Luigi Pirandello: existentialist avant la lettre

This thesis argues that the Italian Nobel Prize winning author, Luigi Pirandello, far from being merely a rather cerebral writer with a philosophical bent, as he has been called by many of his critics, should in fact be recognised to occupy a place within what is often referred to as the field of Contemporary Continental Philosophy, as a pre-existentialist or an existentialist avant la lettre. The idea of so categorising him is not new, but no systematic examination of the entire corpus of his works has ever been attempted from a purely philosophical point of view in order to draw from them a coherent and comprehenisive philosophy. In the field of philosophy, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world, Luigi Pirandello remains unstudied. This thesis deals with such existentialist themes as freedom, responsibility, anguish, the absurd, bad faith, the nature of reality, the self and the relation of the self to others. Pirandello\u27s views in these areas are compared with those of the recognised existentialist philosophers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, in order to attempt to prove a similarity great enough to enable Luigi Pirandello to be classed as an existentialist avant la lettre

From Practice to Theory

pp.97-11

Collected Poems (1950-2011)/Paolo Totaro

There is a saying \u27Translations are like women, the beautiful ones aren\u27t faithful and the faithful ones aren\u27t beautiful.\u27 A clever quip, no doubt, but true. At least about translations. And, in particular, about translations of poetry since words rarely have single exact equivalents in anoth~uage. Rather, each word, apart from its objective denotation, carries myriad\ connotations, subtle feelings which it evokes and it is, in fact, these very feelings, these subtle suggestions which are the essence of poetry. Likewise, irony and parody depend on social context and are thus located firmly in the language of a poem\u27s first conception. This means that achieving equivalents across languages requires particular creativity. The very sounds of the words chosen for a translation must be carefully considered as they too have different connotations across languages. They must create the same soothing or jarring, pleasing or disturbing effect as that rendered in the original text. Of course any translation must always be a balance between beauty and faithfulness - hence the above saying-but given the particular challenges which it poses, can such a balance ever be achieved in the translation of poetry? In fact, many argue that poetry is simply untranslatable. It must be re-written. But if it is re-written, can it truly be said to be a translation or is it a new creation, no longer belonging to the original author