The great essayist Pietro Citati is dead



VS’is a great essayist, a true European and an incredible scholar who has just died in Tuscany at the age of 92. Born in Florence in 1930 into a family of Sicilian nobility, Pietro Citati will have dedicated his life to the most outstanding authors of our culture – Tolstoy, Kafka, Goethe, Proust, Leopardi, Baudelaire, Manzoni. Not only did he take over their lives, in what he refused to call biographies, but he relived their torments, interfered in their consciousness, rewrote their books in his own way, literally became them, for years on end. Foreign to academic standards, Citati’s scholarship was gluttonous and joyous.

From the outset, she captured attention with her sweetness – it was no accident that he devoted an essay to “the voice of Scheherazade”. You thought you heard his when reading it, so much was his language able to grasp, by its exceptional fluidity, the comings and goings of a conscience and the vagaries of a life. Nourished by a mythology which remains alive in Italy, Citati loved more than anything the metamorphoses of the heroes he resuscitated, whether real (Alexander the Great), fictitious (Ulysses in Shimmering Thought) or divine (The Light of Night). Serene, powerful, luminous, his idols reigned in the sky of Ideas like the Jupiter of Ingres, alternately terrible and gentle: “He always identifies himself with characters who in turn identify themselves with the universe”, Italo Calvino said of him.

Citati possessed both genders of the spirit

But Citati was even better when, abandoning the very masculine world of high culture, he raised his Portraits of women. Then, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Therese of Avila, Anna Maria Ortese and the unforgettable Katherine Mansfield lived again, in the fullness of their intimacy, with the explosive grace of Japanese paper flowers – madness was never far away with these geniuses. Jovial here, vulnerable there, Citati possessed both sexes of spirit, and this amphibious ability gave his literary sensibility an oceanic expanse. Just read Absolute Evilwhich he devoted to the English, French, Russian or American novel of the 19e century, to rise gracefully to the center of a celestial salon where Balzac, Poe, Dumas, Stevenson, Dostoyevsky would express themselves in turn in their language, translated with exquisite benevolence by Saint Peter of this secular paradise, I named Pietro Citati. He could say of Jan Potocki, the author of Manuscript found in Zaragozathat he had the imagination of a critic, more than that of a novelist: this was also his case.

READ ALSOLe Fol – Letter to the so-called defenders of freedom of expression

He nevertheless signed an excellent novel, drawn from the passionate letters that his great-grandparents exchanged, A story that was happy, then painful and disastrous. Just as he was able to write the true Fitzgerald novel, this couple torn between fiction and madness, in The Death of the Butterfly. For forty years, Citati was still a keen and feared critic. First to Review Il Pointoin the footsteps of Pasolini, then Il Giornoto Corriere della Sera and to La Repubblica. He directed a collection of Greek and Roman classics at the Fondazione Lorenzo Valla and received the great Italian prizes (Viareggio, Strega), before that of Latinity at the French Academy. Finally, the “king” of the Caribbean island of Redonda, Javier Marias, made him Duke of Remonstanza in 2002. Citati’s prose would have made a dead man want to read, everything there was more than alive. Provided that he finds where he is a vast library which will allow him, like Pierre Ménard de Borges, to continue to rewrite the masterpieces of the past and that his friend Federico Fellini awaits him there, also jovial. , to whom he dedicated his life of Proust, The Stabbed Dove.




Source link -82