Following the recent death of Giuseppe Lippi, which took place on Saturday 15 December, we want to share this interview released a few years ago to Andrea Scarabelli for the Antarรจs magazine, focused on the work of HP Lovecraft and on the role and importance of the Imaginary of the Fantastic in today's world. Our heartfelt thanks go to Lippi for everything he has done.
interview by Andrea Scarabelliย aย Joseph Lippi
published in Antarรจs n. 8/2014,ย HP Lovecraft # 2 - The cosmic horror of the Master of Providence and later on the site of Edizioni Bietti
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You are among the leading scholars and translators of the work of the Solitaire of Providence. When did he find out and how? When was the first writing dedicated to Howard Phillips Lovecraft and signed by Giuseppe Lippi? And the last one?
I discovered Lovecraft through the image in a window, in 1970. The window was that of the bookshop "L'incontro", in Naples; the reflection was that of Monsters on the street corner, hardcover edition of 1966. Here you could see a snake-like city of New England that stretched from the plate, swaying on the coast, and from here it overflowed on the back cover, enriched with monsters and soft architecture: irresistible, for a high school student. Fortunately, at the โEncounterโ I had opened a tailor-made student account, thanks to which I could take home everything I wanted by paying a monthly installment of two thousand lire. That day I chose Lovecraft - or he chose me - and put under my arm the book with the spectacular illustration by Karel Thole, another visionary.
I knew Thole from the covers of โUraniaโ, a science fiction series of which she was the most disturbing presence, and this, together with the suggestive title, was the decisive reminder. Lovecraft became a friend, a guide for the perplexed: in the Greek dictionary I invoked his protection with a superstitious writing, "HP Lovecraft help me!".
Over time I would have published some more articulated reflections: in the first, in 1976, I tried to emphasize the humor of some of his stories and the search for fulfillment, the desire that underlies his macabre production. The triple charm of HP Lovecraft was hosted in a Fanucci volume edited by Gianfranco de Turris and Sebastiano Fusco, among the most original interpreters of the Providence writer and authors of his first biography in Italian.
After that, I continued to write, and the most recent post is an introduction to the new edition ofย All the stories, scheduled for January 2015 in the Mondadori Modern Classic Oscars.
How do you explain Lovecraft's fervor and success, which is growing today?
I explain it with a certain drying up of the current fantastic narrative and with the fact that Lovecraft is now read not only as the author of the supernatural, but as a classic "existential" toto. As regards the first point, we think we live in an era in which the fantastic plays a central role, both in literature and cinema, in comics or in the new electronic arts: but this data refers to quantity rather than quality. . Indeed, the saturation of the market and of the very protected areas of literature with endless fantasy sagas, sequelae of horror novels, increasingly less reliable fictional sciences and magical realisms, has led to a paradox. We cannot take almost any of this seriously. The fantastic is the exception, not the rule, but if we breathe fairy tales from when we open the newspaper in the morning to when we turn off the television in the evening, it is obvious that we will only have exchanged the otherness of an original genre for a series of adventurous surrogates, or in the case of cinema, technological.
Lovecraft preceded us on this ground, observing how little oxygen remained in the superior quality fantasies, besieged by the plethora of derivatives; but, at the same time, he created the antidote in his surprising work, perhaps the last reinvention of the world worthy of the name. HP Lovecraft is instinctive guru which showed us how to awaken the imagination in a world without a soul.
How did the Italian critics react tocosmic horror Lovecraftian? In what terms did the latter represent a novelty compared to classic horror?
At the beginning thecosmic horror not much was understood, except in the circles to which special readers belonged, such as Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini, Mario Picchi or Sebastiano Fusco and Gianfranco de Turris. Moreover, even in America there has been considerable confusion, dispelled only by a few: first of all, Fritz Leiber, who defined Lovecraft a "literary Copernicus". With this fitting expression Leiber underlined how our author had shifted the interest of the terror story from the Earth, with its provincial mythologies (the religions homeless and psychoanalysis itself), to the expanses of remote space.
THEhorror nineteenth-century already tested the mind of the reader, still unaware of Freudian theories: what is in fact its essence, if not the trauma? A profound disillusionment that passes from the nerves to the soul, it shock of a painful conflict in contact with the "other world". Cosmic horror amplifies this feeling, pervades the entire universe: it no longer concerns only the personification of death or traditional figures such as revenant, vampires and ghost killers, but the very nature of the real. And it implies the discovery that beyond the individual world there is a larger one, a mythical unconscious in which chaos boils. The universe is indifferent, religions are an excuse to spare us bigger fears. In short, "It is not true that death is / The worst of all evils", a fact well known to the believers of the Middle Ages, who feared the pains of hell rather than passing away in itself. Now that there are no more hells, or that they have moved to Earth, everything must be reviewed. Well, Lovecraft reviews, but he is not satisfied with the Earth: he expands the field to the most evolved galaxies. And it draws, in times of materialism, certain important consequences.
The monsters that appear in his stories are not only demonic, but existential entities: tangible representations (so to speak) of what Sartre calls nausea and Lovecraft afraid, fear, the oppression of what exists and weighs on us with implacable rules, from which we cannot escape. It is clear that many will try to escape or mystify such a vision, but its originality is equally evident. Lovecraft understood that the arts and philosophies of humanity try in vain to relieve us of the burden of being, the primary and undisguised source of fear. We fear above all โwhat isโ, the absolute reality which, fortunately, is revealed to us only in rare flashes; sometimes we are not even aware of it, but if we realize how things are and try to escape, we will end up falling back into absurdity or horror. Ultimately, Lovecraft is not interested in grasping the absurdity of the human condition as much as its paucity, its negligible role in the universal scale. This is why he focuses on horror: Kafka, Pirandello or Jacques Spitz will think of the absurd.
His stories, therefore, are not limited to pure and simple horror. What other meanings do they have?
As I have tried to say, the best stories are readable on various levels. Horror as such risks annihilating us: to allow it to exist artistically and in thought, that is, in a lasting time and space, it is necessary to surround it with other feelings. In Lovecraft, what reacts to terror and bewilderment is a sense of wonder: a need for awe, a desire for what is beautiful and mysterious in experience; nostalgia for what the soul has lost, if not even for a lost soul. This is what makes her dream world fascinating, which appears to us as a living ground for exercising our imaginative faculties: that is, the faculties of human beings who delude themselves that they are not slaves to the finite.
Let's change subject. To what extent, in your opinion, the pseudo-biblia did they contribute, so to speak, to "spin" the name of Lovecraft?
The books that do not exist have fascinated scholars of history, arcana and unorthodox disciplines, until it was necessary to give body to the most famous of them - the Necronomicon - in numerous editions. Now I add that along with the pseudo-biblia i should study pre-biblical, works that do not yet exist but which are in our destiny.
As far as I'm concerned, I can testify that before devoting myself to curating real anthologies and series, I imagined a large park of non-existent publications, complete with their management, periodicity, directors and illustrators. In the parallel life of the mind one can be equally diabolical editors; today we could think of anticipating the Lovecraft that awaits us over there, its successor in timeless time.
You are the curator of the most complete Italian edition of Lovecraftian works. How did you decide to structure it? It contains many revisions prepared by HPL ... How should they be considered in its entirety corpus?
The structure of our edition was born from the need to arrange the stories in a correct chronological order. Secondly, to welcome all the early texts, those written in collaboration and the so-called revisions. Finally, from the desire to retranslate even the stories already published previously in Italian, following the most reliable sources or even the author's manuscripts, published by ST Joshi for Arkham House (and today in the Penguin Classics). The "revisions" have been maintained in subsequent Mondadorian editions because they are largely works written by Lovecraft, although we must distinguish between primary revisions, in which the contribution of ours is greater, and secondary ones, in which it is more modest. The critical example, as regards this type of material, had already been given in two well-known Fanuccian volumes which appeared in the XNUMXs: In the coils of Medusa e Challenge from infinity.
Are there any editorial news on the horizon? Any anticipation for Lovecraft lovers?
As I mentioned, in January 2015 the four volumes of All the tales 1897-1936 they will come out unified in a single tome: it will be a large-format book, of about one thousand six hundred and twenty pages, also available in digital edition. We have updated the equipment, the bibliography, the contributions and made available, for the first time in a single volume, all of our fiction, from the stories written on his own to the collaborations, which have long been absent in the catalogs of other publishers.
Finally, what kind of person is the "classic" Lovecraft reader, in your opinion?
I have no idea who the classic reader is or even if he exists. Theodore Sturgeon would have replied, perhaps, that he is a "reader of cemeteries", but more kindly we could conclude that he is a reader or a reader who is dissatisfied with himself, even if not entirely dissatisfied with the world, and that, raising his eyes to the sky or by lowering them into the unknown ravines of the Earth, he is tired of imagining them empty. Wanting to populate them, as the ancients did, wanting to fish out the fragments of his own secret personality, he uses his imagination as HP Lovecraft taught almost ninety years ago. He then he sees things, and seeing them he seems to remember them; beyond easy consolations or mere credulity, this ability helps him to be himself.
Video interview with Giuseppe Lippi
[Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5bS-Dr1qwE&w=560&h=315%5D
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