Italian | Italy | Personal Essay
October, 2020Marosia Castaldi (1950-2019) was a Neapolitan writer who spent most of her life in Milan, and this duality animates much of her work. Naples is vast, beautiful, dramatic, hellenic, bright, manic; Milan is small, dull, obscured in fog, closed in on itself, neurotic. That her work draws on largely abandoned devices like pathetic fallacy or even concepts like environmental determinism makes her a certain kind of contemporary Romantic, a true heir to the sublime strain in Italian literature singularly evident in Giacomo Leopardi. Yet the essay featured here, “Milan, International City,” from the author’s miscellany In mare aperto (Portofranco, 2001), builds this intensity from the everyday. Disillusionment with gray, industrious Milan, a principal destination for internal migration for Italians compelled to relocate from more economically depressed hometowns, is something of a commonplace and a literary topos. Castaldi’s quick walking tour of Milan, by contrasting the present with the recent past, the north with the south, and pointing out a number of rather untouristy landmarks, condenses an entire reading of the city into an ontology of geography. While Milan’s cosmopolitan aspirations are painted as somewhat pathetic, Castaldi’s portrait is nonetheless generous, surprisingly sweeping in its brevity, and from the perspective of someone who lives there, dead on.
- Jamie Richards
Armenia | Armenian | Personal Essay
September, 2013"The Man" is a short autobiographical sketch set in Paris, in 1896, during Zabel Yesayan's second year of study at the Sorbonne. It was published in 1905 in the Armenian literary magazine Masis as a response to a text examining the phenomenon of terror from an aesthetic point of view. The sketch explores the psychological effects of alienation and isolation of women as foreigners in a Parisian dormitory.
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