2023-06-09 07:53:51
Time.news – One has stepped into the mythological role of the father, the other has given voice to the emotions of his son, Ulysses and Telemachus relive in ‘Ulysses’, from today in the bookstore for Cong, the company that manages the artistic work of Hugo Pratt, through the pen of Marco Steiner and Fabrizio Paladini, both close to the artist who died in ’95.
After the four titles dedicated to Corto Maltese, the new book (128 color pages, 19.50 euros) sets the course for another magical sailor from Pratt’s universe, preparatory in some way to his symbolic character, reviving and reworking the tables on the protagonist of the ‘Odyssey’ that Hugo Pratt created in 1963 for the ‘Corriere dei Piccoli’, four years before the birth of its most famous character, with texts by Franca Ongaro Basaglia.
“In the early 1960s in the ‘Corriere dei Piccoli’ Pratt, father of drawn literature, dedicated himself to the stories of the great characters of the classics, such as Hercules and precisely Ulysses and a few years later in Genoa, where he gave birth to Corto Maltese – he explains to Time.news Paladini, whose pen gives voice to Telemachus – It seemed important to us to rediscover those plates also in their prologue connotation to those dedicated to Corto Maltese, from the point of view of expressive and emotional affinities but also in that of naval descriptions”.
It was born a sort of ‘Father and son’ a la Cat Stevens brought to the page, with the hero of the journey, of navigation, of deception and of the return told in two voices, that of Ulysses and that of the son who claims his centrality (“this is also my story – it is his incipit – I’ve never met my father, he left for the war when I was still little, if I dig into my memories I’m not even able to outline his face, what color are his eyes?).
Their respective emotions and weaknesses, Paladini continues, “make Ulysses and Telemachus seem a little less heroes and a little more men”. The magical drawings by Hugo Pratt have been recolored and paginated by Patrizia Zanotti, no longer flat and closed in the diagrams of the newspaper page, but which with contemporary techniques also give life to the splashes of water from the stones that Polyphemus throws into the sea. It is the modernization of a classic which, explains Paladini, also passes through the life path of a character who has always been a symbol of freedom but also of power and deceit.
A journey through life, which aims to underline the adventurous coté of Ulysses and Corto Maltese, but also to make us reflect on the differences between the two: Ulysses is the hero also moved by a sense of duty and the need to return home, which they do not belong to the sailor born after him. “Ulysses is the first step on Pratti’s path towards freedom”, Paladini clarifies. An illustrated bildungsroman dedicated to young people as well as Pratt enthusiasts who will begin his Italian tour on June 11 from Palermo at the ‘Una marina di libri’ festival) and aims to lead the reader into an unpublished narrative between a father and a son, between angry gods and vengeful maidens, between reason and feeling, between freedom and oppression.
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