Posts featuring Luigi Pirandello

Translation Tuesday: “Lucky to be a horse” by Luigi Pirandello

May 16, 2023 | in Translations | by Matilda Colarossi

He really can’t grasp the fact that he’s free.

The mystery of an abandoned horse, and what thoughts its mind might contain, are the subject of this week’s Translation Tuesday feature. With the acuity that earned him his Nobel Prize, Luigi Pirandello pores over its gaunt, overworked body and peers into its blankly staring eyes, searching for traces of animal thought.

The stable is there, behind the closed door, just past the entrance to the rustic, downward-sloping courtyard with its worn cobblestones and water tank in the center.

The door has become porous. It was green once, but now it has lost almost all its color, like the house, with that pale-yellow plaster, which makes it look like the oldest and most miserable one in the suburb.

This morning at dawn, the door was locked from the outside with a huge rusty chain, and the horse that was in the stable was taken out and just left there. Who knows why? With no reins, or saddle, or saddlebag, without even a halter.

He’s been standing there patiently, almost immobile, for a long time. Through that door, he can smell his stable, right there, close by, and the courtyard. And when he breathes in through his dilated nostrils, it’s as if he’s sighing.

With every sigh there comes, curiously enough, a nervous twitch of the hide on his back, where the mark of an old saddle can be seen.

Free as he is from any kind of horse tack, his head and his whole body, it’s easy to see what time has done to him: His head, when he lifts it, is noble still, but sad. His body is pitiful: the back is knotted; his ribcage sticks out; his flanks are pointy. His mane, however, is still thick and his tail, although somewhat thin, is long.

A horse that can be of no use anymore, to be honest.

Asymptote at the Movies: Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

February 19, 2020 | in Asymptote at the Movies, Essays | by Rachel Allen, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Kicking off a new monthly column, our blog editors discuss Paul Schrader's visions of Yukio Mishima.

Despite a good deal of justifiable hysteria concerning the survival of print literature in the age of online publishing, new media, and a ruthless attention economy, it seems that the words of Umberto Eco have proven to be withstanding: the book will never die. The text has only become more malleable and diverse as new platforms are granted to it; literature’s performance is the same as that of a drop of paint in a glass of water—the entirety is invariably adopted into its presence. As devotees of the book, however, we at Asymptote found ourselves engaged by the artform that seems to lend itself particularly to the cooperation with literature: film. So, we present the debut of Asymptote at the Movies, in which we discuss cinematic adaptations of our favourite translated works and authors from the lens of readers, to discern and investigate that other enigmatic process of translation, that from the text to the screen.

Our first film is Paul Schrader’s masterful Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, an uncompromising and transcendent film that ideates scenes from the Japanese author’s life in juxtaposition to three of his novels: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko’s House, and Runaway Horses. Below, the blog editors talk about Yukio Mishima’s authorial presence in cinema, the literality of images, and the sensuality and emotionality of film’s structural elements.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): In a 1966 interview, Yukio Mishima quotes the pivotal line from Hagakure, the spiritual guide for samurai: “The way of the samurai is found in death.” He committed suicide four years later, after a lifetime under its fantastic thrall, leaving behind a legacy of language that dreamed in equal ecstasy of death; as a longtime reader of his work, I’m convinced that he intended his existence to be triumphantly underscored by this violent and dramatic end, and Paul Schrader evidently feels the same way. Of the many axioms that Mishima lived and wrote—beauty, purity, honour, truth—Schrader situates the author’s inveterate obsession with death as the ancestor of his work and life, and the suicide as the culmination of a lifetime of justification. So it is that he combines scenes from three of Mishima’s novels that delves most deeply into the psychology of devoted self-obliteration. I’d like to start by talking broadly about this film’s narrative, and as to what you both thought of the director’s Pirandellian choice, to render the author indistinguishable from his characters within such a fluid account, in which the fiction bleeds seamlessly into vérité.