Arthur Machen
Il gran Dio Pan

The publishing history of Il Gran dio Pan by Arthur Machen in Italy is quite curious: despite being his most important novel – even though his masterpiece is probably The Three Impostors – Fruttero and Lucentini decided not to include it in the famous anthology Ghost Stories in 1960, where, for the first time in our country, the translations of some stories by the Welsh author appeared. The two famous critics considered Il Gran dio Pan to have aged poorly and instead regarded the novella The Terror, rightly so, as the pinnacle of his production. Thus, it was necessary to wait until 1980 when, with Mondadori, Giuseppe Lippi curated the anthology Il Gran dio Pan and Other Supernatural Stories to finally see the novel translated. This volume eventually went out of print and, in recent years, even reached interesting values in the collectors' market.

In 2005, Fanucci reprinted it with rather modest graphics, while lately Il Gran Dio Pan has once again sparked the interest of the publishing world: in 2016, Tre Editori published a beautiful edition (currently the best available) with a very interesting critical apparatus. Then in 2017, the new Edizioni Theoria – though it's not known who acquired the brand – released a new edition of the book.

The fifth Italian edition published by Adiaphora Edizioni in a new translation with the English text alongside, critical notes, and a postface by H.P. Lovecraft leaves something to be desired. The idea of making the text available in its original language might be a curiosity, even though, in reality, Machen's material is well available online. However, personally, I don't like the graphics and find it rather anonymous. Perhaps there wasn't such a necessity, especially so soon after the new volume published by Tre Editori, for a new reprint.

Il Gran Dio Pan remains, in any case, a very powerful decadent work, rich with a vivid imagination. It was published in 1894 with the cover by Aubrey Beardsley, an illustrator and friend of Oscar Wilde. At the time, the book caused a scandal to the point that the Manchester Guardian called it "the most despicable ever written in English. It is deliberately so, with a sharp impiety. We could say more, but we do not wish to advertise this cursed book". It is a novel that brings to light ancient pagan legends and is centered on the philosophical concept of Evil seen as part of everyday reality. The story tells of how a surgeon performs brain surgery on a woman: the effect is devastating so much that, through "the vision of the great god Pan," she will experience "living the universe in its entirety." The woman will give birth to a beautiful daughter who, soon enough, will become a sort of malevolent creature, bringing death and destruction and causing numerous suicides in London's West End. Il Gran Dio Pan mixes science and alchemy in an original and fascinating blend and certainly deserves to be rediscovered, even if the fate of Arthur Machen is to remain a niche writer. This despite being esteemed by a giant of literature like Jorge Luis Borges and being the main inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft. In Italy, all in all, he might have had more luck than other forgotten writers of the fantastic, and just recently, Edizioni Hypnos and Providence Press have made unpublished works available in Italy such as A Fragment of Life and The Green Circle..