When words go beyond words: Notes on a hermeneutical and sensualistic approach to text and translation in the poems of Kezilahabi and Leopardi

In this paper, I propose translation as a main tool for a sensualistic and hermeneutical approach to texts. In agreement with the writer and thinker Euphrase Kezilahabi, who claims that the text has to be considered as a living event, I propose to look at a text not as an object but as a living body. I ague that this approach reduces the distance between the body of the text and that of the reader. Perception can thus be used as a means to know and critique a literary text. I present a multifocal sensualistic analysis based on an analogical idea of knowledge, taking translation as a tool to push the critic to focus on the text word for word (not excluding the paratext or the context). The translations discussed here are poems by Kezilahabi and a proposal for a Swahili translation of the poem L’infinito by the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi

Martin Heidegger and Emanuele Severino: A Dispute on the Meaning of Technology

Martin Heidegger and Emanuele Severino reflected on the meaning of technology more than anyone else in the twentieth century. Their philosophies are irreconcilable. They converge on this simple recognition and its implications: techno‐science dominates our time. But they disagree even on the interpretation of this domination. Exploring this disagreement will help us understand the leading dynamics of our civilization. Therefore, the intention in this paper is to unveil, for English speakers, the value of Severino’s philosophy in relation to Heidegger and the meaning technology. We will see that, ultimately, their disagreement concerns the originary truth of Being and has repercussions on how they conceptualize technology and the possibility of redemption from it. Heidegger indicated the letting‐be of beings in their freedom as the possible path beyond technology. Severino saw Heidegger’s indication as destined to remain trapped in technology itself. If we understand why this was so – from Severino’s point of view – this may open a new path for us: the path of day, the path that may truly lead beyond technology. The aim of this paper is, finally, to indicate one reason why delving into Severino’s works is truly worthwhile: if it is possible for the truth to unveil itself beyond willing – where Heidegger couldn’t see – then Severino’s works may the place where this possibility appears in coherent conceptual form

Integrated tool for the acoustic assessment and monitoring of marine activities and operations

Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

A beehive of glances: Valerio Magrelli, the translation of poetry and the poetry of translation

Quest’articolo non si propone di valutare la traduzione delle poesie di Valerio Magrelli, che sono invece punto di partenza, insieme all’interesse stesso del poeta nei confronti della traduzione, per una riflessione della traduzione quale modo poetico. È sintomatico il fatto che la più recente traduzione di Magrelli – opera di grande impegno poetico, conversazione lirica, una sorta di ritorno alla poesia – sia apparsa in Sudafrica nel 2015: da un lato testimonia il crescente riconoscimento del poeta a livello internazionale, dall’altro rappresenta un momento importante nell’intersezione culturale Italia- Sudafrica. La focalizzazione su quattro immagini ricorrenti nella produzione magrelliana – le api, il vetro, gli sguardi e la geometria – apre una discussione sulle difficoltà e sulla possibilità del discorso poetico, che nei testi di Magrelli si rivela quale “utterance” nella traduzione.Keywords: Valerio Magrelli – translation – poetr

Beyond the Suffering of Being: Desire in Giacomo Leopardi and Samuel Beckett

In this dissertation, I question critical approaches that argue for Giacomo Leopardi’s and Samuel Beckett’s pessimism and nihilism. Beckett quotes Leopardi when discussing the removal of desire in his monograph Proust, a context that has spurred pessimist and nihilist readings, whether the focus has been on one writer, the other, or both. I argue that the inappropriateness of the pessimist and nihilist label is, on the contrary, specifically exposed through the role of desire in the two thinkers. After tracing the notion of desire as it developed from Leopardi to key twentieth-century thinkers, I illustrate how, in contrast to the Greek concept of ataraxia as a form of ablation of desire, the desire of and for the Other is central in the two authors’ oeuvres. That is, while the two writers’ attempt to reach the respective existential cores of Beckettian “suffering of being” and Leopardian “souffrance” might seem to point towards the celebrated nothingness of their existential quest, closer examination reveals that the attempt to still desire common to both authors is frustrated and outdone by a combative desire that pervades their later work. Hence, while the desire to cease desiring is at the philosophical kernel of both authors’ oeuvre, it also draws attention to and exacerbates the inextinguishable quality of desire. Looking at Leopardi’s later poetry in the ciclo d’Aspasia, including the last poem “La Ginestra, o il fiore del deserto,” and examining Beckett’s plays Endgame, Happy Days, Krapp’s Last Tape and Not I, I argue that desire in Leopardi and Beckett could be read as lying at the cusp between Jacques Lacan’s and Emmanuel Levinas’ theories, a desire that both splits the subject (and is thus based on lack) as much as it moulds the subject when called to address the Other (inspiring what Levinas terms ‘infinity’ as opposed to ‘totality,’ an infinity pitted against the nothingness crucial to pessimist and nihilist readings). The centrality of desire in Leopardi and Beckett also comes close to the Lacanian desire-as-paradox, a desire that is lodged at the heart of Leopardi’s and Beckett’s dianoetic laugh and held to be expressive of their particularly dark, but elevating, humour

Hell and Back: Selected Essays

This is a collection of essays on writing and writers, the intention is always to find a central principle or strategy underlying the work of each author

Reduction in Time:Kinaesthetic and Traumatic Experiences of the Present in Literary Texts

The chapter explores the dimension of the living present as a form of temporal reduction, looking at its manifestation in literary texts. Bazzoni proposes here a focus on the living present as different from a still, eternal moment, and contrasts the experience of the living present with the reduction at play in trauma. Finally, the author discusses the affective, ethical, and political dimensions of the temporality of the living present as a site of subjectivation, which effects a counter-reduction of normative discourses.Alberica Bazzoni, ‘Reduction in Time: Kinaesthetic and Traumatic Experiences of the Present in Literary Texts’, in The Case for Reduction, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger, Cultural Inquiry, 25 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 191-212 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-25_10

Imagined China. Italian Ideas and Visions of the “Celestial Empire” in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century (1766-1867)

L&rsquo;articolo studia l&rsquo;evoluzione dei giudizi maturati sulla Cina all&rsquo;interno della cultura italiana tra seconda met&agrave; del Settecento e fine Ottocento: dall&rsquo;eredit&agrave; della storiografia gesuitica al mito della semplicit&agrave; e autenticit&agrave; della cultura cinese (Verri, Foscolo, Leopardi); dai primi tentativi di indagine comparata (Giuseppe La Farina) alla percezione, nelle pionieristiche analisi di Carlo Cattaneo e di Giuseppe Ferrari, di una Cina quale paese moderno, potenzialmente concorrenziale nei confronti dell&rsquo;occidente