Fuochi Fatui

Fuochi Fatui. [With a Portrait.].

Solitudes

By the end of modern times, the solitary man had become a destitute and infirm man, though curable with the balms of sociability; today, the "hyperconnected" condition of the contemporary men is quite the opposite: their infirmity a new and more dangerous one. The paradox of the solitude of the poet, who distances himself from everyone to be able to speak to everyone, is one of the myths par excellence of Italian literature. In Solitudes, Giorgio Ficara pens the stories of great solitary poets from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century: Petrarch, lost in an unattainable dream of inner peace and solitary life; Tasso, alone in the small circle of creation; Alfieri, who yearns to be alone amidst the voices of the world; Foscolo on his lonely way to the heliconic peaks; Leopardi, whose effective solitude of the poet-philosopher faces the divine solitude of nature; D'Annunzio, alone in front of a necklace that breaks. For all of them, solitude "in the end is destiny itself, the necessity to which one is subject at the acme of poetic expression". Over the centuries, this intellectual legacy of solitary life has become one of the many ways in which Italy deeply influenced European literature and culture at large.

Greek Tragedy in 20th-Century Italian Literature

Focusing on the works of Camillo Sbarbaro and Giovanna Bemporad, this book offers the first in-depth analysis of poetic translations of Greek tragedy in 20th-century Italian poetry. The close examination of the linguistic and ideological diversity embedded in these authors' works shows how narratives of Greek tragedy shaped their poetic universe, and how their work influenced the Greek paradigm in return. The reader is presented with a textual analysis of Sbarbaro's and Bemporad's translations, as well as a discussion of larger cultural patterns. This volume provides a fresh perspective on the pedagogical commitment of the Italian poets and their roles as translators of classical studies. The web of relationships and historical context in which these authors are placed provide an understanding of their importance for a wider discourse on translation in Italy and Europe in the 1940s. Caterina Paoli's original analysis of Sbarbaro's and Bemporad's poetic translations and her emphasis on their relevance for translation studies, women's writing and classical reception, fills a significant gap in current scholarship on the translation of ancient literature in the Italian poetic community.