The aim of this wide-ranging, well-illustrated and thought-provoking book, as stated by the editors in the introduction, is ‘to explore twentieth-century Italian literature as a key period for the (re-)definition of Italian identity and language’ (p. x). The arguments put forth are based on new interpretations of the concepts ‘classic’ and ‘modern’ as literary categories that are in dialogue with each other, and they bring to the surface the linguistic, cultural and historical similarities that operated between tradition and translation as core notions situated at the heart of Italian modernity. The book is divided into two sections, ‘Forms of Classical Tradition’ and ‘Forms of Literary Translation’, each containing eight chapters, featuring various methodological approaches and rich insights into the ways in which modern Italy, in various sociopolitical contexts, has been dealing with its cultural legacy and its national identity.
C. Caruso, in ‘Classical, Barbarian, Ancient, Archaic: the Changing Perception of the Ancient Past in Twentieth-Century Italy’, deliberately starting his discussion from the 1870s (the decade that saw the publication of important Italian works engaging with the classical and post-classical past), demonstrates that the perceptions of the Italian classical tradition are fluid, ever-changing and unpredictable in destabilising or supporting the cultural status quo, and that labels such as ‘classical’, ‘barbarian’, ‘ancient’ or ‘archaic’ with reference to the ancient past reveal more about the modern sociopolitical contexts in which they have been used than about antiquity itself. In a richly interdisciplinary fashion Caruso discusses, inter alia, the important role of Italian classical scholars, poets and intellectuals of the Novecento, the presence of Classics in the Italian educational system, the Fascists’ aim of recreating Latin Romanitas, the rediscovery of archaic Greece, the change in perceptions of the ancient world brought about by archaeological finds and Pier Paolo Pasolini's modes of refusing Fascist classical ideology.
G. Caltagirone, in ‘La metamorfosi dell'eroe mitico in macchina da guerra in alcuni racconti di Alberto Savinio’, focuses her analysis on Alberto Savinio (pseudonym of Andrea De Chirico, brother of the famous painter Giorgio De Chirico and one of the most important Italian writers of the first half of the Novecento) and, in particular, on the ways in which (and the reasons for which) he represented two celebrated characters of Homeric myth (Agamemnon and Achilles) as war machines during WWI in the short stories ‘Achille innamorato misto con l'Evergeta’ and ‘Vendetta postuma’, which are included in the collections Achille innamorato (Gradus ad Parnassum) and Casa «La Vita». Caltagirone persusasively explains how in Savinio's stories myth, despite the fact that it is deprived of its connection with rites and sacral meanings, continues to function as the sphere of the imaginary and as a means of interpreting reality, so that the storyteller becomes the bearer of a ‘mythical conscience’ through which he plays the role of a narrator delectans, that is, an author whose writing is mainly oriented to the delight of his readers.
D. Todorović, in ‘Pirandello e il mondo classico’, analyses intertextual references to the classical world in Luigi Pirandello's works and pays special attention to his use of Lucian's Menippean-style satirical texts, which become essential for the creation of Pirandello's world view and for his treatment of indifference and disillusionment.
Equally rich in stimulating observations is the contribution of C. Longobardi, ‘La lettura fascista dell'ultimo Orazio lirico’, which deals with a fascinating account of how Horace's works (such as the Odes and the Carmen Saeculare, commissioned by Augustus in 17 bc for the opening of the Secular Games) were re-appropriated (and mis-appropriated) at the hands of those intellectuals who supported the Fascist regime with a view to justifying Fascist colonialism.
Along similar lines, M. Treu, in ‘Classics the “Italian Way:” a Long-Standing Paradox’, discusses Fascist censorship regarding plays such as Aeschylus’ Oresteia (the complete trilogy was performed only after the end of WWII) and Aristophanes’ comedies as well as the effects of Fascist classical ideologies on the later reception of Greek and Roman authors. Treu provides a significant list of theatrical productions directly inspired by ancient Greek tragedies and comedies – from 1914 up to the modern era – staged at the major Italian festivals (chiefly the festival of Syracuse).
M. Piperno, in ‘Myth and Classical Antiquity in Carlo Levi's Cristo Si è Fermato a Eboli’, explores the use of mythological and classical memory (exemplified primarily by Virgil's Aeneid) in Levi's autobiographical novel Cristo si è fermato a Eboli composed between 1943 and 1944 and published in 1945. Piperno's suggestion about the influence of Giambattista Vico's Scienza Nuova (1744) on Levi's work is especially noteworthy because of the new light it sheds on the philosophical understanding of Levi's novel.
L. Vallortigara, in ‘L’ammotorato viandante: il mito di Enea nella poesia di Giorgio Caproni’, analyses Giorgio Caproni's relationship with the Virgilian Aeneas, as shown at the centre of his collection of poems Il passaggio di Enea (1956). Although Aeneas had, in Fascist ideology, been associated with self-sacrifice for the sake of the state, in Caproni's work he is primarily portrayed as an individual whose family and life were irrevocably changed by the war. Caproni is interested in the family dynamics of Aeneas’ story, and the fragility of the Virgilian protagonist exemplifies the fragility of the human condition.
In ‘Italians and the Irrational’ F. Camilletti analyses the rediscovery of irrationalism by academics and intellectuals in post-WWII Italy. His starting point is an interesting comparison of the Italian reception of two works: Il mondo magico (1948) by Ernesto De Martino and The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) by E.R. Dodds. Having remarked on the character of ‘unmediated contiguity’ with which classical antiquity is perceived in Italy, Camilletti concludes that Italian culture reflects the tendency to negotiate between the rational and the irrational, between tradition and innovation.
The opening chapter of Part 2, A. Giammei's ‘Macbeth as Mussolini in Saba's Secret Shakespeare’, provides a detailed analysis of the context, the chronology and the cultural significance of Umberto Saba's unpublished translation of Macbeth into Italian and views Shakespeare's play as a psychological and political allegory through which it is possible to witness not only the rise to power but also the eventual demise of Fascism as a regime.
F. Donatiello, in ‘Salvatore Quasimodo traduttore di Tudor Arghezi’, deals with sophisticated linguistic aspects of the verse translations of the Romanian poet Tudor Arghezi made by Salvatore Quasimodo in the 1960s.
C. Trebaiocchi, in ‘Plauto (in) volgare. Il Miles Gloriosus di Pier Paolo Pasolini’, examines Pasolini's translation of Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus into Roman dialect. Trebaiocchi's stylistic investigation emphasises the originality of Pasolini's translation, and her paper is full of useful points and suggestions for further research. Her argument could have been developed further if she had taken into account a point made by L. Gamberale (Plauto secondo Pasolini. Un progetto di teatro fra antico e moderno. Con un capitolo su Salvatore Cognetti de Martiis [2006], pp. 34–5), namely that Pasolini attempted to find in his version contemporary cultural and linguistic parallels for an Italian audience just as Plautus had done when adapting into Latin the Greek originals of New Comedy for a Roman audience.
In ‘Sulla traduzione in Sereni’ M. Coppo introduces us to the extensive overview of ‘poeti traduttori’ and, in particular, to the translation activity of Vittorio Sereni, who was a prominent intellectual, poet and editor until his death in 1983.
M. Belova, in ‘Giovanni Raboni as a Translator of Baudelaire: “un compito infinito”’, and S. Cerneaz, in ‘L’Onegin di Giovanni Giudici: trame poetiche di un Amor de Lonh’, analyse exhaustively Giovanni Raboni's translation of Les fleurs du mal (1857) by Charles Baudelaire and Giovanni Giudici's translation of Evgenij Onegin (1833) by Aleksandr S. Puškin.
L. Organte, in ‘Luzi, Giudici and Fenoglio as Translators of Coleridge’, offers a detailed comparative study of Giovanni Giudici, Mario Luzi and Beppe Fenoglio as translators of Samuel T. Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and shows the different literary strategies of each translator.
M. Arnaldi's ‘“Un'altra volta, fuori di me.” Anthologisation and English Translation of Saba, Ungaretti and Montale in the Sixties and Nowadays’ closes this thought-provoking book by thinking about the reception of contemporary Italian literature in the Anglophone world, and her case studies are the poets Umberto Saba, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale.
The volume constitutes an important addition to the ever-growing research field of reception studies and breaks new ground in its study of the afterlife of classical canonical authors in contemporary Italian literature. The editors have done a superb job in bringing together a varied but thematically coherent collection of essays, which raise significant issues and refrain from providing simple or easy answers; the contributors discuss topics that deal with tradition and translation as a cultural means of understanding how the past, the present and national identity can be shaped, reconfigured and manipulated, and this is surely a valuable point to make not only for Italian literature but also for the literary culture of any other country that has been influenced by the classical world.
