2024-04-02 08:08:31
Comical and magical are two of the adjectives most often used to describe the prose of Dylan Thomasthe great Welsh poet whose influence on the post-World War II cultural landscape (and also on so-called “pop” culture) is perhaps equal only to that of Allen Ginsberg, at least in the field of poetry. In reality, it cannot be explained enough that Thomas’s stories are first and foremost realist stories, even if transfigured by an imaginative language and even if they frequently sink into the world of childhood and adolescence, which is fabulous by definition. Einaudi is now publishing a new complete collection of Dylan’s prose, The Stories (translations by Floriana Bossi, Lucia Rodocanachi, Angelo Fauno and Claudia Canale, preface by Gabriele Frasca). An excellent opportunity to discover or rediscover Thomas’ prose – 35 stories in total divided into four sections – which is no less exciting than his poetry.
Thomas is an “excessive” author, and in this he is the prototype of the poet. He was also a versatile and far from shy author, who willingly used the radio (the BBC) to spread his words, even when German V2s were raining down on London, who gave himself four highly acclaimed tours in the United States (he read his own compositions but also of other authors), who used the pub in the Welsh village of Laugharne as his personal office, who loved many women, drank excessively and died in New York, in 1953 (he stayed in the legendary Chelsea hotel) after yet another alcoholic night at White Horse.
His most famous collection of short stories is entitled Portrait of the Artist as a Puppy (it would be “of a dog”, but in Italy it is not translated). The title is obviously a reference, and a mockery, to Joyce.
The stories told are those of Swansea, the seaside city where he was born, a popular Swansea, of drunkards and servants, of crumbling houses, fairs and playgrounds. Just outside, the extraordinary nature of Wales, with its tides, its moors and its cliffs, including the famous one, near Rosshili, which gives the title to a story, The Worm’s Head. The events are sometimes filtered by the presence of a child, as in The Snow Day, in which two women team up to unmask a Don Juan who frequents both of them, or put at the center young people hungry for love but destined for disgrace, as in Sabato d summer, with an almost dreamlike ending, which sees the protagonist get lost in a maze of hovels and railing houses, losing his way to the apartment of the woman who promised him a night of passion.
In the urban glimpses, with those long lists of people, streets, buildings, chimneys, tracks, construction sites, rubble, Thomas almost seems to anticipate the imaginative prose of the Beats; nothing strange that Bob Dylan borrowed his stage name from the poet. In the tense, theatrical dialogues, Thomas’s spirit of observation emerges, his ability to read the world and the human beings who inhabit it. There is also, at times, in fact, something comical, picaresque, but never in excessive quantity, nor ever verging on the grotesque; the gaze of this great writer, up to the end, up to the radio play Beneath the milk forest, which will be his involuntary testament, mixes amazed amazement at the variety and irregularity of existence with nostalgia: for his own childhood, certainly, a sort of great cornucopia, but also for the mythical past of his land, which becomes a leading protagonist in the lyrics.
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2024-04-02 08:08:31