Welcome to the podcast “An Ancient Language for a Modern Soul. Poemi Conviviali by Giovanni Pascoli.” Today we will talk about a poem called “Gog and Magog,” an intriguing apocalyptic tale about the fear of barbaric invasion.I’m here with two guests today. The first is Professor Maurizio Perugi, who is Professor Emeritus at the University of Geneva, Switzerland and President of the Centre for Portuguese Studies. Professor Perugi’s breadth of knowledge is impressive, spanning from Romance philology to Camões’ lyric poems, and Neo-Hellenic literature . He also an expert on Pascoli, having written several seminal books and articles on this poet.
The second guest is Dr. Ailise Bulfin, who is Lecturer of English at University College Dublin, and she is also the author of a fascinating book after fears of barbaric invasion called Gothic Invasions, Imperialism, War, and Fin de Siècle Popular Fiction.
You will hear the poem translated by myself and James Ackhurst, and read by George Sharpley. The music is composed by Giovanni Tardini and played at the Celtic harp by Arianna Mornico.
ELENA. This poem tells a peculiar story about hordes of barbarians from the East invading the West. Pascoli drew inspiration from three strands of ancient sources. In the first strand, the most important one is the Bible, specifically the Book of Ezekiel, where we read that Gog and Magog will come from the North to attack the people of Israel. In Byzantine apocalyptic literature that derives from the Book of Ezekiel, Gog and Magog are frequently referred to as “the unclean nations.” Initially, they were believed to be from the North, but in many texts, they are identified with Eastern peoples, like the Mongols or Tartars. They are described as giants, dwarves, and bloodthirsty creatures. Let’s hear how Pascoli describes them.
MAURIZIO
The catalog of exotic names that you’ve just heard, borrowed from Pseudo-Callisthenes, is very important in defining the stylistic and linguistic identity of this poem (not surprisingly, it reappears in stanza XVII). In the Convivial collection, Gog and Magog is the poem written first, likely at a time when Pascoli was beginning to develop his own theory of poetic language. According to Pascoli, words in Italian language are too long, and they are typically stressed on the ending, while his ideal in poetry was a language made up of shorter words with emphasis on the root, to highlight the semantic core. It is in these terms that Max Müller, a most prominent linguist in his time, describes the Turkish language, and, as we can surmise, in Gog e Magog Pascoli uses Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Language, as one of his foremost models: this book, well, the Italian translation published in 1864, which is extant in Pascoli's library, bears dense reading traces and shows a number of precious annotations.
ELENA.
Thank you, that is fascinating, and definitely, one of the most striking aspects of this poem is its “exotic” language, which we strove to preserve in the English translation. The second group of sources inspiring this poem relates to Alexander the Great. The sources here are the Qur’an and the Romance of Alexander by Pseudo-Callisthenes that you quoted, written possibly around 338 after Christ. In the Qur’an (Sura XVIII: 83-102), we encounter a mythical character named Dhul-Qarnein, the Two-Horned. Pascoli uses the spelling Zul-Karnein, i.e. the version he found in his sources. This character, later identified with Alexander the Great, was assigned a mission to travel to the end of the Earth and fight off Gog and Magog. The two horns are significant, as Alexander the Great identified himself as the son of the Egyptian god Amun-Ra, who was depicted with two horns. This source also mentions a wall Alexander built near the Caucasus (the mountains known as “The Breasts of the North Wind”) to keep the barbaric tribes out, thus keeping the West. Safe.
MAURIZIO
In fact, this spelling, Zul-Karnein, which Pascoli found in his sources, corresponds to a pronunciation common in Turkey and the Middle East, while K- (replacing the “emphatic” Q-) is a spelling that came into fashion in Europe along with the interest in barbarian invasions: in a sense, it evokes the feeling of savage. Bicorne in the Qur’an (Qarneïn being a dual) is generally interpreted as "one who rules over two worlds, the West and the East." Beginning in the Byzantine era, and then throughout the Middle Ages, until the discovery of the New World, Alexander personifies the barrier erected by the Greco-Latin and Judaic civilization, with a view to enclosing not only Tartars and Mongols, but also any monstrous creature: dwarfs, giants, centaurs, fabulous or deformed beings, the same ones that 16th-century navigators expected to encounter on their voyages of discovery of new worlds.In the Qur’an, another legend intersects with Alexander’s: Moses and the water of life (Sura 18, 60-65). Moses searched for the place where two seas meet, where all dead things come back to life. This legend also appears in the Romance of Alexander, but neither Moses nor Alexander get to drink from the water of immortality.
ELENA:
Let’s listen to another two stanzas.
MAURIZIO
I must add here that Pascoli found the whole of his sources summarised in two contemporary books: the one is “Rome in the Memory and Imagination of the Middle Ages” by Arturo Graf, published in 1883; the other is Nobili fatti di Alessandro Magno, in English The Noble Deeds of Alexander the Great, by Giusto Grion, published in 1872. In fact, Pascoli makes reference to both, but Graf is by far the better known, and critics usually mention only him, thereby committing approximations or even errors. Actually, as Nava seems to suggest, Grion as Pascoli’s source is at least as important as Graf. It is Grion who, drawing from Nizāmi’s Šaraf-nāma, presents an amazing description of the source of life, in a syntactic arrangement that P. follows quite closely. Let me explain. Alexander’s last major adventure before reaching Rūm is his visit to the Land of Darkness in search of the Water of Life. Ḵeẓr is his guide: he is a saint, a Sufi, a shepherd of human souls. As Grion recounts (p. xcix), «Kisr ha trovato un rio di chiaror argentino, anzi un rio di luce, come brillar di stelle presso all’alba, simile all’acqua ed eziandio al sole». In English: “Kisr has found a river of silvery sparkle, a river of light, like the shimmering of stars at dawn, similar to water and even to the sun”
One must understand why P. traces Grion's syntax so faithfully («A un fonte va, di stelle/liquide, azzurro»). Translating it literally, not like you did, it would be “To a spring he goes, of liquid stars, blue.” I have already mentioned that his ideal poetic language tends toward the monosyllabic word with emphasis on the root. In addition to Max Müller’s treaty, he found these two parameters in a small handbook by philosopher Herbert Spencer, entitled The Philosophy of Style. Here he also read the distinction between indirect and direct style: the former describes an object in scientific and deductive form; the latter, peculiar to the language of savages and children, begins with the most conspicuous features, those which most strike the imagination, and thus, by progressive aggregation, builds up the complete image. So in this case: first you see a spring, then a vision of stars, splendid and unexpected. Gradually you discover that these stars are liquid, and a blue expanse of water opens eventually before your eyes. With this splendid description, P. worthily places himself in the orientalist vein inaugurated by Goethe with his Divan (1819).
ELENA.
Thank you. This is truly fascinating. So, what we have in this poem, is, let’s see on the one hand, a tribe of monstrous, sub-human barbarians, and on the other, we see Alexander described as a demi-god, more than human, and immortal. When I read this poem, I keep thinking about the theories of evolution that emerged in the nineteenth century after Darwin’s books The Origin of Species, but more importantly, The Descent of Man gained popularity. Any educated person in the late nineteenth century would have been familiar with the popularised version of Darwin’s theory. The chief idea behind that was that, well, mankind is developing from its animalistic state towards a supremely evolved form of existence, in an upward trajectory of progress. Late nineteenth-century culture embraced this idea of endless progress and progressive liberation from the “beast within”. For me, merely from a textual point of view, the juxtaposition of Alexander, the divine otherworldly king, and the beastly barbarians embodies the two ends in the spectrum of human evolution, which is a struggle with an upward trajectory. This theme recurs quite often in Pascoli’s prose writings such as La Messa d’Oro The Golden Mass and L’Era Nuova, or The New Era, where he discusses the future of mankind as an evolution, although he is critical of the notion of technological advancement without morality. The way I read it, The beast is the doppelgänger of the super-human, its alter -ego, and I think, setting aside Pascoli’s sources, we can almost see it in the image of the Two Horned King: he is a demigod, but also an animal. The sub-human and the super-human are two opposite ends of the spectrum, but they are inextricably linked. Besides, for Pascoli, and other contemporary authors such as Antonio Fogazzaro,“the beast within” is not fully defeated but it always threatens to return, as Italian anthropologist and criminologist Cesare Lombroso suggested with his idea that “criminals” and savage folks are still at lower stages of evolution, and that anyone can for some reason revert to those lower stages.
MAURIZIO
In fact, Pascoli’s picture fits perfectly into the evolutionist thinking of the time, which was developing in both Europe and the United States. P. knew it very well, especially regarding the triad formed by savages, children, and women. To the social strata considered inferior, or only partially developed, were gradually being aggregated not only non-Europeans, but also immigrants (e.g., the Irish). On the other hand, it is well known that the rediscovery of barbarians as a literary motif invaded European literature in the second half of the century.
ELENA:
The theme of the“ fear of invasion” was common in nineteenth-century Europe. In your book, Gothic Invasions, Imperialism, War, and Fin de Siècle Popular Fiction” you have explored this theme in Victorian literature. Ailise, could you tell us a bit about it? The British Empire was not in any way in danger of being invaded, so why do we have these narratives?
AILISE
Thanks Elena and thank you for inviting me onto the podcast to talk about this. It's a big question, I suppose, that you ask with kind of a global answer, and you can kind of think of the answer in terms of global geopolitics and the balance of power between what we're referred to as the great powers at the time, which would refer to Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, to an extent the USA was emerging. And what you have is a series of very dangerous rivalries between them around the world, over strategic territory, and you have small disputes sparking larger disputes, and the general fear and sense that at any moment one of these disputes could kick off a war between two great power nations at the time as well, which, as is very well known, there were series of military alliances between the great powers So that that would drag other powers into what was imagined in the late 19th century as a coming global war. So while the fear that the British Empire would be invaded, in a sense, is very unrealistic, the idea that a major global conflagration was about to break out was was not so unfounded. And you can add to that, then the fact that most of the great powers were colonising nations. Britain and France have been doing it for a very long time. Other nations were getting into the game, like the US and Italy certainly went out and held territories in the Far East and in North Africa, and you had the much less founded sense that these nations might, in turn, rebel resist. And that was certainly there were. There was a lot of anti colonial resistance, both physical force and non physical force, within colonised areas, but there was no real danger that it was going to over spill beyond those boundaries and take the form of hordes of as they would have been described in the contemporary discourse, of people, colonised peoples, invading European countries. That was just a really, very much unfounded fear, kind of a guilty conscious fear of the colonisrs experiencing what they, in fact, were perpetrating. But linked into that, very importantly, for the context of the poem, is also this idea that Britain, in particular, in the sense, may have also been present. I don't know, in other European powers, they were the inheritors of the Roman Empire. They were the new Romans. So on the one hand, this was a cause for celebration. The Romans were very much valorized in 19th century European country. But on the other hand, any educated people of the day were well aware of the cyclical nature of empires, that just as they rise, they declined and fall. The really important historical work of the period was, of course, Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He doesn't even cover the rise. He's just really fascinated with what are the factors that make it fall? So in the British Empire, for example, they're watching all the time. What are the signs? What are the signs that could be interpreted as the beginning of the decline and the beginning of the fall, and of course, the fall comes in kind of European terms with the invasion of what were always described as invasive, barbaric Gothic hordes. Now, I'm sure, from the perspective of the invaders, they didn't see themselves in those terms, but that's very much how they're painted in European political discourse, and there's a lot of fear about that. What I think is really interesting is in the very first stanza of the poem, there's mention of a storm cloud. So that was a recurrent metaphor in European kind of geopolitical discourse at the time, or British discourse, at any rate, that you could see in the distance, it was always described as a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, but that the cloud could approach, that the cloud could grow, that the storm could break it. You see the metaphor of a cyclone engulfing all of Europe in in a major war. And so I think Pascoli is very much positioning himself within this discourse. So something that to us as contemporary readers might be lost, is actually a very significant political metaphor. And I should say, then that all of this kind of invasion anxiety spawned a fictional genre to accompany it, in which you could give Freer rein to the descriptions of invading hordes than you could, for example, in political discourse. And it was very much propagandistic in intent, as was the non-political accompanying discourse. It was often very much directed at encouraging support for military preparedness. And so the call for Britain, for example, to prepare itself to face an invasion. So this, of course, meant sort of increased defense spending, building up the army, building up this the sources of weaponry, which paradoxically, of course, makes the very events that you're trying to guard against more likely that kind of paradoxical statement to safeguard peace prepare for war. So it's against this really, highly volatile geopolitical backdrop that Pascoli’s poem is written.
ELENA
Ailise, do you think that notions of evolutionism are reflected in the depiction of the Gothic past? How do you think these barbarians are “othered”?
AILISE
I, yes, I really very strongly do. There were many versions of the invasion fear, for example, that European nations would invade each other, or that colonial, colonised nations would invite would invade colonisers. But there was also the growing and very unfounded fear that the what might have been called oriental nations, would invade various Western nations, so that that tended to be referred to in the highly racist parlance at the time as the yellow Herald fear and I would really see Pascoli’s poem as being situated right at the center of that fear and the set of discourses around it, and very much drawing on that. And you can see it for as soon as you get to stanza one, where the people's designated as Gog and Magog are referred to as Mongols. So that was a term, a pejorative term used in the 19th century to refer to Chinese people generally, but also maybe all Far Eastern peoples more generally. And I think that's really, really telling. So it's explicitly placing the poem to contemporary readers within this widely circulating Anglo-European race. Discourse of the yellow peril. You were telling me, Elena, that the poem, although published in 1905 was written in 1897 and 1897 is one of these kind of high water marks of yellow peril discourse, because at that time there was what is kind of little known, compared to the scramble for Africa, but there was the scramble for concessions in China, so for strategic footholds in China, which would allow the various European powers more trade and more control of the trade with China. And there was rivalry between the European powers for this. And there was a lot of kind of hysterical discourse in the papers about how this might be the spark that you know, kicks off a European conflict, or a conflict with one of the Eastern powers. But going back to just a couple of years before that, in 1895 you had the sino Japanese war, so a brief war between China and Japan, which very bizarrely sparked European fears of a oriental invasion, even though the Oriental nations were clearly at odds with each other, just kind of fact of seeing them militarized led to like a wide surge in Yellow Peril Fears. For example, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany commissioned this famous sketch referred to as the Kaiser build depicting the yellow peril. So you have the personifications of the European powers and Britannia and so on lined up on one side, and then in the distance you have, like a kind of a personification of the Eastern powers in the form of Buddha, and he's sitting on a storm cloud, again, the cloud metaphor, and there's a burning city beneath him, and he's imminent. So Europe is imminently going to face this invasion. And all of the time, you know, the Western powers are making further and further incursions into China, but just inverting what they're doing in these fears of the yellow peril. So you get it referred to as the peril zone in France, the Gelber guffair in Germany. David Glover, as a scholar, has done lots of really interesting work into this. And I imagine there was a parallel term in Italy, but I can't personally speak to it, and you had this fantasy that Europe is here, heading into a period of decay, and that these barbarians, these new barbarians of China and Japan, are now at the gates of Europe, and they may be the ones that will affect the fall of Europe in the same way that Rome's fall was affected previously, and e invaders themselves and in terms of how they're described in the poem, are very similar to the way that the invaders are described in 19th century, invasion, yellow peril, invasion fiction, which drew on all of that geopolitical discourse and the Chinese and Japanese invaders are monstrous and barbaric. Key tropes are their cruelty, which we can see to a certain extent in the poem, when they turn upon each other and fight, when they're facing famine, when they're described as drinking blood, which is a real recurrent trope in the discourse. Though, I think Pascoli is quite restrained here. So he just works at the level of giving hints of cruelty. But he knows, he knows, as soon as he says something like drinking blood, that his readers, all of these stereotypes of Oriental cruelty are activated for his readership. And then the second trope that is very much relied on is that of the numerousness of these invaders. And this, you know, this is a key fear. You combine the cruelty with numerousness, and Europe is in real trouble. So they're repeatedly described as hordes or as ants swarming. And I think both are really designed to kind of pro provoke anxiety and unease, kind of like form to participate in that cautionary tale discourse. You know that Europe needs to wake up and realise its peril.
Yes, I think they are relentlessly othered, and they're never in any way depicted from their own terms, or as anything but a kind of a terrifying and gothic and atavistic other. The main way that they're, they're they're othered, though, is just by being described as barbarians. So barbarians are both lower down the scale in terms of social evolution, in terms of how their societies are organized versus European societies. You know, this is in 19th century thinking and in terms of biological evolution. So we've got 19th century racial pseudoscience, kind of informing how oriental societies are understood at this time. It was often very like visually depicted in terms of kind of a hierarchy of forms, with white Europeans on the top of the racial hierarchy and all other races below. African races tended to be put on the bottom of the racial hierarchy, and then oriental races, so to speak, were put in the middle what Europeans might have referred to as yellow races. So they came from societies that I suppose were considered to be stagnant and moribund and trapped in the past, and hence considerably below the civilization of the European empires and nation states. You can see this in the way that I mean when you look at the highly racist language that's used to describe them filthy tribes, you tend to think more about the label of filthy and how pejorative that is. But even just think about tribes, this immediately shows that European society is not organised in primitive ways, like tribes. You know, it's, it's, it's civilized, versus this kind of tribal social organisation. So I think this is kind of, this is the aspect of evolutionism and the degeneration theory that's behind it as well that's less actually widely interpreted, but it's important for designating how non-European societies are trapped in the past, and that makes them atavistic and barbaric. And then you've also got the ideas of the biological hierarchy and the difference of the Oriental peoples. And you can. See that in the way that they are closely associated with animals, for example, as well. It's very dehumanising language. Black herds of wild boars, hands like claws, savage anger, the constant use of the adjective black to describe the non-European peoples, which obviously speaks to the negative connotations of 19th century race, racist pseudoscience, and then that's contrasted in the very end, in that that turn in the final line of the poem, when European society, well, implicitly, European society is revealed to be in peril, and it's these black barbarians are poised to sweep down on the white cities. At the end, they're on the brink of being overrun. And then you've got really just the plain supernatural imagery, which is very gothic.
Gog and Magog peoples, for want of a better term, are described as black tongued giants and groomed dwarves. But this is also probably, especially if the poem was written in 1897 actually a reference to the political discourse at the time as well. In this discourse, the Japanese were referred to as the yellow dwarfs. I'm sorry, I know this is highly racist discourse, and the Chinese people were referred to as the yellow giants, and the fear was that the Japanese, who were kind of more socially advanced, would form kind of the leadership and use the Chinese as muscle in their massive invading army, and form a sign of Japanese Alliance and invade Europe, which is where these things always go. So I was really interested to see those very specific terms being used in the poem. I think they really do reflect those circulating fears of the time.
ELENA
It seems that the British Empire at its zenith produced this literature as a kind of counter-narrative to the brash confidence in its own might, something that very much reminds me of the of ghost of the “beast within”, and in this poem, the stark juxtaposition and yet similarity between the beastly Eastern barbarians and the Divine, Two-Horned King Alexander.
MAURIZIO
However, it is worth mentioning that Pascoli’s symbolism and/or allegorism is often very complex. In our case, bicorne is also an attribute of Pan (δικέρατος) in one of the Homeric Hymns, and P. uses it in Psyche, v. 19, where Pan is personification of love.
ELENA.
Of course, yes, thank you for pointing this out. We are getting closer to the end. Before I reveal how “Gog and Magog” ends, or maybe I shouldn’t spoil it, I want to ask Ailise one more question: how do these tales of invasion typically end?
AILISE
They form a kind of a spectrum of endings, I suppose, that you could say running from optimistic to pessimistic. So on the optimistic side, you see that while say, European powers may suffer an initial terrible route, they rally. And in fact, they maybe go out and they conquer more territory at the end of the tales, or they you can have kind of a Pyrrhic victory, where they just about Hold on, but a lot is taken away from them in the process. And then there's authors, I think, who really want to hammer home the dangers and they tend to have much more pessimistic empires endings. I should say, for example, in one of those, Britain ends up a province in actually a German Empire, nascent German Empire. When you're talking about the fictions of Europe versus Europe, there's a really interesting example of fiction that came out in the same year that the poem did, called the yellow danger by an author called MP shield. And so he has he imagines the Sino-Japanese Alliance. He imagines them sweeping from Peking, as it's called at the time, all the way to Europe. The army is so large that while its rear guard is still leaving Peking, its Vanguard has already reached Europe. And it is one of the most exaggerated and kind of repulsive works of fiction I've ever had the mispleasure to read. And it depicts in very graphic terms, the Chinese and Japanese people slaughtering basically all of Europe, and they're stopped reaching Britain by the barrier that the sea presents, and at the last minute, there's a turn and the British hero basically unleashes germ warfare on the Chinese and Japanese invaders and commits genocide and wipes them out, almost to a person. And so you have kind of an unexpected victory for Britain in that when she ends up, I think Britannia ends up Empress of the Earth, if I'm quoting correctly, but very much the focus of the tale is on showing the damage that the Chinese and Japanese invaders can do. And then another really interesting one showing the power of the stereotypes of cruelty, is called the pot of caviar. It's a short story by Arthur Conan Doyle. In it, you have a group of British expats living in China, who find themselves under siege, as missionaries often did in China, and a lot of missionaries were killed in China, especially during the Bucha rebellion, and their fear of being captured by the Chinese is so great that before the siege is lifted, they all commit suicide from a poisoned pot of caviar. So. This is the context in which Pascoli’s poem and its ending, which I guess I can spoil by saying it's very much. The invaders have broken through Alexander's gates. Alexander has neglected his duty on the top of the breasts of the North, guarding the west with his wall. And again, the idea of the wall is so resonant as well, isn't it, in contemporary anti-immigration discourse and this kind of constellation of right-wing fears that stretches and absolutely has its roots in 19th century geopolitics and racism. But just at the end of the poem, we see that the hordes of Gog and Magog are poised to sweep down on the white cities and so falling, I suppose, on the pessimistic side of the endings for these kinds of tales.
ELENA
Should I reveal how Gog and Magog ends? Perhaps I should first go back to the third source, which is an early modern one. Ricoldo da Montecroce, a missionary and an explorer who lived between the thirteenth and fourteenth century after Christ, provides a detailed description of how Gog and Magog actually invaded. He says that Alexander left trumpets on the wall that would blow in the wind, giving the barbarians the illusion that Alexander and his soldiers were forever guarding the wall. But one day, Gog and Magog discover the ruse. Let’s listen to the very end of the poem.
MAURIZIO
The dwarf reveals to the giants that Zul-Karnein is a myth, an illusion. And also in Nizāmi's third version, Ḵeżr drinks from the spring and becomes immortal, while Alexander loses his way and never finds the elixir. It is the Wise man, not the King, who is granted the divine mission to discover the Fountain of life, i.e. the meaning of life which he would be able to share with other humans through mystical knowledge.
In this sense, Eastern thought is much less pessimistic than Western. From a purely chronological point of view, the Conviviali opens with the revelation of a gigantic illusion. Toward the center of the collection, Ulysses sees his ideals being thwarted one by one: "naked and trembling still in death/Who refused immortal youth." Just like Firdawsi’s Zul-Karnein, Ulysses rejects immortality. And a similar feeling of dejection seizes Alexander at the end of his adventures.
ELENA: Thank you both for this fascinating conversation, and I will now let people enjoy the poem in its entirety