List of cultural references in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

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The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is a 2004 novel by Italian semiotician Umberto Eco.

Yambo, the main character, is an antiquarian book dealer. After a stroke, Yambo loses his autobiographic, episodic memory but not his semantic memory: he only remembers words, sentences, memorable sayings.

Hundreds of quotations and allusions spring up in Yambo's mind, from poems, novels, newspapers, magazines, childhood comic books, songs, sayings, paintings, illustrations, encyclopedic facts acquired in his past.

The reader learns about Yambo's story and his inner world of meanings by identifying and connecting the quotations and allusions that spring into his mind, thus accompanying him in his rediscovery of his own identity.

This page contains a list of quotations and allusions present in the novel, in order of appearance, acknowledging the contributions of their original authors and sources. Page references are based on ISBN 978-0-43-620563-7 Search this book on .. Quoted text from the book is indicated in bold, in the English translation and, in brackets, in the original Italian; original quotes are in italic.

Chapter 1

The title of the first chapter is "The Cruelest Month" ("Il più crudele dei mesi"), i.e. the month of April, a reference to the opening line of "The Waste Land" (1922) by T. S. Eliot (1888–1965): "April is the cruellest month".

Page 3

"Bruges the Dead" ("Bruges la morta")
"Bruges-la-Morte" ("Bruges the Dead") is the tile of a novel written by Belgian poet Georges Rodenbach (1855–1898), in 1892, portraying the Flemish city in Belgium.

"Where fog hovers between the towers like incense dreaming" ("Dove la nebbia fluttua tra le torri come l'incenso che sogna")
From the opening line of the XII stanza of a poem, "Les Femmes en mante", by Georges Rodenbach:

"Le brouillard indolent de l'automne est épars;
Il flotte entre les tours comme l'encens qui rêve"

("The lazy autumn fog is scattered;
it floats among the towers like dreaming incense")

Yambo quotes it again, in French, on p. 31.

"A gray city, sad as a tombstone with chrysanthemums" ("Una città grigia, triste come una tomba fiorita di crisantemi")
From the IV stanza of "Les Femmes en mante", by Georges Rodenbach:

"Ville morte où chacun est seul, où tout est gris,
Triste comme une tombe avec des chrysanthèmes".

("Dead city, where each man is alone, where everything is grey,
sad as a tombstone with chrysanthemums")

"My soul was wiping the streetcar windows so it could drown in the moving fog of the headlamps" ("La mia anima detergeva i vetri del tram per annegarsi nella nebbia mobile dei fanali.")
Lines from "Expedición", poem from the collection "Sobre los ángeles" written in 1927/1928 by Rafael Alberti (1902-1999):

"Desde lejos, desde muy lejos,
mi alma desempañaba los cristales del tranvía
para hundirse en la niebla movible de los faroles"

Translated in Italian by Vittorio Bodini (1914-1970) in "I Poeti surrealisti spagnoli: saggio introduttivo e antologia":

"Da lontano, da molto lontano,
la mia anima detergeva i vetri del tram
per annegarsi nella nebbia mobile dei fanali."

("From afar, from very far,
my soul wiped the trolley windows clean
in order to submerge them in the streetlights' mobile mist")

Page 4

"Maigret plunges into a fog so dense that he can't even see where he's stepping..."
Referencing Inspector Jules Maigret from Georges Simenon's titular book series, which often utilizes fog as a descriptor:

"They shake hands, like two phantoms in the mist. And life goes on in the fog, where one may suddenly bump into an invisible man."

Page 5

"Seltsam, im Nebel zu wandern!"
Opening line from "Im Nebel", poem from the collection "Unterwegs" (1911) by Herman Hesse (1877-1962):

"Seltsam, im Nebel zu wandern!
Einsam ist jeder Busch und Stein,
Kein Baum sieht den anderen,
Jeder is allein."

("Strange, to wander in the fog.
Each bush and stone stands alone,
No tree sees the next one,
Each is alone.")

Page 6

"My name is Arthur Gordon Pym."
From Edgar Allan Poe's (1809-1849) only complete novel, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" (1838):

"My name is Arthur Gordon Pym. My father was a respectable trader in sea-stores at Nantucket, where I was born."

Page 7

"Call me... Ishmael?"
From the opening line of "Moby Dick" (1851) by Herman Melville (1819-1891):

"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world."

Page 19

"All that came to mind was there are perfumes as fresh as a child's flesh."
Lines from "Correspondences", poem from the collection "Flowers of Evil", written in 1857 by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867):

"Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
— Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,"

("There are perfumes fresh as children's flesh,
Soft as oboes, green as meadows
— And others, corrupted, rich, triumphant,")

External links

• Umberto Eco Wiki: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana: List of cultural references.

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