There’s now a Kindle edition of the Italian Tolkien e Lovecraft: Alle origini del fantastico. The paper version can’t be sent to an Amazon locker for pick-up, so that had meant ‘no deal’ for me. Not that I can read Italian, but I could have flatbed-scanned and translated the pages and got the gist of it.
A potential buyer can now get a free 10% sample of the ebook. I had this sent through, and as a result I find that a Kindle Fire tablet will permit screenshots of books being displayed in the Amazon reader app (nice, I didn’t know that). These screenshots can then be opened on the desktop PC, OCR’d by Abbyy Screenshot Reader, copied out to a Word .DOCX then auto-translated. The contents of the new book are then…
Introduction.
Premise [of the book].
1. Distant biographies [between the two writers]…
2. …but not too much.
3. Shared readings.
4. William Morris and George MacDonald.
5. Edgar Allan Poe.
6. Herbert George Wells and William Hope Hodgson.
7. Algernon Blackwood and Montague Rhodes Tames.
8. Eric Rucker [E.R.] Eddison.
9. Lord Dunsany and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
10. Tolkien’s gothic and Lovecraft’s fantasy: the beauty of Perilous Realms.
Bibliography.
Parallel biographies: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
And here is the English translation for the one-page “Premise [of the book]”, clarified for sense and fluency in English:
‘In their mastery of the narrative of the imaginary, a mastery never again attainable, it is commonly supposed that John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and Howard Phillips Lovecraft are polar opposites. Even now this is still the view, after these writers have over many decades achieved deep worldwide resonance with scholars and readers. When they have both strongly contributed to the modern re-foundation of a mode of storytelling whose ancestral roots are lost in ancient epics and the very beginnings of man’s literary adventure. When they have both laid the foundations of a real philosophy of the ontological sustainability of alternative worlds born from the creative imagination. Yet on the surface, one has to admit that there does seem an evident and apparently unbridgeable difference between these two master-artisans of the fantastic. Tolkien with his luminous living fairy tale of Arda, crafted with all the slow rigour of the world’s leading philologist combined with the aesthetic wisdom of a medieval amanuensis. The dark, pre-human cosmic horrors of the dreamer of Providence, tempered only by his occasional ventures into the fabulous and otherworldly ‘dreamlands’. Of course, these two writers seem two extremes of what critics would like to deem an irreconcilable dichotomy. One ‘light’ and the other ‘shadow’. Yet does not this seeming dualism assure us of the vast range of the narrative territory which they have mapped? They have shown us new worlds alternately capable of arousing enduring hope or sudden terror, visions of divine providence or blindly impersonal cosmogonies. In these wide gaps, where on earth might one find points of significant contact? The aim of this work is to at least shorten the distances — perhaps inevitably only via my circumstantial inferences — firstly by showing their common literary reading and their appreciation of earlier or contemporary authors. Then by discussing some subtle similarities in artistic and aesthetic sensitivity. I hope these twin approaches will make their paths to the fantastic seem less antithetical than some might have been led to believe.’
Turns out the full £10 ebook runs to only 98 pages, which works out in a Word document at 24,000 words for the body-text minus the biographies at the back. Regrettably these biogs do not run side-by-side by-date for quick comparison.
Via the screenshots for the whole book, and via Abbyy Finereader, I got a Word .DOCX file. This then went through Google Translate. Who knew auto-translating short Kindle ebooks was so easy?