From bredwine1968 at earthlink.net Tue Jul 21 15:05:28 2009 From: bredwine1968 at earthlink.net (Bruce Redwine) Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:05:28 -0700 Subject: [ilds] "Deus Loci" Message-ID: I've just acquired a signed copy, unnumbered, of the privately printed edition, 200 copies, of Durrell's "Deus Loci" (Ischia, 1950). Three things: 1. Durrell signed it in what looks like blue-green ink, possibly aquamarine, but that's had to determine because of the age. This makes me think of the "green ink" references in the Quartet and elsewhere. 2. The poem has an epigraph which is not included in The Tree of Idleness (London 1955), where the poem first appears in public, so to speak, nor in his Collected Poems (New York 1960, 1980). The epigraph: "era nel tempo cuando Filomena . . . " The unattributed fragment is from Luigi Pulci's Morgante Maggiore (First Canto, third stanza). My translation of the Italian (please correct, if wrong), of which I know next to nothing but which I base on my little Latin: "It was in the time when Philomela . . . " Philomela, of course, is the nightingale, which eventually becomes Keats's nightingale. In my ignorance, I've never heard of Pulci, a Renaissance poet from Florence, and I wonder how Durrell came across him. Byron did a translation of Morgante Maggiore in 1823, now probably located somewhere in his complete works; maybe that's the source, but I haven't checked it out. Or, perhaps Durrell learned about the poem on Ischia, in 1950, when he and Eve visited the island. Why was the epigraph dropped? Maybe Ray Morrison could answer that. 3. Did Morrison ever publish his excellent essay on "Deus Loci," a version of which he read at OMG, Victoria, BC, 2006? Bruce -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20090721/9ac8b201/attachment.html