The aim of this essay is to analyze La cognizione del dolore by Carlo Emilio Gadda with a focus on the relationship between the main events and an episode concerning a particular character, Gaetano Palumbo. It will be shown how these links appear to be of three different classes and how the interpolation of Gaetano Palumbo’s story is functional to Gadda’s argumentative approach. Therefore, this analysis will also throw light on Gadda’s exemplary “fragmented” style.…
I Frammenti lirici di Clemente Rebora: dalla crisi al realismo cosmico
This article intends to analyze the first poetic collection of Clemente Rebora, Frammenti lirici, published in 1913 and testifying to the inner torment of his youth and of his search for the Absolute. In the wake of the crisis concerning his relationship with the world and pivoting on the city-nature contrast, Rebora would increasingly cultivate a desire for an immersion in reality: following the example of nature, he opened up to the harmony of the cosmos and focused on the 1910s, to which the poem is dedicated.…
In omaggio al centenario della nascita di Mário Cesariny: la traduzione di Louvor e Simplificação de Álvaro de Campos
This article provides a translation of Louvor e Simplificação de Álvaro de Campos (1953) by Mário Cesariny, which was carried out by the students of the Portuguese-Italian Translation Workshop 2022-23 on the occasion of the centenary of the poet’s birth. The text, a parodic reworking of verses that Cesariny produced under the Pessoan heteronym “Álvaro de Campos”, aims to challenge and, at the same time, pay homage to the “Pessoa myth”.…
«Vent’anni di idiomi e di oceani diversi»: l’America nell’opera poetica di Cesare Pavese
This article aims at analysing the role of American poetry in Cesare Pavese’s poetic activity. The first part of this study focuses on the influence of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass on Cesare Pavese’s poetry collection Lavorare Stanca. The second section provides an analysis of some examples of Pavese’s poetic translations from Lee Masters and Whitman.…
«Sorvegliare e punire» i corpi nel convento delle Micaelas
The purpose of this article is to provide a detailed analysis of the chapters related to the Micaelas convent in Benito Pérez Galdós’ novel, Fortunata y Jacinta: dos historias de casadas (1887). By drowing on Michel Foucault’s concepts from his essay Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (1975), the article aims to explain how the tools, techniques, and management of bodies introduced in the convent exemplify a disciplinary and panoptic system.…
L’Irlanda al femminile
This article provides an introduction to Irish writer Éilis Ní Dhuibhne. It focuses on her importance as a representative of Irish Literature written in English. Moreover, it includes an interview with the author during which we have addressed topics such as her personal literary evolution, the importance of women’s contribution, and writing in Gaelic and Hiberno English. Lastly, I present here an as yet unpublished translation of her short story Midwife to the Fairies (2003), constituting an excerpt from my master’s thesis.…
Das Rollenspiel als didaktisches Mittel in der Vermittlung des Deutschen als Zielsprache
This article addresses the question of how a systematic survey of grammar teaching in a foreign-language classroom, as regards especially the teaching of German as a foreign language, can be linked to concrete language practice in the communicative field. In connection with the topic, this paper aims to explore the potential of role playing as a means of consolidating grammar. Due to its versatility, role play can take on different meanings and be used in different areas. Here, it is seen in terms of an interaction based on an increasingly improvised dialogue. Our aim is to highlight the didactic potential of role playing as a mode of interaction among students and, at the same time, of familiarizing with the grammatical structures of German. The first part presents two didactic approaches from over the past centuries, which used dialogue as a central tool in foreign language teaching. We will see how both Georg von Nürnberg’s and Berlitz’s approaches invited students to reproduce the dialogues they had learned. For these reasons, the two approaches are cited here as precursors of educational role playing as we understand it today. The second part of the article will deal with its various fields of application, namely Psychology, Pedagogy and Ludology. The main focus of exploration pivots on the use of role play in the field of foreign language teaching.…
Carmen de Burgos: «A la mayor honra y gloria de Giacomo Leopardi»
This article is an excerpt from my master’s thesis, focusing on the relationship between the Spanish writer Carmen de Burgos (1867-1932) and Italy through an analysis of her literary production. Specifically, the article highlights the writer’s extraordinary interest in Leopardi and her significant role in promoting Italian culture in Spain through the composition of works inspired by this author.…
La dialettica del tempo nello Zauberberg di Thomas Mann
Acknowledging the significant role of scientific innovations in shaping the early twentieth-century European cultural landscape, this study investigates the literature-science dialectic, with a particular emphasis on the impact Einstein’s theory of relativity had on Mann’s novel Der Zauberberg. While Mann may not have fully embraced Einstein’s ideas, they undeniably influenced the novel’s exploration of time, which emerges as a central theme, in a dynamic interplay of historical and pure time. However, differently from the German physicist, who seeks to describe natural laws through objective facts, the conceptual experiment shaped by Mann unveils the subjectivity of space and time experience.…
Lux Æterna: aggressioni allo sguardo di Gaspar Noé
The article analyzes the movie Lux Æterna by Gaspar Noé, trying to understand its main distinguishing traits: mainly the flicker, the split screen and an apparently chaotic narrative structure that blurs the lines between fiction and documentary. The analysis also features thoughts about the male gaze, time-related images, and experimental cinema.…
In ricordo di Giorgio Piccitto, lessicografo, linguista e padre della dialettologia siciliana
This article aims at highlighting and revealing the importance of Giorgio Piccitto, a scholar, linguist and pupil from Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, who died prematurely more than 50 years ago. The father of modern dialectology in Sicily and author of the five-volume dictionary titled Vocabolario siciliano, he is still considered as the major reference for Sicilian studies.…
La ferocia della ragione: Millennium People di J. G. Ballard
This paper is a condensed version of my undergraduate dissertation, entitled La ferocia della ragione: Millennium People di J. G. Ballard. It is an analysis of the novel, which depicts a middle-class uprising in the heart of contemporary London. It discusses how the British writer, by envisioning a dystopian scenario, encourages the reader to reflect on themes such as urban violence, the triviality of consumer society, and the dangers of totally suppressing human instincts.…
Prufrock’s simultaneous archetype. Between literary and psychic function
In this article I propose a reading of Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in the light of its intertextual relations with two works in particular: Dante’s Comedy and Homer’s Odyssey. Moreover, I take the structural positions of these references as fundamental to understand the very meaning of the poem’s voice, that is to say, Prufrock as a poetic I. Finally, from a Lacanian perspective on Prufrock’s desires, I posit the interpretation of this intertextual relation with Dante and Homer as the result of a double-faced archetype, shaped by Eliot’s idea of simultaneity which, according to his poetics, affects all literary paradigms.…
Il romanzo storico di José Saramago: storia, memoria e finzione nel Memorial do convento
Memorial do convento, an interesting historical novel by José Saramago, was published in Portugal in 1982. The year 2022 marks the fortieth anniversary of its publication, as well as the centenary of the birth of its author. In this novel the reader is faced with unexpected, fantastic and marvellous situations. The second volume of what we can call Saramago’s “historical cycle”, following Levantado do Chão, Memorial do convento partially recovers the themes and style of the previous work, developing and expanding them.…
Tra vecchi e nuovi passati: la nuova interpretazione storica di Mia Couto in As Areias do Imperador. Introduzione alla traduzione
This article provides a commentary on the translation of the first chapter of Mulheres de Cinza (2015), the first volume of the trilogy As Areias do Imperador, written by Mozambican author Mia Couto. I will start by explaining the need for Mozambicans to find forms of representation within a historical narrative which seems to be modelled according to a specific political ideology. After an overview of the narratives that characterize Portuguese and Mozambican official historiography in connection with the episode of the defeat of Gungunhana, I will explain how Mia Couto’s historical novels try to fill the gaps of identity representation for contemporary Mozambicans.…
La formazione del lessico medico-farmaceutico nell’ambito dell’antico occitano con riferimenti all’area ibero-romanza
The study of a selection of terms relating to the pharmaceutical medical field of the ancient Occitan language allows us to describe the formation of the Provençal lexical heritage, which, more than others, is marked by heterogeneity. The oral dissemination of ancient recipes, the literary tradition of the Occitan medical school, the Latin heritage and the Catalan, Arab and Hebrew contributions constitute the foundations of the ancient Occitan medical pharmaceutical lexicon. The present work singles out the semantic relationships existing between the different names of plants and also the linguistic phenomena that underlie the formation and dissemination of this particular terminology, with specific regard to the Iberian Romance area.…
Odi et amo – Gli inglesi visti dagli spagnoli fra Otto e Novecento
This article is an excerpt from my Master’s Thesis, which aims not only to analyze the relationship between Spain and England during the 19th and 20th centuries, but also to reconstruct the image of England from the point of view of five Spanish travellers, namely Eugenio de Ochoa (1815-1872), Emilio Alcalá-Galiano y Valencia (1831-1914), Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920), Pío Baroja (1872-1956), and Carmen de Burgos (1867-1932). After giving a general overview of the relations between the two countries, this paper focuses on a comparative analysis of the travel accounts by the authors mentioned above, trying to detect their thematic constants as well as a series of revealing observations concerning the Spanish attitude towards the British.…
Leichte Sprache und Standardsprache im Vergleich von Textpaaren
This article investigates Leichte Sprache, a recent but increasingly important simplified linguistic variety of German. Complex texts, taken especially from several technical fields (such as politics, medicine, administration etc.), are conveyed by using strategies of simplification. Leichte Sprache is mainly – but not exclusively – addressed to people with reading and learning difficulties, so as to give them access to texts which, due to their complexity, would otherwise be difficult to understand. This paper underlines the social, political and cultural role of this simplified variety of German, through which an active and conscious participation of primary addressees in society is achieved. Moreover, this work explores the linguistic features that, identifiable at the lexical, syntactic and structural levels, make a Leichte-Sprache-Text recognizable and different from a Standardtext. In order to fulfil this aim, a linguistic analysis of two pairs of text-types is carried out, so as to highlight the differences between the source text in standard German and its corresponding simplified form (Übertragung). In the last section, some problematic issues of Leichte Sprache are also taken into consideration.…
Elemente der Fachsprache in Faust als Nationalsozialist von Alexander Kluge
This article focuses on the technical language used by Alexander Kluge in one of his most important narrative fragments. As a basic premise, the article highlights the common classification of “technical languages” and then moves on to the chosen text, including a brief, fundamental overview of its author, who, more than others, grasped that intrinsic link between art and science. The focus of the article is placed on the technical terminology in Faust als Nationalsozialist as a means of textual coherence and an instrument capable of evoking and deconstructing the Faustian motif.…
Ascesa e caduta di un eroe: Bellerophontes di Marie Luise Kaschnitz
This work presents an analysis of the short story Bellerophontes, from the collection Griechische Mythen by German writer Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1901-1974). The main character of the tale is the Corinthian hero Bellerophon, best known for slaying the Chimera. I compare Kaschnitz’s rewriting of the myth with ancient literary sources, specifically the Iliad (VI, 119-236), Apollodorus’s The Library (II, 3.1), and Pindar’s Olympic XIII (47-92) and Isthmian VII (43-48). The goal is to ascertain how this modern version of the story follows classical tradition on the one hand, and how it partly departs from it on the other. In Kaschnitz’s Bellerophontes the myth takes on typically modern traits, thus coming closer to the sensibility of the contemporary reader. The translation adopted here − the first Italian translation of Bellerophontes − was originally presented in my Bachelor’s Thesis.…
Die Metapher als textkonstituierendes Element in der Presse. Eine Korpusanalyse zum Thema Klimawandel
The aim of this study is to highlight and briefly analyze the essential role played by metaphors in the German press. In the introduction, emphasis is laid on what metaphors are and on the meanings that they have acquired throughout history (from the Aristotelian era up to our days). The first section provides an analysis of the different text-types in journalism on the basis of their textual functions. Moreover, two different types of articles are compared, along with the so-called “top-heavy-form” or “inverted pyramid” structure. The second section deals with the relation between the use of metaphors and the coining of new words. Subsequently, in the third section, attention is drawn to some of the most significant metaphorical expressions emerging in our corpus (consisting in ten newspaper articles from FAZ.NET, a well-known German newspaper), together with their ability to build up “isotopic chains”, which give cohesion and coherence to a text. The last section of this study is a reflection on the power of metaphors to influence readers and present a certain event from positive or negative perspectives.…
An Interview with Nickolas Butler on The Hearts of Men (2017)
In The Hearts of Men (2017), his multigenerational and controversial Bildungsroman, Nickolas Butler devastatingly peels back the layers of the American educational system by using the scout honor code, attempting to stick to its rules in a world where violators appear to hold sway. This 2020 interview with the author, which is presented here for the first time to an Italian public, seeks to dig into the novel’s key insights grounded in the scout oath and law. It also aims to provide an inside perspective on issues ranging from the differences between scout law and a predominant militaristic worship to a core of morality which Butler’s text variously interrogates, eventually looking towards a quest for forgiveness. Butler seems thus to describe an unavoidable downfall that is also a premise for catharsis, for a healing of the wounds of an America that finds it hard not to repeat the same old faults.…
Tradurre la circolarità: la ripetizione come strumento didattico-analitico in Radiografía de la pampa di Ezequiel Martínez Estrada
This paper is an excerpt from my Master’s thesis, which included an analysis of Ezequiel Martínez Estrada’s Radiografía de la pampa, a translation into Italian of its first part and a translation commentary. After a short introduction to the author and his essayistic work, with a few considerations on the reasons that led him to distance himself from poetry and publish Radiografía, the paper focuses on the translation process and on the importance of preserving in the target text one of the most striking features of Martínez Estrada’s literary style, that is to say, repetition.…
Anna Achmatova e T. S. Eliot: chiamarsi ed inseguirsi fino alla fusione
This work is a revised excerpt from my Bachelor’s thesis, in which I focused on Anna Akhmatova’s reception in the UK and, as a second step, on the impact of English Literature on Akhmatova’s poetry. In this article I have decided to investigate the parallelisms and similarities between Akhmatova’s Poem without a Hero and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Four Quartets. What I try to show is that the poem by Akhmatova shares important and crucial features with Eliot’s landmark works. In order to strengthen my argumentation, I take into consideration a number of relevant critical studies on these aspects.…
Azorín e le sperimentazioni surrealiste degli Anni Venti traducendo il racconto inedito Gestación
In recent years, Italian readers have rediscovered the love for short stories on a national as well as international level. This has led to a considerable increase in translations pertaining to the genre, even if there are great Spanish authors who continue to receive very little attention. This is the case with Azorín’s tales, and that is why I have decided to provide an Italian version of Gestación. In this way, one can hope to incentivize not only a proper assessment of Azorín’s short fiction, but also the investigation of his dialogue with Surrealism throughout the 1920s.…
Vestito di blu come un papavero: l’antipsichiatria in Campos de Carvalho
This paper is a condensed adaptation of my Master’s thesis, which focused on the study of the novel A lua vem da Ásia by the Brazilian writer Walter Campos de Carvalho, so as to suitably introduce this author and his work within the Italian literary scenario. More precisely, the research presented here mainly pivots on the ‘anti-psychiatric movement’ theme. In addition to this, I have translated four key chapters from the book into Italian, which can help to throw light on the peculiarities of the author’s style.…
Botanica e orticoltura per le donne vittoriane: Jane Loudon e il suo Instructions in Gardening for Ladies (1840)
This article is a revised excerpt from my Master’s thesis and focuses on Jane Loudon, a Victorian writer and cultural mediator who published several educational books on the topics of gardening and botany in the 1840s. Her works were mostly aimed at middle-class women who did not have the opportunity to study natural sciences at school and who were usually deterred from physically dealing with gardening practices. Within Loudon’s production, Instructions in Gardening for Ladies (1840) is especially worth mentioning, since it both provided technical information and morally encouraged women to look after their gardens in a creative and responsible way, thus starting to deconstruct the Victorian notion of feminine ‘delicacy’ and the gender assumptions linked to the separate spheres ideology.…
Post-esotismo e traduzione militante. Il caso di Les aigles puent di Lutz Bassmann
This article is an excerpt from my Master’s thesis entitled Il post-esotismo di Antoine Volodine: una letteratura per sovvertire il mondo. Proposta di traduzione di “Les aigles puent” di Lutz Bassmann. Here, post-exoticism is cast as an alternative to the substantially binary categories we have been accustomed to. Across surreal scenarios and apocalyptic settings, post-exotic authors can be said to call their readers (and translators) into action, asking them to face reality by considering it as a whole and as an extremely varied mosaic at the same time.…
La invención de Morel e Dormir al sol: l’automa e il simulacro in Adolfo Bioy Casares
This article intends to investigate the representation of simulacra and automatons in Argentinian writer Adolfo Bioy Casares’s narrative. A short commentary on this phenomenology and its connections with Bioy Casares’s favourite topics – such as science, technology, and simulacra themselves – is supplemented by an analysis of two female automatons that populate a couple of his novels: La invención de Morel (1940) and Dormir al sol (1973).…
La Vara di Messina e gli autos sacramentales, punto di unione tra Sicilia e Spagna
This article explores the connections between the Spanish autos sacramentales of the seventeenth century and the Vara di Messina, a triumphal chariot which is still used nowadays during the namesake procession held in the Sicilian city and dedicated to the Virgin Mary. In the course of my study, quite a large number of similarities has emerged. This paper also analyzes the history of the ‘Vara’, in particular its name and how it came into being, and highlights further links with Spanish culture and language.…
Die Textsorte »Lexikonartikel« im Übergang von der traditionell-gedruckten zur online-Form: ein Vergleich nach textlinguistischen Kriterien
The aim of this paper is to explore the differences and similarities between print and online encyclopedias. More specifically, some linguistic aspects of two encyclopedias, the German Brockhaus Enzyklopädie (a printed source) and Wikipedia, will be analyzed and compared. In the last section of this study, some critical issues will also be taken into consideration.…
Le rime amorose dell’Etrusco. Una riflessione sul manoscritto inedito V.C. 183
This article is a condensed adaptation of my Master’s thesis Le rime dell’autografo Vincenzo Capponi 183 di Alfonso de’ Pazzi. Edizione critica e commentata, which focuses on the analysis of an unpublished sixteenth-century manuscript by Alfonso de’ Pazzi, currently preserved in the National Central Library of Florence. In particular, this paper deals with the structure and content of the book of poems allegedly assembled by the Florentine author, and it shows how his collection of love poems was inspired by the Petrarchist sentiment typical of that era.…
«A Deo sed per populum»: la duplice elezione di Goffredo nella Gerusalemme liberata
This article analyzes the peculiar dynamics of Goffredo di Buglione’s double election as captain of the Christian army in Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata: the first election is made by God, while the second is carried out by his fellow commanders of the army. The aim of the article is to show the connections between Goffredo’s double election and the important political theory summed up in the expression «a Deo sed per populum», which is ascribed to Saint Thomas of Aquin and is relevant to all political philosophy.…
«Leve cum levibus meschientur vanaque vanis». Aspetti del racconto nel Baldus di Teofilo Folengo
The aim of this paper is to explore the narrative organization of the fourth section of Baldus by Teofilo Folengo. The paper deals with the construction of a new diegetic order and its relationship with the different genres imitated by the poet. First of all, a review shows that this narrative organization is strongly related to the new setting of the poem: a forest where the characters disembark after a shipwreck. Secondly, a textual analysis shows that Folengo blends topoi of three different genres: chivalric romances, latin epic and hagiography. Finally, these narrative models are discussed in relation to the fifth (and last) section of the poem.…
Lo scrittoio di un commentatore tardoantico: gli scholia pseudoasconiana a Cicerone Verr. II, 1
In 1416 the humanist Poggio Bracciolini brought to light a series of glosses to Cicero’s Verrinae attributed to the 1st century author Asconius Pedianus. During the 19th century modern scholars proved that these rhetorical and grammatical annotations were written by an anonymous late-antique commentator, probably a 5th century grammaticus who worked from an interpolated and textually flawed copy of Cicero’s works. This fact is demonstrated by a series of textual critical annotations where the commentator seems to mention variant readings of the transmitted text.…
Voci di migranti tra narratività e oralità: un’esperienza sensibile nel romanzo Patricia di Geneviève Damas
This paper is a condensed adaptation of my master’s thesis, which focuses on the study of the novel Patricia by Belgian writer Geneviève Damas. More precisely, the research presented here mainly pivots on the Italian translation of Damas’s novel. First of all, I approach this literary work as a tool through which the author meant to raise awareness on the plight of unwanted migrants, who are deemed to pose a threat to the stability of western societies. Secondly, I ponder how to deal with the peculiarities of Damas’s text from both a linguistic and cultural point of view, so as to identify the best strategies through which the original message is conveyed in the Italian translation.…
Identikit di un dittatore atipico e della sua dittatura
This paper brings together some chapters of my master’s thesis, which also included an Italian translation of José Gil’s essay Salazar: a Retórica da Invisibilidade. While drawing on Gil’s essay’s topics as a suitable starting point, I proceed to show Salazar’s unconventional way of dealing with the masses. After a short introduction to the dictator’s political and intellectual background, my contribution highlights two of his ways to gain consensus: the escrito-lido technique and the nearly total lack of what classical rhetoric commonly refers to as actio.…
Adamastor, fra Mozambico e Sudafrica: due rivisitazioni del mito secondo Luís Carlos Patraquim e Roy Campbell
This paper analyzes two different rewritings of the myth of Adamastor, one of the most well-known and iconic characters of Os Lusíadas. A hideous giant and rejected lover, this figure has gone through a variety of reinterpretations, particularly in Mozambican and South African literature. In relation to these two contexts, a couple of poems are taken into consideration here, namely Luís Carlos Patraquim’s Metamorfose (1980) and Roy Campbell’s Rounding the Cape (1930). The analysis of the poems is preceded by an introduction which both delves into the role of Adamastor in Os Lusíadas and offers a brief overview of the noteworthy critical reception connected with such a character.…
La tematica del naufragio in Luís Vaz De Camões
This article investigates the shipwreck theme in relation to Portugal’s greatest epic poet, Luís Vaz de Camões. In particular, the contribution aims at analyzing how, on the one hand, the theme is linked to the biography of the author of The Lusíadas, and how, on the other hand, the subject is connected to a specific genre that was popular in Portuguese literature at his time: the so-called relatos de naufragios, which was a heavily codified genre narrating shipwrecks and maritime disasters. The article examines how such a correlation works.…
“Que mi nombre no se borre de la historia.” Mujeres y Franquismo
It would seem that the international interest on Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, in particular its repression of women, is only recently taking shape. In December 2008, a conference was organized in Madrid to bring to light the complexity of the phenomenon. At the same time, it is interesting to note the extreme difficulty of accessing the many records written by all those women who suffered the unfair restrictions imposed by the government. From the extracts, it is possible to grasp the terrible hygienic conditions of the overcrowded female prisons, the starvation the women suffered, their fight against the “power”, and the physical and psychological abuses perpetrated by Caudillo’s officers in the police stations, in the houses and in the streets. The reasons for the abuses against women were not only political (all those women were communists, republicans and anarchists), but also gender-related: they were persecuted for the only fact of being women.…
Dall’esilio a Sombras de sueño: significato e rappresentazione dell’isola in Miguel de Unamuno
This article focuses on Unamuno’s experience in the Canary Islands, from his stay in Las Palmas to his exile in Fuerteventura. These were crucial moments both for his life and for the production of his work Sombras de sueños. Starting from the letters the author wrote during his stay in the Canaries, the article deals with the spiritual bond that Unamuno established with the islands, which he saw as a different reality, far from the world and with a sense of isolation inherent in it.…