Italy, Garibaldi and Goldoni Give Lady Gregory ‘a Room with a Different View’

This paper analyses the complex influence of Italy on Lady Gregory’s imagination. On the one hand she considered the Italian fight for independencea good example for Ireland. Reading Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic was “comforting” to her. On the other, she looked at Eleonora Duse’s efforts to create a national theatre with sympathy and with pride as she succeeded where the Italian actress had failed. She had a wide knowledge of Italian literature which she could read in the original. In her youth she even translated passages from Dante’s Commedia, but what is more important and revealing is that, at the height of her own creative career, with the intention of providing a more international repertory for the Abbey Theatre, she translated Goldoni’s La Locandiera. The choice of this play and the technique adopted for the translation cast new light on her view of life and on her work.This paper analyses the complex influence of Italy on Lady Gregory’s imagination. On the one hand she considered the Italian fight for independencea good example for Ireland. Reading Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic was “comforting” to her. On the other, she looked at Eleonora Duse’s efforts to create a national theatre with sympathy and with pride as she succeeded where the Italian actress had failed. She had a wide knowledge of Italian literature which she could read in the original. In her youth she even translated passages from Dante’s Commedia, but what is more important and revealing is that, at the height of her own creative career, with the intention of providing a more international repertory for the Abbey Theatre, she translated Goldoni’s La Locandiera. The choice of this play and the technique adopted for the translation cast new light on her view of life and on her work

“Invention gives that slaughter shape”: Irish Literature and World War I

This essay deals with a number of works by poets, playwrights and novelists who tackled the theme of the Irish participation  to World War One. The crucial point was about the divided loyalties of Irish soldiers enlisted in the British Army at a time when Ireland was at first fighting for Home Rule and later, on Easter 1916, engaged in a hopeless but decisive uprising. Can literature change the world? Yeats invited the poet to remain disdainfully silent in time of war but, notwithstanding this, was forced to deal with its painful consequences  because of the death of Major Gregory, son of his dear friend Lady Augusta. Sean O’Casey had a totally different approach to the theme, using the theatre to create a collective response to its futility. Some decades later Frank McGuinness in one of his most successful plays maintains that “Invention gives that slaughter shape”. Francis Ledwige who died on the Belgian front, the only Irish “war poet”,  gave “shape” in his poems to his own divided loyalties to Britain and Ireland, becoming years later a source of inspiration for Seamus Heaney, trapped in the Troubles. The second part of this paper examines novels by Iris Murdoch, Jennifer Johnson and Sebastian Barry who have considered an effort of recollection to tell fictional stories set in those ominous years in order to overcome the “collective amnesia” (Boyce, 1993) that tried to exorcise the deaths of so many Irishmen who fought during WWI wearing the “wrong” unifor

“Invention gives that slaughter shape”: Irish Literature and World War I

This essay deals with a number of works by poets, playwrights and novelists who tackled the theme of the Irish participation  to World War One. The crucial point was about the divided loyalties of Irish soldiers enlisted in the British Army at a time when Ireland was at first fighting for Home Rule and later, on Easter 1916, engaged in a hopeless but decisive uprising. Can literature change the world? Yeats invited the poet to remain disdainfully silent in time of war but, notwithstanding this, was forced to deal with its painful consequences  because of the death of Major Gregory, son of his dear friend Lady Augusta. Sean O’Casey had a totally different approach to the theme, using the theatre to create a collective response to its futility. Some decades later Frank McGuinness in one of his most successful plays maintains that “Invention gives that slaughter shape”. Francis Ledwige who died on the Belgian front, the only Irish “war poet”,  gave “shape” in his poems to his own divided loyalties to Britain and Ireland, becoming years later a source of inspiration for Seamus Heaney, trapped in the Troubles. The second part of this paper examines novels by Iris Murdoch, Jennifer Johnson and Sebastian Barry who have considered an effort of recollection to tell fictional stories set in those ominous years in order to overcome the “collective amnesia” (Boyce, 1993) that tried to exorcise the deaths of so many Irishmen who fought during WWI wearing the “wrong” unifor

“Who am I? Well, I’m Irish anyway, that’s something.” Iris Murdoch and Ireland

Peter J. Conradi, a lifelong friend and biographer of Iris Murdoch,born in Dublin of Anglo-Irish parents, speaks of her attachment to/detachment from her country of origin as follows: “Her Irish connectionwas reflected in a lifetime’s intellectual and emotional engagement[that] – before her illness – transformed her from a romanticMarxist idealist to a hard-line Unionist and defender of the politicsof Ian Paisley” (Conradi 2001b). This article is an attempt to investigatepossible connections between Murdoch’s social, ethnic, andreligious background and her philosophy based on up-rooted androotedness and self-distancing (terms borrowed from Simone Weil)personified in the characters of her numerous novels. Her only worksset in Ireland, namely the short story “Something Special” (1958),and the novels The Unicorn (1963) and The Red and the Green (1965),will be analysed and compared with the novels of another womanwriterfrom the same background, Jennifer Johnston, the doyen ofIrish writers, who has inherited and modified the same tradition inthe light of contemporary Irish history

Giuseppe Cafiero sulle orme di Joyce a Roma

In 2006 Giuseppe Cafiero published James Joyce, Roma & altre storie, a novel with thriller-like undertones that weaves stories around the author of Ulysses. In her conversation with the author, Carla de Petris investigates the genesis of the novel and reflects on the post-modernist stances of its complex plot

Introducing Countess Constance Markievicz née Gore-Booth: Aristocrat and Republican, Socialist and Artist, Feminist and Free Spirit

Cilj ovog istraživanje bio je utvrditi utjecaj kinematičkih parametara, morfoloških mjera i nekih motoričkih testova na uspjeh u izvođenju kompleksnog elementa na preskoku - Tsukahara skok. U tu svrhu provedeno je istraživanje na uzorku od 10 mladih gimnastičarki, starosne dobi 12 do 14 godina. Ukupno je analizirano deset kinematičkih varijabli dobivenih video snimkom, petnaest morfoloških mjera i četiri testa motorike. Svaka ispitanica skočila je po tri skoka, čiji su pokušaji snimljeni na pripremama reprezentacije u Čakovcu. Rezultati su obrađeni regresijskom analizom, čime je utvrđeno da postoji značajna višestruka povezanost između skupa kinematičkih parametara i Tsukahare preskoka. Utvrđen je i pojedinačni utjecaj šest kinematičkih parametara na kriterijsku varijablu. Nije utvrđena nikakva povezanost morfoloških mjera i motoričkih testova sa kriterijskom varijablom - Tsukahara preskokom.The aim of this paper was to examine the relation between some anthropological factors (motor space skills and morphological characteristics) as well as kinematic parameters and performance of Tsukahara vault. Therefore, the research was conducted and the sample consists of 10 young female gymnasts that are between 12 and 14 years old. Ten kinematic variables extracted from video recordings have been analyzed along with fifteen morphological measures and four motor skills tests. Three vaults from each of ten participants have been recorded during preparation stage in Čakovec. Regression analysis has been used and the results showed multiple significant correlations between kinematic variables and Tsukahara vault performance. Also, the relation between each of six kinematic parameters and criterion variable was found. There was no correlation between morphological measures and motor skills tests and the criterion - Tsukahara vault performance

Lost (and Found) in Translation. Women and Emigration in two poems by Eavan Boland, translated into Italian, with an Italian envoi

Taking as its cue the concept of emigration and translation as connected to the idea of metamorphosis, this paper focuses on Irish women’s experience of emigration with the traumas that change of place, language and mores provoke. In her poetical and critical works Eavan Boland, now an outstanding female voice of Irish poetry and literary scholarship, provides a remarkable and perceptive reading of that experience, juxtaposing it to the symbolized role of mothers of male heroes or to that of an ugly, grizzling and dangerously demanding old woman as represented in the Irish tradition. This contribution is also an exercise in translation, a metaphorical mirror, i.e. a reflection of/on a text: it offers Italian translations of “The Emigrant Irish” and “Mise Eire”, two poems by Boland, and of Padraic Pearse’s poem in the Irish language “Mise Éire”, which inspired the second, with some considerations and critical remarks. The Italian envoi consists of “Fogli bianchi”, a poem about emigration written by Eugenio Lucarelli, now working in Switzerland, translated into English and Gaeilge by Irish speaker and musician Kay McCarthy