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A New York Review Books Original There's a certain street--via Saterna--in the middle of Milan that just doesn't show up on maps of the city. Orfi, a wildly successful young singer, lives there, and it's there that one night he sees his gorgeous girlfriend Eura disappear, "like a spirit," through a little door in the high wall that surrounds a mysterious mansion across the way. Where has Eura gone? Orfi will have to venture with his guitar across the borders of life and death to find out. Featuring the Ashen Princess, the Line Inspector, trainloads of Devils, Trudy, Valentina, and the Talking Jacket, Poem Strip--a pathbreaking graphic novel from the 1960s--is a dark and alluring investigation into mysteries of love, lust, sex, and death by Dino Buzzati, a master of the Italian avant-garde.… (more)
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At the time of publication, the format confounded critics, who by and large knew no better than to obtusely condemn Buzzati's "experiment". It didn't seem serious enough to them. It was demeaning to literature to enclose it into sequential images, bubbles and squares such as were usually seen around Donald Duck and Diabolik. And, it struck some as sort of obscene. In short, the critical reception was uncomprehending and cold, but the book sold very well.
The visual, literary, political and autobiographical references of this relatively short and incredibly rich work would take a tome to expound, beginning with Buzzati's life, and what follows are the broadest of strokes. Buzzati's imagination wedded pictures to words from the earliest age, so the question of origin of the idea for a literary story told in pictures is moot. His final decision and choice of the topic, however, had crystallised more than ten years before publication, in the aftermath of a shattering and revelatory love affair, thanks to which Buzzati, by his own testimony, had discovered love for the first time, "at the threshold of old age". The woman in question had been much younger than Buzzati, as was his wife, whom he met and married some years later. The erotic longing, despair and infinite regret that infuse Poema a fumetti are clearly autobiographical.
The plot is taken from the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, here called Orfi and Eura, and translated to the 1960s Milan. Pop singer Orfi sees one night his beloved Eura disappear into the grounds of a mysterious house, which turns out to be the gateway to Hades. Desperate, he follows and looks for her among the dead (who "live" their death not that differently from how the living live life), beguiles the spirits with his music and song of what they have lost, and almost snatches Eura away… except that she refuses to follow him, telling him it's useless, that another great law reigns in Death, and that they would meet again some day. This is the major departure from the myth, making Eura a positive, independent agent, different from the wholly passive and passively lost Eurydice.
(The reason for this departure, I think, is that Buzzati HAD to abide by the truth of the experience he was conveying. The girl ditched him. Love abandoned him. I can't help wondering what Buzzati's output would have looked like had he known Eros for as long as he had known Thanatos. Oh, he certainly knew, as he wrote to a friend, what it meant to "go to bed with a woman", but it is interesting that his protagonists' main relationships are always with their own and others' death. The joy of living in Buzzati is concentrated in his magnificent appreciation of nature and animals, most poignantly, that of mountains.)
A little on the visual style of the book. Buzzati collected images all his life. He drew and painted in different styles. For Poema a fumetti he adopted a collagistic and "sampling" approach. Some images were drawn from life, including models, such as the young friend who posed for Orfi (Buzzati's wife posed for Eura, a detail which was discreetly overlooked at publication), but others were references to famous illustrations or illustrators, reworkings of photographs, homages to other artists, and concoctions in various styles of the day, influenced by Pop Art and the commercial fumetti. Buzzati's references (according to Lorenzo Vigano) include the image of a hanged man from a medical atlas, architectural plans of buildings in Milano, Salvador Dali's Lobster telephone, photographs of Irving Klaw (famous for his Bettie Page and striptease photos), Caspar David Friedrich, the German Romantic painter, Arthur Rackham, famous illustrator of fairy tales, Otto Greiner, a Symbolist painter, F. W. Murnau, the director of Nosferatu, Wilhelm Busch, German humorist and cartoonist, the creator of Max und Moritz, Hans Bellmer, of the famous quartered Doll, Fellini etc. etc. etc.
This mix creates a strangely dreamlike, surrealist atmosphere, as these diverse visual signals tug at memory and elicit streams of associations. Reading the Poema a fumetti is like lucid dreaming, with eyes open.
The story follows Orfi, a talented singer, who one day sees his beloved Eura going into the reputedly haunted house across the street. The next day, he learns of her death and decides he has to find her. His guide to the underworld is a sentient jacket and he learns that the denizens of the land of the dead are dully content but devoid of passion. Orfi sings a song of what they’re missing from the living world and is then able to find Eura in a train station. The ending is a version on the usual story of loss.
Buzzati gives us a punk rock comic strip
So long you're okay with the graphic novel format I'd recommend you check out Poem Strip, even if you haven't had much exposure to the Orpheus and Eurydice myth before.
I can't say that I really get comic books (although I will go see every Marvel movie in existence), but I love the myth of
Also, I am not sure why this book says it includes "An Explanation of the Afterlife," since that appears to be a legitimate chapter and not a separate work.