Legend has it that Umberto Eco once gave a lecture on the indebtedness of Dante's Commedia to Lucretius’ De rerum natura (DRN). Halfway through his speech, after discussing at length the many instances of Lucretian images in Dante, he looked up at the by then petrified audience to remark that it would have all been very well, if only the DRN had been available in Dante's age. Eco had been poking fun both at his audience and at the vogue for unbridled Quellenforschung in texts; but in so doing he could not have chosen a better subject, given the perceived affinity between Dante and Lucretius that has struck so many Italian readers of all times.
As a matter of fact, the Dantean quality of Lucretius’ poetry (or vice versa) served as a tool for many Italian translators of the DRN, especially in the nineteenth century, when translations from the classics were works of poetry in their own right. Today, as the book under discussion reveals, the Dantean approach to Lucretius is still alive in Italy in the work of the actor Roberto Herlitzka, who has devoted many years to translating the DRN into rhymed tercets.
This is just one of the many revelations to be had in the present book, which deals with the reception of Lucretius in contemporary Italian culture. The book, as the editors Citti and Pellacani explain in the foreword, originated as an art exhibition and conference in Bologna in 2017, marking the sixth centenary of the rediscovery of the DRN.
In this volume it appropriately falls on Dante scholar E. Pasquini to illustrate how Herlitzka's yet unfinished translation draws on the Commedia's metre, imagery and sound effects to reproduce Lucretius’ peculiar solemnity and expressiveness. Pasquini's chapter brings full circle the theme of readers/translators and their approaches, which unsurprisingly covers the lion's share in the volume. Citti leads us to a treasure trove of twentieth-century translations, adaptations and dialogues with Lucretius: in Neo-Latin, Italian and even regional dialect. Citti's chapter follows Pellacani's ample introduction, which, with its sixty pages and touching upon a number of Italian authors and artists that have established a fruitful dialogue with the DRN over the last hundred years, can read as a synopsis and anticipation of the rest of the volume, tracing themes that often find further expansion in the individual chapters and deftly avoiding any overlapping.
The three sections of the book (‘Arti’, Filosofia’, ‘Letteratura’) vary widely in length: the fact that R. Bodei's paper could not be included in the book because of his untimely death (the book is dedicated to his memory) probably partly explains the lack of any reference in the philosophy section to the work of G. Sasso (Il progresso e la morte. Saggi su Lucrezio [1979]) or M. de Caro, who has identified Lucretius as the inspirer of Machiavelli's theory of free will.
Through the literature section, readers/translators of the DRN include famous names of twentieth-century Italian literature, from I. Calvino to P. Levi, from M. Luzi to A. Moravia. L. Landolfi offers an elegant and philological close reading of G. Ungaretti's encounter with Lucretius. Moving on to more recent years, A. Bertoni introduces us to the laboratory of two living poets, Giancarlo Pontiggia and Milo De Angelis, both translators of the DRN and admirers of what we might call the contemporariness of Lucretius’ poetry.
Some encounters are bound to strike the reader more than others. While it is well known that Calvino devoted one of his Lezioni americane (the Harvard Norton Lectures, that he did not live to deliver or see in print) to the lightness, the leggerezza he identified in Lucretius, he harboured a lifelong admiration for the DRN. As E. Nicoli recounts, he singled out the poem as his livre de chevet (with Ovid's Metamorphoses) and referred to it in some of his early work. And who would expect a satire of the Fascist regime under the guise of a fictional biography of Lucretius (1938) from someone who was the opposite of a politically engaged author – Alberto Moravia? If a classic is in Calvino's words ‘a book that has never finished saying what it has to say’, Lucretius is indeed a classic in Italian culture, given that he continuously resounds through different ages and arts.
One of the great merits of the book is to reveal how today's Italian culture has imbibed Lucretius well beyond what one might expect of a classical author with such a troubled and restricted early modern circulation. Large audiences regularly grace Herlitzka's Lucretian recitals, but the Italian performing arts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are brimming with Lucretian adaptations, be it in ballet, music or theatre. Comparisons with other classics are not easily made, but it is striking that a didactic poem, and one that was once condemned, in the wake of Aristotelian categories, for lack of mimesis, might have held its own on the modern Italian stage against the likes of Ovid and Virgil.
The sections of the volume dealing with the arts are some of the most engaging, and the many illustrations entice readers towards a little known (to this reader at least) world of Lucretian visuals. They also project the Italian reception of Lucretius onto the larger backdrop of the international cultural scene, as does S. Harrison's excellent chapter on modern English translations.
The Hymn to Venus is an obvious favourite with modern poets and artists, as it has been since the unearthing of the poem in 1417, and so is the plague of Athens (the inspiration behind a cantata by Teresa Procaccini of 1958, for instance), or the finale of Book 4 on love and sex that the artist Mino Maccari depicted in a series of engravings.
Thanks to an exhaustive index of names and passages, readers can follow the fate of a specific Lucretian theme or image. The famous simile of DRN 2.112ff., where atoms are compared to the specks of dust dancing in a sunbeam was the inspiration behind a 1940 poem by Mario Luzi bearing the eloquent title of Clinamen, a passage in Calvino's novel of 1973 The Castle of Crossed Destinies and a video by visual artist Sabrina Mezzaqui (Here comes the sun [2000]). And appropriately, in his translation of the passage, Herlitzka turns to the strikingly similar image with which Dante describes the dance of the blessed souls in Paradiso 14.110–17:
From dancing atoms to dancing Venus, the Lucretian ballet trilogy by Virgilio Sieni deserves a special mention for its visual impact, breadth and complexity: in Sieni's work, the poem on the nature of things becomes a moving reflection on the ages of man.
One of the advantages of dealing with present-day authors and readers of Lucretius is the possibility of knowing first-hand the circumstances of their encounter with the poet: there is no chapter dealing specifically with the place of Lucretius in the Italian school system, but piecing together L. Piazzi's analysis of Lucretian scholarship in the twentieth century in Italy with what we can gather from the occasional quotation, it is obvious that the liceo classico of the Italian educational system offered the environment where most of these authors and artists met Lucretius. The poet Milo de Angelis recounts how he first wrote about Lucretius for his finals in school (p. xxx), and some version of this story surely applies to the rest of the artists and authors featured in this book. School must not be idealised as the cradle of talent and inclination, as Primo Levi makes clear, when he says (p. xxxii) that, if he had read Lucretius in school, he certainly would have loathed him. Still, it is a testament to the endurance and structure of the Italian liceo that people so far apart in time as G. Ungaretti (born 1888) or A. Moravia (1907) and A.M. Sieni (1958) or S. Mezzaqui (1964) all presumably owe their first and formative encounter with Lucretius to the school syllabus.
Despite innumerable attacks by successive school reformers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the classical syllabus in Italy still bears more than a passing resemblance to its original form. Its roots are to be retraced not just to the two main school reforms of 1861 (the Casati reform) or 1923 (the Gentile reform). Quite the contrary, as F. Condello has claimed in a passionate pamphlet (La scuola giusta [2018]) in defence of what he calls the just school: the classics syllabus of today stems directly from the Jesuit educational programmes of the sixteenth century. The fact that the classical lyceum is still so close to its original roots means that modern Italian readers are not so far (yet) in their approach to Lucretius from illustrious Renaissance authors such as Torquato Tasso or Girolamo Fracastoro.
The fate of Lucretius in Italy before the twentieth century is justly left out, given the scope and aim of the book. Readers familiar with the topic of Lucretius’ early reception, as many of the authors of this book are, will certainly notice the similarities with previous strands of Lucretian reception in Italian culture: a strive to engage with the text driven by personal passion rather than official canons, a fascination for the man behind the poem, a pattern of appropriating and responding to Lucretius through the same words that he uses.
Modern reworkings of the poem usually display many if not all of the same passages favoured by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century authors. The fundamental difference between now and then in the reading of Lucretius is the lifting of the ideological censorship that the Catholic Church wielded against the DRN ever since its rediscovery. Counting more on readers’ self-censorship than on active sanctioning, the Catholic Church never condemned Lucretius to the Index of Forbidden Books. Yet, the Church did succeed in keeping Lucretius out of the reach of the general public, by stifling any attempt at vernacular translation. For Italian readers, the turning point came in 1717, when the first vernacular translation, by Alessandro Marchetti, was published (and immediately put on the Index).
This book makes an important and welcome addition to the recent tide of Lucretian reception studies, and it will appeal not only to scholars and professional readers, be it of classics or Italian culture. In Italy it will be a resource for all those teaching Lucretius or simply curious about how this poet was and still is relevant and present in our culture.
