by Eric Byrd
Angelo Maria Ripellino (1923 – 1978) was a poet, Slavicist, translator of the great Russian Symbolists and Silver Agers (Bely's Petersburg into Italian, a transmutation as arduous and heroic as any of Ulysses, from what I've heard Nabokov say), and, most memorably, a servant of Czech letters whose devotion extended, in one instance, to the patient chaperoning of Věra Linhartová in her cognac-confused dipsomaniacal descent on Rome. Shortly after the Second War, Ripellino went to study in Prague, married a Czech woman, and lived in Prague for some years. He became a student of the city's hauntings and urban demonology, its “lugubrious aura of decay” and “smirk of eternal disillusionment.” Denied visas after the Soviet invasion in 1968, he joined the émigrés in a sympathetic semi-exile. Shut out of Prague, “perhaps forever,” Ripellino caught himself “wondering whether Prague exists or if she is an imaginary land,” and under an exilic gloom compounded of ill-health and nostalgia, “despair and second thoughts,” he composed – gathered – dreamt – Magic Prague (1973). Mournful anatomy, elegiac bricolage, rarefied and classless as the best books are; a civic enchantment (as St. Petersburg and Dublin had been enchanted), an ark of motifs, an “itinerary of the wondrous”:
How then can I write an exhaustive, well-ordered treatise like a detached and haughty scholar, suppressing my uneasiness, my restlessness with a rigor mortis of methodology and the fruitless discussions of disheartened formalists? No, I will weave a capricious book, an agglomeration of wonders, anecdotes, eccentric acts, brief intermezzos and mad encores, and I will be gratified if, in contrast to so much of the printed flotsam and jetsam surrounding us, it is not dominated by boredom…I will fill these pages with scraps of pictures and daguerreotypes, old etchings, prints purloined from the bottoms of chests, réclames, illustrations out of old periodicals, horoscopes, passages from books on alchemy and travel books printed in Gothic script, undated ghost stories, album leaves and keys to dreams: curios of a vanished culture.
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