic to the hypotactical chain of our sonnet's first part as well as to the isolated last tercet. The names of Venus and Ulysses, no less than the hieratically un-named Homer, all come at the end of their respective clauses, and so does the vocative “o materna mia terra” (O my motherland), so symmetrical to the first one, in the last tercet. What in less strong hands might have remained a conventional figure of speech, Foscolo refashions into a propulsive device of utterance. Combined with the many enjambments, it energizes discourse by keeping it in forward motion from idea to idea, each climax becoming a hinge, each provisional goal a new departure. In this way a purely personal memory—childhood spent lounging on the shores of a Mediterranean island—can release a flood of historical and mythical memories, of which it becomes a part.

Combined with apostrophe, prolepsis characterizes other fine sonnets of Foscolo's, notably the already quoted “In morte del fratello Giovanni” and the sonnet to Evening (“Alla Sera”):

Forse perché de la fatal quïete
tu sei l'immago, a me si cara vieni,
o Sera, …
Perhaps because you are the very image
of the ultimate quiet, your coming is so dear to me,
O Evening. …(17)

where the maternal function is taken over by Death, the promise of peace after so much tumult, the ultimate exile which now appears as a homecoming? Less pervasively, but still significantly, the proleptic pattern (with or without apostrophe) propels the feverish transitions of The Sepulchers, from scene to scene of European history down to the crowning evocation of Homer in the act of wresting life from a penetrated tomb—as if the whole poem were one gigantic prolepsis, gravitating on that absolute image. Utterance surges forward toward its apogee by moving backward in time—mythic-historical time, the memory of the West. And memory is prophetic—it disinters mankind's future from mankind's past, not just the foregone fictional future of Troy, or of any one city. The figures of Homer and of Cassandra, who prophesies Homer's coming to the still dancing youths of intact Troy, are complementary, and they converge in the vatic persona of Foscolo. This happens most ostensibly in The Sepulchers, but it was foreshadowed in the sonnet to Zante, where the figure of Fate partly functioned in a Cassandra-like way, and where again personal memory delved into its ethnic source.

In the present editorial framework it has seemed advisable to sample that one sonnet for special focus as the best way to illustrate depth and thematic range of Foscolo's writing, as well as the connections between his haunted life and his work. “A Zante” is indeed a culmination of poetic maturity and a portent of things to come for its author, both existentially and artistically. We have glimpsed some of its seminal relevance to the later Sepolcri, and space prevents me from showing in detail how it relates to the still later opus, the unfinished Le Grazie, which Foscolo wrote mainly in the shadow of Napoleon's impending collapse, and on the eve of his own last exile. But I can at least point out the recurrence of the island theme in Part III of The Graces. As a novel celebration of Zacynthos it already crops up in Part I, but in Part III it becomes a myth of Atlantis, the vanished continent which now can only dawn on the sailor as a mirage. It is a world suspended beyond reality, the last refuge of Athena Pallas and of the Graces, the powers of civilization perpetually exiled by human recklessness or brutality and eternally committed to the immunity of art. Once again, the island forever lost is the sanctuary of imagination, and there Pallas and the Fates weave a magic veil for the Graces, a synaesthetic Kunstwerk der Zukunft that depicts reality and generates cosmic harmony, conquering Time and its ravages. This is Foscolo's version of Paradise, sustained by longing and not by faith, unlike Dante's, in the face of stark science. It is a man-made paradise; it is poetry trying to capture its own essence: poetry, that is, on the making of poetry. Perhaps Foscolo's failure to write more poetry (apart from his work on the translation of the Iliad) in his not altogether fruitless English exile should not be blamed on that exile itself. The poet of history had achieved the myth of meta-history and thereby completed his cycle; now he could commit his creative powers only to critical prose, moving among several languages since exile had sharpened his ear.

Exile prompted him to correlate different cultures to his own Mediterranean heritage; it also spurred him to “keep his erasers in order,” this being the only way to keep faith with the initial vision. Europe had come a long way from the time when exiled Ovid could feel it as a half-comical degradation to have to learn the language of the host country. In the same context, Foscolo's activity as a translator (whether of Sterne or of Catullus, Sappho and Homer) bears scrutiny. Along with his essays on translation, it mediates between his poetical and his noteworthy critical contributions, extending from the golden Milanese period to the silver Londoner one. There are invaluable technical observations to be gleaned from this part of Foscolo's work, and they place him in the forefront or even well in advance of his age, since his vatic stance goes hand in hand with a keen consciousness of his craft; this in turn makes him intolerant of classicist Aristotelian rules which he resents for having hamstrung the Italian genius from the high Renaissance on. His Greekness, though preeminently Apollonian, has a Dionysian touch, like an intimation of things to come in European culture. The philologist in him, as the essay on Homer's Zeus shows,¹⁸ was as perceptive as the critic; and as a critic, whether of his own work or of the work of others, again he proved how the recognition of affinities between oneself and one's brethren need not blur objective vision.

We have something to learn from his statement that Dante's chief quality was a swiftness of language and imagery, or that to Petrarch¹⁹ the Italian language, so exactingly shaped into polished verse, was (as a consequence of the man's wandering life) “both native and foreign.” These judgments are fairly self-descriptive on Foscolo's part, yet perfectly relevant to their historical subjects. Again in Epochs of the Italian Language (1818) he insists on dynamism and rapidity as the native virtue of that tongue, though he places ancient Greek above even Italian in the matter of “harmony.” Then in an unsigned piece on modern Italian writers,²⁰ which he did for Hobhouse as a commentary on Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Book IV, he defines his own achievement in terms of rhythmical mimesis (against Dr. Johnson's dictates), for his hendecasyllables are supposed to bear a unique stamp; he wants a different melody, whether vocalic or consonantal, from each line, and a different harmony from each sentence. And he goes on to say that the intellectual tension his writing demands from the reader is of one piece with the vehemence—also physical—of his conversation; poetry to him was evidently gesture and dance, a kinetic instinct. One could also profitably read his foreword to the Experiment of translation from the Iliad (1807) for the pointed remarks on style,²¹ which seems to anticipate those of an Ezra Pound. Whether engaged in repossessing his complex heritage through poetry, criticism, or literary historiography, he never ceased revitalizing the great tradition which was to him a matter of life and death. The lesson of exile, coming to him from Dante and Petrarch and the Bible, fostered constant exercise of critical judgment as the accompaniment—or antiphon—to the ascetically cultivated poetical gift which enabled him to dream of his Zacynthian “pre-existence”²² while squarely facing the wounds and blights of existence.

Notes

1. Two relevant passages, among others, are Tristia V, vii, lines 40-68, and Tristia V, x, 33-44. I am referring to the Loeb Classical Library volume: Ovid—Tristia, Ex Ponto, tr. by A. L. Wheeler (Cambridge, Mass., and London, England, 1924, 1965).

2. Tristia V, vii, 61-68: “Yet for fear of losing the use of the Latin language, and so that my voice will not grow dumb in its native sound, I talk to myself and revive obsolete words, and revert to the ill-starred practice of my art. In this way do I drag out my life and time, in this way do I manage to withdraw from contemplation of my troubles. Through song I endeavor to forget my wretchedness: and if I do obtain such a reward, it is enough.” (Tr. mine).

3. One remembers Stephen Dedalus' motto: “silence, cunning, and exile.”

4. Not only Ovid's, but also Horace's epistolary verse and his satires come to mind in this connection. In his comments on his own free translation of Propertius (“Homage to Sextus Propertius”), Pound said that the Roman poets of the imperial age were culturally our contemporaries, this being one reason why he gave Propertius, as a mask of himself, an English voice attuned to prosy cadences and style and free of any archaism. Disenchantment can be a defense—whether against exile or against the corruption of the times.

5. Literally, a “threshold situation,” a predicament which strains our moral or intellectual resources to the utmost. It is interesting to remember that Karl Jaspers, the modern German philosopher, began as a psychiatrist.

6. Croce considered him a true European, for reasons that go beyond the biographical vicissitudes I am now summarizing. See Croce's European Literature in the Nineteenth Century (1924), as well as Karl Kroeber's The Artifice of Reality—Poetic Style in Wordsworth, Foscolo, Keats, and Leopardi, (Madison, Wisconsin, 1964). Foscolo was by temperament and achievement a member of the “visionary company,” and he showed an affinity for English literature even before moving to England, where he acted as a cultural liaison officer of sorts.

7. E. R. Vincent, Ugo Foscolo—an Italian in Regency England (Cambridge, 1953).

8. Foscolo's Esperimento di traduzione dell'Iliade di Omero had been published by Bettoni in Brescia in 1807, but the project kept him busy far beyond that date and well into his last years. The completed part of the project, with the variants, has been published in the Edizione nazionale delle opere di U. F., a long, committee-directed scholarly enterprise in many volumes, the publisher being Le Monnier of Florence. Le Grazie, despite the author's tireless self-editing, remained unfinished though not incomplete at his death, and its entire publication (posthumous, of course) has engaged the guessing and the polemical skills of generations of scholars. May I refer to Vincent, cit., and Fubini in this regard. The essential structure of the rhapsody consists of three hymns (respectively to Venus, Vesta and Athena Pallas) celebrating the graces of civilization and dedicated each to a lovely young lady who cultivates an art (in the order, dancing, apiculture, music). The three Hellenic goddesses of beauty and harmony are thus personified and at the same time depicted as forms of the creative process.

9. I am translating my text from Opere di Ugo Foscolo, a cura di Mario Puppo, Ugo Mursia editore (Milan, 1962-71), p. 709 (“Notizia intorno a Didimo Chierico”). It has been pointed out that at about the same time Foscolo also took an interest in the urbane work of Horace.

10. A recent translation of I Sepolcri, by Thomas G. Bergin, has been published in 1971 by The Bethany Press at Bethany, Conn. The translation of excerpts here given is mine.

11. In a review article on Ippolito Pindemonte's translation of the Odyssey, dating from 1810 and now available in Vol. VII of the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere, pp. 197-230. In this context, talking of the general problem of translation, Foscolo digresses to criticize his own experiment as a translator of the Iliad, and says (p. 210) he has been better at writing essays on the question than at conveying Homer's own spirit in his version, because Nature seems to have made him “an apter follower of Pindar and Milton than of Virgil and Homer.”

12. Mario Fubini, Ugo Foscolo, La Nuova Italia (Florence, 1962). Fubini's first study of F. appeared in 1928. At p. 188 he has this to say of Foscolo: “… only his being an exile, an Italian, a poet, could enable him to feel the universal human sorrow as his own intimate sorrow.”

13. See Foscolo's own report on some strictures from friend and foe, chiefly aimed at his compressed eloquence, in Essay on the Present Literature of Italy, Ediz. Naz. delle Opere, vol. XI, Part II, 479-80.

14. “In my boyhood days a god often saved me …”, from Hölderlin—Selected Verse, with an introduction and prose translations by Michael Hamburger. The Penguin Poets (Baltimore, Md., 1961), p. 26. See also “Der Archipelagus,” p. 81.

15. Fubini, cit., p. 124.

16. The myth of Aphrodite Anadyomene, Venus rising from the sea, had a particular fascination for Foscolo, who used it also in his Odes.

17. Because the imagery of this sonnet is so antiphonal to that of the Zacynthos sonnet, I am appending here my free translation:

    Perhaps because you are the very image of the ultimate quiet, your coming is so dear to me, O Evening, and whether the summer clouds blithely court you along with the mild breezes or through the snow-ridden air you bring disquieting, long darkness to the world, you always alight as a presence invoked, and softly win secret access to my heart. You make me roam with my thoughts along the way that leads to eternal nothingness; meanwhile this wretched age flees, and with it go the herds of worries that devour me in its wake; and while I contemplate your peace, there slumbers within me the warlike spirit, its roars hushed.

18. More easily than in the exhaustive Edizione Nazionale delle Opere, cit., this remarkable piece of sensitive erudition which holds a clue to Foscolo's poetics as well can be found in Opere di Ugo Foscolo a cura di Mario Puppo, cit., pp. 420-27 (“Su la traduzione del cenno di Giove,” On the translation of Zeus' nod).

19. The original English text as published in 1821 (Essays on Petrarch) can be found, along with the Italian translation, by Ugoni in Edizione Nazionale delle Opere, cit., vol. X. The Italian text alone is reprinted in Opere di U. F. a cura di M. Puppo, cit. which also includes the Italian text of Epochs of the Italian Language. The revealing statement on the ambivalent nature of the Italian language to Petrarch is at p. 64 of Edizione Naz. delle Opere, vol. X: “At the same time that he improves the materials in which the Italian language already abounded, he seems to create it afresh, for it was in reality both native and foreign to him.”

20. The Essay on the Present Literature of Italy is to be found, both in its English and in its Italian versions, in Edizione Nazionale delle Opere, cit., vol. XI, Part II. See Vincent, cit.

21. See Note 8. In the foreword F. names imagery, style and passion as essential to both poet and translator, translation being for him contiguous to poetry as such. While he declines to define the element of passion, he analyzes style to break it down into the three components of harmony, movement and color; harmony results both from the “absolute sound” of words and from their rhythmical combinations, movement dwells in verbs because they express action, and color attaches to nouns. Furthermore, he makes much of the connotative function of literature (“accessory and concomitant ideas”), which gets lost in dictionaries and in most translations. Finally, he postulates an elective affinity between author and translator, calling it a “harmony of souls” bestowed by Nature alone and to be discovered only by experiment. If we dissolve the element of “passion” into the tangibles of imagery and style as defined by Foscolo, we shall move in a very Poundian sphere indeed, the more so as the exercise of translation as self-discovery or self-masking was intrinsic to Pound's work no less than to Foscolo's. The relevant passage is to be found in vol. cit. of Ediz. Naz. cit., p. 210.

22. The expression coined by Hugo von Hofmannsthal (“Preexistenz”) to define what Blake would have called innocence, a basic myth to Romantics and moderns alike, seems strikingly apt for the condition evoked and cherished in Foscolo's Zacynthos sonnet; a condition forever lost yet mentally reattainable in poetry, with the help of the “Graces.”