Italian Poetry Research Articles

Nomadic Translations: (G)hosting in Amelia Rosselli’s <em>Variazioni belliche</em>

Author(s): Lacayo, Aaron | Abstract: Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996) was the first female author (and remains one of the few) to be included in the canonizing anthologies of 20th century Italian poetry. And although she has been published outside of Italy, few book-length translations of her work have been produced. Consisting of Italian, English and French, her poetics forges an alliance between three languages. Following Rosi Braidotti’s concept of “nomadic subjectivity,” Rosselli could be considered a nomadic polyglot poet never at home in one single language. She chose Italian, the language of her paternal heritage, to write most of her poetry. Nonetheless, her Italian poems contain linguistic elements—ghostly traces—of English and French. Considering her poems as nomadic texts, this paper explores to what extent the process of translation can function as a nomadic mode. Using Braidotti’s nomadic politics as a theoretical starting point via Walter Benjamin’s theories of linguistic kinship, the present analysis considers an ethics of hospitality via a guest-host relationship of language in translation. For instance, if Italian “hosts” English in the original poems, I explore how her contemporary translators have maintained, modified or reversed this linguistic (g)hosting in translation. I focus on a section of poems translated by Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti as War Variations: A Bilingual Edition (2005) as well as Jennifer Scappettone’s Bellicose Variations in Locomotrix: Selected Prose and Poetry of Amelia Rosselli (2012).

Las rimas de Giannantonio de Petruciis, conde de Policastro

La lírica culta napolitana en lengua italiana del segundo Quattrocento está dominada por los llamados líricos de vanguardia o poetas de la vieja guardia aragonesa; es decir, Giovanni Aloisio, Giovan Francesco Caraciolo, Francesco Galeota, Pietro Jacopo de Jennaro, Giannantonio de Petruciis y Rustico Romano. A pesar de que las obras de estos líricos encierran múltiples paralelismos, acentuados por el hecho de que operaron bajo unas circunstancias políticas, históricas y culturales similares, las divergencias entre las rimas de los líricos de vanguardia son tan marcadas que pueden llegar a delinearse distintas tendencias dentro de la vieja guardia. En este sentido, tal vez el más original de estos poetas sea Giannantonio de Petruciis, conde de Policastro, cuyas rimas (formadas por un total de 81 composiciones y recogidas en el ms. XIII D 70 de la Biblioteca Nacional de Nápoles) fueron compuestas, según la postura más aceptada por la crítica, durante su presidio en la torre de San Vincenzo, a la espera de su juicio y posterior ejecución por haber secundado una revuelta contra el rey de Nápoles. Dados los escasos y obsoletos análisis de la obra del conde de Policastro, en este estudio pretendemos poner de relieve las principales características de las rimas de este autor tomando como base aquellos factores que resultan determinantes en otros autores de la vieja guardia.

Filosofía del Renacimiento en la traducción de Hernando de Hozes

The Renaissance led to changes in the way people understood the process of translation. In the Spanish Empire of Charles v, Spanish started to replace Latin and the translation of Italian poetry — notably Petrarch — into Spanish led to the blossoming of Petrarchism in Spanish literature. Hernando Hoze’s translation of the Triumphi played a particularly important role both in propagating Petrarchism in the peninsula and in contributing to changes in the translation process.

Renaissance in the Graveyard: The Hebrew Tombstones of Padua and Ashkenazic Acculturation in Sixteenth-Century Italy

The acculturation Ashkenazic Jews in Italy is the focus of the present discussion. By 1500 Jews had been living in Padua for centuries, but their cemeteries were destroyed in the 1509. Four cemeteries remained with over 1200 inscriptions between 1530–1860. The literary features of the inscriptions indicate a shift from a preference for epitaphs written in prose, like those of medieval Germany, to epitaphs in the form of Italian Jewry's occasional poetry. The art and architecture of the tombstones are part and parcel of the Renaissance ambient, with the portals and heraldry characteristic of Palladian edifices. The lettering, too, presents a shift from the constituency's medieval Ashkenazic origins to its Italian setting. These developments are situated in the broader context of Italian Jewish art and architecture, while the literary innovations are shown to reflect the revival of the epigram among poets of the Italian Renaissance.

Poems that Flow: The River Motif in the Spanish Petrarchan Tradition

This essay examines a common motif in Italian and Spanish Petrarchan poetry: the lover who speaks with a river or stream. It argues that this topos often has a metatextual function. Through close readings of texts by Petrarch, Bernardo and Torquato Tasso, Garcilaso de la Vega, Herrera, Gongora and Quevedo, the study examines how the motif is used to explore the function of poetry and the relation between the author and the poem.

Legend: From Einfache Formen (“Simple Forms”)

Who was andré Jolles? born in den helder in 1874; raised in amsterdam; in his youth a significant player in the literary Movement of the Nineties (Beweging van Negentig), whose organ was the Dutch cultural weekly De Kroniek; a close friend of Aby M. Warburg's and Johan Huizinga's—Jolles studied art history at Freiburg beginning in 1902 and then taught art history in Berlin, archaeology and cultural history in occupied Ghent during World War I, and Netherlandic and comparative literature at Leipzig from 1919 until shortly before his death, in 1946. A man of extraordinary intellectual range—his publications include essays on early Florentine painting, a dissertation on the aesthetics of Vitruvius, a habilitation thesis on Egyptian-Mycenaean ceremonial vessels, literary letters on ancient Greek art, and essays in German and Dutch on folklore, theater, dance, Boccaccio, Dante, Goethe, Zola, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Provençal and Renaissance Italian poetry—he was also an amateur playwright and an outspoken champion of modern trends in dramatic art and stage design. To his friends, he could be something of an intellectual midwife, helping Warburg to formulate what would become a signature notion, the “pathos formula,” and Huizinga to conceive The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919). Jolles's chief work, the one for which he is best known, is Einfache Formen (1930; “Simple Forms”), a collection of lectures he had delivered in German at Leipzig in 1927-28 and revised.

1612--John Dowland and the emblem tradition

John Dowland’s last publication, A Pilgrimes Solace (1612), was perhaps the finest of his four songbooks. In it, he sought to unite the ‘traditional’ approach to composing with the ‘new music’ emanating from Italy. There is a touch of sardonic humour in his only setting of Italian poetry in a scherzo, Lasso vita mia: the poem self-consciously plays with the traditional ‘gam-ut’ syllables (la, so, fa, mi, re etc.), but has the mindless Cantor, who is not familiar with the teaching of the previous 800 years, crying out ‘Mi fa morire’ on the wrong hexachord pitches. This complicated humour is typical of Dowland’s dilemma—he was at once a conservative and a progressive—which is why, perhaps, his music has universal appeal, although this humour might only be appreciated by a very refined circle of cognoscenti—then, as well as now. In the same year, 1612, Dowland was addressed in a fascinating publication by a close friend: Henry Peacham the Younger (to distinguish him from his father, Henry Peacham the Elder). The print was called Minerva Britanna,1 and it has a rather odd title-page, with a scribal hand appearing from behind a theatre curtain (illus.1). On page 74, a curious device was dedicated to John Dowland (illus.2). This presentation is typical of the emblem-book tradition: a Latin title, a symbolic picture, and a poem or short essay expanding on the specific theme. Here Philomel (the nightingale) represents Dowland, and the whole contrivance explores the subject of his ageing (‘thy years have made thee white’) that compares neatly with Dowland’s own statement in the preface ‘To the Reader’ in A Pilgrimes Solace (‘being I am now entered into the fiftieth year of mine age’). The statements made in Peacham’s second verse suggest a familiarity with Dowland’s complex feelings of criticism from, and rejection by, his younger contemporaries, which he spends much time complaining about in his address—Peacham and Dowland clearly were mutually admiring friends of long standing. This page is my starting-point for an exploration of the emblem tradition and its profound effect on the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, and specifically its influence on Dowland as a composer.

Trobar clus in the Early Italian Lyric: Textual Enclosure, Social Space, and the Poetry of Guittone d’Arezzo

Stylistic difference has long been a useful category of critique in troubadour studies, but, for thirteenth-century Italian poetry, has traditionally been subsumed by considerations of Dante’s ‘inspired’ poetics. This essay recuperates trobar clus, the rhetorically complex style of composition in troubadour song, for the Italian context by exploring the implications of textual closure in the poetry of Guittone d’Arezzo. Following the precedent established by Marcabru, Guittone excludes potential readers (the ‘Gente noiosa e villana’ of Arezzo) by composing obscure and parodic poems, but also opens a textual enclosure that protects virtue from the moral and economic degradation of Italy’s urban centres. His cleaving of signifier from signified runs contrary, however, to the Comedy’s metaphysics of language and thus guarantees his poor treatment in Dantean liteary history.

Dante, Guinizzelli, Guittone, and the Politics of Literary Debate

Though copied far less than the celebrated philosophical debate over poetics between Guido Guinizzelli and the Tuscan poet Bonagiunta da Lucca ( Voi ch’avete mutata la mainera and Omo ch’e saggio non corre leggero ), the tenzone (ca. 1265) between Guinizzelli and Fra Guittone d’Arezzo — [O] caro padre meo and Figlio mio dilettoso — has been the recent object of study and criticism. This study explores the poetics of a series of debates, or tenzoni, located in the thirteenth-century MS Laurenziano Rediano 9, among which is located the exchange between Guinizzelli and Guittone, demonstrating in particular that throughout the manuscript there exist multiple criteria for organizing tenzoni, and that Guittone’s response to Guinizzelli differs technically and materially both from those tenzoni that surround the exchange from cc. 124 v –126 r , and from the feigned debates with “la Donna” and “Maestro Bandino” that form part of Guittone’s “profane collection of sonnets” in the section preceding his canzoniere (cc. 105 r –115 v ). The dynamics of the tenzone and its manuscript collocation indicate that its reception, principally via Dante’s reading in Purgatory 26, remained unique among early interpreters of medieval Italian poetry, who did not copy the tenzone.

Poezje i pieśni okresu Risorgimenta w polskich przekładach

The article aims to present the reception of Italian poetry in the Polish press and the anthologies from the 1830. to the 1920. It focuses on the subject and local importance of the compositions, the chronology and the fortune of their Polish diffusion, as well as highlights the figures of the translators within the wider context of their creative work, patriotic background and their links to Italian culture.

Sul barocco letterario in Italia. Giudizi, revisioni, distinzioni

The essay reconstructs the sequence of judgements that have occurred on the Italian literature of the early xviith century over a period of about three centuries. The first section discusses some of the first literary histories of the late xviith century and, through the critique of the Risorgimento, comes up to significant studies of the second half of the xxth century. It also discusses the progressive construction of the category of Baroque in literature and it attempts to define the role and the centrality of G.B. Marino into the negative views usually reserved to that season. The latter part of the essay raises the possibility of application of a new and focused notion of baroque to the Italian poetry of early decades of xviith century.

Julie Singer, Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2011. Pp. x, 238; illustrations. $99. ISBN: 9781843842729.

Julie Singer, <i>Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry</i>. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2011. Pp. x, 238; illustrations. $99. ISBN: 9781843842729.

The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry

The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry

Distances of the Father, Instances of Italian Poetry (1976-2004)

Distances of the Father, Instances of Italian Poetry (1976-2004)

"Verrà un dì l'Italia vera...": poesia e profezia dell'Italia futura nel giudizio fascista

There are many famous verses in italian poetry that prophesy a glorious and powerful Italy to come. This article describes how those verses of Dante, Petrarca, Leopardi and Foscolo were read, in the 1920's and the 1930's, as a precise and clear prediction of fascist Italy. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that this kind of literary criticism, considering poetry as a privileged voice of political prophecy, is not to be considered as a marginal and anecdotal expression of propaganda, but as a part of a larger phenomenon: the sacralization of politics – even through literature – that characterizes italian fascism.

Introduction to Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinthio's "Discourse or Letter on the Composition of Comedies and Tragedies"

Previous articleNext article FreeIntroduction to Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinthio's "Discourse or Letter on the Composition of Comedies and Tragedies"DANIEL JAVITCHDANIEL JAVITCH Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 392011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/rd.39.41917487 Views: 283Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright © 2011 Northwestern University PressPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Francesca Schironi The Reception of Ancient Drama in Renaissance Italy, (Apr 2016): 131–153.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118347805.ch7 References, (Apr 2016): 506–551.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118347805.refs

Canções de guerra e canções da guerra: a poesia em Si menor de Fabrizio De Andrédoi:10.5007/2175-7917.2010v15n2p249

The 2nd half of last century, the Italian composer Fabrizio De Andre (1940-1999) occupied a prominent place in the history of Italian song and even the modern Italian poetry. His fans admire the moral courage and artistic coherence with which he, in the post-war Italian society, through his libertarian and pacifist songs, portrayed the world of the marginalized, the rebels and the prostitutes, and other characters on the margins of society, among those, the war combatant, hero of lost victories on the battlefield. Three of his songs are emblematic: La Ballata dell'eroe, La Guerra di Piero and Girotondo. Three poems that talk about war, death, and the figure of the combatant as an outcast of society, that kills him and then relegates him to oblivion, on behalf of the Fatherland. Exposing his provocative vision of post-war society by showing two videos of the composer is the purpose of this presentation.

Sacred Rhythms, Tired Rhythms: Dino Campana's Poetry

Early twentieth-century Italian poetry experiences a crisis in confidence concerning the expressibility of rhythm. Dino Campana's writings exemplify the processes the poet goes through in order to write (about) rhythm. Rhythm is difficult to deal with because it is both sacred and tired. These two incarnations of rhythm lead Campana to different modes of expression; from more traditional definitions (in terms of metre or pulse) through to more fluid definitions (in terms of poetic form, syntax and metaphor). Two strands of analysis reveal themselves as central to understanding Campana's theoretical stance, namely fluidity and movement. These point to a careful veiling of rhythm which opens up new spaces for the articulation of something that, whilst difficult, remains the essence of poetry.

From can to Dawg: Rendering Calzavara's Dialectal Poetry for Italophone and Anglophone Readers

This article suggests a new strategy for the translation of Italian dialectal literature, using the poem Can, written in Trevisan by Ernesto Calzavara, as a case study. After offering a brief bio-bibliographical description of Calzavara, this manuscript summarizes the history of the translation of Italian dialect poetry in the Anglo-American world, paying particular attention to those translators who have treaded new ground by making use of a trilingual format (dialect, Italian, English), and those who have focused their efforts on works authored in Venetian dialects. The most innovative aspect of this study is the co-authors' decision to translate a Trevisan poem into Southern American vernacular.

An Anthology of Modern Italian Poetry: In English Translation, with Italian Text. (Texts and Translations, 25) by Ned Condini, Dana Renga

MLR, 105.4, 2010 1167 build a Canadian identity, the latter tomaintain a Catholic French Canadian one. She cogently argues that the giftedRoy was no victim but rather a beneficiary of this power struggle, successfully manipulating both sides, not just as a survival tactic, but as a source of power and pleasure' (p. 19). Roy was thus able to shape the open bilingual and bicultural identity thatwould ultimately be the basis of her outstand ing achievement as a francophone author successfully bridging the 'two solitudes' of Canadian writing in French and in English. Chapman then concentrates on Roy's fictional and autofictional depiction of the play of power relations in a diglossic educational environment, focusing on the teacher as thedesignated vector of opposing colonial narratives (anglophone or francophone), but also as a force for their transformation where the identity of the other' (including aboriginal, metis, and immigrant) iswelcomed and valued. She follows thiswith a particular emphasis on the issue of language, examining the communicational difficulties of Roy's protagonists and the inequalities of power thereby displayed. This reflection on the problematic aspects of interlingual and intercultural relations is subsequently reoriented to an analysis of theways inwhich translation intoEnglish has simultaneously widened the ambit and modified perceptions of Roy's ceuvre across itsdiverse Canadian readership. Chapman then concludes with a discussion of excerpts from Roy's 1940-46 pan-Canadian journalism commissioned by the Quebec-based Bulletin des agriculteurs, and the later transmutation of some of this material in fictional texts such as La Riviere sans repos (1970). Roy's criss-crossing ofCanada is argued as both personally formative and paradigmatically exemplary, developing her lifelong search, born of the duality of herManitoban upbringing, for more fluid and more open forms of identity, while also constructing an itinerary readable theoretically as a movement produced by colonial power relations thatprefigures and explores the possibilities of the postcolonial' (p. 18). Chapman's book offers new areas of significant reflection to Roy specialists, while simultaneously opening up her work to a wider range of readers interested in postcolonial studies, translation studies, and language policy, the latter still an area of significant tension within Canada, notably but by no means exclusively inQuebec. Extensive quotation, including original and translated excerpts from Roy's corpus, supports Chapman's analysis. It is to be hoped that the extracts of Roy's original French will encourage all those not already familiar with her work to explore further the poignant clarities of her unique literaryvoice. University of Leeds Rachel Killick An Anthology of Modern Italian Poetry: In English Translation, with Italian Text. Ed. and trans, by Ned Condini. Introduction and notes by Dana Renga. (Texts and Translations, 25) New York: Modern Language Association of America. 2009. xxxvii+431 pp. $11.95. ISBN 978-1-60329-032-6. This dual-language anthology comes as a most welcome contribution to a still limited corpus of Italian poetry in translation. It brings together the work of thirty-eight Italian poets from the end of the nineteenth century to n68 Reviews the contemporary period, some translated for the first time. Canonical texts such as Guido Gozzano's 'La signorina Felicita owero la felicita, Dino Campana's 'Chimera', and Pier Paolo Pasolini's 'Le ceneri di Gramsci' are included alongside lesser-known works by poets such as Gian Pietro Lucini, Roberto Sanesi, and Luigi Fontanella. Women poets are particularly well represented and integrated into the anthology, from Amelia Rosselli, Antonia Pozzi, and Maria Luisa Spaziani to Sibilla Aleramo and Amalia Guglielminetti. There are, however, some notable omissions, especially Vittorio Sereni and Attilio Bertolucci, who, as central protagonists for the development of the lyric form, one would expect to find represented alongside contemporaries such asMario Luzi and Franco Fortini. Ned Condini's translations are highly readable and he skilfullymoves between different registers and styleswhile maintaining a consistency of voice across the work of individual poets. Considerable effort is also made to preserve something of the original rhythm and metrics, with the translator opting for themost suitable equivalent rhymes or half-rhymes in English, and often playing very effectively with assonance and consonance. An emblematic example comes in Condini's translation of D'Annunzio's 'La pioggia nel...