Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies

In the last two decades, the task of the translator for the theater has been frequently discussed and translation has been recognized as an important element in the process of play production. In light of these developments, and keeping in mind that a translation, as a “politically and ideologically charged creative process of rewriting” (Krebs and Minier, 2009: 66), is always shaped by constrictions that go beyond linguistic and semantic criteria, this article examines and compares the Italian, German, and French dramatic texts of Luigi Pirandello's Questa sera si recita a soggetto and their relation to first productions in Germany and France, within the time frame of 1929–1935. The aim is to investigate strategies for drama translation in the context of the late 1920s to early 1930s ideology and to examine how translators' choices affected the representations of regional and national transnational identities. The analysis sheds light on drama translation as well as on the role of the translator in the process of play productions; in addition, it questions the porous boundaries between translations and adaptations, as well as the hierarchy according to which scholars have often read the “original” in relation to subsequent versions.

This essay posits translators’ prefaces as democratic spaces of individuality. Among the usually limited opportunities for translators to present their work and discuss its nuances, challenges, methods, and solutions, a translator’s preface affords the rare luxury of displaying one’s array of tools and, by establishing one’s credentials, convincing readers of the legitimacy of specific translatorial choices. However, the possibilities and expectations of a translator’s preface are strongly influenced by factors that hinder the translator’s freedom of expression and are, to some extent, enslaved to a strictly persuasive function. These pre-packaged topics seem to weigh even more on the translators of so-called ‘classic’ texts, who, on top of other real or perceived duties, need to pay homage to past translations and justify the need for an additional one. A close examination of various translators’ prefaces to Dante’s Divine Comedy will highlight recurring themes and persuasive strategies along with deviations from the norm that might suggest alternative avenues towards a more illuminating way of inhabiting this unique locus. By unveiling the points of contact between the space of the source text and the space of the translator’s individuality, the former is infused with renewed life and the latter with new meaning.

This essay examines Natalia Ginzburg’s novella, È stato così, and the role that distorted perception plays in the demise of the protagonist’s marriage. The analysis of the narrative takes into consideration two of Ginzburg’s postwar essays, ‘Human Relationships’ and ‘The Little Virtues.’ Ginzburg’s works are contextualized within a broader conversation amongst existentialists (namely, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Buber, and José Ortega y Gasset) about interpersonal perception within romantic love. Indebted to scholars who have noted certain parallels between Ginzburg and Sartrian existentialism, this essay affirms and elaborates upon these similarities and then introduces Buber and Ortega y Gasset into the discussion. While Sartre offers an explanation as to why distorted perception occurs so often in amorous relationships, Buber and Ortega y Gasset offer alternate models in which lovers choose to alter their perception of the beloved. Reading È stato così in light of Buber and Ortega y Gasset allows the reader to more readily recognize a constructive layer embedded in this novella. This subtext of the novella is consistent with Ginzburg’s essays in which she argues that human relationships are a problem to be solved, not renounced or avoided.

Ricordiamo di più il poeta dell’oltranza, del mistero, calato negli arcani della parola e dell’essere. La poetica di Ungaretti non è però sganciata dalla vita, dalla storia, dalla rete dei rapporti nel mondo delle lettere. Lo dimostra, in particolare, il discorso sulla Grande Guerra. Esso palesa un complesso retroterra biografico (discendenza lucchese, nascita in Egitto, formazione francese), ma riflette anche un grande tema del dibattito culturale: l’interpretazione del conflitto come epilogo del Risorgimento, fucina d’italianità, crogiolo dell’unità morale degli italiani. Idea diffusa, tra l’altro, nell’ “avanguardia fiorentina”, ovvero nella famiglia intellettuale del poeta. Egli si identifica con la nazione in armi, in essa trova compiutezza, radicamento e armonia. Questa integra matrici identitarie diverse (italiane, straniere e lucchesi) in sintonia col nazionalismo (modernista, cosmopolita e regionalista) rilevato in area vociana. Le metafore e il lessico di Ungaretti afferiscono alle sfere della morte e del martirio, della rinascita e del battesimo, con richiami alla Bibbia e alla letteratura risorgimentale, in linea con la tipica morfologia del discorso nazionale italiano. Ricompaiono, con sensibili variazioni, in fasi successive, non di rado in rapporto con l’adesione al fascismo.

Questo lavoro bio-bibliografico costituisce un excursus della vita e dell’opera di Renato Poggioli ripercorrendo le vicende del duplice esilio di uno spirito eclettico e cosmopolita, nel nome della libertà di pensiero. Oltre a rappresentare un contributo alla memoria del traduttore e comparatista, il saggio costituisce anche una doverosa introduzione prospettica alla traduzione ed edizione italiana del carteggio tra Poggioli e Stevens di cui Laura Alcini è autrice. Il saggio intende altresì mettere in risalto la scarsa considerazione che la figura di Renato Poggioli, studioso cosmopolita e illuminato, ha avuto e purtroppo ancora ha, in Italia (se si esclude il settore specialistico degli studi di slavistica). Poggioli, esule durante il fascismo, è stato sfortunatamente vittima di diversi ma similmente ottusi ostracismi culturali e politici che hanno offuscato la sua fama di raffinato traduttore e fondatore della comparatistica ad Harvard.

This article proposes an analysis of characterization in the narrative production of Alessandro Perissinotto. In particular, it aims to establish a relation between the construction of problematic identities and implications of socio-historical relevance. The increasing difficulty of dealing with individual identity in narrative suggests a comparison with Italy’s shared memory and several contemporary topics of social interest. Such psychological conditions as the Electra complex, burnout, bipolar disorder, and the projection of one’s personality on a doppelgänger evince the difficulties of the study of identity in the contemporary novel. The internal struggle of the character overlaps with social perceptions of mental illness, drug addiction, and recent immigration, as well as the legacy of fascism and terrorism on today’s Italy.

In debates about strategies of in/visibility and recognition in the Italian migratory context, the right to look is almost exclusively attributed to Italians. This essay explores the work of contemporary writers and filmmakers, who reframe the seen/seer dichotomy and focus on the migrant gaze to demand a reevaluation of the frontiers between host/guest, Italian/foreigner. It approaches the issue of recognition through a critical reading of two philosophers, Derrida and Hegel, who root identity in reciprocal relations and emphasize the importance of mutual recognition in disrupting static categories of identity. While the first part presents an analysis of Khouma’s Io, venditore di elefanti in the light of Derrida’s discussion of the laws of hospitality, the second part focuses on Hegel’s dialectics of recognition to examine the laborious entanglement of Italians and migrants in de Caldas Brito’s ‘Io, polpastrello 5.423’ and Garrone’s Terra di Mezzo.

For Pasolini the extinction of the firefly symbolized the disappearance of any popular resistance into the homogeneity of consumer culture. However, Francesca Comencini revitalizes the symbolic potential of the firefly for Rome through an engagement with the Italian postfeminist girl in her 2012 film Un giorno speciale. Made in the wake of the Berlusconi scandals, the film mobilizes a familiar set of dichotomies to express nostalgia for the clarity of a second-wave feminist vision: margins and center, authenticity and artifice, rebellion and conformity, agency and coercion. However, in blending more popular cultural forms with familiar apocalyptical readings of the cityscape, the film also marks significant shifts in interpretations of the cityscape and its association with the body politic through the degraded female figure. Recognition of the ambiguities of postfeminist culture, expressed through the motif of ‘girl power,’ reframes spatial dichotomies of artifice and authenticity. The film puts questions of branding and performance at the center of the debate about Italy’s future. Rome emerges as a postmodern cityscape (Trentin, 2013), in which the girl can nonetheless embody intermittently the symbolic potential of the elusive ‘firefly.’

The movie La Grande Bellezza stages the most recognizable sights and sounds of the city of Rome, in a referential gesture that brings us back to the past glories of Italian cinema. This is why the movie has been accused of pandering to foreign – mostly American – audiences, an accusation that was in fact encouraged, rather than prevented, by the winning of the 2014 Oscar as best foreign movie. This essay argues, instead, that Paolo Sorrentino anchors his movie in the aesthetics of the sublime as a profoundly ethical category, based in our emotional and affective response to infinity and loss. In the movie, Rome not only serves as a postcard-like, picturesque backdrop for a sublime perception of historical time; the city’s skies open up to inhuman and even saintly figures, and remind us that what is needed in today’s Italy falls nothing short of a profound ethical and political reformation.

Il saggio esamina l'esservazione della periferia di Roma a ridosso del Grande Raccordo Anulare (GRA) nel film di Gianfranco Rosi (Sacro GRA: storie dal Grande Raccordo Anulare, 2013) e nel racconto di viaggio di Nicolò Bassetti e Sapo Matteucci (Sacro romano GRA: persone, luoghi, paesaggi lungo il grande raccordo anulare, 2013). Lo studio colloca le due opere all'interno delle caratteristiche territoriali della cosiddetta “città del GRA”, e le pone in dialogo con la più recente riflessione urbanistica. Riconoscendo la presenza massiccia di territori in costante mutamento e la difficoltà di capirli in modo costruttivo, chi oggi si interroga su identità e bisogni del periurbano sta urgentemente generando nuove categorie interpretative per la città. In rapporto con questo pensiero urbanistico, i lavori sperimentano una modalità d'osservazione della periferia attraverso gli strumenti epistemologici della lentezza e del cammino. Inoltre, i due percorsi italiani a ridosso della tangenziale romana sono avvicinati alle esperienze artistiche di peregrinazione attorno alla tangenziale londinese di Iain Sinclair, come racconto di viaggio (London Orbital: a Walk Around the M25, 2002) e Chris Petit, come film (London Orbital, 2004).

This article focuses on the emergence of a dystopian imagery of Rome in Fellini’s Toby Dammit and Roma and in Pasolini’s Petrolio. In these films and novel, the cohabitation of vernacular and modern elements that had characterized Fellini’s and Pasolini’s works in the 1960s (Ragazzi di vita and Accattone, Le notti di Cabiria and La dolce vita) suddenly fades away. What surfaces instead is a dissociated and chaotic cityscape that tends toward a state of maximum disorder and to the incorporation of diversity into sameness. I propose an interpretation of this paradigm shift of Rome’s imagery through the concept of ‘entropy,’ which in thermodynamics and information theory refers to a process of gradual decline of a self-enclosed system. I will first discuss the material mutations of Rome’s 1960s map through an examination of urban analyses by Benevolo, Cederna, and Insolera, before moving to a close reading of Rome’s image in Toby Dammit, Roma, and Petrolio. What I argue is that the process of dissociation and fragmentation of Rome’s map theorized in urban studies is replicated at the aesthetic level by the sense of entropic confusion and the loss of spatial coordinates that mark Fellini’s and Pasolini’s 1970s engagements with Rome.

The author asks himself how it is that without a specific local or even national connection to Neapolitan song, Naples’ music heritage ‘speaks’ to him, as it speaks to millions of people around the world. Neapolitan song is indeed one of the few local musical traditions that have become truly global. The notions of imagined community, cultural distance, geographic distance, and nostalgia must be summoned and played out against each other if we want to understand the impact that Neapolitan songs had for centuries and, to a certain extent, still have. If opera is the ‘official’ musical representation of Italian unity, Neapolitan songs are the familiar lexicon of the Italian diaspora and have been appropriated by emigrants from every region of Italy. Opera and Neapolitan song share similar characteristics, however. They are both ancient and literate. Their diffusion, in addition, has been facilitated not just by printed scores but by oral transmission as well. Opera composers, not necessarily from Naples, also wrote Neapolitan songs, and famous songs whose authors are uncertain have been attributed to opera composers. Moreover, Neapolitan songs can be performed in two opposite styles (operatic, with orchestral accompaniment) and intimate (an untrained voice accompanied by a guitar) without losing their appeal and their stylistic uniqueness. The author also refers to his personal experience researching the musical heritage of Italian emigrants to Australia, where Neapolitan song has been for a long time a token of belonging.

Emanuele Severino’s latest book on Giacomo Leopardi’s writings, In viaggio con Leopardi: La partita sul destino dell’uomo, is seen as a ‘match’ between the Black Knight (Leopardi) and the White Knight (Western tradition) to halt the imminent destruction of mankind. A third player emerges, who, however, does not participate in the match but is capable of recognizing the catastrophic direction the game is taking, that is, threatening Western civilization itself.

Gli studi sulla mascolinità nella cultura italiana sono un’area di ricerca che non si è ancora pienamente sviluppata. Per questa ragione, risulta essere di particolare importanza la pubblicazione, nel 2014, di due volumi dedicati alle rappresentazioni delle figure maschili nel cinema italiano. I due testi, Masculinity and Italian Cinema: Sexual Politics, Social Conflict and Male Crisis in the 1970s di Sergio Rigoletto e Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema di Catherine O’Rawe, analizzano i modi in cui la mascolinità è stata raffigurata nei film italiani rispettivamente degli anni Settanta e dell’epoca contemporanea. Oltre ad occuparsi di temi simili, i due studi presentano ulteriori punti di contatto e offrono nuove e stimolanti letture di film appartenenti a generi diversi.