No one has ever been able to dialogue with death as she did, and her own death resembles a suicide, wrapped in a veil of uneasiness, like something unresolved. But when her time ended, it began again.Belle da morire is a middlebrow book about great female beauties of the twentieth century who (allegedly) came to an unhappy end. The title is hard to translate: Fatal beauties or Beauties to die for, though neither is quite right.
Marco Innocenti and Enrica Roddolo, Belle da morire
The book trots out all the hoary, dim-witted clichés about female sexuality and its supposed nexus with shame, unhappiness, and death. Maria Callas is one of its subjects, along with a surprising number of women she knew or had met: Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, and (yes) Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
And yet… the snippet I quoted, from the end of the Callas chapter, struck me with its lyricism and stunning turnabout: Callas not as victim but as phoenix (Φοῖνιξ), immortal, triumphant. The Wiktionary entry on phoenix reads, in part:
from Ancient Egyptian Fnkhw (“Syrian people”). Signifies “mythical bird,” also “the date” (fruit and tree), also “Phoenician,” literally “purple-red,” perhaps a foreign word, or from phoinos (“blood-red”).Splendor, nobility, sensuality, nourishment, life: Callas indeed shares much with the Φοῖνιξ.
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