Italian Texts Research Articles

Book Review: Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, Italian Text with Facing English Translation

Book Review: Dante Alighieri, <i>Vita Nuova</i>, Italian Text with Facing English Translation

The Tempter’s Voice: Language and the Fall in Medieval Literature by Eric Jager

REVIEWS organizational solutions when one's topic entails many hundreds of stories. Still, I think that The Fabliau in English will tend (in spite of its own awareness and arguments to the contrary) to reinforce a very traditional and limited view of its subject: first came the Old French fabliaux, then Dame Sirith, then Chaucer, and then some other not very important stuff. This book might have done more to challenge or at least qualify that view, particularly with respect to the influence of Chaucer's fabliaux in the fif­ teenth century. GLENDING OLSON Cleveland State University ERIC }AGER. The Tempter's Voice: Language and the Falt in Medieval Litera­ ture. Ithaca, N.Y, and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Pp. xiv, 332. $42.50. EricJager's topic is the cultural centrality ofthe Fall myth and what it has to say about language. He subscribes to Derrida's view, that "the sign is always a sign of the Fall," and produces a study of "how biblical commen­ tators, moralists and poets used the Fall to address practical and theoretical problems of language relating to literature, knowledge, power, society and eros" (p. 1). The project is welcome and entails a return by medievalists interested in poststructuralist theory to areas ofpatristic exegesis that were long the reserve of Robertsonians. Jager establishes the importance of his topic and does much to explore it. He writes succinctly and often lucidly. Yet his work is uneven and at times unsatisfactory in its handling of history. Jager's book divides into two halves. The first halfdeals with Augustine and patristic exegesis and the second with medieval vernacular texts (mainly English, from Anglo-Saxon to Chaucer, but with discussion of French and Italian texts as well). Both show a capacity to read texts closely, but I find in the first a surefootedness and subtlety that breaks down progressively in the second. In the first half Jager offers a careful and sustained reading of some patristic writing on the Fall. This is expounded in three chapters, "The School ofParadise," which presents the Fall as a paradigm for true and false teaching; "The Genesis ofHermeneutics," arguing that the Fall causes the 217 STIJDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER slippage and multiplication of signs that obscure the open book of divine Word with the figleaves, orfolia, of human language; and "The Garden of Eloquence," which presents the Fall as "the archetypal seduction through language." While Jager has useful things to say about Ambrose and the fifth-century bishop Avitus of Vienne, whose Poematum de spiritualis histo­ riae gestis becomes more relevant in the second half of Jager's book as a precursor of Genesis B, the focus is steadily on Augustine, and especially on the Confessions. Jager's reading is discriminating. He demonstrates that for Augustine signs antedate the Fall but change their function after it, so that textual interpretation becomes virtually synonymous with original sin, and the agricultural tropes used to describe reading and writing are close to being literal Qager is equally perceptive in his third chapter about the textile tropes used to describe rhetoric). His interest in gender leads to some good work on the masculine reader and the feminine text, and the text of The Song of Songs itself as "woman" (p. 87). The reading of Au­ gustine builds up to real excellence, as one in whose life "textual ambiva­ lence and feminine ambivalence mirror each other" (p. 88). To Jager's credit, the central difference between Augustinian and modem semiotics is emphasized: written text paradoxically allows Augustine to discover a self, not to decenter it. Nevertheless, the first part of the book has some worrying features. While it is impossible to overestimate the importance ofAugustine, he is not the whole story about patristic exegesis, still less about its transmission to the later Middle Ages; there is a major historical hiatus here. (An even more serious hiatus occurs in the book's misconceived epilogue, where Jager makes no real effort to trace the life of the Fall myth beyond the Middle Ages.) Moreover, an account focused on Augustinian semiotics and sensitive to modern criticism (Ricoeur, Derrida, Vance, Nichols, and, inev­ itably, Peter Brown) cannot afford to...

Even Jove sometimes nods

Translators and editors of early dance instruction books face a formidable task. Anyone who has ever tried knows this only too well. One has to be familiar with the language of the manual as such. One has to be alert to irregularities of spelling, since most European countries did not codify their written words until the sixteenth century or later. Punctuation in the fifteenth-century manuscripts and even more so in the printed books of the late sixteenth century can be puzzling indeed, yet on its proper interpretation the meaning of an entire passage or directive may depend. The terminology for both the dance and the music is often ambiguous (tempo and misura are two cases in point), there are idiosyncrasies of style in the writings of the dancing masters, dialects make themselves felt-the list goes on and on.1 No translator and/or editor in modern times has taken lightly the task of converting an Italian or French text about dancing into English. All deserve our collective thanks for making available precious documents that without their labors would not be accessible to the interested reader who may be lacking in viable foreign language skills. However, for anyone who works with dance manuals either as a theorist or for the purposes of dance reconstruction, there comes a time when the original text must be consulted, to confirm a passage that arouses one's curiosity or to obtain the exact wording of a step

Emden as a centre of the sixteenth-century book trade A catalogue of the bookseller Gaspar Staphorst

AbstractThis paper offers an analysis of an unusual source: a broadsheet bill of wares published in 1567 by the sixteenth-century Emden bookseller Gaspar Staphorst. Staphorst is a figure who has not previously figured prominently in the history of the north German and Netherlandish book trade, but it is clear from this document (discovered among papers in the Public Record Office, London) that he ran a very considerable business. A reconstruction of the editions offered for sale reveals that most were high quality Latin works, published for the most part in the major centres of Reformed publishing: Basle, Strasburg, Zurich and especially Geneva. The vernacular editions offered for sale, smaller groups of French, German, Italian and Dutch texts, were also overwhelming works of Protestant, and generally Reformed scholarship. The character and range of the works listed suggests that Staphorst was intending with this list to penetrate the English market, a market with a proven appetite for the high quality Latin editions that make up the bulk of his stock. If this was the case this catalogue offers further corroboration of Emden's ambition to develop its international trade at a critical moment for the history of the established international emporium of Antwerp.

Nephrology from the Middle Ages to Humanism: The Italian Influence in Spain (12th-16th Centuries)

The influence of medieval Italian medicine first reached Catalonia via Montpellier. Physicians from Salerno are known to have worked in Aragon, and many Italian medical and surgical texts circulated in Catalonia. By the end of the 15th century it was Valencia that maintained close ties with Italy, and in the 1st third of the 16th century, at the height of Renaissance humanism, the Castilian universities became the greatest Spanish patrons of medicine. Post-Vesalian anatomists were active and many Castilian doctors were educated in Italy. In both medieval and Renaissance Spain the most commonly described renal pathology was lithiasis. The works of Joanes Jacobi (14th century) and Julian Guttierez (15th century) are outstanding, and foreshadow the monograph on lithiasis by Sanchez de Oropesa (16th century) and the work of Francisco Diaz, probably the greatest Spanish contributor to modern nephrology. He devoted 3 books of his collected professional experience to lithiasis, renal ulcers and sores, kidney inflammation and other processes including haematuria. His view of renal anatomy was totally modern, and he strongly advocated autopsy as a means of determining the cause of death. This underlines the new anatomopathological approach to investigation that was adopted in Renaissance Spain.

Cohesion in Italian adult learners’ and native speakers’ compositions

Abstract This paper presents data from a cross-sectional study of the use of cohesion in Italian texts written by L2 adult learners and by native speakers. Twenty-six free compositions were analysed for cohesion: eighteen by anglophone learners of Italian attending first, second, third and fourth year of Italian at Sydney University, and eight by native speakers of Italian divided in two groups: one of students, who have either done their schooling in Italy or recently arrived in Australia, the other of Italian professionals living in Sydney. More specifically, cohesion was analysed for the three categories of reference, conjunction and lexical cohesion. The objective of the study is twofold: a) to compare learners and native speakers in their use of cohesion, and b) to observe the developmental sequences in the use of cohesion in the six different groups. Examples from the texts are given and a tentative interpretation of the data is presented.

A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance.

The banquet gives rise to a special moment when thought and the senses words and food enhance each other. Throughout history, the ideal of the symposium has reconciled the angel and the beast in the human, renewing the interdependence between the mouth that speaks and the mouth that eats. Michel Jeanneret's lively book explores the paradigm of the banquet as a guide to significant tendencies in Renaissance Humanist culture and shows how this culture in turn illuminates the tensions between physical and mental pleasures. Ranging widely over French, Italian, German, and Latin texts, Jeanneret not only investigates the meal as a narrative artefact but enquires as well into aspects of sixteenth-century anthropology and aesthetics.

:La corte di Ferrara e il suo mecenatismo, 1441-1598. Atti del convegno storico internazionale Copenhagen, maggio 1987

Text in English & Italian. The present volume contains the Acta of the International Conference on the Patronage of the Este Family, Copenhagen 1987. The special situation in the Duchy of Ferrara offers an element of dynastic continuity in the various phases of Humanistic and Renaissance culture which makes it nearly unique in European history. The approaches chosen by the contributors in various disciplines -- music, theatre, pictorial arts, literature, history of ideas -- make it possible to analyse the interaction between the cultural policy of the Signori and the intellectuals of their court, covering the historical period from 1441 to the passing of the Duchy of Ferrara into the hands of the Papal State in 1598.

Silent Witness: Russian Films 1908-1919. Ed. Yuri Tsivian et al. London: British Film Institute, 1989. 621 pp. Texts in English and Italian. Photographs. $75.00, cloth. Distributed by Indiana University Press.

Silent Witness: Russian Films 1908-1919. Ed. Yuri Tsivian et al. London: British Film Institute, 1989. 621 pp. Texts in English and Italian. Photographs. $75.00, cloth. Distributed by Indiana University Press. - Volume 50 Issue 2

Schrijven in Een Tweede Taal

In this article an attempt will be made to explain the nature of the non - native character of Italian L2 texts written by advanced Dutch university students by analyzing the various ways in which the nominal group is formed in these texts. It will be argued that the non -native character of the L2 nominal group is to be ascribed to an imbalance in the use of the possibilities offered by the target language, an imbalance that is the outcome of Ll-based choices.

Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy

Examples, crucial links between discourse and society's view of reality, have until now been largely neglected in literary criticism. In the first book-length study of the rhetoric of example, John Lyons situates this figure by comparing it with more frequently studied tropes such as metaphor and synecdoche, discusses meanings of the terms example and exemplum, and proposes a set of descriptive concepts for the study of example in early modern literature. Tracing its paradoxical nature back to Aristotle's Rhetoric, Lyons shows how exemplary rhetoric is caught between often competing aims of persuasive general statement and accurate representation. In French and Italian texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this dual task was rendered still more challenging by a transition to new sources of examples as the age of discovery brought increased emphasis on observation. The writers of this period were aware of a crisis in exemplary rhetoric, a situation in which serious questions were raised about how authors and audience would find a common ground in interpreting representative instances. Lyons's focus on the strategy of example leads to new readings of six major writers--Machiavelli, Marguerite de Navarre, Montaigne, Pascal, Descartes, and Marie de Lafayette.

The Order of Santo Stefano in the Levant: An Unpublished Account of a Voyage in 1627

"The Order of Santo Stefano in the Levant: An Unpublished Account of a Voyage in 1627." Late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century naval expeditions of the Order of Santo Stefano against the Turks in the eastern Mediterranean are generally well known. However, one voyage-that undertaken by the fleet of six galleys under the command of Admiral Giulio Barbolani de' Conti di Montauto in the period April-June l627-has until now lacked reliable documentation. An unpublished manuscript in the University of Wisconsin Memorial Library chronicles this voyage which began in Italy (Livorno) on April 12 and progressed through the Ionian Sea to the Peleponnese, across the Aegean to the Dardanelles, and back to Italy (Taranto) on June 30. An introduction treats the historical context of this particular voyage and comments on linguistic peculiarities in the Italian text. A critical edition of the manuscript account is accompanied by an English translation and notes.

The Munus of Transmitting Human Life: A New Approach to Humanae Vitae

THE MUNUS OF TRANSMITTING HUMAN LIFE: A NEW APPROACH TO I-IUMANAE VITAE JANET E. SMITH University of Dallas Irving, Texas 'TIRE ONLY ACQUAINTANCE 1bhat most rea;ders have with the Latin of Humanae Vitae is the tit1le. It is likey that fow laymen and perhaps eV'en fow schofars make ire:ferenoe to the Latin text; indeed, it is ireported that I-Iumanae Vitae was originally composed in ltalian, and it seems that aH available translations of the text al'e based primarily on the Italian V'ersion. But since the official text of Humanae Vitae is in Latin and since translations are necessa11ily deficient, we shouild not be surprised that the ava:ilahle translations fail to convey a:M the nuances of the official text. (Latin, of course, is tihe langua:ge in which all official documents of the Church are written.) This study seeks to show that attenti¥eness to certain words fa the Latin text, most particularly the word munus, uncovers important eonnections between Humanae Vitae and pe['spect[ves of the Church, perspectives particularly highlighted in the documents of Vatican II. It also seeks to show that the La.tin provides greater philosophical precision for certain key teaohings of the text, most particularly section 11: "each and every maritail act must remain open to proc11eation ." It is ii.mportant to note that some of the crucial Latin words of the document cal'ry connotations tihat cannot possibly be captured ihy 1any one English word. Indeed, some of the words convey concepts and attitudes that are quite foreign to speak:iers of modern English; to convey the meaning of some terms requires a. fairly lengthy expl,ication of notions not immed :iate1ly and directly graspaible hy ail readers. Even to the reade[' of Latin, the text does not 'easily ~eld its secrets. The 385 386 JANET E. SMITH Latin of the document has no identifiahle souTee of reliabJe deoipherment; it is a kind of " modern " 0 1 r " Church " Latin, which is an odd comhinat~on of elassical Latin and the lang1uage the Ohurch ha:s deve1oped oveil.' the centuries. The method of translation employed here has invo1 lved consultation of classical and medieval dictionaries, reference to arguably rep- !l1esentative classical and medieval 1 authors, tracing of the word 'being ioonsidered through t1he documents of Vatican II, con- 'sideration of 1appearance of the word in other Church documents , cross-reference to other uses of the word within Huma,nae Vitae itself, and reference to the Italian" 1 original." 1 l In preparation for this article reference was made to six English translations : (a) the translation done by the NC News Service, made widely available by the Daughters of Saint Paul, Of Human Life (Boston, Mass.: Daughters of St. Paul, 1968), hereafter referred to as the "usual translation" and designated by HY; (b) the translation by the Catholic Truth Society printed in John Horgan, Humanae Vitae and the Bishops (Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1972), 33-53; this translation was modified and reprinted in (c) The Pope Speaks 13 (1969): 329-346, and in (d) the Vatican Press Office translation, " Encyclical Letter on the Regulation of Births " in Vatican II: More Post-Conciliar Doauments, ed. Austin Flannery, O.P. (Northport, N. Y.: Costello Publishing Company, 1982), 397-416; (e) the translation by Rev. Marc Calegari, S.J., Humanae Vitae (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1978), which has undergone a further, as of yet unpublished, revision. 'There is one translation (f) that was made entirely from the Latin, by Rev. A. J. Durand, Humanae Vitae: A New Translation (Bethlehem, Pa.: Catechetical Communications; no date given); it is, though, not widely available. Rev. Calegari, in private communication with this author, noted that the document was originally written in Italian, though the Latin text is the official text. He also stated that the modern language versions were made from the Italian text. My comparisons of the translations of Humanae Vitae with the Italian and the Latin versions indicate that Rev. Calegari is correct in saying that most modern versions are based on the Italian, though a few, most notably that by the Catholic Truth Society, have clearly made reference to the...

Erudition and Aphasia in Hélisenne de Crenne’s Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d’amours

Erudition and Aphasia in Hélisenne de Crenne’s Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procèdent d’amours Jean-Philippe Beaulieu T HE FIRST FRENCH NOVEL written by a woman, LesAngoysses douloureuses qui procèdent d’amours, composed by Marguerite Briet and published for the first time in 1538 under the nom de plume of Hélisenne de Crenne, displays a potentially interesting textual phenomenon: in the first part of the novel, the narrator and the heroine are identified as one and the same person. In the narrative, Hélisenne places herselfboth as the speaking persona (lesujetparlant) and the sub­ ject matter of writing (l’objet d’écriture), telling in the first person of the unfortunate experiences she had when she became involved in an adulter­ ous relationship. In this early novel often described as autobiographical,1 the first third of the narrative superimposes two textual identities which have very different verbal characteristics: as a narrator, Hélisenne does prove to be erudite while as a character she is episodically aphasiac, that is, speechless. It is this dissociation narrator/heroine—corresponding to the opposition erudition/aphasia—that will be presented here as the textual transposition of the contradictions experienced by a French woman of the early sixteenth century, as far as access to social expres­ sion is concerned. In such a perspective, the contrast between the charac­ ter’s speechlessness and the narrator’s mastery of language illustrates the near impossibility for an educated woman of that time to make herself heard on social matters: therefore, the narrator has recourse to writing by way of compensation for an insolvable conflictual situation in the character’s vécu. Examination of the text shows that this kind of conflict is repeatedly resolved in such compensatory self-expression. As a narrator, Hélisenne’s purpose is to inform her women readers— the book is indeed dedicated to women—about her personal experience which proves, she claims, that it is preferable to avoid “l’amour sen­ suel,” source of psychological, marital and social difficulties. In the first part of Les Angoysses, Hélisenne explains the different steps of a per­ sonal and dramatic love affair which she presents for the edification of the reader and especially so that the “honnestes Dames” will avoid “toute vaine et impudicque amour.” 2During this narrative, Hélisenne 36 Fa ll 1989 Beaulieu shows her considerable erudition, on the one hand, in the many intertextual references and, on the other, in the rhetorical and stylistic devices that she uses. Intertextuality is the functional dimension through which the text is articulated and characterized in relation to previous texts. This dimen­ sion is rather important in the first part of Les Angoysses where the influence of identifiable Italian and French texts is manifest. After hav­ ing studied the nature and importance of these influences, Paule Demats asserts: “La part de l’imitation dans Les Angoysses apparaît (lonc con­ sidérable [...]” (Demats, p. xxiii). The imitation alluded to is La Com­ plainte des tristes amours de Flamette by Boccaccio, Le Pérégrin by Caviceo,3to which we must add Les Illustrationsde Gaule et Singularitez de Troie by Lemaire de Belges, Jehan de Saintré and even Le Roman de la Rose (Demats, p. xx). The influence of these works, however, is felt more on the level of expression than that of the action. For Hélisenne mainly uses mythological examples, images and quotations for the most part from the sources that have just been mentioned, and she borrows very few elements pertaining to their narrative and didactic organization (Demats, p. xxiii). The literal borrowings from the French translations of Boccaccio and Caviceo, respectively published in 1532 and 1527, are numerous. In fact, Demats identified more than 250 quotations of dif­ ferent length coming from the writings of the two Italians, Lemaire de Belges, Ovid and Virgil (Demats, pp. 104-24). This impressive number of borrowings imply the meticulous work of inserting the quoted sentences in the appropriate original contexts. Such a combination of new material and literary influences on the narrative expression level can be inter­ preted in several ways: one could simply reproach the author for pla­ giarizing; some others could...

Is Culture to Us What Text is to Anthropology? A Response to Jeffrey M. Peck's Paper

At first glance it is difficult to see what Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish anthropologist who during World War I wrote what became a classic ethnography on the Trobriand Islanders of New Guinea, has to do with German Studies. Malinowski's Austrian passport was largely a circumstance of political history; educated in Cracow and London, Malinowski wrote on anthropological topics in English; his private Trobriand diary he wrote mostly in Polish.' How is it that we can redefine German Studies to include this Malinowski and future ones, and why would we want to? The figure of the German Erich Auerbach poses less of an immediate problem. Writing in Istanbul during World War II, Auerbach, a Romance philologist, completed his classic work on the representation of reality in European literature, treating Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and English texts ranging over three thousand years, from Homer's Odyssey and the Bible to Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse. But aside from the fearlessness with which Auerbach ventured beyond the disciplinary confines of his own field-which was not Jeff Peck's reason for bringing up the example I don't think there is much we can find here to emulate. Auer-

The Treaty of Kuchuk Kaynardja: A Note on Its Italian Text; Roderic H. Davidson

<b>The Treaty of Kuchuk Kaynardja: A Note on Its Italian Text</b>; Roderic H. Davidson

Conceptual graphs for the analysis and generation of sentences

A system for analyzing and generating Italian texts is under development at the IBM Rome Scientific Center. Detailed semantic knowledge on word-sense patterns is used to relate the linguistic structure of a sentence to a conceptual representation (a conceptual graph). Conceptual graphs are stored in a database and accessed by a natural-language query/answering module. The system analyzes a text supplied by a press-agency-release database. It consists of three modules: a morphological, a syntactic, and a semantic processor. The semantic analyzer uses a conceptual lexicon of word-sense descriptions, currently including about 850 entries. A description is an extended case frame providing the surface semantic patterns (SSP) of a word-sense w. SSPs express both semantic constraints and word-usage information, such as commonly found word patterns, idioms, and metaphoric expressions. SSPs are used by the semantic interpreter to build a conceptual graph of the sentence, which is then accessed by the query-answering and language-generation modules. This paper makes the claim that the SSP approach is viable and necessary to cope with language phenomena in unrestricted domains. Surface patterns are easily acquired inductively from the natural-language corpus rather than deductively from predefined conceptual structures. SSPs map quite complex sentences into surface semantic representations that can be generalized at a subsequent stage. In contrast, the current state of the art does not provide viable theory or methodology to go from superficial to deep structures. This issue is more extensively addressed in the body of the paper.

A Cluster of (Old) Portuguese Derivational Suffixes:-ece, -ice, -ez(a),Viewed in Relation to their Spanish Counterparts

A Cluster of (Old) Portuguese Derivational Suffixes:<i>-ece, -ice, -ez(a),</i>Viewed in Relation to their Spanish Counterparts

Providing Comprehensible Input for Advanced Conversation Classes in University Settings

One of the overriding assumptions of current second language acquisition theory (as developed by Krashen et al.) concerns the great importance of the receptive skills in the acquisition process: The ability to produce language is based primarily on comprehensible input, i.e., listening comprehension and (263).1 Rivers also has emphasized the importance of developing these two skills, which constitute 60% of communicative interaction. However, until recently, these abilities were given lip service at pedagogical conferences and were practiced very little in the classroom in a systematic manner. This article will explore ways in which advanced conversation classrooms may provide the aural and written comprehensible input necessary for fostering the students' continued acquisition of the target language. Practical ideas for utilization of this input will be provided throughout the text and in the Appendix, where an Italian reading text has been adapted for advanced conversational purposes. However, since this article is meant for a panlinguistic audience, an English translation of the communicative exercises that accompany the text is also provided for colleagues who do not possess a reading knowledge of Italian.

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, A Verse Translation: “Paradiso,” 1: Introduction, Italian Text and Translation, trans. Allen Mandelbaum. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1982. Pp. xxi, 307; illustrated. $29.95.

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, A Verse Translation: “Paradiso,” 1: Introduction, Italian Text and Translation, trans. Allen Mandelbaum. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1982. Pp. xxi, 307; illustrated. $29.95.