Dialogo della Moda e della Morte di Giacomo Leopardi

Il Dialogo della Moda e della Morte – composto a Recanati tra il 15 e 18 febbraio 1824 – è stato a lungo sottovalutato dalla critica, che lo ha generalmente considerato infelice o comunque marginale rispetto al nucleo più autentico delle Operette morali. Tra i giudizi dei primi autorevoli commentatori, esemplari sono, in tal senso, quello di Della Giovanna che, nel suo commento del 1895, ha affermato: «Veramente io non scorgo tanti pregi in questo dialogo che mi pare una disputa piuttosto retorica. La forma è tutt’altro che naturale e rispondente alla particolare natura delle persone allegoriche e disputanti» (DELLA GIOVANNA 28); e quello di Manfredi Porena: «Tutto sommato mi pare che il dialogo [...] sia dei meno riusciti» (PORENA 55). E anche in tempi più recenti, studiosi come Fubini e Binni hanno continuato a sottovalutare l’«operetta »: per il primo, essa manca «di un centro lirico o logico» (FUBINI 90), mentre per il secondo, il dialogo: «dopo una prima parte più vivace, [...] viene poi assumendo una certa pesantezza che risulta dallo scarso impegno interno su questo tema reso, tutto sommato, un po’ troppo superficiale» (W. Binni, Lezioni leopardiane, a cura di N. Bellucci con la collaborazione di M. Dondero, Firenze, La Nuova Italia, 1994, p. 342). Infine, Cesare Galimberti ha parlato a proposito del Dialogo della Moda e della Morte di «effetti generali grotteschi piuttosto tetri che divertiti» (GALIMBERTI 99).Lungi dall’essere marginale nell’economia delle Operette, questo dialogo anticipa alcuni nuclei tematici fondamentali dell’opus leopardiano, che saranno poi sviluppati, dapprima, nella Proposta di premi fatta dall’Accademia dei Sillografi, composta pochi giorni dopo, e quindi in testi decisivi come Il Parini ovvero della gloria (mi riferisco al motivo della vanità della fama letteraria), e i più tardi Dialogo di Tristano e di un amico e la Palinodia al marchese Gino Capponi (da riallacciarsi al Dialogo della Moda e della Morte per la critica di certi idoli moderni)

Antiturismo e scrittura di viaggio in se non la realtà di Tommaso Landolfi

Se non la realtà, published in 1960, collects travel stories written by Tommaso Landolfi during the 1950s. Among the texts contained in the collection you can find stories, articles, micro-reports on various – also less known – Italian cities. The writer chooses alternative routes to mass tourism, which he strongly criticizes. Anti-tourism practiced by Landolfi is also reflected in his literary style, adopting strategies unusual for travel literature, such as combining literary and non-fiction fiction, numerous allusions and quotes, and esoteric illuminations. Unlike other authors of travel reports from the 1950s, such as Pasolini or Piovene, Landolfi criticizes the euphoria associated with the development of Italy during the economic boom, anticipating some of the topics of Guido Ceronetti’s Un viaggio in Italia.Zbiór Se non la realtà, opublikowany w 1960 roku, obejmuje relacje z podróży spisywane przez Tommaso Landolfiego w latach pięćdziesiątych. Wśród zawartych w zbiorze tekstów można znaleźć opowiadania, artykuły, mikroreportaże dotyczące różnych – również mniej znanych – miast włoskich. Pisarz wybiera trasy alternatywne wobec turystyki masowej, którą ostro krytykuje. Antyturystyka, którą uprawia Landolfi, odzwierciedla się także w jego stylu literackim, przejawiającym cechy nietypowe dla literatury podróżniczej, jak łączenie fikcji literackiej i non-fiction, liczne aluzje i cytaty, iluminacje ezoteryczne. W przeciwieństwie do innych autorów reportaży podróżniczych z lat pięćdziesiątych, jak Pasolini czy Piovene, Landolfi krytykuje euforię związaną z rozwojem Włoch w czasach boomu ekonomicznego i zapowiada tym samym niektóre tematy podjęte później przez Guida Ceronettiego w Un viaggio in Italia

Il divino entusiasmo del poeta: Ricerche sulla storia di un tòpos

My investigation deals primarily with the history of the topos of poetic enthusiasm, from its first formulation in Democritus and Plato to Romanticism, with particular reference to its aesthetic implications and development in the course of Italian literature. In ancient Greece, the topic of poetic enthusiasm appears in main philosophical works, such as the Ion and the Phaedrus, which both Plotinus' Enneads and Proclus' Commentaries on Plato's Republic subsequently take up. Later on, in Latin culture, Cicero's philosophical thought and Ovid's poetry draw on such a matter. Throughout the Middle Ages, instead, the topic of poetic enthusiasm becomes more of a religious matter and, in the wake of Iacopone da Todi, tends to constitute a primary source for the Duecento poetry. Only with the coming of the Dolce Stil Novo, the topic of poetic enthusiasm stands as an essential presupposition for any creative process in Italian literature. Furthermore, Dante's Comedy will introduce, for the very first time in Italian literature, the Muses as a privileged means of divine inspiration and consider the poet as sacred as the prophets or the evangelists. Later on, both Mussato in his Epistolae and Petrarch in the Collatio laureationis and Invective contra medicum, whose main reference is, in this specific case, Cicero's Pro Archia, stress the idea of poetry as a godsend. Boccaccio, in the wake of Petrarch, also claims the divine nature of poetry, especially in his writing on Dante, and the very firm apology of poetry that he sets in the last two books of the Genealogie deorum gentilium. Then, Salutati's De laborious Herculis takes up Boccaccio's defense of poetry in the Genealogie and develops a particular concept of poetry as a revelation, which appears to be closer to theology. In the fifteenth century, Leonardo Bruni, directly translating from the Greek Plato's Phaedrus, gives new nourishment to the topic of poetic enthusiasm (Bruni's letter to Marrasio represents the very first testimony of the topic of poetic enthusiasm in the fifteenth century). Ficino, in the wake of Bruni, accomplishes the complete translation of Plato's works, Ion included, writing the well-known epistle De divino furore. The topic of the furor also appears throughout Landino's writings on Dante and becomes a recurrent subject in poetry as well, as Poliziano' Silvae and Michele Marullo's Hymni naturales bear witness. A century after, the poetic furor would become the fashion within and outside the Italian boundaries. It is unlikely to find a Cinquecento treatise of poetics which did not either deal with or hint at this specific topic. It generally comes from authors who are, first of all, followers of Plato's doctrines, but there are also figures such as Lorenzo Giacomini and Girolamo Fracchetta who put the poetic furor into the bigger frame of agreement between Platonism and Aristotelism. However, best results for the development of such matter still come from Platonism. Francesco Patrizi, in his investigation on divine inspiration of primitive poetry, denies the Aristotelian principle of mimesis. Bruno had already put this principle into discussion in the dialogue De gli eroici furori, which is, in the end, a treatise on enthusiasm. In the seventeenth century, the topic of poetic enthusiasm appears throughout literary treatise writing, from Campanella to Tesauro, in more concealed ways. Only in the eighteenth century, the topic of divine inspiration in poetry becomes again, both in Italy and Europe, one of the central subjects of aesthetic treatise writings. Shaftesbury's Letter concerning Enthusiasm and Voltarie's entry on «enthousiasme» in the Dictionnaire philosophique represent the two key-texts on the matter of poetic enthusiasm. In Italy, the topic appears in Gravina's Della ragion poetica, with his theory of «delirium», a treatise often quoted by authors such as Foscolo and Leopardi, as well as in Muratori's Della perfetta poesia, where the author specifically refers to the topic of poetic furor. Conti's Trattato de' fantasmi poetici, Vico's De mente heroica and De Ratione, and Bettinelli's Dell'entusiasmo delle belle arti are other important works where the topic of enthusiasm recur. Not to forget the Pseudo-Longinus' On the Sublime, a fundamental reference text on the matter of aesthetics all over the eighteenth and nineteenth century, where the author refers to inspiration as «a whisper full of enthusiasm» through which a god penetrates into pure souls. The treatise On the Sublime is a primary source of Alfieri, who, in the Del principe e delle lettere, takes up the Pseudo-Longinus's ideas and develops, in terms of aesthetics, a theory of creativity based on the role of poetic genius. Further references to the topic of poetic enthusiasm also come from authors who belong to the so called Italian Pre-Romantic period, such as Cesarotti, with his work on Ossian's Poems and Pindemonte, with reference to his Epistole and Sermoni. With the coming of the poetics of Romanticism, the topic of poetic enthusiasm reaches its peak in terms of debate, especially in Germany and England. As to Italy, the authors who extensively treat the subject of poetic enthusiasm are Foscolo, especially with the Dell'origine e dell'ufficio della letteratura, Di Breme, and Leopardi. For Leopardi, the poetic enthusiasm represents a constant matter of reflection, since his early writings, such as Lettera ai sigg. compilatori della Biblioteca italiana. Also, the pivotal passage of the Zibaldone di Pensieri, after defying poetry as «facoltà divina» («divine faculty») Leopardi affirms, in the wake of Pope's preface to Shakespeare's works, that the poet doesn't imitate Nature, since Nature speaks through him. Leopardi's case, who unconsciously is on the same wavelength as the most revolutionary aspects of the European aesthetic theories of Romanticism, clearly shows how the meditation on poetic enthusiasm stimulates and goes beyond the traditional Aristotelian mimetic principle, which represents one of the most notable connotations of the modern aesthetic thought

Sul tradurre in Landolfi: tra teoria e fisiologia

L’intervento si propone di approfondire le riflessioni teoriche di Tommaso Landolfi intorno al tradurre, così come emergono sia dagli scritti di accompagnamento a certe opere da lui stesso tradotte, sia dagli articoli di carattere giornalistico, in gran parte mai raccolti in volume. Pur essendo convinto, al pari di Croce e degli amati romantici, che tradurre un’opera poetica in modo autentico non fosse propriamente possibile, Landolfi insisté più volte sull’utilità delle traduzioni, specie dalle lingue meno diffuse, e si impegnò in prima persona, fin dagli anni Trenta, a tradurre e divulgare i classici della letteratura russa in Italia (si pensi alla vasta e importante antologia dei Narratori russi che curò per Bompiani nel 1948). Oltre a molti classici della prosa, Landolfi tradusse, specie nella seconda fase del suo itinerario letterario, esemplari sillogi delle poesie di Puškin, Lermontov e Tjutčev. E in questo caso il tradurre diviene per lui un fondamentale presupposto per la sua attività di poeta in proprio (poi affidata alle tarde raccolte Viola di morte, del 1972, e Il tradimento, del 1977). Ma per Landolfi il tradurre fu anche e sopratutto espressione di una «mania dell’impossibile»: la stessa mania che gli dettò le pagine migliori della sua opera più propriamente creativa. The paper aims at investigating Tommaso Landolfi’s theoretical reflections on translation as they are in the author’s notes to his own versions and newspaper articles, which have been so far not collected together. Although Landolfi believed, in the wake of Croce and the Romatics, that an authentic act of translation was not possible, he claimed the utility of translations, especially in the case of languages which were then marginal to the Italian literary canon. This is way from the 1930’s onward he attended to the diffusion and translation of Russian classics into Italian such as in the case of the pioneering collection of Russian authors (Narratori russi) edited by Bompiani in 1948. Landolfi’s interest for Russian literature brought him to translate, especially in the second part of his life, also exemplary poetic collections by Puškin, Lermontov e Tjutčev. The act of translation becomes here the fundamental means of interpretation of Landolfi’s poetic activity, as it is in his late collections Viola di morte (1972) and Il tradimento (1977). However, Landolfi’s taste for translation was above all the expression of an «impossible mania», that uncontrolled creative feeling that dictated also his best and most inspired literary works.</p

Traces of a Friendship. Gustaw Herling-Grudziński and Elémire Zolla

The aim of this article is to show the relationship between Gustaw Herling-Grudziński and Elémire Zolla through their letters, until now unpublished, kept in the Archive of Herling-Grudziński in Naples. The letters sent to Herling-Grudziński by Zolla are published here for the first time. The literary relation between the two writers and intellectualists can also be traced in Zolla’s review of Herling-Grudziński’s volume of short stories Pale d’altare, translated into Italian and published in Italy, as well as in Herling’s-Grudziński review of Zolla’s novel Cecilia o la disattenzione.The aim of this article is to show the relationship between Gustaw Herling-Grudziński and Elémire Zolla through their letters, until now unpublished, kept in the Archive of Herling-Grudziński in Naples. The letters sent to Herling-Grudziński by Zolla are published here for the first time. The literary relation between the two writers and intellectualists can also be traced in Zolla’s review of Herling-Grudziński’s volume of short stories Pale d’altare, translated into Italian and published in Italy, as well as in Herling’s-Grudziński review of Zolla’s novel Cecilia o la disattenzione

Effect of Intraoperative High Positive End-Expiratory Pressure (PEEP) With Recruitment Maneuvers vs Low PEEP on Postoperative Pulmonary Complications in Obese Patients: A Randomized Clinical Trial (vol 321, pg 2292, 2019)

status: publishe