Lately I have been noticing a career-long trend of Hearn's where in he romanticizes the love between the dead and the living. In some cases morbid, in others merely reminiscently lovelorn, these stories appear to interest him as early as his first published work translating Theophile Gautier in One of Cleopatra's Nights and Other Fantastic Romances. Even earlier hints to his passion can be found concretely in his Enquirer article Valentine Vagaries (Feb. 14th, 1875 - American Miscellany vol. I, 48-50). This fascination of Hearn's is evident in his eager translations from "the Cleopatra" with such stories as Clarimonde, Arria Marcella, Omphale: a Rococo Story, and The Mummy's Foot. Each of the previous romances featured a hapless youth encountering a beauty long dead and their peculiar loves across the seas of time. I could argue that it was Hearn himself who was the first of these young men to be seduced, as evinced in Valentine Vagaries, by the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite.
It was none other than a similar such story which attracted Elizabeth Bisland to Hearn's place of work, then in New Orleans, by way of her admiration for his fantastic: A Dead Love (a story collected in Fantastics and Other Fancies; "It was to my juvenile admiration for this particular bit of work that I owed the privilege of meeting Lafcadio Hearn, in the winter of 1882...")
Doubtless there are many more of these morbid infatuations for me to find in his New Orleans writings, however, here are some from his works from Japan:
A Passional Karma from In Ghostly Japan, 1899.
The Reconciliation from Shadowings, 1900.
Memory thus failing me, I will add to this list whenever I rediscover more of these stories.
No comments:
Post a Comment