Mario Manlio Rossi

Mario Manlio Rossi
Pilgrimage in the West
Translated by J.M. Hone
Dublin: Cuala Press, 1933;
reprint, Shannon: T.M. MacGlinchey for Irish University Press, 1971.
(SPL) DA 977 .R65 1971

In the summer of 1931, Yeats befriended Mario Rossi, an Italian philosopher and scholar of Berkeley and Swift. Yeats displayed a keen interest in Rossi during the latter’s time in Ireland. Rossi wrote of Yeats:

He had no philosophy to offer by chapter and verse. He offered poems -- and asked for philosophical theories, for an explanation. . . . He asked and listened, and asked and listened again. His slow voice which he had deliberately trained on the psaltery, might have seemed pontifical. But he was not proud of himself. He was proud of poetry, of the great things to which he gave voice. . . . He wanted to solve his problems. He wanted to come in clear about his own mind. He wanted to connect thing and image.

Rossi became acquainted with Yeats’s circle in Ireland, and the Cuala Press published a translation of one of his works in 1933 in memory of Lady Gregory who had passed away May 22, 1932. J.M. Hone wrote:

This ‘Pilgrimage’ is to be regarding mainly as a tribute to Lady Gregory. It is not long, even as it appears in Italian, but in view of the limited space of a Cuala book, I have not been able to translate it in its entirety. There is enough to show that the philosopher need not be, as the vulgar conceive, a pedant immersed in insipid professionalism. Nothing came amiss to Doctor Rossi, from our games and our horses to our literature and our politics; but I have generally favoured the inclusion of descriptive passages which reveal how Ireland took the eye of a philosophic and imaginative writer from abroad.