Italy in the First World War: the upcoming conference by the Association for the Study of Modern Italy (ASMI)
Units:
Books,
Conferences
The 34th edition of the Silent Movie Festival in Pordenone and the Italian war film "Maciste alpino"
 |
| Maciste alpino, Italian movie, 1916 |
Le Giornate del cinema muto / Silent Movie Festival
34th edition
Pordenone, Italy
3-10 October 2015
Here below is a video with an interview about the restoration of the film Maciste alpino, unluckily available only in Italian.
Units:
Films
The poets and the world war: "Lust" by Massimo Bontempelli
 |
| Massimo Bontempelli (1878 - 1960) |
But what if we go beyond that praise of war and we imagine the deepest shock that the conflict, together with alcohol, violence and degeneration of humanity can produce on a soldier? Once the necessary distinctions have been made, we could say that like the Second World War had its Céline, the Italian poetry of the First World War found in Massimo Bontempelli a testimony of an ambiguous, contradictory and masochist "sentiment of war". There is no heroism, no salvation for the mankind in this love declaration poetically addressed to war and death. It's like wallowing in the mud of forgetfulness, running over self and time to erase self and time simoultaneously in a sort of cruel sex act (even if this is also a poem of memories, see the beginning where the violent part is probably impersonated by a woman). The poem belongs to the book entitled Il purosangue. L'ubriaco ("The Thoroughbred. The Drunk", 1919), a title that casts light on the well-known scenario of use of alcohol among soldiers, especially before the attacks. It was the only poetry book by Bontempelli, whose legacy is more on the fiction and drama sides. In 1933 Massimo Bontempelli released a second edition of his poems: the new title was shortened to "The Thoroughbred" (Il purosangue, Milano, Edizioni La Prora, 1933) and the poem "Lust" was eliminated. Titles - as well as "director's cuts" - speak to us.
LUST
Smell of trench
smell
smell
of used corpse shit mud
memories
do you remember
when coming in
you wrapped my neck with your arms
and I bent under the hug
wallowing on the latticework
fighting with force
before loving you?
The nausea enters from the mouth
and goes down to the heart
squeezing crushing fermenting
now, while I go on the hit latticeworks
under the yelping trajectories
with bowed head.
But the nausea becomes must and wine
in the emptiness of the heart.
And that gets drunk by the smell
smell
smell of trench.
It provokes joy.
Joy of walking
walking
walking in this rot
of being pelted with stones
by the noise of shells
of getting lost
on the right and left
fifty times
and standing up with mud in mouth
to get there and see
the German flesh fall,
collapsing with head down
swines bagged
in the guts of the blue coats.
LUSSURIA
Odore del camminamento
odore
odore
di cadavere usato merda fango
ricordi
ricordi
quando all’entrare
tu mi buttavi le braccia al collo
io sguazzando sul graticcio
mi piegavo sotto l’abbraccio
lottavo di forza con te
prima di amarti?
Entra la nausea per la bocca
scende al cuore
si pigia si pesta fermenta
mentre vo sui graticci sbattuti
sotto le traiettorie che guaiscono
a capo chino.
Ma la nausea si fa mosto e vino
nel vuoto del cuore.
Lo ubriaca l’odore
odore
odore del camminamento.
Vi aizza la gioia.
Gioia di camminare
camminare
camminare nel putridume
d’esser presi a sassate
dal rumore delle granate
di perdersi
a destra e sinistra
cinquanta volte
e inciampare abbracciati all’odore
cinquanta volte
e rialzarsi col fango in bocca
per arrivare a vedere
la carne tedesca cadere
afflosciati testa in giú
porci insaccati
nel budellame dei cappotti blu.
(from Massimo Bontempelli, Il purosangue. L'ubriaco, Milano, Facchi, 1919)
Units:
Poets
"The Major Battles of 1916", international conference and call for papers
 |
| Ruins in Verdun, 1916 |
The French Commission for the Centenary of the Great War, 1914-1918 (Mission du centenaire de la Première Guerre mondiale) and its Scientific Council are organizing an international conference in Paris, 22, 23 and 24 of June 2016 on the subject of “The Major Battles of 1916.”
Problematic
The commemoration of the battles of 1916 runs the risk of treating the latter as if they are self-evident and thus of reducing them to their purely military aspects, whereas the very use of the term “battle” is anything but self-evident. What Maurice Agulhon described as: “a combined series of assaults, of attempts to break through the front or at least to ‘gnaw away’ at the enemy’s defensive lines and so push back the front” stands in sharp contrast to previous meanings of the term “battle.” Indeed, we might ask what a “battle” is in relation to operations covered by the terms: “war”, “campaign”, “offensive”, “combat” or “front”?
The conference will therefore take the “battles” of 1916 in their international dimensions as its problematic.
Its object is two-fold: first, to advance knowledge by broadening perspectives and introducing international comparison; second, to introduce a broad audience to the approaches that have renewed the history of the battles of 1916 in recent years, notably on fronts other than the western front.
The timeframe is the whole of the year 1916.
The conference will encompass all the major battles, wherever they occurred and whatever their form and nature. This includes naval battles. The three great battles of Verdun, the Somme and the Brusilov offensive in Galicia will naturally occupy a central place. However, the interdependence of these battles and the desire for a comparative approach between different battles and fronts make any narrow definition of the subject impossible.
The conference will be organised around three themes.
Constructing battle
Battle was constructed first in the minds of the actors who conceived it and defined its temporal and spatial dimensions, decided on its organisation and made strategic and tactical choices. Those who took part, from the ordinary soldier to the commanders in chief, also constructed battles on the spot. Witnesses constructed them, too, whether as nurses, journalists or eventually through films. Civilians likewise constructed the battle by “public opinion,” by their prior imagery of battle, by their emotions and through the tales told by the “survivors” of battle. Words were crucial, for they inscribed a new reality in the field of experience, a reality of which by definition there was no prior knowledge.
Finally, battle was constructed retrospectively by the authorities that drew up the list of battles, by eyewitness literature, by histories and by commemorations that ranged from simple reminders to full-blown myths. Narrating battle was at the heart of its construction.
To sum up, the question is how the battle was constructed (or reconstructed):
By words
By actors
By the circulation of information and the tales of “survivors”
By memory, myths and historiography.
Experiencing battle
The question here is how to reconstruct the experience of the soldiers in a way that sees them as more than suffering victims. This will be addressed by various criteria: the prior experience of combat, the relationship between space and time, the material realities of terrain and weather, the moment of intervention in a battle, bodily experience, the length of time spent in the line. Also important are different possible exits from battle: relief by new units, being taken prisoner (but not the subsequent experience of POWs), evacuation with wounds, refusing to obey orders, desertion and fraternisation.
The experience of battle also encompasses the ideas that soldiers had of themselves and of others (the enemy, their commanders, civilians) in the midst of battle. It will be important to identify battlefield learning as this evolved, i.e. knowledge about weapons and their effects and also about terrain, both by the soldiers but also by the officers (detailed mapping, aerial photography).
Of interest, too, is the place of combat within the battle. Combat evolved from one front to another in relation to changing weapons, tactical ideas, unit organisation and the accumulation of experience. Being in battle does not necessarily mean engaging in combat; conversely, combat is not enough to make a battle.
To sum up: the question here is that of the practices and representations of battle in space and time:
Space and different bodily experiences
The experience of space and the question of scale
The experience of battle in terms of its duration
The use of weapons: combat within battle and the changes in combat in 1916
Representations of self and other in battle
Exiting battle: relief, capture, wounding, desertion, refusal to obey, fraternization.
Supplying battle
Supplying battle is first and foremost a question of men. The manpower crisis is a central subject, with repercussions on military mobilization, the organization of units, command (how many officers in the line had been there since 1914?). It is also an international issue, since allies reinforced each other and transferred troops between fronts and sectors. It also entails the overestimation by each side of its own and enemy losses.
Supply is a matter, too, of feeding the combatants, which was a considerable undertaking, without forgetting their horses (a major source of draft power). Battlefield archaeology has much to teach us in this regard, as does socio-economic history. It is also a question of supplying the matériel (weapons, munitions, aircraft, lorries etc.) required by a battle: logistics was a decisive dimension entailing collaboration between allies that has barely been studied.
Finally, new forms of industrial mobilization raise an even broader question: that of civilians and their mobilization or re-mobilization. Supplying a battle means sustaining morale in the rear as well as on the front.
To sum up: this final theme deals with everything needed to make battle function:
The manpower crisis and transfers of men and matériel between fronts
Feeding the soldiers
Producing matériel
Ensuring the logistics of battle
Sustaining or reinforcing morale on the front and at home; re-mobilizations
Organisation
The conference will last three days in late June 2016 and will be held in Paris.
Papers will not be read out by their authors but will be summarized in a report presented by a rapporteur in order to facilitate a broad discussion, during which the authors will be able to express their ideas.
The working languages of the conference will be French, English and German, with simultaneous translation.
Papers in Russian will be accepted.
Proposals for papers must reach the scientific secretariat of the Mission du Centenaire 14-18, 109 Boulevard Malesherbes, 75008 PARIS, (alexandre.lafon@centenaire.org) before 1st December 2015. They should consist of an outline of not more than 1,000 words.
The Scientific Council will examine the proposals. Those selected must be received in full by the end of March 2016, in order to allow for their translation into French where necessary and for the rapporteurs to draft their reports.
In addition to the regular sessions consisting of the rapporteurs’ presentation of the papers followed by the general discussion, there will be three or four keynote speeches, including one each to open and close the conference. It is also hoped that at the end of the conference two daylong (but mutually exclusive) battlefield visits will be organized, one to Verdun, the other to the Somme.
Units:
Call for papers,
Conferences
An interview with Tim Kendall about the poetry of the First World War
 |
| Wilfred Owen |
Q: Let's start with the definition of "War poetry". As far as
I know the English literature is only literature that "isolated" and
grouped some texts under a similar strong "label", even if all
countries developed their own war literature and poetry. Do you have a similar
opinion and, if so, why do you think this happened? Was there at that time a
kind of awareness of being a "war poet"?
A: The term ‘war poetry’ is an oxymoron: destruction and creation, ugliness and beauty. But, of course, war has been the subject of poetry as far back as we can trace. What made England different, in 1914, was the sense that poetry spoke urgently to our national identity. We were the nation of Shakespeare, of Henry V at Agincourt, and our civilisation was bound up with our literature: the greater the literature, the greater the civilisation. After all, we weren’t going to beat the Germans at music or fine art. So, to write a poem was, in some small way, to assert the very values which were under attack. Wilfred Owen told his mother that the only thing which would hold him together on a battlefield was the thought that he was defending the language in which Keats wrote.
Q: A conspicuous part of your studies and research is dedicated to First World World poetry. What brought you to these researches and could you illustrate your last book on this theme?
A: I was tutored by Jon Stallworthy at university. Jon was an immensely generous as well as a brilliant man, and he taught me to love war poetry. My latest book, Poetry of the First World War, is dedicated to Jon, who was the inspiration for so much of my work.
Q: Is there a particular initiative about war poetry (book, conference,
event, other) that you want to point out in this "centenary mood"?
A: A great deal of energy was expended in the run-up to the centenary, to ensure that the familiar myths of the war’s futility, of lions led by donkeys, etc., were challenged. But the national curriculum is a rough beast to resist, and Blackadder and Oh! What a Lovely War et al. have ensured that the simple narratives are firmly entrenched. What I’ve most appreciated about the recent treatment of war poetry is an acceptance and appreciation of poets who speak truths to this new kind of power: sometimes, they dare to say, war is enjoyable, enriching, exuberant, as well as dreadful, wasteful, unimaginably brutal. More than that, most of the British poets of 1914-18 believed that the War was necessary. This can come as a surprise to those readers who only knew Owen and Sassoon.
Q: Let's now move to First World World English novelists for a moment. Which
are still today the most popular novels and which are the novels that according
to your standpoint would deserve a deeper attention (or perhaps a rediscovery)?
A: I’m a Kipling obsessive, and I think that his stories in Debits and Credits and elsewhere stand above any other war fiction that I’ve read. But they’re not novels. Jacob’s Room is the book by Virginia Woolf to which I return. I’m not sure, though, that Kipling or Woolf qualifies as a neglected genius. I would make a special mention of Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte Sometimes, published half a century after the Armistice. That does get overlooked, for no better reason than that it’s commonly classed as a children’s novel. Let me also say that some of the finest prose about the War came from the novelist Mary Borden, who served as a nurse at the Front. The Forbidden Zone is a hybrid masterpiece: memoir, prose poetry, a collection of fragments.
Q:The First World War was paradoxically the last war with a large number of poets, then something has changed in the relation between war and poetry. Do you agree with such statement or do you think it is only an exaggeration?
A: War breeds poets. Every recent conflict provides a cue for the poetasters to wring their hands and indulge their sensitivities. They always want to tell us what we already know --- that war is bad --- but also that they feel this particular truth more acutely than the rest of us. I think of Anthony Hecht’s ‘fierce Strephon’, whose poetry denouncing the Vietnam War brought not only fame but considerable profit: ‘a fate he shared---it bears much thinking on--- / with certain persons at the Pentagon’.
Q: Generally speaking and according to your experiences, what do English students know and study about Italian, French, German, American (etc.) war poets?
A: Generally speaking, absolutely nothing. My own small attempt to improve the situation is to promote the work of the entirely unknown American poet John Allan Wyeth, whose sonnet sequence This Man’s Army is the great forgotten book of the War.
Q: I would love to end this interview with your personal choice, namely a
poem you would like to suggest to our readers. What do you propose us? And why?
Thank you.
A The war poem which hurts me every time is Keith Douglas’s ‘Vergissmeinnicht’: a painfully candid account of the mixed emotions (love, pity, hatred, curiosity, pride, shame, even sexual satisfaction) provoked by viewing a dead and decaying enemy. If you want a First World War poem, I’ll return to Wyeth, and his poem ‘Picnic’. Sassoon wrote that ‘The rank stench of their bodies haunts me still’, but that’s mere mood music compared with Wyeth’s account of what the dead smell like: ‘We drove through Bayonvillers---and as we ate / men long since dead reached out and left a smirch / and taste in our throats like gas and rotten jam’. And the nonchalant payoff of his sandwich-munching companion as Wyeth remarks that the corpses ‘smell pretty strong’: ‘I’ll say they do, / but I’m too hungry sir to care a damn.’
A: The term ‘war poetry’ is an oxymoron: destruction and creation, ugliness and beauty. But, of course, war has been the subject of poetry as far back as we can trace. What made England different, in 1914, was the sense that poetry spoke urgently to our national identity. We were the nation of Shakespeare, of Henry V at Agincourt, and our civilisation was bound up with our literature: the greater the literature, the greater the civilisation. After all, we weren’t going to beat the Germans at music or fine art. So, to write a poem was, in some small way, to assert the very values which were under attack. Wilfred Owen told his mother that the only thing which would hold him together on a battlefield was the thought that he was defending the language in which Keats wrote.
Q: A conspicuous part of your studies and research is dedicated to First World World poetry. What brought you to these researches and could you illustrate your last book on this theme?
A: I was tutored by Jon Stallworthy at university. Jon was an immensely generous as well as a brilliant man, and he taught me to love war poetry. My latest book, Poetry of the First World War, is dedicated to Jon, who was the inspiration for so much of my work.
 |
| Siegfried Sassoon |
A: A great deal of energy was expended in the run-up to the centenary, to ensure that the familiar myths of the war’s futility, of lions led by donkeys, etc., were challenged. But the national curriculum is a rough beast to resist, and Blackadder and Oh! What a Lovely War et al. have ensured that the simple narratives are firmly entrenched. What I’ve most appreciated about the recent treatment of war poetry is an acceptance and appreciation of poets who speak truths to this new kind of power: sometimes, they dare to say, war is enjoyable, enriching, exuberant, as well as dreadful, wasteful, unimaginably brutal. More than that, most of the British poets of 1914-18 believed that the War was necessary. This can come as a surprise to those readers who only knew Owen and Sassoon.
A: I’m a Kipling obsessive, and I think that his stories in Debits and Credits and elsewhere stand above any other war fiction that I’ve read. But they’re not novels. Jacob’s Room is the book by Virginia Woolf to which I return. I’m not sure, though, that Kipling or Woolf qualifies as a neglected genius. I would make a special mention of Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte Sometimes, published half a century after the Armistice. That does get overlooked, for no better reason than that it’s commonly classed as a children’s novel. Let me also say that some of the finest prose about the War came from the novelist Mary Borden, who served as a nurse at the Front. The Forbidden Zone is a hybrid masterpiece: memoir, prose poetry, a collection of fragments.
Q:The First World War was paradoxically the last war with a large number of poets, then something has changed in the relation between war and poetry. Do you agree with such statement or do you think it is only an exaggeration?
A: War breeds poets. Every recent conflict provides a cue for the poetasters to wring their hands and indulge their sensitivities. They always want to tell us what we already know --- that war is bad --- but also that they feel this particular truth more acutely than the rest of us. I think of Anthony Hecht’s ‘fierce Strephon’, whose poetry denouncing the Vietnam War brought not only fame but considerable profit: ‘a fate he shared---it bears much thinking on--- / with certain persons at the Pentagon’.
Q: Generally speaking and according to your experiences, what do English students know and study about Italian, French, German, American (etc.) war poets?
A: Generally speaking, absolutely nothing. My own small attempt to improve the situation is to promote the work of the entirely unknown American poet John Allan Wyeth, whose sonnet sequence This Man’s Army is the great forgotten book of the War.
 |
| Keith Douglas |
A The war poem which hurts me every time is Keith Douglas’s ‘Vergissmeinnicht’: a painfully candid account of the mixed emotions (love, pity, hatred, curiosity, pride, shame, even sexual satisfaction) provoked by viewing a dead and decaying enemy. If you want a First World War poem, I’ll return to Wyeth, and his poem ‘Picnic’. Sassoon wrote that ‘The rank stench of their bodies haunts me still’, but that’s mere mood music compared with Wyeth’s account of what the dead smell like: ‘We drove through Bayonvillers---and as we ate / men long since dead reached out and left a smirch / and taste in our throats like gas and rotten jam’. And the nonchalant payoff of his sandwich-munching companion as Wyeth remarks that the corpses ‘smell pretty strong’: ‘I’ll say they do, / but I’m too hungry sir to care a damn.’
Units:
Interviews,
Novels,
Poets
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)