Italian Title Research Articles

The database “Italian writers translated into Romanian: 1990-2023”. Analysis and proposals

Abstract The article presents the database Italian writers translated into Romanian: 1990-2023, created and edited by Afrodita Carmen Cionchin, which can be consulted online in the bilingual intercultural magazine “Orizzonti culturali italo-romeni / Orizonturi culturale italo-române”. This is the first vast study that offers a bird’s eye view on the reception of Italian literature in Romania in the years 1990-2023, quantitatively analyzing translations, which exceed 2.200 publications, for a total of 290 publishers. The author lists the most translated Italian books (and first editions) and classifies Romanian publishing houses based on the number of Italian titles published, through targeted observations, reports and proposals.

Entendre ces silences : traduire, transmettre et refléter Entendez-vous dans les montagnes… de Maïssa Bey, en italien et en anglais

Listen to those silences: translating, communicating and reflecting Entendez-vous dans les montagnes…by Maïssa Bey, in Italian and English
 Maïssa Bey is a French-speaking Algerian writer whose first works were published in the 1990s, during the "black decade" of the civil war that ravaged Algeria. Algerian people, especially women, of whom the author is an integral part, are the protagonists of her stories and novels that aim to break the silences and censorship, to explore the small stories hidden behind the big story. This article aims to analyse the Italian and English translations of Entendez-vous dans les montagnes..., a novel published in France in 2002 and in Algeria in 2007. The Italian translation, published by Astarte in 2020, is by Barbara Sommovigo, who had already translated Bey’s Puisque mon coeur est mort in 2013, initiating an almost paradigmatic author-translator relationship that allows for an effective approach to a short but complex text like Entendez- vous dans les montagnes... The English translation is by the American Erin Lamm, and is the result of her doctoral thesis, with a clearly more academic intention than the Italian text, whose publishing house Astarte aims to communicate voices from the shores of the Mediterranean. In fact, Bey's work travels between two languages and therefore between two cultures, the French and the Algerian, which intersect in the pages of the story like the lives of the three protagonists. An Algerian woman, an elderly Frenchman and Marie, a young blond woman, meet in the same compartment of a train to evoke memories and thoughts, which lead them to the past and recent history of Algeria, through painful pages among which is evoked the loss of the author's father, killed in 1957 by French soldiers. It is a difficult task for the translators to render this multiplicity of themes and languages from the title: for a French-speaking reader, there is a strong reference to both a line from the Marseillaise and an Algerian patriotic song (Min Djibalina). The Italian title is therefore changed to Dietro quei silenzi…, while the English title is purely literal, Do You Hear in the Mountains... This is just one of the translation choices that will be analysed in this paper, in which the comparison between the strategies and techniques used in the two translation works will be constant, creating a perpetual dialogue with the original text, in the image of the friendship that now exists between the author Maïssa Bey and the two translators.

The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, Volume 1 by James D. Jenkins Ryan Cagle Richmond

and was repeatedly revised until 1969, the year before Ungaretti’s death. Although selections from it appeared in half a dozen English-language editions of Ungaretti’s poetry (Allen Mandelbaum, 1958 and 1975; Patrick Creagh, 1971; Charles Tomlinson, 1983; Kevin Hart, 1990; Diego Bastianutti, 1997; and Andrew Frisardi, 2002), Geoffrey Brock’s is the first complete translation of the 1931 edition, “Ungaretti’s first full-length volume of poetry and a seminal work of Italian modernism.” In a brief and informative section of “Afterthoughts,” Brock explains that “its title is most often rendered as Joy, though tin-eared dictionaries may prefer merriment , gaiety, or mirth.” Joy is indeed Brock’s choice, as it was Mandelbaum’s and Frisardi ’s before him (while Creagh and Bastianutti refer to the collection by its Italian title but do not translate the poem “Allegria di naufragi”). It is also the best if not the only choice, even though allegria is more distinctly an external manifestation of an inner feeling, and one which may involve and unite multiple individuals (as in the case of a shipwreck). Plus, the orthographic similarity between allegria and allegoria suggests “Allegory of Shipwrecks” as a plausible and, indeed, fascinating alternative for the title of both the poem and the eponymous 1919 collection. Written between 1914 and 1919, during Ungaretti’s active service on the Italian and the western fronts, most of these poems burn like sparks of emotion, flashes of understanding, splinters of insight. However , despite their diaristic form, intensified by the horrors of war in the trenches, there is nothing fragmentary or unfinished about them; on the contrary, they aim to represent the totality of experience in the infinite and fathomless details of its unfolding, and they are carved and polished like the Karst Plateau on which they were originally crafted. As an editor and translator of Italian poetry who is also a poet in his own right, Brock is uniquely qualified to meet the challenges presented by one of the most difficult poets to render in any language. For the most part his versions improve upon those of his predecessors (except perhaps Frisardi), keeping close to the text, avoiding the pitfalls of interpretation, and generally striving for a middle ground between faithfulness and clarity. Occasionally, one feels that he could have cut closer to the bone of Ungaretti’s compact and parched poetic diction, instead of domesticating the text both syntactically and lexically, and making it “friendlier” to the anglophone reader than it is to an Italian. But if the latter may ask, cynically, “Why bother translating at all?” (Ungaretti or, for that matter, any other poet), the former will be grateful to Brock for a version that outlines and occasionally transcends the limits of what translation can do. Graziano Krätli New Haven, Connecticut Editorial note: While our mandate is focused on literature written in the twenty-first century, I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to have Ungaretti’s first collection, published in its entirety for the first time and sporting a fresh English translation, reviewed to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the poet winning the inaugural Neustadt Prize in 1970. – Rob Vollmar The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, Volume 1 Ed. James D. Jenkins & Ryan Cagle Richmond, Virginia. Valancourt. 2020. 428 pages. TODAY YOU CAN watch horror films from just about everywhere. We are truly living in a golden age of horror films, not only in terms of global availability but also of artistic quality and thematic versatility. Horror fiction, however, is another story entirely. The US market rules the anglophone horror world and is almost entirely white, with a few authors like Stephen Graham Jones, Victor LaValle, or Gabino Iglesias accumulating a respected but still small readership. Though scholarship has recovered a great deal with regard to the gothic in German, French, Italian, and Spanish literature (mostly in the period prior to World War II), and some anthologies like the VanderMeers’ thousand-page The Weird (2012) have collected a wider view of the genre, what’s going on in horror outside the anglophone world is virtually unknown to English monolinguals. Volume 1 of The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories changes that. Founded by...

"L’aver cura di donne è pazzia": una comedia italiana del siglo XVIII y No puede ser de Agustín Moreto

The present contribution deals with Aver cura di donne e pazzia, a comedy by the Florentine playwright Giovan Battista Fagiuoli (1660-1742). Until today, no parentage has been detected between this text and comedy by Agustin Moreto No puede ser, written in 1659 and first published in 1661. The identification of the Italian title in an eighteenth- century theatrical catalogue lead to speculate that there was a relationship between Fagiuoli and Agustin Moreto’s comedies; the collation between these two texts confirmed this relationship, and researchers may infer that Fagiuoli was fundamentally faithful to the main plot of the Spanish comedy, although he suppressed some dramatic segments so as to include new subplots in his re-worked version. This essay features a comparative chart of the diegetic units of the source text, based upon a summary divided in numbered cuadros, and the diegetic units of the Italian text, starting from a synopsis, divided into scenes. This chart highlights Fagiuoli’s apparent expansion of the dramatic material.

PIOGGIA E ILLUSIONE. UNA CONSIDERAZIONE SU UN LETTORE DI TOLSTOJ

A possible relation between D'Annunzio's famous poem La pioggia nel pineto and Tolstoj's novel Katja (title of French translation)/ Felicita familiare (Italian title) is examined.

Oh Paris! The Journeys of Lasse Braun’s 8mm Pornography

Oh Paris! The Journeys of Lasse Braun’s 8mm Pornography Mariah Larsson (bio) An easy way to challenge the concept of national cinema is by drawing on examples: if a Danish film director makes a film, set in the United States, funded by various European institutions and production companies, in Trollhättan, Sweden, bringing in an Icelandic singer as the star of the film as well as a French cinematic icon and American actors—how do we describe that film? Film journalists and critics have used the disparaging term “Euro-pudding” to mark such ventures, but as various recognized auteurs have come to exploit the possibilities of European funding, this type of transnational film production has become much more common and is not routinely disregarded anymore. The same kind of transnationality can be found in a 1970s porn context: if an Italian pornographer, with a production company at the time based in Copenhagen, makes a film in France with French and Vietnamese performers—how do we describe that film, in particular if the film surfaces in an American archive with an Italian title? Such is the case for the film Hotel Amour (Lasse Braun), of the Oh Paris! series from 1971 that also includes Petite fleur and Magnifique! Comparing Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000), described in the first instance, with Hotel Amour may seem far-fetched, but I would say that in terms of maverick transnationalism the two directors are not so different. The opportunistic transnationalism—that is, “responding to available economic opportunities at a given moment in time and in no wise about the creation of lasting networks or about the fostering of social bonds”—is evident in both cases, and in their respective contexts both are recognized as auteurs with distinct personal visions.1 The purpose of this article is not to compare Lars von Trier and Lasse Braun. Rather, I wish to point to and discuss some aspects of late 1960s to early 1970s pornography, using Lasse Braun and Hotel Amour to argue that adult film history provides a perspective on transnational film studies that contests received notions about how transnational films are produced and circulate. In fact, adult film and pornography in general challenge three traditionally strong conceptualizations of film history. First, because many such films were made in some [End Page 158] sort of transnational collaboration but were also often excluded from national film histories, they make evident the concept of national cinema as a clearly demarcated canon of films. Second, the history of adult film and pornography contests the notion of a world-dominant American (Hollywood) cinema, as the international diversity of productions on the internet and in the former “adult” sections of video stores demonstrate. Third, adult film and pornography defy the notion that popular European genre cinema and stars have difficulty traveling—that is, that European film stars often have to make a mark in a Hollywood film to be recognized in other European countries than their own. Transnationality has become something of a buzzword within film studies—and, as Mette Hjort astutely observes, it seems to carry with it an intrinsic value in and of itself. Nevertheless, as Hjort goes on to point out, there are many different types of transnational cinema, and by distinguishing them, their ostensible value can be defined and measured.2 In addition, one could argue that “transnationality” per se is a neutral term, simply referring to cross-border interactions. Outside of film studies, it is used in conjunction with both positive and negative issues, like transnational cooperation or transnational crime. However, what is quite often disregarded in discussions of transnational cinema is the importance of nationality to making someone or something itinerant. Without any kind of acknowledged nationality, travel becomes difficult and may leave the traveler in a state of suspension, an eternal limbo, much like the stranded Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks) in Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal (2004), whose passport became invalid when his home country ceased to exist. Nationality, or at least an assumed nationality, is in fact a prerequisite for transnational interactions to take place. Perhaps the most apparent example of the transnationality of pornography in the predigital era, and...

Joan Roís de Corella, la seua vida i el seu entorn: noves dades per a la història de la cultura en la València del segle xv

This article offers a full updating of the biographical records of the writer Joan Rois de Corella (1435-1497) and his family: his great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, siblings and children. All data are presented in a systematic way, generation by generation, and a new vision of the writer himself is offered. In its documentary section, 432 documents are transcribed or summarised, dating from 1373 to 1516. A broad range of new archival data is presented; other previously known data are corrected or improved. Some examples: Joan Rois de Corella had four children: Magdalena (born 1459), Maria, Joan and Estefania, the latter two by Isabel Martinez de Vera. Joan Rois de Corella was widely known and respected amongst the citizens of Valencia; he was frequently sought out for positions of trust, such as being the executor of wills. New documents testify to the long period over which Corella preached, and details are given of this, particularly his preaching activities in his last years. Further data are given on his relationship with the Borja family. Magdalena Rois de Corella, his daughter, was married to another writer, son of the notary Pero Perez: Miquel Perez ?who, therefore, turns out to be Corella?s son-in-law. Miquel Perez?s library had more than 75 books, among which several new Italian titles stand out. New documentation is given of business transactions by Isabel Martinez de Vera regarding copies of Joan Rois de Corella?s translation of the Vita Christi by Ludolph of Saxony. The date on which jurats of the city of Valencia licensed Joan Rois de Corella, the writer?s son, to print a ?Passis? is also modified. Finally, an exact localization is given for the respective houses in which Joan Rois de Corella, Dalfina Rois de Corella and Isabel Martinez de Vera and her children lived. In a significant part of this documentation, new information is provided which affects our knowledge of other important characters in fifteenth-century Valencia, such as Bernat Fenollar, Joan Escriva, Berenguer Mercader, Jaume Roig, Lluis de Castellvi, Guillem Ramon de Vila-rasa and Elionor Flors de Vallterra.

Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean.

Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean.

The Son's Room

PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF: THE SON'S ROOM Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what will fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish. Sigmund Freud, Letter to Ludwig Binswanger (1929) PHILIP FRENCH makes the point that La Stanza del Figlio (the Italian title of The Son's Room) carries a pun. In addition to 'the room' explicit in the English version, stanza also means a verse in both languages, thus suggesting the idea of 'a poem or part of a life left standing' (2002). In this pun lies the key to what makes...

The Sources and Traditions of Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso: A New Approach

Up to now, nothwithstanding their Italian titles, the sources and traditions of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso have mainly been sought in early modern English literature; in this essay, however, they are for the greater part linked to Italian Renaissance literature, art and music. This approach yielded some interesting results of which the most important are as follows: a) regarding the concept of contrasting characterisations in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso Milton may have been inspired by Michelangelo's statues of Giuliano and Lorenzo de' Medici in the new sacristy at San Lorenzo in Florence, representing respectively the active life (vita activa) and the contemplative life (vita contemplativa); that Michelangelo's statue of Lorenzo de' Medici in present-day critical discussion is referred to as Il Penseroso need not be a coincidence; b) there is evidence that the banishment with which the poems begin has origins in the carnivalesque tradition, the device of banishment as part of the structure of the poems has links with the philosophical discours of the time; and c) the frequent occurrence of physical movements, namely steps and gestures in the text of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso affords a link with Monteverdi's musical composition in the genere rappresentativo of Tancredi and Clorinda, showing the poems' suitability for being performed, they may have been meant to function as intermezzi. In the end a final structural image of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso emerges, which can be considered to reflect the humanist philosophical debate of the time on the relative merits of the active life and the contemplative life, that is of Mirth and Melancholy, and on the individual's moral independence, that is his moral liberty of choice.

La Cazzaria: The Book of the Prick (review)

Reviewed by: La Cazzaria / The Book of the Prick William Stockton (bio) Antonio Vignaly , La Cazzaria / The Book of the Prick. Ed. and Trans. Ian Frederick Moulton. New York: Routledge, 2003. 181 pp. $18.95 La Cazzaria, a Sienese dialogue written sometime between 1525 and 1527,is a dirty little book. As indicated by the English translation of its Italian title, this is a book about sex, though not just about the male member. It is also about assholes, cunts, and balls (to use the rude expletives translated from the Italian), about their relationship to one another and their relationship to church and state. Ian Frederick Moulton, author of Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge UP, 2000) and editor and translator of Vignali's text, writes of his initial encounter with the dialogue: "There is no shortage of erotic writing from sixteenth-century Europe, but nothing in my experience of early modern texts prepared me for La Cazzaria. . . . [I]n both tone and content it is unique" (3). Even coming from Moulton, this can only be an understatement. La Cazzaria is raunchy, anti-clerical, misogynistic, elitist, parodic, and deeply invested in both Sienese politics and philosophical debates over proper objects of scholarly study. It is also startlingly open in its veneration of sodomy, though its erotic focus cannot be reduced to acts between members of the same sex. Vignali's dialogue may bear some generic relation to poems such as Thomas Nashe's "The Choise of Valentines" and Lorenzo Venier's "La Puttana errante," but La Cazzaria weaves a uniquely dense web of religious, erotic, national, political, poetic, and philosophical concerns though its shockingly obscene discussion of sex. In 1992, while doing research for a dissertation that would eventually become Before Pornography,Moulton encountered an eighteenth-century French translation of La Cazzaria in the British Library. Subsequent textual history revealed that the dialogue has been translated a number of times into French and German, and even edited and annotated in Italian as recently as 1984. Yet Moulton is the first to translate the dialogue into English, a task he assumes with no little investment. Moulton is thoroughly engaged with the text, not [End Page 139] only with its language and tone, but also with its place in histories of politics, sexuality, and philosophy. These concerns form the touchstones of his nearly seventy-page introduction, entitled "The Greatest Tangle of Pricks There Ever Was: Knowledge, Sex, and Power in Renaissance Italy." Though long, the introduction provides well-organized, necessary context; in its lucidity and breath, Moulton implicitly builds a strong case for the importance of La Cazzaria to scholars in numerous fields. Moulton's outline of the text is also in- depth and comprehensive without being tedious—a welcome preparation for a dialogue that wanders, with little transition, in unforeseen directions. In part, La Cazzaria is an intellectual dialogue in the Platonic tradition. Using a similar trope to that of Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier, Vignali frames La Cazzaria as a text found by two members of the Academy of the Intronati, the Sienese Academy of which Vignali was a founding member. The principle interlocutor and author of the dialogue—Arsiccio, Vignali's academic pseudonym—has hidden the text in his study, and what we are about to read is constructed from the outset as a secret. The dialogue opens after Sodo, the younger interlocutor and another Academy member, has embarrassed himself by revealing his sexual ignorance in an earlier conversation. Arsiccio, who voices an impassioned belief in the importance of sexual knowledge, offers to educate him. What Arsiccio does offer, however, is nothing so Platonic as an education in truth. In this nexus of secrets and exposure, Arsiccio reveals many of the secrets of sex with little sense of how they connect to one another or to reality. (Foucault's truth of sex, we might say, is persistently elusive.) Sex education entails explaining the existence of pubic hair, the reason people fart when they urinate, and, to quote one of the many marginal quaestiones, "Why, as Soon as a Man Has Shit, He Looks at the Turd" (95). Yet, even though the answers to these...

America in Ezra Pound's Posthumous Cantos

In 2002 I published a selection of drafts of The Cantos, from Ezra Pound's manuscripts, typescripts and magazine publications, under the title Canti postumi.1 Some questioned this title, "Posthumous Cantos," which clearly indicates a posthumous collection of material related to The Cantos. Similarly, Wallace Stevens' Opus Posthumous is a book of uncollected and rejected prose and verse written by Stevens over his long life.2 Perhaps I stretched the title by calling "cantos" what are in fact drafts and fragments of cantos, to use a well-worn phrase, and alternate versions and rejected passages, but this is largely justified by Pound's own practice and by editorial expediency. Thus Canti postumi presents material written by Pound over fifty years, from the "Three Cantos" of 1917 in the Poetry text, to some "Lines for Olga" that he composed not long before his death in homage to his loyal companion. Therefore, as one reviewer suggested,3 Canti postumi is a sort of Cantos in a nutshell, since we are confronted with Pound's various ways of writing, from the more discursive style of circa 1915, to the visionary allusiveness of the 1920s, to the toughening of the 1930s to the breaking down and recovery of the 1940s, to the "atomic" style of the 1950s and the final softening as "Old Ez" approaches death. These are styles that readers of The Cantos are familiar with, as they are familiar with the historical and mythical material that engages Pound. So one could ask why publish these left-overs of the feast of The Cantos? The answer is that The Cantos are finally neither well-known nor widely read, and this volume could be used as a compact guide to their phases; no new poetry by Ezra Pound has appeared since his death,4 only letters and [End Page 90] polemical writings that have in some cases detracted from his image as a poet of genius. Therefore a selection of unpublished and uncollected drafts of intrinsic value (i.e., not merely of documentary or academic interest) would remind readers of the stature of Pound the poet. Judging from responses from readers in Italy and abroad,5 my project has been successful. I have tried to rescue Pound from the archives and their frequenters and to present him once again in front of his natural audience, the readers of poetry. To this a footnote must be added. It is strange that this new collection of poetry by a major American writer of the twentieth century should appear not in the United States but in Italy, with an Italian translation opposite the English original (except for those drafts that Pound wrote directly in Italian). But Pound spent most of his life in Italy, wrote extensively in Italian, and in fact published in Italy the original editions of two volumes of cantos, Rock-Drill and Thrones. So, though I am not averse to preparing an expanded American edition of posthumous cantos, this is only yet another curious turn of Pound's checkered publishing history. Even his posthumous verse has to come to America by way of Rapallo ... Indeed there is not much about America in Canti postumi. I will distinguish my edition, using the Italian title, from the plentiful drafts to be found in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It goes without saying that all the drafts related to the American cantos of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s are steeped in American materials, observations, notes from Pound's reading in Rapallo and Washington D.C. As these are mostly rather arid stretches of cantos, it will be no surprise that they contribute little to my selection in Canti postumi. When we think of America in The Cantos, we think of Jefferson, the Adamses, Van Buren, and John Randolph—all of which stand out with some memorable trait or saying. Contemporary America is mostly absent from the cantos written in Washington during Pound's confinement...

Auschwitz and the Remains of Theory: Toward an Ethics of the Borderland

As the questions posed by this journal indicate, the idea of is easily conflated with a narrative of decline: What is left of theory? Has lost its relevancy and critical edge? Has it lost the self-identity that it once had? The account of what is feared lost delineates (by negation) a nostalgic image of theory's past: relevance, a critical edge, and self-identity. When those things are gone and that golden age is over we are left with ruins and remainders, as other recent titles on the state of theory, which the journal's questions selfconsciously echo, make all too clear: What's Left of Theory? (Butler, Guillory, and Thomas); In Near Ruins (Dirks); The University in Ruins (Readings). This essay too will relate the notion of theory trouble to conceptions of remnants and remainders, but it will do so without a narrative of decline. Consider, rather, how images of ruins and remains appear also in another theoretical text from the past couple of years: Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz (the original Italian title could be rendered more precisely as What remains of Auschwitz). Here the question of what is left has a rather different valence. Agamben does not concern himself with, say, a decline in the interest in or sense of relevance of Auschwitz, but with a task that he believes has barely started: thinking the ethical implications of the events of the Holocaust.

With Great Liberty: A Short History of Christian Monasticism and Religious Orders by Karl Suso Frank, O.F.M.

610 BOOK REVIEWS manists and reformers. For they appear as major architects of an institution apparently familiar and timeless, but actually, as Atkinson demonstrates, a new phenomenon of early modern times. Its central image is "the mother at home, installed in a patriarchal household and naturally inclined toward service and sacrifice" (p. 235) and the obedience these entailed. The outcome of a "domestic revolution" compellingly surveyed in its political and social, as well as its religious setting, the new construction not only fostered the exclusion of "good mothers" from the public sphere but often encouraged more dire forms of exclusion for other kinds of women. Placing motherhood in the contexts of massive historical change, in a study that traverses more than fifteen centuries, is a formidable enterprise and one that Clarissa Atkinson has accomplished with remarkable success. As she explores an immense, varied body of evidence, she invites her readers to participate in her quest, to reflect on the questions of interpretation it raises as well as the answers it offers. Reminding us constantly ofthe gulf that separates the ideologies of motherhood from the realities they were meant to shape, her book also reminds us even more urgently how much of this "vast buried history" remains to be exhumed. Mary Martin McLaughlin Millbrook, New York With Great Liberty: A ShortHistory ofChristian Monasticism and Religious Orders. By Karl Suso Frank, O.F.M. Translated and with a postscript by Joseph T. Lienhard, SJ. [Cistercian Studies Series, Number 104.] (Kalamazoo , Michigan: Cistercian Publications. 1993. Pp. 269) Karl Suso Frank, O.F.M., professor of ancient church history and patristics at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, is well known for his important publications in the field of the history of monasticism. In 1975 he published his Geschichte des christlichen Mönchtums, well received by reviewers and public alike. The Cistercian Studies Series presents here a translation of the fourth edition of Frank's work, supplemented by the translator, Joseph T. Lienhard, SJ., with a "Translator's Postscript" chronicling contemporary developments and a "Further Reading" section, nineteen pages ofwellchosen books and articles on the history of religious orders, the greater majority in English, with a few German, French, and Italian titles. Unfortunately, there is no index provided, nor are there any ofthe usual maps or chronologies students and educated readers find so helpful. The book offers the reader a résumé, intended for a broad audience, of the history of Christian monasticism from its origins through the twentieth century , highlighting periods of transition and innovation. Proposing a volume that will "demonstrate the adaptability of the monastic ideal, namely: living BOOK REVIEWS6ll for God in the quest of one's own perfection, amid a community of brothers or sisters, serving the Church and the world," Frank intends monasticism to be understood here as Christian religious life, the history of which "encompasses all the realizations of the monastic idea up to the present, from the monks of the Egyptian desert to the members of secular institutes who live in the midst ofthe modern world" (p. 15). Under this broad rubric, Frank (and his continuator, Lienhard) treat not only monastic history narrowly defined (Benedict, Cluny, Citeaux, Solesmes, Beuron, etc.) but the history of religious orders in general, including such disparate groups as canons regular, mendicants , missionary congregations, Mother Teresa of Calcutta's Missionaries of Charity, and Opus Dei. Nor are Protestant and Orthodox monasticisms ignored. For this reader, the first was the most successful of the twelve chapters. Here Frank presents a lucid discussion of the movement in die Church from asceticism to monasticism, highlighting the fact that the Gospel was proclaimed in a world familiar with the ascetical life, a world that provided a milieu open to the ascetic impulse. The remaining chapters deal in a rather straightforward and perhaps by now slightly stale fashion with the development or transformation of this original ascetic ideal throughout the centuries as it met challenges presented by the Church and world it was designed ultimately to serve. This book has much to recommend it, not the least of which is the fact that it is a fairly complete survey of the history of religious orders...

Novitas Christiana: Die Idee des Fortschritts in der Alten Kirche bis Eusebius by Wolfram Kinzig

BOOK REVIEWS629 White's book, namely, that which concerns Rome on the one hand and especially the Near East on the other. For it seems evident that, apart from the opposition of other religious groups in micro-Asiatic environments and generally in Near Eastern rural centers, Christian communities had freer access to accumulating real estate properties and private ownership of goods and proper religious buildings earlier than this might have been possible in Urbe, where the center of imperial government seems to have had a heavier hand on control, if not on persecution. Indeed, the argument ofpersecution should have been set forth in more express terms in this book. Probably, for Rome, materials so broadly investigated in the two volumes by Charles Pietri, Roma Christiana, could have been better utilized. The same is also true of Friedrich Wilhelm Deichmann's Einführung in die christliche Archäologie (1983), which contains an accurate and very detailed account especially of the situation in the Near East and related enclaves. Likewise no reference to PaulyWissowa 's Realencyclopädie appears in these pages, although it is still useful in many respects. Mistakes in citations of Italian titles are more frequent than of German. But these are minor flaws in an admirable work. Giovanni Montanari Archives of the Archdiocese ofRavenna-Cervia Novitas Christiana: Die Idee des Fortschritts in derAlten Kirche bis Eusebius. By Wolfram Kinzig. [Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte, Band 58] (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. 1994. Pp. 702. DM 198,-.) While there is a vast literature on the concept of progress, the author in his Habilitationsschrift from Heidelberg maintains that most of the scholarship on the subject is defective because there has not been a deep and thorough study of the early Christian notion of progress. This work proposes to fill that lacuna. He defines progress as an advance of mankind for the better, whatever the cause. He begins by exploring the literature on the subject dating from the past two centuries. Thoughts of progress were rare in pagan antiquity, nor were they, as defined here, to be found in Scripture. While it is clear that Jesus' coming was something new, Kinzig feels that the thought of progress remained foreign to Jewish-Christian thought through the end of the first century. Christian apologists were torn between two tendencies. The thought of emphasizing Christian newness was tempered, if not sometimes extinguished, by the need, in view of ancient presuppositions, to stress the antiquity of Christianity. This was done by underlining Christianity's continuity with Judaism . The fading of eschatological expectation in the second century led to the need for theorizing about the continued existence of Christianity in time. 630BOOK REVIEWS The basic framework for doing this was that of two covenants of God with his people, with the second constituting progress over the first. At this point, starting with Irenaeus, Kinzig begins his detailed analysis of the idea of salvation history as progress. The Montanists raised the possibility of ongoing revelation. For Tertullian, this took the form of a more stringent discipline by means ofwhich the Church would become progressively better. But these ideas did not receive general acceptance. He shows how Clement, Origen, and Arnobius all contributed to the growth of the idea of salvation history as progress, but, for them, this was primarily a justification of Christian origins. The author sees the culmination of the development of the Christian idea of progress in the work of Lactantius and Eusebius at the beginning of the fourth century. The defining event of this time was, of course, the conversion of Constantine. The Church was psychologically unprepared for this great turnabout, but, he insists, the work of authors like Origen had laid the theoretical foundation for the conclusions drawn by Eusebius. The latter did not politicize theology; rather, he formulated a theological politics. For Eusebius, the Constantinian empire emerged as the vanguard of a God-directed progressive development. The Christian empire became an anticipation of God's kingdom. Since Eusebius had little interest in eschatology, one can conclude that this progress would not stop soon but would continue in this world for a long time to come. Kinzig concludes with a modest amount of editorializing...

Perceptual redundancy reduction in image sequences: (Original Italian title: Riduzione della Ridondanza Percettiva nelle sequence di immagini)

Perceptual redundancy reduction in image sequences: (Original Italian title: Riduzione della Ridondanza Percettiva nelle sequence di immagini)

Multiple Formes and Vertical Setting in Susato's First Edition of Lassus's "Opus 1"

In 1555 the Flemish music printer Tielman Susato published the fourteenth and final book in a chanson series he had begun in 1543 shortly after settling in Antwerp': Le quatoirsiesme livre a quatre parties contenant dixhuyct chansons italiennes, six chansons francoises, & six motetz faictz (a la nouvelle composition d'aucuns d'Italie) par Rolando di Lassus. This unusual mixed collection marked the first printing of Italian madrigals and canzoni villanesche in the Low Countries. Popularly termed Lassus's Opus 1, the miscellany signaled the young composer's northern debut in a manner consistent with his precocious versatility. Furthermore, it reconfirmed Susato's reputation as a master craftsman who sought technical perfection in publishing the works of Flemish composers, many for the first time. Within the year Susato released Lassus's first opus under an Italian title that designated the book as the first in a series: D'Orlando di Lassus II primo libro dovesi contengono Madrigali, Vilanesche, Canzoni francesi, e Motetti a quattro voci. This book has often been described as the first edition of Lassus's Opus 1 and Le quatoirsiesme livre as a reprint, or second edition.2 However, Le quatoirsiesme livre is actually the first issue and II primo libro the second issue of the first edition, both having been printed from substantially the same setting of type. In her exemplary bibliographic analysis of Lassus's Opus 1, Kristine Forney identifies all the extant copies of the first edition, including two variant states of Le quatoirsiesme livre, and establishes the actual relationship between issues on the basis of patterns she has deduced in the

Microfotografia e Macrofotografia

The Italian title of this book may well prove misleading to English readers. Its subject is in the main photomicrography (not microphotography), with a relatively small section dealing with such matters as still photography and document reproduction.

Alcide De Gasperi, Prime Minister

The nomination of the Christian-Democrat, Alcide De Gasperi, as Prime Minister of Italy, marks the breaking of the Liberal and anti-clerical tradition of Italian politics. It is true that the first to be “President of the Council of Ministers’’ (the historic Italian title), in March, 1848, was Cesare Balbo, a Catholic belonging to the Neo-Guelf current, but after him came a series of Presidents, Catholic indeed, but known as Liberals because they stood for the abolition of the rights and privileges of the Church. The true founder of Italian Liberalism—of a conservative type both politically and economically—was Camillo Benso di Cavour.Once relations between State and Church were broken, and Catholics constrained to follow the system of political abstention (the non expedit), no more opportunities came for the nomination of a Presilent openly professing himself a Catholic, outside the Democratic-Liberal Italian tralition, till the advent of the Popular Party (1919).The first case presented itself in April, 1920, when the Popular Party had provoked the crisis of the Nitti Cabinet, but then the King chose Nitti himself to form a new ministry. However, through an imprudent move (his decree on the price of corn on the eve of the reopening of the Chamber), Nitti was obliged to present himself to the Chamber as resigning, with all his Ministry. This time the King called upon Giolitti, indicated by agreement of the Right and Centre (including many members of the Popular Party), and Giolitti once more came to the top.