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Archivio di Lettere Italiane: Introduzione | Indice 1-100 | Indice 101-200 | Indice 201-300 | Indice 301-380
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New books: Dante, Montale[11-4-1996]La Foundation for Italian Studies dello University College di Dublino ha pubblicato recentemente i seguenti volumi: *Dante and the Middle Ages: Literary and Historical Essays*, a cura di John C. Barnes e Cormac O'Cuilleanain (Dublino, Irish Academic Press), pp. 319, ISBN 0.7165.2527.5, prezzo IEP 25,00. George Talbot, *Montale's "Mestiere Vile": The Elective Translations from English of the 1930s and 1940s* (Dublino, Irish Academic Press), pp. 271, ISBN 0.7165.2526.7, prezzo IEP 25,00. Chi desideri acquistare i volumi dovrebbe contattare la casa editrice: Irish Academic Press Ltd Segue, in lingua inglese, una descrizione piu' dettagliata dei due libri: The essays contained in *Dante and the Middle Ages* are based on lectures forming part of the annual Dante Series in UCD between 1987 and 1993. Historical enquiries open the sequence: Christine Meek scrutinizes Dante's experience of city-state life and exile; Diana Webb pursues the theme of saints and pilgrims in Dante's Italy; Peter Biller examines Florentine culture's engagement with demographic issues around 1300. The next three contributions might be broadly situated in the history of ideas. Yolande de Pontfarcy reviews recent work on the origins of Purgatory and maintains that Dante's conception of the afterlife may well have been influenced by two texts of Celtic provenance; Christopher Ryan challenges the usual view that Dante's understanding of the Incarnation simply replicates that of St Anselm; Zygmunt Baranski explores Dante's debt to theories about God's communication with mankind by means of signs. Clotilde Soave-Bowe surveys Dante's references to members of the Swabian dynasty and gives a detailed reading of the Manfred episode in *Purgatorio* III. Teresa Hankey offers fresh insights into the prophetic roles of Dante and particularly his re-created character Virgil. John Barnes finds that Dante had a remarkably extensive knowledge of the liturgy, and considers the poet's use of that knowledge in creating liturgies of his own in the *Commedia*. The last two essays, chronologicaly speaking, reach out beyond Dante: Jean-Michel Picard weaves a cultural web which links Italy with Ireland both before and after Dante; Deborah Parker concludes a critical survey of modern scholarship on Dante's early commentators with a plea for awareness of cultural tradition as this scholarship enters the era of the database. *Montale's "Mestiere Vile"* examines Montale's uncommissioned translations from English composed during a period in which translation was widely seen as a way, often in covert protest against Fascism, to break out of a narrow and ossified literary tradition. Montale's own work is seen as an appropriation of a foreign (Anglo-American) tradition in the interests of exploring new poetic possibilities in Italian. George Talbot scrutinizes Montale's approach to translation in the context of the theories of Walter Benjamin and Roman Jakobson, and uses the concept of intertextuality to relate the poet's translation work to his creative writing. Montale's encounter with Modernism is seen in his reading of Joyce's short stories and his translations of T. S. Eliot. His reassessment of tradition is considered in the light of his work on Shakespeare's sonnets and the presence of Shakespeare in his poetry. Translations from Emily Dickinson, Hopkins, Melville and W. H. Hudson are examined as significant for Montale's own poetic practice, while his versions of Blake, Hardy, Joyce, Yeats, Leonie Adams and Dylan Thomas are considered more briefly as acts of ambiguous homage. This work should be of interest to students of both Italian and English literature as well as those involved in translation studies, and also to the general reader of poetry.
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