When
ethnologist, mountain climber, travel writer, poet and photographer Fosco
Maraini died on June 8, 2004, at 92, the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence
acquired his unique collection of over 8,000 volumes and 42,000 photographs
centred on Asia, and especially Tibet and Japan. It was therefore fitting that,
on March 12, 2012, the Gabinetto Vieusseux hosted the first of the many
celebrations that will take place all over Italy throughout the year to mark
the centennial of the birth of this remarkable man.
Born in Florence on November 15, 1912, Maraini was the
older son of Italian sculptor Antonio Maraini (1886-1963) and writer Cornelia
Edith Yo? Pawlowska Crosse (1877-1944), who was English on her father’s side
and Hungarian of Polish origin on her mother’s. Bilingual from childhood and
later an accomplished polyglot speaking fluently, amongst other languages,
Tibetan and Japanese, he grew up within the sophisticated Anglo-Florentine set
and frequently accompanied his cosmopolitan parents on their many voyages.
In 1934, at
22, Maraini, then employed as an English teacher at the Naval Academy in
Livorno, travelled to Egypt, Syria and Turkey on the cadet training ship, the
Amerigo Vespucci. In 1935, he married painter Topazia Alliata di Salaparuta, of
the aristocratic Sicilian princes of Villafranca, with whom he had three
daughters: Dacia (a celebrated novelist and feminist), Yuki, and Toni (also a
writer). Of this marriage, the handsome and witty Maraini once joked, ?I felt
I’d married a sound. Ours was a phonetic marriage.’
During his
earliest trip to Tibet in 1937, as photographer for an expedition of
orientalist Giuseppe Tucci, Maraini purchased the first book in what became the
collection found today at the Gabinetto Vieusseux. Fascinated by the East, on
his return to Italy, he graduated in natural science at the University of
Florence and, in 1938, won a scholarship to study in Japan. After a 40-day
crossing by sea, he and his family settled on Hokkaido island. He taught
Italian at Kyoto University until, on September 9, 1943, the Japanese demanded
he make an oath of allegiance to their ally, Mussolini and his puppet republic
of Sal?. When Maraini, who was both anti-fascist and anti-communist, refused to
do so, he, his wife and his daughters were interned in a concentration camp at
Nagoya for two long years of deprivation (in 2001, Dacia Maraini published her
mother’s internment diaries in The Boat to Kobe). The family was released on August 15, 1945, just
before Japan surrendered.
Maraini
spent the next year working as an interpreter for the Eighth United States Army
in Tokyo before the family finally returned to Italy. Thanks to the deputy
director of the French Cultural Institute in Kyoto, Maraini was able to bring
back with him 50 precious boxes of books and ethnographic material that his
friend had managed to save by hiding them in the institute’s cellar.
Although no
love was lost between the two men, Maraini joined Tucci on a second Tibetan
expedition in 1948. This journey, together with the earlier one, formed the
backdrop for Secret Tibet, one of Maraini’s best-known books,
published in Italy in 1951 and translated into 12 languages. In it, he
portrayed a vivid picture of Tibetan society with its ?delightful, disastrous,
irrepressible humanity’ before it was changed forever when Communist China
occupied the country in 1949.
From 1954 to
1956, he returned to Japan to film documentaries and publishing his book, Meeting with Japan, full of extraordinary photos, in
1955. He lived there again from 1966 until the end of the decade. In 1970,
after his divorce from Topazia, he married his Japanese companion, Mieko
Namiki.
In the late
1950s, Maraini also joined several mountaineering expeditions with the Italian
Alpine Club, climbing peaks in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He then travelled
widely in India, Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia and Korea. In 1959, Maraini became a
fellow in the department of far eastern studies at St. Anthony’s College in
Oxford and stayed there until 1964. From 1972, the same year in which he
founded the Italian Association of Japanese Studies, until his retirement in
1983, he taught Japanese literature at the University of Florence. He received
many awards for his work during his lifetime, including the Order of the Rising
Sun, Third Class, from the Japanese government in 1982.
Maraini
spent the last years of his active life organising his research material at
Torre di Sopra, the family villa near Poggio Imperiale. In 1999, he published
both an autobiographical novel, Homes, Loves and Universes, and a volume of his photographs, Acts of Photography, Acts of Love.
He is buried
in a small graveyard in Garfagnana, near his country home. Whilst not written
on his headstone, Maraini’s words to his daughter, Dacia, that she should
?Remember always that races do not exist. Only cultures exist,’ could have been
inscribed there, for they summarised his guiding philosophy and approach to
life.
Always
infatuated with words and ideograms, throughout his life Maraini wrote metasemantic
poetry: poems based on the same rules as Italian but containing invented words,
similar in style to the nonsense poems written by Lewis Carroll, like
?Jabberwocky’ in Through the
Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. To hear Maraini recite one of
his verses of ?Il Lonfo,’ go to http://youtu.be/1jgTECYzdtU.
Enchantment of the Women of the Sea: Fosco Maraini,
Photographs, Japan 1954
Palazzo Medici Riccardi, via Cavour 3, Florence
Until April 30, 2012 , www.palazzo-medici.it
This exhibition features 30 of Maraini’s famous photographs of the nude fisherwomen of H?kura, taken in 1954. Considered one of the first ?underwater ethnographic reportages,’ the pictures visually reflect the everyday lives of these women, who often dived as deep as 20 meters to collect the molluscs needed to feed the village. The exhibit, which debuted at the Museum of Culture in Lugano in 2005, is organised by the Gabinetto Vieusseux and the Province of Florence. The special equipment Maraini used to capture his compelling and almost erotic images is also on display. The exhibition will travel next to San Quirico d’Orcia (Palazzo Chigi; May to July 2012), Rimini (Castel Sismondo; July to September 2012) and Lecco (Palazzo delle Paure; September to December 2012).
