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Success and Translation of Italian Literature in Hungary
20-35Views:249Literary criticism, both in Hungary and in Italy, has paid great attention to the fortune and irradiation of Italian literature in Hungary, just think of the thirteen volumes, the result of the scientific collaboration of the Giorgi Cini Foundation of Venice and of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The article aims to offer a broad overview of the success of the Italian literature in Hungary, especially through translations. The article reviews the various historical periods and literary movements that characterized the literary contacts between the two countries. Until the second half of the eighteenth century, the irradiation of Italian literature was first of all manifested in the use of literary models and poetic formulas in the works of the major authors of Hungarian literature. The 19th century saw instead the season of translation of the great classics of the first Italian literature (Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio) translated again in the twentieth century, thanks also to the commitment of the Magyar Italianists. Finally, the article focuses on the present situation, describing the translations of contemporary authors
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The link between space and the individual in Petrarch and Leopardi
38-45Views:190The interdisciplinary approach in history makes it possible to widen researchers’ perspectives. Italian literature is one medium in which we can reflect the relationship between geography, identity and imagination. John Agnew’s idea that ‘Place is a meaningful site that combines location, locale and sense of place’ conveys the main aspect of a ‘meaningful location’ and gives us a framework within which we can rethink space and place through Italian literature.1 In my research, I intend to examine the connections between identity and landscape, how experiences form the view of the environment through Giacomo Leopardi’s Infinity (1819) and Francis Petrarch’s letter of 26, April, 1336 in which he describes a vision about his ascent up Mount Ventoux. My main aim is to present how the impressiveness of nature becomes visible through the experiences of Leopardi and Petrarch, which is part of their existence. The mountain and the sea are key elements of these texts. The two places chosen and described by the poets have different significance: while Petrarch considered that the Mount Ventoux is the place of spiritual fulfilment, for Leopardi the hill of Recanati meant an isolated place where he could let his imagination roam free. All in all, this research offers new perspective to discover relationship between Italian literature and other disciplines in order to answer other, complex theoretical questions. I examined the topic from an interdisciplinary view to highlight the ways in which history, geography and literature can be linked.
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Gramsci and The South as a Space of Emancipation
39-55Views:166The paper will actively engage with the contradictions found in Gramsci in an attempt to tease out the elements of emancipation found in his thought, as well as a sub-culture of opposition against Western notions of rationality. Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of the Italian South and of the Southern Italian peasantry in relation to the formation of a radical politics of emancipation constitutes one of the most salient features of his critique of orthodox Marxism. I argue that for the Italian Marxist theorist, the liberation of the Italian peasantry is not only a project of social, economic and political emancipation. Rather, the peasantry’s emancipation is also seen as a project of cultural liberation, a liberation from the dominant strands of rationalist and positivist Enlightenment thought, which Gramsci saw as encapsulated in Crocean philosophy. For Gramsci, the task of the organic intellectuals is to create an ideational sphere in which the colonized South can potentially articulate and celebrate a culture that has historically been deemed backward and primitive. However, Gramsci’s analyses of the South also contain historicist encrustations, which create a dialectical tension in his theory of politico-cultural emancipation that has never really been solved. I argue that the positivist and progressionist encrustations of Gramsci’s program for the emancipation of the South is an instantiation of a wider, Western, 19th and 20th century intellectual tradition which conflates “progress” as such with emancipation, a tradition that goes beyond the Italian and European context, and that is even paralleled by the model for black emancipation in the American South put forth by a figure as seemingly divergent as, say, W.E. B. Du Bois in the The Souls of Black Folk (1903).
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“I can't write English, not even Italian... give me any 'giobba'": the Italian emigrants in the theater of Nino Randazzo
56-68Views:173The paper examines the cultural, social and linguistic representation of Italians emigrated to Australia in the writing for the theatre of Nino Randazzo, a playwright of Aeolian origin, who emigrated to Melbourne in 1952, considered one of the most important and prolific authors in the context of the so-called “letteratura dell’emigrazione”, and more particularly the Italian-Australian literature in italian language. Of particular interest is the theme of cultural and social prejudices of Anglo-Australians towards people of Italian origin, labelled as ignorant, impossible to acculturate and to discipline, largely linked to criminal organizations, which mostly speak a mixed variety of Italian and English. Thus, in particular, in the comedy Il Sindaco d’Australia (1981), in which the stereotypical (but hilarious) image of the emigrant from the south of Italy, impulsive and ambitious, characterized on a linguistic level by the use of Italian-Australian terms; and in the comedy Victoria Market (1982), conceived by Randazzo as a protest against the tendency on the part of Anglo-Australians to build stereotypes towards Italian-Australians, in this case the one that Italian equals mafioso. Randazzo’s theatre, however, manages to distinguish itself from the works of the majority of first-generation Italian-Australian playwrights for its attempt to demystify such prejudices and clichés in an enjoyable way. It is in the choice of a popular tone of comedy, also achieved through the skilful mixing of more traditional Italian forms with Italian-Australian terms typical of the years in which the narrated events are set, that the specific aspects in this author lay.
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Linguistic and cultural contacts between the two shores of the Adriatic. The Italian of Albanian writers
69-86Views:212Migrant literature is a powerful medium of expression which offers a great variety of interpretation and a great source of inspiration for scholars to investigate the different aspects of the life and those of the society. Finding themselves in-between, migrant authors have the opportunity to live (in) two or more languages and cultures bringing them together, changing and shaping them. It is precisely here where linguistic contact occurs and where different strategies take place becoming an interesting part of a linguistic and literary research. This article investigates the contact between Albanian and Italian language through the analysis of some of the works of Ornela Vorpsi, Artur Spanjolli, Ron Kubati and Anilda Ibrahimi. Taking into consideration the fact that these authors has decided to use Italian as their language of expression, this investigation offers some considerations of what this means to them and the impact on both languages. Considering the fact that these writers transfer in their texts not only important aspects of the culture but also some features of the Albanian language, it is interesting to see the way in which transference takes place and what happens to the text when two different and distant languages such as Albanian and Italian meet.
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"Nordic Mists" on the Strait. The roots Northern Sicilian Romanticism
28-46Views:134The present essay aims at tracing the influences of Northern European Romanticism on the works of some Sicilian authors of the early Nineteenth century. The objective is to debunk the myth of a “lower” level of the Italian Romantic literature when compared to the Nordic literature, as it is not focused on the representation of the dark areas of the self, of supernatural, fantastic, and irrational themes that are present in reality. Some ballads by Felice Bisazza (1809- 1867) and Vincenzo Navarro (1800- 1867) are examined. In these works the narration of popular legends highlights a ghostly and horrifying universe, mirroring real situations, such as the violence of the noble class and patriarchy, or the injustice of social inequality. A play by Giuseppe La Farina (1815- 1863), entitled L’abbandono di un popolo (1845), will be then considered; the author portrays the anti-Spanish revolt of 1676 in Messina by focusing on the disturbing and underground forces that intersect with the revolutionary movements. Lastly, the production by Tommaso Cannizzaro (1838- 1921) as translator will be analyzed: the writer makes the fascinating world of Scandinavian mythology available to the Sicilian and Italian public, through the translations of some cantos by the medieval Edda antica.
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The novel Libertà by Verga and the demythologization of Risorgimento rhetoric
30-38Views:305Giovanni Verga’s tale Libertà has often been object of multifaceted – and frequently discording –critical interpretations, being the most common readings those of who saw in it a clear bias for the Italian Risorgimento (despite its violent development), and those who read it as an expression of resilient skepticism by the author towards the same historic event. Leonardo Sciascia, for example, uses the term “mystification” to describe Verga’s attitude towards Bronte’s insurrection, at a time – 1860 – when Garibaldi was carrying out his well-known Expedition of the Thousand.
The essay goes through all the noteworthy moments of this critical tradition, eventually deducting that it is by no means possible to draw firm assertions about Verga’s political ideology with the sole literary work as a point of reference. It argues instead that the author’s literary eminence must be seen in his outstanding ability to raise such a vast array of multilayered interpretations in the readers.
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For a dream grammar in the "Decameron". Forms and structures of the oneiric themed novels
96-109Views:307This paper takes into account the oneiric issue in Giovanni Boccaccio Decameron, with the aim of defining Boccaccio’s overall “grammar of dreaming”: besides an accurate investigation on Decameron’s sources, which range from classic to Medieval literature, it retraces the narrative constructions of the short-novels with oneiric subjects, hypothesizing the existence of two main schemes. In the short-tales on a vision (which are the most known), it is almost always replied the scheme of the “tale in the tale”, due to the creation of a imaginary world with its own rules. Meanwhile, in the short tales of deceiving, the dream is useful to trick the naive antagonist, making him believe something unbelievable. In both cases, it has a deep influence on the so-called “statute of reality” (Amedeo Quondam): in the first, there is the invention of a new reality; in the second it is deconstructed instead.
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Translations belles infidèles. Comments to those of Domenico Tempio's oily compositions
161-182Views:384Belles infidèles is a French expression highlighting a well-known problem in translating from one language to another. This is true especially in the field of literature and particularly in poetry, where the exterior aspects of the words (for example, the harmony of rhymes, the images, the emotional vibrations, the semantic fields, the polysemy, and so on) become substantial and hardly translatable. The essay focuses on some bad translations of some selected verses from the obscene poems by a 18th-century Sicilian dialect poet, Domenico Tempio: they clearly show the translators’ intervention, who took many liberties and betrayed the formulation, the sense and the effect of the original texts. The essay proposes some more faithful translations of them.
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Pepe-Lamartine A literary controversy and a duel for the Risorgimento
64-79Views:245The essay reconstructs the reactions in Florence provoked by the publication of Alphonse de Lamartine’s Le dernier chant du pelerinage d’Harold (1825), inspired by Lord Byron’s unfinished work. The portrait of absolute decadence of contemporary Italy, with the definition of its inhabitants as “polvere d’uomini”, outraged the intellectuals, who would have liked to respond in Vieusseux’s Anthology, the most important periodical of the time. Pietro Giordani also intended to reply to Lamartine by publishing an essay about Operette Morali of the young (and still unknown) Giacomo Leopardi, portrayed as a great and living Italian. Censorship prevented this and other responses, but not a harsh reference contained in a booklet by the Neapolitan exile Gabriele Pepe. His pride wounded, Lamartine (at the time in charge of the French embassy in Florence) challenged Pepe to a duel.
Pepe’s victory sparked a great enthusiasm in Florence and throughout Italy. The theme of offended honor (the symbolic kind, of the Italian homeland and of its Sons) and avenged with a Proof of Value became a constant and was imitated many other times, in reality and in literature, feeding the imagination of several generations. -
Simone Giusti, Natascia Tonelli: Comunità di pratiche letterarie. Il valore d’uso della letteratura e il suo insegnamento, Torino, Loescher, 2021
152-154Views:110Review for Simone Giusti, Natascia Tonelli: Comunità di pratiche letterarie. Il valore d’uso della letteratura e il suo insegnamento, Torino, Loescher, 2021
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Luigi Russo: the union of science and life
10-19Views:255In his work as a historian and literary critic, Luigi Russo considered literature not in the perspective of the limited disciplinary knowledge, but always tended to correlate it with wider aspects of reality, history, to “make history” rather than to “know how to read”, to always connect “science” and “life”, theory and practice, study and ethi-cal-political values, according to the teaching of Francesco De Sanctis, set out in the extraordinary Neapolitan prolusion of the same name of 1872, interpreted by Russo in the monograph 1928 Francesco De Sanctis e la cultura napoletana. The work of Luigi Russo, anti-authoritarian, anti-demagogic, anti-dictatorial, can still be a point of reference for those who care about the values of culture and the polis together.
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Danese Cataneo: «felicissimo spirito» in Tasso's documents. The Amor di Marfisa and the Gerusalemme liberata
8-20Views:166Published in 1562, Danese Cataneo’s epic-chivalric poem Amor di Marfisa had a wide but undervalued influence in Torquato Tasso’s masterpiece, Gerusalemme liberata. In this short essay I’ll provide the necessary evidences to demonstrate the existence of a deep connection between those two poems, and establish how it is organized. In particular, Cataneo’s literary legacy, which is underlined by a long list of quote, is strongly perceptible for what concerns the expression of feelings and thoughts. Amor di Marfisa, in this regard, gives to the young Tasso an unusual example of epic poem interested in characters’ psychology: aspects such as the self-analysis and the fragmentation of the ego are underrated in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and all the other Italian poems in ottava rima, whereas they are fundamental in Cataneo’s poem. More than just an example, it represents for Tasso a training ground and a mine, where he founds themes and lexicon that later will be used in Gerusalemme liberata.
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Why read the French classics: Calvino and the lesson of the French masters
119-131Views:73Calvino’s move to Paris in 1967 marks a new phase of his life, in which, inevitably, contact with French culture becomes closer and more direct. The essay examines the relationship that, during the years in Paris and in those of his return to Italy, the writer weaves with the great French classics, in scattered writings and within the Norton Lectures.
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Max Gobbo and the fantasy rewrite of a Renaissance period
122-130Views:112The paper examines thè characteristics of Max Gobbo’s writing in his fantasy novel Alasia - The Iron Maiden. The novel is set in a dystopian XVI century Italy infested by demons, vampires and other strange creatures. The novel unfolds in a clear and flowing prose, supported by a simple and effective writing, expressing thè complexity of a world of darkness, in thè hands of devils. It is full of suspense, of comings and goings, of mythical evocations, as of dramatic moments and a humorous multitone irony.
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Witnessing "another time within our time": Carlo Levi's Tutto il miele è finito
10-27Views:176Tutto il miele è finito is part of Carlo Levi’s interest in Other cultures and in the continuity of the encounter with the anthropological diversity of Southern Italy inaugurated by Cristo si è fermato a Eboli. This article focuses on the theme of the archaic, and on the perspective of the “contemporaneity of times” that characterizes Levi’s thought, in order to demonstrate how from Tutto il miele è finito emerges the testimony “of another time that precedes history but that is itself contemporary of history and as present as history itself” (G. Agamben).
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«Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto?» .The faces of Brunetto Latini Representation and self-representation
96-107Views:166As in portrait (attributed to Giotto) of Brunetto Latini and Dante Alighieri, history has tended to pair the two poets, who were both exiled from their native Florence. The role played by Brunetto Latini in Florence’s history paralleled that of the orator Cicero in Republican Rome and Dante, his student, was Florence’s Virgil. The famous “Brunetto’s Song” (Canto XV of Inferno) has generated many controversies, determined and justified by an uninterrupted and secular reflection. The encounter between the protagonist-traveler and his master has great importance also from the point of view of the creation of The Divine Comedy. But the old florentine intellectual does not only appear in this canto: in fact, he is the author and, at the same time, the protagonist of the famous opera Il Tesoretto, a didactic-allegorical poem written in volgare. In my study I focus on the figure of Brunetto Latini and on his representation by Dante. At first I examine the protagonist Latini: how he appears in the canto and what his part is in The Divine Comedy. Then I concentrate on the author Latini and I try to identify the poet’s voices in the texts and descriptions according to the context.
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Woman, that you were a Sun among women ": on the youthful poetic attempts by Paolo Paruta (mid 16th century)
60-73Views:136During the mid-1560s, Paolo Paruta (1540-1598), future Ambassador of the Republic of Venice in Rome (1591-1595) and author of the three books of Perfettione della Vita Politica (Venice, 1579) wrote some poems: the canzone Donna, che fosti tra le donne un Sole, and three somnets. The former was then published in Dionigi Atanagi’s Rime di diversi nobilissimi et eccellentissimi autori, in morte della Signora Irene delle Signore di Spilimbergo (Venice, 1561), the latters were insert in Diomede Borghesi’s anthology for Cinzia Braccioduro Garzadori (then published in Padua, 1567, without Paruta’s somnets).
Writing those juvenile poems and making them circulate among the Venetian literary circles (such as Domenico Venier’s), Paruta was looking not only for artistic approval, but also for social visibility: the canzone and the somnets were part of his wider strategy for social climbing inside Venetian patrician ruling class.
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Populism: A Controversial Historiographical Category
80-94Views:306The note stems from the need to carry out a survey on recent international literature dedicated to populism, starting above all from the considerations contained in The Populist Temptation by Eichengreen, and in From Fascism to Populism in History by Finchelstein, as well as the results from the Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Rovira Kaltwasser, Taggart, Ochoa Espejo and Ostiguy. The contrasting reflections recorded around a phenomenon so debated allow to delineate the elements, that justify the introduction of a historiographical category in its own right and to project some definitions on the entire history of the Italian political system. The intention of this overview is to construct a catalog of the various interpretations of populism that have emerged in recent years. It is noteworthy that in the years following World War II until the present day, publications on populism have been produced in a discontinuous fashion, thus rendering the subject even more elusive and unclassifiable.
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"Sad is such art and sad what spends / all its time in such works": critical edition and commentary on the Alfabeto de' giuocatori by Giulio Cesare Croce
110-124Views:137Giulio Cesare Croce (1550-1609) was a polygraph who composed several poetical works that describe the daily life of the Bolognese people. This paper examines Alfabeto de’ giuocatori, a poem dedicated to the theme of the game and of the vices and virtues of the players. The author analyzes the poem and discusses the transmission of the text and philological variants. The article is concluded by the critical edition and the commentary (regarding philological, linguistic, lessical and literary aspects).