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Christina Rossetti and the Wombat

 


When Dante Gabriel Rossetti acquired a wombat (circa 1869), his sister Christina was amongst the most enraptured Londoners in her response to the Antipodean creature. As usual with Christina, she immediately penned an Effusion, others would say an Ode, this time in Italian. All good odes open with an O. “O Uommibatto,” she exclaims, “Agil, giocondo, / Che ti sei fatto/ Irsuto e tondo!” Let’s unpack that. Her impression is spontaneous (D.G. himself said she was the more spontaneous poet), espying how the wombat is agile and carefree. One biographer, Mary Sandars (1930), translates ‘giocondo’ as frisky, which I suggest she’s used to rhyme with tricksy, however ‘giocondo’ comes closest to joyous, Betty Flowers’ word in the Penguin Complete Poems (2003). Fans of Leonardo da Vinci will notice the connection with his most famous portrait, and who is to say Christina does not have La Gioconda in mind upon meeting this mysterious and happy being? How you have grown hairy and round, is the gist of the next line, as one would but wonder who had never before seen such a creature. The addressee, Uommibatto, is a most curious coinage to anyone halfway familiar (like me) with Christina’s writings, strikingly using the word for man (uomo) in connection with bumping or beating (battere), conjuring a picture of boisterous liveliness. D.G.’s frontispiece to her extraordinary poem ‘Goblin Market’ features a wombat, amongst other creatures, while one of the goblins in the story is likened to a wombat. The main rhyme thread is giocondo-tondo-vagabondo-mondo-pondo, which is worth pondering when we notice how the second half of the poem shifts, via these rhymes, from lightness to heaviness, from initial delight at the vision glorious to the weighty meaning of the wombat’s very existence. Because Christina knows what they all know, this being, “hairy and round”, came from the other side of the world, down under. Sandars translates, “Pray run not from us/ A vagrant wild,/ Pray do not vanish”, expression of a fear of loss, even perhaps the death of the wombat far from home. “Deh non fuggire/ Qual vagabondo,/ Non disparire/ Fornado il mondo,” this last phrase “piercing the globe” thinks Sandars, while Flowers sees that Christina is talking about burrowing. For burrowing is, as every Australian knows, a basic characteristic of wombats, though the poet is not just thinking about digging. How do we imagine the world? “Pesa davvero/ D’un emisfero/ Non lieve il pondo,” she concludes, this creature embodying the reality of our hemispherical planet, grace and then gravity. The lines are almost untranslatable. Sandars goes, “the weight ‘tis clear/ Cannot be told.” Flowers too bumbles about, close to the gist, saying: “It’s really the weight of/ a hemisphere/ Not a light burden.” How do we imagine the world?

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