Utente:JhonSavor/sandbox1/SandboxEU
L'unica macchia nera (tradotta anche come La macchia nera) è una poesia postuma scritta da Robert Howard e appartenente al ciclo di Solomon Kane.
| L'unica macchia nera | |
|---|---|
| Titolo originale | The One Black Stain |
| 1ª ed. originale | Primavera 1962, The Howard Collector 2 di Glenn Lord |
| 1ª ed. italiana | Settembre 1979, Il Libro d'Oro della Fantascienza 2, Fanucci Editore |
| Genere | Poesia |
| Lingua originale | inglese |
| Ambientazione | Puerto San Julián, Patagonia, 1578 |
| Protagonisti | Solomon Kane |
| Antagonisti | Francis Drake |
| Altri personaggi | Thomas Doughty |
| Serie | Ciclo di Solomon Kane |
Storia editoriale
L'unica macchia nera (The One Black Stain in The Howard Collector, 1962) (tradotta anche come La macchia nera)
La poesia è stata pubblicata per la prima volta all'interno del secondo numero della rivista The Howard Collector di Glenn Lord nella primavera del 1962 dopo essere stata recuperata da un microfilm di R.H. Barlow. Secondo la cronologia di Glenn Lord gli eventi raccontati sono successivi a quelli del racconto La Luna dei Teschi dopo i quali Kane si sarebbe imbarcato al seguito di Francis Drake verso il Nuovo Mondo[1].
In Italia la poesia è stata pubblicata per la prima volta nel settembre 1979 all'interno del secondo volume della collana Il Libro d'Oro della Fantascienza edita da Fanucci Editore[2].
Trama
Critica
A Review of Robert E. Howard’s “The One Black Stain” by Frank Coffman
Robert E. Howard’s poem, “The One Black Stain,” is a work proving the young man’s mastery of poetic form and sound. It also exemplifies Howard’s love of history and real historical subjects to ground his fictional work—both in prose and poetic forms.
The poem recounts the execution of Sir Thomas Doughty by Sir Francis Drake—with the fictional addition of the character of Solomon Kane, not only at the scene, but giving his objections to the execution to the extent that Drake has Kane arrested and bound belowdecks. Kane, of course, then gets free of his bonds, helped by a sleeping guard and confronts Drake threateningly—before disappearing into the night at the poem’s conclusion. Thematically, it demonstrates a couple characteristics of the character of Kane: 1) his hatred of injustice (and, perhaps specifically, of authority abused); 2) though his “wrath” is “slow to rise,” it reinforces the lethal volatility of his temper.
Typical of Howard who had become a master of the narrative poem—an art that fell away from popularity among “free verse” and other “realist/modern” poets in the later 20th c. and has only in the past few decades seen a true revival—the poem is a variation of the ballad form, due to its regularity of rhythm of the type known as the “literary ballad” (as opposed to the “folk ballad” or “ballad of tradition” that has been the standard in Western language narrative poetics for over 800 years).
The poem is an expanded “Long-line Ballad” (as I have termed it in my Robert E. Howard: Selected Poems and elsewhere). Rather than the 4343 accent pattern of the traditional ballad and the normal iambic alternation of tetrameter and trimeter lines, Howard uses two 7-beat lines and one 8-beat central line in his three-line stanzas, He uses multiple internal rhymes in the “long segments.” In this poem, we might divide each stanza for the 7-8-7 accent tercets into two parts—but with much variation in the essentially iambic rhythm, often substituting an anapestic foot uu/ for the iamb or inverting the iamb u/ into a trochee /u or leaving off an initial unstressed syllable in the line (acephalous/ “headless” iambic foot = / rather than u/) for metrical variation. The basic pattern of accents and rhymes is as follows:
Basic Meter (with many variations, as noted above: u/u/u/u/ || u/u/u/ iambic tetrameter || iambic trimeter 7 accents total u/u/u/u/ || u/u/u/u/ iambic tetrameter || iambic tetrameter 8 accents total u/u/u/u/ || u/u/u/ iambic tetrameter || iambic trimeter 7 accents total
Rhyme Scheme (showing the typical line divisions): They carried him out on the barren sand 4 A where the rebel captains died; 3 B Where the grim grey rotting gibbets stand 4 A as Magellan reared them on the strand, 4 A And the gulls that haunt the lonesome land 4 A wail to the lonely tide. 3 B
While this is not an especially difficult rhythm to achieve, the necessity for all the internal rhyming is daunting and very difficult to achieve. That fact and the typical narrative power of Howard’s verses and compact storytelling make me rank this as one of Howard’s best poetic works.
Adattamenti
La poesia ha avuto un solo adattamento a fumetti realizzato dalla Marvel Comics nel 1981 all'interno del magazine antologico Savage Sword of Conan composto da una pagina di introduzione scritta da Louise Jones e sei tavole realizzate da David Wenzel.
| Data | Edizione inglese | TItolo | Titolo italiano | Sceneggiatura | Disegni | Colori | Copertina | Prima edizione italiana | Data italiana |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marzo 1981 | Savage Sword of Conan 62 | The One Black Stain | L'unica macchia nera | R. E.Howard (autore della poesia originale) | David Wenzel | Bianco e nero | David Mattingly | La Saga di Solomon Kane 2 (Panini Comics) | Giugno 2018 |
Note
Altri progetti
Collegamenti esterni
[[Categoria:Solomon Kane [[Categoria:Componimenti poetici di Robert E. Howard [[Categoria:Componimenti poetici in inglese [[Categoria:Componimenti poetici di autori statunitensi