Fosco Maraini; Independent obit (travel writer)
Hyfler/Rosner
Writer and traveller who photographed 'secret Tibet'
19 June 2004
At the end of the Pacific War, in August 1945, the gates of
Japan's camps were opened. In the city of Nagoya, among the
released internees was an Italian family. They were Fosco
Maraini, the writer, photographer, mountaineer and
ethnographer, his wife Topazia and their three small
daughters.
At the time of his incarceration Maraini was a Reader in
Italian at the University of Kyoto. He went on to write a
number of distinguished books on his travels in Asia,
including Meeting With Japan and Secret Tibet, and on his
mountain expeditions in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In later
life he was a lecturer in Japanese at the University of
Florence, the city of his birth.
Born to an Italian artist father and an English mother, the
writer Yoi Crosse, from an early age Fosco was an
enthusiastic skier and mountain climber, and he made his
first big ascents with the great Emilio Comici. He was also
fascinated by the art of photography. In 1930, when he was
only 18, he successfully showed his experimental
black-and-white photographs in Rome at the exhibition
"Mostra Nazionale di Fotografia Futurista".
Another of Maraini's passions was Oriental culture and in
1934, he embarked as a teacher of English on the cadet ship
Amerigo Vespucci, visiting Greece, the Lebanon, Syria and
Turkey. The following year he married Topazia Alliata, a
member of an old Sicilian family. In 1937, he accompanied
the Orientalist Giuseppe Tucci as official photographer on
an expedition to Tibet. Tucci was a supporter of Mussolini,
and a close friend of the Fascist philosopher Giovanni
Gentile. Maraini's stance was resolutely anti-Fascist.
On his return to Italy (after brief visits to Japan and
Korea) Maraini decided to dedicate his life to Oriental
ethnology. He took his final examinations in Natural
Sciences at the University of Florence, and in 1939, with a
grant from the Japanese government, travelled to Sapporo in
Hokkaido to study the tribal traditions and arts of the Ainu
people, then on the verge of extinction. He was also
attracted to the art of ukiyoe or wood-block prints,
especially those made by Hokusai (1760-1849), a master of
evocative perspectives whose art influenced Maraini's own
work with a camera.
When the Pacific War broke out, Tucci was sent by Mussolini
to found the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo and
travelled all over Japan giving lectures on Tibet and on
"racial purity". Maraini was appointed Reader in Italian at
the University of Kyoto in 1941, but his own political
opinions were directly opposed to those of Tucci, the German
Fascists and their Japanese imitators. In 1943, when he
refused to give his support to Mussolini's last stance,
Maraini and his family were incarcerated at Nagoya as "civil
internees". They remained there until 15 August 1945.
Towards the end of their enforced stay in the prison,
Maraini made the rather operatic gesture of chopping off his
little finger in the highly dramatic style of yakuza
(gangster) movies, where the gesture symbolises deep apology
to the boss as well as undying loyalty to him. If Maraini
was expecting to impress the guards he was under a delusion.
It had no effect at all, for such a traditional "honour"
self-sacrifice is valid only when performed by a Japanese in
atonement for errors.
Maraini returned to Italy, where his photography took on a
new depth as he portrayed with total realism the agonies of
post-war life, adopting the grand verismo style of Roberto
Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti. From 1948
to 1950 he made an extraordinary documentary film on
southern Italy, Nostro Sud, which even today is in large
part unedited.
In 1948, Maraini participated in Tucci's second Tibet
expedition. His experiences and photographs were collected
in his first book, Segreto Tibet (1951) which was translated
into English as Secret Tibet the following year. In the
mid-1950s he spent a further year in Japan, collecting
materials for future works. He was a Fellow of St Antony's
College, Oxford from 1959 to 1964, and made many voyages
across Asia - to India, Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia, Japan and
Korea.
His best book, Meeting With Japan, was published in 1959
(the original Italian version, Ore Giapponesi, had appeared
two years earlier) when I read it during my first year as
Professor of English at Tohoku University in Sendai. Its
construction considerably influenced my own early books
about Japan.
During the rest of his very full life he was loaded with
honours in both Italy and Japan. In 1999, his slightly
fictionalised autobiography, Case, Amori, Universi ("Houses,
Loves, Universes"), was published. His photographic
collection of over 25,000 images and his library of books on
the Orient have been acquired by the city of Florence for
the Centro Vieusseux-Asia.
Dacia Maraini, one of his daughters, became a celebrated
Italian playwright and novelist. She recalled this saying of
her father, which he told her as a child, "Remember always
that races do not exist. Only cultures exist" - words that
encapsulate Maraini's whole philosophy of life.
James Kirkup
Earlier this year I received a card from Florence with kind
words from Fosco Maraini on my becoming editor of the Alpine
Journal, writes Stephen Goodwin. He pointed out that he had
at his house a full run of AJs, the oldest mountaineering
journal in the world, from 1863, plus its two forerunner
issues of Peaks, Passes and Glaciers - a rare and valuable
collection indeed.
Maraini was an alpinist in the classic European gentlemanly
mould, urbane and witty, the mountains a different venue for
social engagement and intellectual inquiry as well as fun
and physical challenge. He certainly wasn't one of the
obsessional "hard men" of climbing, though his list of
ascents in the Dolomites and the western Alps from 1929 to
1937 is impressive. He was elected to the Alpine Club in
1960 and remained a member to his death.
While most of his climbs were done guideless, he made
several excursions onto the spires of the Dolomites with the
Trieste ace Emilio Comici, notably two ascents of the Dülfer
route (V+) on the Cima Grande di Lavaredo and the committing
Preuss Crack (V) on the Cima Piccolissima. Maraini kept fine
company. Against one climb on the Torre del Diavolo, on his
record is written: "with E Comici and King of Belgium".
This phase of activity came to an end when he travelled
East; to Tibet in 1937 and then to Japan. While in Japan, he
climbed Mount Fuji and made several ski ascents of peaks in
Hokkaido.
In 1958, Maraini's knowledge of Asia and facility with
languages made him a useful member of the successful Italian
expedition, led by Riccardo Cassin, to Gasherbrum IV
(7,925m), the "Matterhorn of the Baltoro glacier" in
Pakistan. Maraini secured the all-important peak permit in
Karachi, and later reached 7,200m on the formidable
mountain.
A year later he led a team from the Rome section of the
Italian Alpine Club to Saraghrar Peak in the Hindu Kush, on
the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Four climbers gained
the 7,367m summit. Looking back on this trip he delighted in
the contrast between the mountaineers' enjoyment of "the
ruder pleasures of nature" and a sophisticated Rome where
"the last descendants of feudal lords mingle with monsignori
and abbots", coupled with the "rather scandalous aura" of
politics and cinema stars.
Maraini recorded these adventures in Gasherbrum (1960,
translated as Karakoram: the ascent of Gasherbrum IV, 1961)
and Paropàmiso (1963, Where Four Worlds Meet: Hindu Kush
1959, 1964), accompanied by superb photographs. But his most
enduring work is Secret Tibet. The book is by turns intimate
and scholarly as Maraini and Giuseppe Tucci ("the great
master") visited villages and monasteries on a route from
Sikkim to Lhasa.
Maraini couldn't know it at the time, but many of the
statues and wall paintings he photographed with his Leica
and described so elegantly, would be destroyed in Mao's
Cultural Revolution - a term he regarded as horribly ironic,
describing 1966 to 1977 as "those years of fire and shit". T
he photographs in Secret Tibet became the only record of the
treasures of places like the 1,000-year old Kyangphu
monastery, reduced to rubble.
Four years ago, a new edition of Secret Tibet was published
(the Italian version appeared in 1998), augmented with fresh
reflections by Maraini on his travels, Buddhism and the
future of Tibet. When he recalled Kyangphu, he did so, he
said, "with tears in my eyes".