La leggenda di Orfeo ed Euridice è stata raccontata e/o rappresentata da numerosissimi scrittori, artisti e musicisti europei. In questo saggio ne verranno discussi diciotto: Euripide, un anonimo bassorilievo greco, Platone, Vergilio, Ovidio, Tiziano, Monteverdi, Canova, Gluck, Offenbach, Poussin, Leighton, Browning, Rilke, Cocteau, Anouilh e, soprattutto, Buzzati, degno di essere classificato tra i lettori e gli interpreti più dotati del Novecento. Nell'elaborazione di Poema a fumetti, graphic novel di notevole portata, si osserverà come Buzzati cerchi di fondere in modo acuto soggetti classici e filoni modernizzanti che, nel loro intreccio, fanno emergere il meglio della poliedrica personalità dell'autore e artista milanese.

The legend of Orpheus and Eurydice has been recounted or otherwise represented by thousands of European writers, artists and musicians. In this essay eighteen of these will be discussed: Euripides, an anonymous Greek bas-relief, Plato, Vergil, Ovid, Politian, Titian, Monteverdi, Canova, Gluck, Offenbach, Poussin, Leighton, Browning, Rilke, Cocteau, Anouilh and, primarily, Buzzati, worthy to be classified amongst the most gifted and dramatic-minded amongst Twentieth-century readers and interpreters. In fashioning his Poema a fumetti, a large-scale graphic poem, it will be observed how Buzzati strives towards a subtle fusion of classical subject-matter and modernising strands that in their interweaving bring out the very best in the multi-faceted personality of the Milanese author and artist.

Introduction

The legend of Orpheus and his Eurydice, one of the most popular and deep-felt of all myths worldwide, has been recounted or otherwise represented by hundreds, if not thousands, of major European writers, artists and musicians. In what follows, eighteen of these will be discussed in one way or another: Euripides, an anonymous Greek bas-relief, Plato, Vergil, Ovid, Politian, Titian, Monteverdi, Canova, Gluck, Offenbach, Poussin, Leighton, Browning, Rilke, Cocteau, Anouilh and, primarily, Buzzati, worthy to be classified amongst the most gifted and dramatic-minded amongst Twentieth-century readers and interpreters. In fashioning his Poema a fumetti, a large-scale graphic poem, it will be observed how Buzzati strives towards a subtle fusion of classical subject-matter and modernising strands that in their interweaving bring out the very best in the multi-faceted personality of the Milanese author and artist[1].

 

 

The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice

The Greek μῦθος belongs to the oldest documented lexemes in European literature, featuring regularly in Homer[2]. It corresponds etymologically to the English “mouth”, meaning originally “anything delivered by word of mouth”, being the opposite to ἔργον (our “work”), i.e. a deed. Amongst its meanings, alongside “conversation” and “advice”, there appears that of “story”. At a certain point, it came to signify “a legendary tale”, as compared to a distinctly historical account of events[3]. In modern English it may be understood as any heroic narrative strand widespread in the Graeco-Roman world, be it the vicissitudes surrounding the fall of Troy and the successive exploits of its protagonists (the backbone to the three greatest classical epics, the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid), be it the fall of Thebes, the voyage of the Argonauts, the twelve labours of Hercules, etc. Ancient myths have never lost their grip on European literature from Homer to the contemporary age. If in the final book of the Iliad Achilles tells Priamus the story of Niobe, sentenced to lose her twelve children to the wrath of Apollo and Artemis, over two and a half millennia later – exactly a century ago, in 1922 – Joyce would revive Odysseus’ adventures as a day in the life of Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus.

The nimble-fingered Thracian Orpheus stands out as one of the most popular figures in ancient mythology. His name suggests both ὄρφνη (“darkness”) and ὀρφανός (“orphan”: cf. the Latin orbus): it may be conjectured that both the proper name and the noun and adjective cited derive from a common root ὀρφ- signifying “bereft”, being “darkness” in itself a lack of light[4]. As is universally known, such was Orpheus’ gift of song as to enchant the very animals in their lonely haunts. Son of one of the Muses, Calliope, and of the king of Thrace Oeagrus (or alternatively of Apollo), he set off with the Argonauts in their quest for the golden fleece, delivering the other heroes from the perils of the Sirens’ refrain, as testified by Apollonius Rhodius (IV, 891-919). In a recent study, Eva Cantarella rightly synthesises a common factor in all the episodes surrounding Orpheus: the magical power of song, the invincible strength of music[5].

The story of Orpheus’ ill-starred passion for Eurydice - Εὐρυδίκη[6], “far-reaching right” – left remarkably little traces in the culture of ancient Greece. In Euripides’ Alcestis (438 BC) the character of Admetus alludes to the singer having successfully rescued his wife from the underworld, charming Persephone and Hades with his melody (v. 357-62). A Roman copy of a Greek bas-relief from the Fifth century BC, preserved in Naples in the National Archaeological Museum, depicts Eurydice at its centre holding in her right hand the left hand of Hermes and with her left caressing the shoulder of Orpheus who clutches his lyre: she is turned towards Orpheus who looks back lovingly; a Hermes ψυχοπομπός (“leading souls to the netherworld”) and at the same time inventor of the lyre and patron of the arts watches the maiden attentively. In his Symposium (c. 385-70 BC) Plato declares that the gods cast the harper Orpheus empty-handed out of the infernal realm, having presented him with a mere phantom of his defunct consort (179d).

The woeful story only found a mouthpiece with ancient Italy’s finest poet, Vergil. Given that the Georgics (37-30 BC) were to be one of the most beloved and studied works in the European cultural tradition, the overarching presence of the episode at the end of the fourth and final book guaranteed Orpheus and Eurydice a central position in worldwide literature.

The book in question concerns itself with beekeeping. Should the colony die out, the wily beekeeper can resort to the pseudo-science of bugonia, i.e. the spontaneous generation of insects from within the carcass of a young bull. The shepherd Aristaeus discovered this art. He had lost his bees to a disease and complained to his mother, the nymph Cyrene. She in turn accompanied him to the marine prophet Proteus[7]. Under duress, Proteus proceeded to explain to Aristaeus that he was atoning for a dreadful crime: his punishment originated from Orpheus, enraged at the death of his wife Eurydice. As she was fleeing Aristaeus beside a river, a water-snake bit her[8]. Orpheus was devastated at the loss of his darling. By way of Taenarum, in Laconia, he contrived to descend into the underworld, delighting the souls of the dead with his song: the Furies were struck dumb, Cerberus ceased his bark, the wheel of Ixion stood still. Husband and wife set off for the upper breezes, Eurydice following from behind upon the command of Proserpina, the companion of Pluto lord of the dead. Seized by sudden madness, «victus animi» («overtaken by desire», IV, 491) in Vergil’s brilliantly creative expression, Orpheus turned to look at her, thus violating his agreement with Pluto. Thrice the pool of Avernus was heard crashing:

 

Illa «Quis et me» inquit «miseram et te perdidit, Orpheu,

Quis tantus furor? En iterum crudelia retro

Fata vocant conditque natantia lumina somnus.

Iamque vale, feror ingenti circumdata nocte

Invalidasque tibi tendens, heu non tua, palmas». (IV, 494-98)[9]

 Eurydice disappeared, never to see Orpheus again, he who had the unseemly misfortune of losing his wife not once but twice. The bard bewailed his bride for seven months on the banks of the Strymon, with his dulcet tones soothing tigers and moving oak trees. He became oblivious to any other love. Ciconian women, spurned by the dutiful husband, tore him to pieces in a Bacchanalian rite. The youth’s head, floating along the river Hebrus, still called after Eurydice, the banks echoing her name. Proteus thus ended his tale. Now Aristaeus knew the cause of the dearth of his bees. His mother instructed him to sacrifice four bulls and four heifers, depositing their bodies in a grove, and to offer poppies to Orpheus, a calf to Eurydice. From the carcasses sprang forth, at long last, the sought-after bees.

Vergil, analogously to the other major Roman writers, was anything but a literary revolutionary: vast tracts of his Eclogues and Aeneid are demonstrably indebted to Theocritus and to Homer. A similar consideration ought to be valid for the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice which only apparently finds its first fully-fledged exposition within the Georgics. It seems far more likely that Vergil would have elaborated upon an earlier poetic version of the tale, for example in some lost work by Callimachus. The Georgics were written while Vergil was living in a Greek-speaking city, «dulcis Parthenope» («sweet Naples», IV, 563-64). It may conceivably be hypothesised that the Latin author pored over Hellenistic Greek verse in some well-stocked Neapolitan library and unearthed amongst the scrolls the source of the episode at the end of the fourth book.

No less influential on European culture was that encyclopaedia of myths, a cluster of transformations of divine and mortal beings into animals, birds, plants or animate objects, a tapestry of lust blackened by scenes of horror, known under the title Metamorphoses (c. 1-8 AD). Its author, Ovid, basks to such an extent in lush excess that it hardly astounds that, in reviving Vergil’s version of the Orphic myth (X, 1-85 and XI, 1-66), he baroquely enriches it with additional elements. The «Threïcius vates», uninterested in women following the second loss of his wife, introduced pederasty into his native land. His severed head in Lesbos is seized upon by a serpent, before Apollo – being the god of music, an obvious patron – petrifies the mischievous beast. Furthermore, Bacchus, troubled over the murder of someone who intoned his sacred rites, chastises the Thracian women by transforming them into trees.

Ovid also subtracts from the Vergilian prototype. Thus, the wretched Eurydice is not permitted to get a word in edgeways, remaining deathly silent throughout the narrative. Curiously enough, the Ovidian rendering of an archetypical myth of deprivation comes to a happy close. After having been slaughtered by the Ciconian Bacchantes, the soul of Orpheus descends once again (and definitively) into the depths:

 

Umbra subit terras et quae loca viderat ante

Cuncta recognoscit quaerensque per arva piorum

Invenit Eurydicen cupidisque amplectitur ulnis.

Hic modo coniunctis spatiantur passibus ambo:

Nunc praecedentem sequitur, nunc praevius anteit

Eurydicenque suam iam tutus respicit Orpheus. (XI, 61-66)[10]

Originally inspired by Vergil’s Georgics and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, European culture positively teems with reinventions of the Orphic myth, especially since the Renaissance and on the stage. To cite just four cases from Italy, we might firstly touch upon Politian’s Fabula di Orfeo (1480), considered the earliest example of vernacular Italian profane theatre[11], a text in various metres and languages based on the previously mentioned Vergilian and Ovidian sources and simultaneously poised between eclogue and dithyramb; secondly, a painting attributed to Titian dating back to around 1510, housed in Bergamo at the Accademia Carrara and illustrating in the left foreground the snakebite, in the right background the fatal moment of Orpheus’ glance backwards[12]; thirdly, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo – the first authentic masterpiece of an art form in which, all the way to Cherubini’s Médée in the late Eighteenth century, classical myths would predominate –,[13] an opera scored to a libretto by Alessandro Striggio, first performed in Mantua in 1607 and renowned, amongst other aspects, for Orpheus’ highly ornamented aria “Possente spirto” sung to the infernal ferryman Charon[14]; and, finally, Canova’s twin sculptures of a despairing Orpheus and Eurydice (1775-77), located in Venice at the Museo Correr. Two especially well-known musical works by German-born composers are Gluck’s classically refined Orfeo ed Euridice, first performed in Vienna in 1762[15], in which during the ascent to the upper world Eurydice, peeved that her partner will not behold her, expires yet again, before being resuscitated by Love and rejoicing upon her return to the earthly breezes, and Jacques Offenbach’s “opéra-bouffon” Orphée aux Enfers, first performed in Paris in 1858.[16] In the libretto, supplied by Crémieux and Halévy and a superb example of the comic dynamism that can arise from desecrating a lofty myth, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Eurydice – naturally singing soprano – turns out to loathe her husband, being initially in love with the honey-trader Aristaeus; upon learning of her demise, Orpheus rejoices; she eventually becomes the paramour of a Jupiter disguised as a fly who then with a thunderbolt smites Orpheus so as to force him to look back and thus part ways with his troublesome spouse.

Yet, before moving on to a reading from a mythological and comparative standpoint of the main work to be analysed here, Dino Buzzati’s Poema a fumetti (1969), it may be illuminating to consider in somewhat more detail paintings by Poussin and Leighton, poems by Browning and Rilke and plays by Cocteau and Anouilh, progressing from the Seventeenth to the early Twentieth century.

Poussin operated in the same century as Corneille and Racine, supporting the rise of French classicism. His first great patron was Giambattista Marino, dwelling at the time in Paris, who commissioned from Poussin – who had himself studied Latin – a series of drawings inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, sixteen pages of which survive today in Windsor Castle and in Budapest. Indeed, alongside biblical subjects of a striking pathos, mythical themes would enact a major part in Poussin’s brilliant career as an oil painter, from Venus and Adonis to Pyramus and Thisbe[17]. His picture of Orpheus and Eurydice (1650, Paris, Musée du Louvre) was fashioned for Jean Pointel and displays the artist’s gift for dealing innovatively with conventional iconography. In the foreground the maiden frightened by a snake in the grass is not, as per usual, Eurydice but rather her maidservant. She herself listens – half-lost in her feelings, seated with a garland and already immersed in an ominous shadow – to Orpheus as he sings to the lyre and not, as so often in Renaissance and baroque illustrations, to a viola[18]. A standard representation of the underworld was a smoking building, as seen in the previously mentioned Titian painting. Here, by choosing Castel Sant’Angelo as his burning construction, a structure that could only be construed as an infernal symbol by heretically minded critics, Poussin deliberately confounds our visual expectations. The conflagration that engulfs the ancient Roman monument is, however, to be interpreted as an omen of the incumbent tragedy[19]. A closer look at the middle ground between Orpheus and the architectural backdrop reveals other allusive details. In particular, the naked figures bathing in the lake and partly beckoning to the manned ship suggest the departed souls desirous of crossing the Styx, calling upon Charon.

Like Poussin, the Victorian Frederic Leighton also spent considerable time in Rome where, as a budding artist, he had the opportunity to make the acquaintance of Robert Browning. Again similarly to Poussin, he manifested a fondness for mythological subjects: his best-known picture, alongside Flaming June, must be The Bath of Psyche. Other noteworthy paintings include Helen of Troy, Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon and Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis. At the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1864 Leighton showed three works: Dante at Verona, Golden Hours and Orpheus and Eurydice[20]. The latter (London, Leighton House Museum) illustrates the unhappy couple before an indistinct landscape that ought to conjure up the underworld. Orpheus, crowned with the laurel wreath of poets, dressed in dark blue with a bright pink cloak, his lyre slung over his shoulder, stubbornly refuses to make eye contact with Eurydice, turning his head away and thrusting his wife backwards with his right hand on her snowy shoulder. Her complexion is indeed white, just as her dress, ghost-like. It is Eurydice who seeks to look upon her loved one, tugging at his cloak anxiously. Leighton consequently turns a millennial tradition topsy-turvy: the shade, presumably as well informed as Orpheus over the penalty of such a gesture, cannot withstand the craving to gaze once more into the eyes of her corporeal spouse.

The painting elicited a short poem by the aforementioned Browning. Eurydice, hardly the passive figure of previous renditions, goads Orpheus on, yearning for a look such as to grasp onto for eternity:

 

But give them me – the mouth, the eyes, the brow –

Let them once more absorb me! One look now

Will lap me round for ever, not to pass

Out of its light, though darkness lie beyond.

Hold me but safe again within the bond

Of one immortal look! All woe that was,

Forgotten, and all terror that may be,

Defied, – no past is mine, no future! look at me![21]

Eurydice evolves along parallel emancipatory lines in a text by Rainer Maria Rilke. Begun in Rome in early 1904, completed in the autumn of the same year in Sweden and eventually published in the Neue Gedichte (1907), the nigh on hundred verses of Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes were loosely inspired by the previously described Graeco-Roman bas-relief. Initially, Rilke evokes the underworld as a strange mine through which Orpheus, Eurydice and Hermes journey upwards. A slim bard with a blue cloak, silent and impatient, leads the way: he tells himself the other two are following behind, Hermes and, in his left hand, Eurydice. It is the female figure – so intensely loved by Orpheus that her death crushed his very being – that now prevails. She appears disinterested in her imminent resurrection, entirely fulfilled by her new mortuary condition:

 

Sie aber ging an jenes Gottes Hand,

Den Schritt beschränkt von langen Leichenbändern,

Unsicher, sanft und ohne Ungeduld.

Sie war in sich, wie Eine hoher Hoffnung,

Und dachte nicht des Mannes, der voranging,

Und nicht des Weges, der ins Leben aufstieg.

Sie war in sich. Und ihr Gestorbensein

Erfüllte sie wie Fülle.

Wie eine Frucht von Süßigkeit und Dunkel

So war sie voll von ihrem großen Tode,

Der also neu war, daß sie nichts begriff[22].

Eurydice has forgotten marriage, entering upon a new maidenhood, untouchable. She is no longer a possession of her husband. As Hermes announced that he had turned around, quietly she answered: Wer? (“Who?”)[23].

In his Orphée, first staged in 1926 before becoming a film in 1949, an avant-garde drama merging Dada, farce and Catholicism, Jean Cocteau, just as he borrows from Offenbach’s comic opera, also brings distinctive novelty into a time-honoured plot. The action takes place in the singer’s Thracian villa. Orpheus and his Eurydice – needless to say, a Bacchante – are going through a somewhat turbulent patch. Orpheus spends his life spoiling a white horse installed in his villa, eager for a reply from the steed (in reality, the devil). He also fears that Eurydice may be having an affair with a glazier named Heurtebise (in truth, the pair’s guardian angel). Yet Eurydice still loves her husband, to such an extent as to plan on poisoning the meddling horse. Regrettably, she licks the glue on an envelope and herself dies of poisoning. A female personification of Death enters the scene and administers Eurydice’s poison to the horse; in leaving, she overlooks her rubber gloves. Heurtebise has a bereaved Orpheus put them on; the latter passes through a mirror to Death. He returns trailed by Eurydice, clarifying that he is forbidden to look at his resurrected spouse. Eurydice points out the advantages: Orpheus will avoid the spectacle of her wrinkles. She adds: «Le voyage d’où je reviens transforme la face du monde. J’ai appris beaucoup. J’ai honte de moi. Orphée aura dorénavant une épouse méconnaissable, une épouse de lune de miel»[24]. Orpheus, Eurydice and Heurtebise sit down to a meal. But the couple return to their old habits of quarrelling. Eurydice cries that it would have been better to stay dead. Orpheus resolves to leave, his wife tugs at his clothes, he falls over and looks at her. She vanishes. Orpheus states that he feels better, claiming to have gazed upon Eurydice deliberately. He soon meets with an identical destiny, thanks to the arrival of the Bacchantes. All that remains is Orpheus’ speaking head. Eurydice returns via the mirror, leading back with her, into the world of the dead, her husband’s invisible body. Later Heurtebise will follow into the mirror. The once unhappy Thracian twosome dwell now in Paradise. A cheerful ending to the tragedy.

Dashes of Cocteau, as well as of Pirandello, surface in two of the protagonists of Jean Anouilh’s hallucinatory Eurydice (1941), a drama revolving around a generational dialectic between youthful impulsiveness and middle-aged savoir-faire. This time Orpheus is an impoverished travelling musician, Eurydice a rather ambiguous actress in a minor theatre company. Their first encounter in a train station café turns out to be love at first sight. The duo end up in a hotel in Marseilles. But Eurydice receives a letter and flees in secret; her coach journey to Toulon proves fatal. A certain Monsieur Henri – a counterpart to Cocteau’s Heurtebise – reunites the couple at the train station: Orpheus is not to look into his beloved’s face before the morning. Eurydice relates that she left because she did not want Orpheus to run into her impresario Dulac. She maintains she was never his mistress. Orpheus longs to look into her eyes in order to ascertain the truth. He infringes the condition of their reunification. She admits that she did indeed have a relationship with Dulac, forced to do so by threats. Whilst Eurydice retreats, the secretary of the police chief reads the letter that she wrote to Orpheus in her flight. In it, she demonstrates her complex personality, riddled with self-doubt:

Je m’en vais, mon chéri. Depuis hier déjà j’avais peur et en dormant, tu l’as entendu, je disais déjà «c’est difficile». Tu me voyais si belle, mon chéri. Je veux dire belle moralement, car je sais bien que physiquement tu ne m’as jamais trouvée très, très belle. Tu me voyais si forte, si pure, tout à fait ta petite sœur… Je n’y serais jamais arrivée[25].

Eurydice disappears. In the fourth and final act of the play a distraught Orpheus lies in a hotel room with his father and Monsieur Henri. The latter endeavours to persuade Orpheus to forget Eurydice, even advising him that he would have betrayed her one day. Finally, he advocates suicide. Orpheus promptly follows his guidance. The couple meet again on the stage in another happy ending.

Orpheus and Eurydice in Poema a fumetti

The blurb on the back cover of Dino Buzzati’s Poema a fumetti highlights both the presence of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice within the graphic poem and its modernisation to meet the ends of the Milanese author: «in 200 tavole mescolando parole ed immagini Dino Buzzati esprime il suo mondo poetico facendo rivivere in termini moderni e con moderna sensibilità un antichissimo mito»[26]. The work is subdivided into four, unnumbered parts: Il segreto di via Saterna (p. 7-62), Spiegazione dell’aldilà (p. 63-100), Le canzoni di Orfi (p. 101-182) and Eura ritrovata (p. 183-222). The longest and aesthetically most accomplished of the four parts is the third, including the portrayal of an over-sized elderly bulldog on the brink of death (p. 131) and the frightful micro-narrative of a prostitute in «Il visitatore del pomeriggio» (p. 154-157).

The first part describes an imaginary Milanese side-road just off Via Solferino, a road through which nobody willingly passes by night, where the youngest son of the Baltazano counts, Orfi, dwells. The Buzzatian scion of the mythological Orpheus forms the narrative fulcrum of Poema a fumetti. He is an acclaimed singer, his latest hit being Le streghe della città, a cautionary tune regarding the perils of women for young men: «Voi subito un bel sorriso / E il vostro destino è deciso / Ragazzi, siete perduti» [27]. The wild-headed Orfi loves Eura Storm. Her English surname points to the tempestuous character of the sentiment Orfi harbours towards her. As for her Christian name, the shortened form of Eurydice may also conceal an allusion to the Greek root εὑρε- meaning “find”, i.e. the mission which awaits her partner. Eura’s unsettling first appearance (p. 31) takes the form of a frontal facial portrait. In the close-up her eyes alone are coloured, red, as if to prefigure her demise between the paleness of death and the ruddy iconography associated with the fires of the underworld. Her duplicated eyes create a sensation of disorientation in the viewer, akin to seeing double: this in turn reflects the bewildering passion Eura excites in Orfi.

It is a cold March night. The hero sees from his window, on Via Saterna, Eura crossing through a closed doorway, like a ghost. The next day he witnesses her funeral procession, at first quite unaware of what has occurred[28]. She fell foul to a mysterious evil. In a modern urban tale Buzzati would have shied away from the rusticity of a classical snakebite. He depicts Eura (p. 44) lying colourless in bed, whilst above her a monstrous red creature representing illness, a distant relative of Hieronymus Bosch’s worst nightmares[29], sucks out her life via tentacles.

Orfi makes his way to the doorway where he lights upon an enigmatic male figure, smoking a cigarette, the same one who had informed him of Eura’s death. The man, in his diegetic function comparable with Cocteau’s Heurtebise and Anouilh’s Monsieur Henri, proves to be conversant with the scheme of the hereafter. Orfi sings a song beginning «Toc toc» («knock knock»):

 

Perché là dietro c’è lei

Se c’è lei io non ho paura

Anche se tutti sanno

Anche se tutti sanno

Che di notte o di giorno

Di là non esiste ritorno[30].

The doorway finally opens. Orfi enters not into the garden of the villa opposite his house but rather into a room. He descends a staircase, a naked lady acting as his guide, Trudi. It ought to be mentioned that Buzzati’s afterlife is populated with attractive nude women. The rationale is largely biographical and stems from the erotic awakening of the author during his fifties and sixties, as also testified by the 1963 novel Un amore, the story of the infatuation of the forty-nine-year-old architect Antonio Dorigo – a double of Buzzati himself – for a young prostitute named Laide[31].

The second part of Poema a fumetti, Spiegazione dell’aldilà, commences. Orfi goes through another door. The person in charge, a custodial devil, turns out to be nothing but an empty jacket. Said jacket, effectively the equivalent of the classical Pluto or Proserpina, observes that there exist millions of doors into the other world. Furthermore, that the dead are mindless of hope, the worst of all things, and therefore are actually lucky. In a striking turn to the original myth, the jacket proffers alternatives to Eura amongst his “vallette” (usually signifying in Italian “female co-presenters in television”), comprising the aforementioned Trudi, modelled on Runa Pfeiffer[32].

The third and longest part of the work, Le canzoni di Orfi, now begins. The infernal jacket is prepared to reveal the whereabouts of Eura but Orfi with his guitar must sing of the upper world, home to the living. The Milanese youth does what he does best, in the age-old Orphic praxis from Vergil’s hero, able to strike the Furies dumb, to Monteverdi’s protagonist before the ferryman Charon. In these songs, as previously mentioned, Poema a fumetti reaches its aesthetic acme, harmonising a felicitous combination of word and image in which the latter tends to acquire the upper hand – Buzzati was, in fact, no less of an artist than a writer –[33] and in which an erotic tension, occasioned by the main character’s longing for Eura but also by the artist’s own peculiar temperament, continues to thrust itself upon the reader. The jacket announces that Orfi may cross the threshold: he has twenty-four hours at his disposition, after which he will be expelled. He suggests calling Eura, she will reply. Once again, the modern-day hero descends a staircase.

The fourth and final part of Poema a fumetti, Eura ritrovata, ranks as the most important vis-à-vis Eura-Eurydice. It also vouches for Buzzati’s capacity, in a rare narrative context in which he ventures to breathe new life into an ancient myth, to deal with the chosen subject matter in an innovative form, in as much as the idea itself of an Orpheus having to detect the exact whereabouts of his Eurydice in the underworld seems to be a patent novelty.

Orfi calls in vain for Eura. He proceeds to a registry office, Kafkaesque in its immensity, where a naked employee searches for information: perhaps she is still at the train station. Orfi goes forth and suddenly catches sight of his partner on a train. The twin half-length portraits on pages 198-199 form a contrasting diptych. To the left, the first sighting of the loved one presents Eura flabbergasted. She stretches out her arms, as if emulating those of Orfi hailing her (ironically a mere shadow), whilst her hair stands tautly on end, mouth open, eyebrows raised: the likeness is at the same time naïf and highly stylised. To the right, instead, a more realistic Eura – who now makes herself heard, as in the Vergilian prototype – clearly takes on the features of Buzzati’s young wife Almerina, wedded in 1966. Fiction and reality thus intermingle, the poet Orfi-Dino has located his Eura-Almerina.

The reunited pair strike up a conversation: Orfi burns to reach the exit and bring Eura back to the world of the living. A weary Eura replies that their plight is hopeless; even if he abides by the rules imposed on his forerunner Orpheus, the outcome will not differ:

Te l’ho detto, tesoro. È inutile. Non posso accompagnarti lassù. Povera favola di Orfeo. Anche se tu non ti volterai indietro, non servirebbe lo stesso. Adagio, ti prego, Orfi, io sono stanca. Tutti qui siamo stanchi[34].

At last they encounter the doorway; only fifteen minutes are left out of the twenty-four hours allotted. In a scene (p. 208) that harks back to Leighton’s painting, Eura rests her right arm on Orfi’s left shoulder. In both images the bodies of the couple fill the space available and the background appears neutral, albeit in Leighton’s adaptation Orpheus brushes Eurydice off, whilst in Buzzati the couple’s gaze meets and they are engaged in conversation. Eura, as if to echo Browning’s poem, beseeches her beloved: «Orfi mio, abbracciami, tienimi stretta, amore. Un giorno ci rivedremo».

No further delay is sanctioned, Orfi and his guitar are whisked off by an irresistible force and return to Via Saterna. The enigmatic male figure apprises him that his vision was nothing other than a dream, granting him the apparition of Eura as she slumbers beneath the earth. She lies (p. 215) in the foreground, her eyelids with florid lashes closed, arms crossed over her chest, strangely alive; further behind her lie strewn other coffins. If the inside of Eura’s is tinged yellow, the other, smaller and of secondary importance from the standpoint of the story, remain a colourless white. The nocturnal backdrop is provided by the straggling silhouette of a wood and a lonely house, a half-moon and Buzzati’s usual mountain range.

Yet the events recounted were in truth no dream. In his left hand Orfi grasps Eura’s ring, accidentally snatched away from her as he was borne off. Thus ends Poema a fumetti.

Conclusion

The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has been told or otherwise represented by countless European poets, writers, playwrights, painters, sculptures and musicians. Here eighteen have been mentioned: Euripides, an anonymous Greek bas-relief, Plato, Vergil, Ovid, Politian, Titian, Monteverdi, Canova, Gluck, Offenbach, Poussin, Leighton, Browning, Rilke, Cocteau, Anouilh and, primarily, Buzzati, one of the finest and most original amongst the Twentieth-century interpreters. It would of course have been easy to adjoin further names to the list.

A constituent element of myth is the force of song, a topos which emerges at the very beginning of European culture as we understand it. In Homer’s Odyssey the strains of a skilful poet are divine, θέσπις ἀοιδή (I, 328); they enchant, being βροτῶν θελκτήρια (I, 337). But all that is generic to the entire cycle of Orphic myths. The fundamental specific trait of the legend surrounding Orpheus and Eurydice is, instead, the unavoidable demise of the latter and the yearning of the former to deliver his companion from her fate. Other elements may vary. Even Orpheus’ impatient look back at Eurydice, an allegory of youthful impetuosity, need not come to be, as endorsed by Buzzati’s original reworking. The essence of the myth lies rather in humanity’s reluctance to accept the irreversible loss of a loved one. Certainly, in retelling the tale, writers and artists have reacted to their own times: more recent works from the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, for example, attribute a greater significance to the traditionally passive character of Eurydice, Offenbach’s comic opera playing a major role in this sense. Still, what dominates is the lingering spectre of death, that universal phenomenon which the ancient Greek civilisation delved into as never before in the history of the European continent, through the writings of Homer, Euripides and others, as well as through the construction of a copious mythological repertoire. The same civilisation, although no longer extant as a society, remains today very much alive, especially thanks to those legends, those μῦθοι, which continue to pervade general education and the arts. Modern-day Europe would be quite unimaginable without Medusa or the Cyclops Polyphemus, without the labours of Hercules and the Trojan war. The passing away of a similar heritage would perhaps have no less dramatic consequences than that of Eurydice for Orpheus.

 

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