Description:
Angelo Maria Ripellino's Bohemian rhapsody:
Magic Prague, Angelo Maria Ripellino's hymn to the Czech capital, is eccentric as well as erudite and anticipates today's psychogeographers.
Our greatest reading pleasures often arise from pure chance, and so it was that a brief mention of a "wonderful, sprawlingly erudite" book in Nicholas Murray's Kafka biography led me to Angelo Maria Ripellino's Magic Prague. Published in Italy in 1973, the book was translated into English for a Macmillan edition in 1994 but is now out of print. Having tracked down a copy in the hope of enjoying a few diverting passages, I found mys
Angelo Maria Ripellino's Bohemian rhapsody:
Magic Prague, Angelo Maria Ripellino's hymn to the Czech capital, is eccentric as well as erudite and anticipates today's psychogeographers.
Our greatest reading pleasures often arise from pure chance, and so it was that a brief mention of a "wonderful, sprawlingly erudite" book in Nicholas Murray's Kafka biography led me to Angelo Maria Ripellino's Magic Prague. Published in Italy in 1973, the book was translated into English for a Macmillan edition in 1994 but is now out of print. Having tracked down a copy in the hope of enjoying a few diverting passages, I found myself absorbed in a truly extraordinary work.
Ripellino, a poet, novelist and professor of Russian and Czech literature at the University of Rome, died in 1978. Magic Prague, his magnum opus, is a work of extreme density that blends history, literature, painting, architecture, anecdotes and esoterica. It prefigures similar works by Claudio Magris, Iain Sinclair, Luc Sante and Peter Ackroyd. The following passage is typical:
"There are a number of pointed objects in league throughout the skies of the Bohemian capital: the Cathedral pierces the thorax of the heavens with its spires, as does the magnificent belfry of the Old Town Hall, the Powder Tower, the towers of the Týn Church, the Water Towers, the towers of Charles Bridge and a hundred others. It is no accident that Nezval compares the towers in the clear night air to a 'gathering of magicians'. The Prague sky recovers from these pinnacle pricks by resting its cheeks on the soft cupolas of the Baroque age, though their marshy emerald conceals an admixture of witchcraft: according to Seifert you can hear the croaking of frogs in the verdigris when the moon rises."
Ripellino's discourse is eccentric as well as erudite, modulating unexpectedly between a formal register and personal asides to unidentified interlocutors, such as "You wore black felt ankle boots and drew incoherent alphabets on the snow-covered paths with the tip of your umbrella." John Banville called Magic Prague a "clotted, mad masterpiece", and the verb is apposite: in less than 300 pages Ripellino crams in more than 1200 quotations and attributions from sources as varied as Nietzsche, Karl Kraus, Cendrars, Breton (to whom the book's title nods), and Prague residents from Comenius to Vladimír Holan by way of Meyrink, Kafka, Hašek and Bohumil Hrabal. Curious readers with burgeoning 'to read' lists might want to steer clear.
The book's sections concern themselves with themes and events which, Ripellino contends, have shaped both external and internal perceptions of Prague. When the knowledge-obsessed Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II moved his court from Vienna to Prague in 1583, for example, he rendered it a stage for the "ravings of alchemists, birthday horoscopy, the elixir of life and the philosophers' stone, Tycho Brahe and Kepler...the animal and vegetable physiognomies of Arcimboldo, Rabbi Loew and his homunculus Golem". This milieu in turn fed "the hackneyed devices and trite horrors of late Romanticism", which would later be picked at by the Surrealists.
The section on Rudolfine Prague alone, including as it does remarkable accounts of the Welsh magus John Dee and the historical origins of Faust, compresses a book's worth of information into less than 50 pages. From here Ripellino moves solemnly past the ignominy of White Mountain, an encounter "of minimal importance for the rest of Europe [that] spelled ruin for Bohemia...and the onset of a decline that was to last for centuries", and on to a detailed excavation of the Fifth Quarter or Jewish Ghetto, demolished in the 1890s. Supposedly the site where the golem was first brought to life, an artificial man made of clay the legend of which 'justifies its creation as a means of defending Jews against the pogroms unleashed against them by Christians accusing them of ritual murder', Ripellino in fact traces the myth's origin to 17th-century Poland, its Prague variant a product of Romanticism that reached its apogee with Gustav Meyrink's 1912 novel The Golem.
Such passages are breathtaking, Ripellino making audacious connections spanning centuries and disciplines like a funambulist of thought. If there is a complaint to be made it's that the mystical interpretation of Prague, exploited by Decadent authors such as Jiří Karásek and German Expressionist cinema, is reductive. While Ripellino is clearly beholden to it, balance of a sort is attained by lengthy meditations on the more earthy concerns of Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk and the Poetists, the Czech Surrealist movement spearheaded by Vítězslav Nezval.
Further contrast with the gaudy excesses of occultism comes with the book's engagement with politics. Ripellino first visited Prague in 1946 but, over time, communist policy made travel difficult and Magic Prague was written in part as a result of his inability, post-1969, to reach his beloved city on the Vltava.
The book's closing section combines anger that "ideological arrogance, police brutality and tautological tedium hold sway there yet again" with a longing to return. In the meantime he consoles himself with "leafing through the Vienna phone book, overflowing as it is with Czech surnames". That this line should chime with one from Magris's Danube ("...Pokorny, Pekarek, Kriczer and Urbanck. There is an old saying that every true Viennese is a Bohemian") is fitting. It seems only right, after all, that a book which gathers such divergent sources into haphazard dialogue with one another should itself become part of an ongoing cultural discourse.
... (more)
(less)
Release date: 31 December 1969
ISBN-10 : 0330337793 |
My tags:
Add tags
Login
