Old TIBET TIBETAN BUDDHISM Book HIMALAYAS TRAVEL EXPLORATION Customs Food Magic

Description: Secret Tibet, by Fosco Maraini. Translated from the Italian by Eric Mosbacher. Forward by Bernard Berenson. Illustrated with 70 photographs by the author. 1st American Edition published in 1952 by the Viking Press of New York. Maraini actually travelled in Tibet on two different occasions, 1939 and 1948, and telescopes both visits in this book, although most of it is based in the 1948 trip. As an Italian, and a highly cultured European, he has a somewhat more sympathetic view of Tibet than English and American writers. He compares Tibet not to Nebraska but to Florence, the Italian Alps, Italian Catholicism, and the Vatican. While Tibet was medieval, in many ways Catholicism in the 30s and 40s could also be called medieval. Maraini thinks like a man of science, but he knows the mind of Italian peasants as well, and an old woman repeating a mantra is not so different from an old woman in Italy saying her own rosary. So there is a lot of sympathy in his view.He is also clear-sighted. He does not like dirt and smells, for example, and when he describes the Tibetans, he doesn't pretend not to notice the level of filth. He admires Buddhism, but not so much that he loses objectivity. Underground chapels which contain animal carcasses stuffed with straw and rotting away and artwork filled with skulls, human bones and bloody images horrify him, and he says so.He also conveys a wonderful sense of the beauty, the air, the silence, the scale and scope of the Tibetan land. His book is about people and events, which he describes with piercing insight and analysis. He describes faces and bodies in terms of the character they reveal. He doesn't fill pages with descriptions of ornery porters and bad trails. Instead he takes the hardships of travel for granted and describes the personality and character of every person, mountain, monastery, dance, and meal. The fact that he was not hell-bent for Lhasa allows him to be present in each place that he visits.Because he is along on the trip as a photographer, he observes the art intensely. His writing is vivid, poetic but not pretentious, and the translation from the Italian is flawless, at least as English style goes. You would never imagine that you are reading a translation.Maraini also had another advantage that makes him the perfect travel companion--he lived and taught in Japan in the years between his first and second trips to Tibet (because WW2 had broken out and he got stranded there) so he can see Tibet not only as it appears to a European but also in the greater context of Asia. (Evelyn Uyemura) Condition: Sound binding. Staining to boards as pictured above. Backstrip hinged (Pulls away from book but pages secure). Pages are clean, tight and whole. 6 1/4" x 9 1/2" with 306 pages.

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End Time: 2024-12-27T19:22:04.000Z

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