CIMITERO @Isola di San Michele
One of the islands in the Laguna which we had never
visited before: Cimitero @Isola di San Michele.
Purpose of my visit was to visit the graves of two fanous authors here, but I was positively
surprised to find the grave here of the 1st wife of a famous Dutch author, Tine Douwes Dekker.
In part from the above: 'Tine spent her last remaining years sickly and in poverty with her 2 children in Venice. Friends collected money for her burial here. For over a century the grave was unattended, it was derelict
and trodden on. In the Multatuli House (Korsjespoortsteeg 20, 1015 AR Amsterdam), the birthplace of Dutch most famous 19th-century writer, the museum and the Multatuli Society are established.
The society had the grave here restored in 2002.
The grave was again seriously damaged in march of 2010 by a severe storm, when a large tree was toppled and the grave was uprooted. The cemetery was not insured against storm adamage.
The society decided to renovate the site thoroughly: useful parts were carefully selected from the debris, roots were further removed, remains of the tree were cut and removed, and finally the grave was lovingly restored. In may the work was completed by the Multatuli Society.' |
'Everdina (Tine) Huberta van Wijnbergen (b.Antwerp, 26Sep1819 - d.Venice, 13Sep1874) was the 1stst wife of writer Eduard Douwes Dekker and appears in the books 'Max Havelaar' and 'Tine'.
After their parents died at an early age, the girls were raised by their grandmother and her two unmarried daughters.
In 1837 she and her sister were taken in by the family of her great-nephew and guardian Jan Pieter van der Hucht.
In 1845 they left with him and his family for the tea country Parakan Salak on Java.
His brother, Willem van der Hucht, asked Douwes Dekker to pick up the Van Wijnbergen sisters in Batavia and accompany them to the Preanger estate.
On 26Sep1845, Tine became engaged to Eduard Douwes Dekker. On 10Apr1846 the wedding was celebrated in Javanese Tijandjoer.
They had 2 children, Edu and Nonnie.
She became known as Tine in the book 'Max Havelaar'.
In 1866, Stephanie Etzerodt, later Mrs. Omboni, gave her a position as a governess in Italy.
She returned to Dekker once more, but left again in 1868 with her children for Venice.' [Wikipedia (NL)] |
This grave reminded me of my 'MAGNIFICENT SEVEN' project (2014) when I documented 7
overgrown cemeteries in London.
The first writer I looked for was Ezra Pound, buried
in the righthand side of that center bush. His wife Olga
is buried on the left. It took a bit of searching before I found this grave; this section has many authors but mostly
unknown to me. Other sections include composers, but we did not explore Cimitero beyond this section: too warm.
'Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (b.30Oct1885 – d.01Nov1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II.
Working in London in the early 20th century as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, he helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway.
Angered by the carnage of World War I (1914–1918), Pound lost faith in England and blamed the war on finance capitalism, which he called "usury".
He moved to Italy in 1924 and through the 1930s and 1940s embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler, and wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. During World War II, he persuaded the Italian government to let him make hundreds of paid, antisemitic radio broadcasts attacking the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Jews, as a result of which he was arrested in 1945 by American forces in Italy on charges of treason.
Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.
While in custody in Italy, Pound began work on sections of The Cantos that were published as The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949 by the Library of Congress, causing enormous controversy.
After a campaign by his fellow writers, he was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958 and lived in Italy until his death in 1972.' [Wikipedia]
Upon the exhibition 'The Beautiful and the Sinister', photography by Bill Brandt (see MyBlog_2022Q2), I came across a portrait of Ezra Pound, taken by Bill Brandt.
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"Man's greatest enemy is not Communisme, not Socialism, not Capitalism," Brodsky wrote,
"but rather the vulgarity of the human heart, of human imagination." (¬Susan Sontag by Benjamin Moser)
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky (b.24May1940 – d.28Jan1996) was a Russian-American poet and essayist.
Brodsky was born into a Russian Jewish family in Leningrad. He was a descendant of a prominent and ancient rabbinic family, Schorr (Shor).
His father, Aleksandr Brodsky, was a professional photographer in the Soviet Navy His mother, Maria Volpert Brodskaya, was a professional interpreter whose work often helped to support the family. They lived in communal apartments, in poverty, marginalized by their Jewish status.
In early childhood Brodsky survived the Siege of Leningrad where he and his parents nearly died of starvation.
As a young student, Brodsky was an unruly child, known for his misbehavior during classes. At fifteen, Brodsky left school. He worked odd jobs, one was at the morgue at the Kresty Prison, cutting and sewing bodies.
He learned Polish so he could translate the works of Polish poets such as Czesław Miłosz, and English so that he could translate John Donne. On the way, he acquired a deep interest in classical philosophy, religion, mythology, and English and American poetry.
Brodsky ran afoul of Soviet authorities and was expelled ("strongly advised!" to emigrate) from the Soviet Union in 1972, settling in the United States with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters.
He taught thereafter at Mount Holyoke College, and at universities including Yale, Columbia, Cambridge, and Michigan.
Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity".
He was appointed 'United States Poet Laureate' in 1991. [Wikipedia]
In 2022 I acquired Willem Diepraam's '50 Years of Photography' photobook and came across
a portrait (Amsterdam, 1980)
of Josef Brodski (must be Dutch spelling at the time).
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Photos © Ruud Leeuw
