(‘the devil’) and nesuferitul (‘the insufferable one’).
An alternative explanation, which has been accepted by many writers, is that ‘nosferatu’ is derived from an old Slavonic word nesufur-atu, which was apparently itself derived from the Greek nosophoros , meaning ‘plague- carrier’ or ‘disease-bearing’. The obvious objection to this etymology is that Romanian and other Slavonic languages are Romance in origin and contain very few words of Greek. It’s also significant that, though the word nosophoros is a valid compound word in the Greek language – meaning that the two parts of the compound word are individually valid and are correctly combined – there’s no evidence that the word ever existed in any phase of the Greek language. So this suggested etymology relies on an unknown Greek word that somehow gave rise to an unknown Romanian word, which seems fairly unlikely.
It has also been suggested that nesufur-atu/nosferatu was a technical term in Old Slavonic that had migrated into common usage, but never appeared in a Romanian dictionary. That is a somewhat difficult argument to sustain, given that the sole purpose of a dictionary is to record words in common usage, and it would be reasonable to expect that it would have been recorded somewhere.
So we’ll probably never know exactly where ‘nosferatu’ originated, but the balance of probability is that Emily Gerard either misheard a Romanian word or was misinformed.
Bram Stoker, of course, used the word in his novel Dracula, but his usage suggests that he probably believed it meant ‘not dead’ or ‘undead’ in Romanian, not ‘vampire’, and he used it as a calque or loaned word.
The silver screen showed the world the face of the vampire for the first time, with the 1922 film Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens ( Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horrors), starring Max Schreck as the vampire, his appearance taken straight from the descriptions in folklore: bat-like ears, hairy palms and sharp pointed teeth. In 2010 the film was ranked number 21 in Empire magazine’s list of the 100 best films of world cinema, and was basically an unauthorized movie version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The word ‘nosferatu’ was popularized by it because the studio hadn’t obtained the rights to the novel, and so several changes had to be made. ‘Count Dracula’ became ‘Count Orlok’, and they used the word ‘nosferatu’ as a synonym for ‘vampire’, and this has essentially remained its meaning until today.
Bela Lugosi then took over the vampire role as Hollywood latched on to the character, while in England a few years later, Christopher Lee strutted his stuff as the suave, handsome, almost romantic, antihero. Since then, vampires seem to have appeared almost everywhere, and in a bewildering variety of forms, from the leather- jacketed stars of The Lost Boys through the almost tragic hero of the Anne Rice novels, to the extreme violence of From Dusk Till Dawn and the sexy light-hearted exploits of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
At least in one sense, then, the vampire does seem to be truly immortal.
Why Venice?
Venice is a beautiful, romantic and mysterious city, with a fascinating and extremely colourful history. And vampires – in both fiction and reality – feature in that history. The 1988 film Vampire in Venice starred Klaus Kinski in the title role, and more recently The Vampires of Venice was an episode in the Doctor Who television series.
That’s the fiction, but this is reality.
This picture shows the skull of a sixteenth-century supposed female vampire which was discovered in a mass grave – a plague pit – in Venice in March 2009. The brick jammed into her jaw was intended to stop her feeding on the other plague victims buried with her.
So Venice seemed an ideal location for this novel. There are over one hundred islands scattered around the Venetian lagoon, some with busy, populous settlements, others far too small to live on, and still others on which ancient ruined houses stand as stark reminders of the difficulties of establishing a viable habitation in the salty, marshy waters.
Venice itself can be spooky enough on a fine day. When the mist rolls in from the Adriatic, even small figures can cast giant shadows in the narrow streets and across the canals. Out in the lagoon, the islands become isolated worlds of their own where, in my imagination, almost anything could – and in this novel did – happen.
James Becker
