Quaderni del ‘900 | 2018 | N. 18

This essay is part of a Departmental Research Project coordinated by Simona Costa and called Luigi Pirandello : the library, the papers, the letters, which takes stock of Pirandello studies by going back to his cultural education and reviewing what is left of his private library, with a focus on the writer’s relationships, partly with the support of the dedications and notes scribbled in his books. Actually, analysing such records, meant reviewing not only every single text for the many marks left by the author while reading them, but also the scattered notes, the notebooks and epistolary collections that had not been completely investigated yet. As is known, what is left of Pirandello’s library is not a well-organised collection of the books that left their mark on Pirandello’s cultural education : in addition to a few occasional or gifted works, just a small part of the books his knowledge was built on could be retrieved from there. Just think that next to nothing is left of his Italian classics, and the texts that were essential for Pirandello’s learning, such as works by Alfred Binet, Giovanni Marchesini or Gabriel Séailles, are missing. This essay tries to find specific instances in which the epistolary collections, notes and notebooks contained in the extant books may help understand how the writer developed his culture and his creative skills.

The purpose of this paper is to relate, based on unpublished or partly-unpublished letters, the contradictory philosophy of Edoardo Scarfoglio, in the run-up to the First World War. It mainly deals with the ten Letters on War (only partly published) sent from the journalist to Hon. Pasquale Masciantonio between October and December 1915, so that the latter could share them with the politicians he knew. The letters were sent from Masciantonio to Giolitti on 12th December 1915 and are now in the Fondo Giolitti-Cavour, in the Central State Archives in Rome. In chronicling Scarfoglio’s reflections about Italy’s involvement in the war, it will be crucial to retrieve even the writer’s articles published that year on « Il Mattino » (censored and never republished).

Based on unpublished records from Fondo G. A. Borgese, this essay tries to piece together and review an unusual “rereading” of Rubè by the author himself, whose positions were part of the vast critical debate that the novel aroused in the literary society of that time. They are apologetic reflections and comments, quotes or suggestive references to articles, which are evidence of a carefully- considered rethinking of the 1921 novel, when he was an exile in the USA, and the eventual re-enactment of the tight web of human and intellectual relations that Borgese established with some of the most prominent figures of the international literary society in the early 20th century.

Taking inspiration from the epistolary records in the Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset Archives, this article sheds light on some episodes concerning the success of Spanish literature in Italy, especially in the magazines, looking for connections in the network of contacts that bonded Italy and Spain in the first few decades of the century and which eventually led to the rediscovery of Spanish literature in Italy.

The tight correspondence between Enrico Falqui and Giuseppe De Robertis consists of 1597 letters, which describe the cultural climate of a long period, from 1933 to 1963, and testify not only to the deep friendly bond that joined the two men but also to their outstanding vision, which they applied as much to philology as to editing. In addition to an extraordinary aptitude for management and editing, this paper showcases some projects from the Forties that perfectly encapsulate their close partnership : the publication of Poesie Disperse with a critical section about all the variant readings of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s poems edited by De Robertis, the first genetic edition of the work of a living author, the publication of Dino Campana’s Orphic Songs edited by Falqui, and the drafting of an anthology of 20th-century Italian short stories for the publishing house Sansoni, edited by both of them.

This paper looks at the way documentary sources were put together to describe the exchange of correspondence between Giorgio Caproni and Vittorio Sereni. A wide array of diverse Italian literary archives was searched : this essay thoroughly describes how such records were accessed, as well as the amount and relevance of such records. The core of such records, which were the letters, was found in Archivio Vittorio Sereni in Luino, Archivio Contemporaneo « A. Bonsanti » of Gabinetto « G. P. Vieusseux » and the National Central Library in Florence. Additional documentary details came from the « G. Marconi » Library in Bologna, the Historical Archives of Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori, and the Centre for Research in the Manuscript Tradition of Modern and Contemporary Authors at the University of Pavia.

Largely based on documentary records from several archives (Manuscripts Centre at the University of Pavia, Ossolineum in Wroclaw, Archiwum Akt Nowych in Warsaw), this essay, focused on Quasimodo’s translations of four poems by Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), a Polish classic writer, celebrated as a prophet in his country, is actually a case study that fully endorses the aptness of Munday’s comments. The archival sources, mainly literary ones, provide quite a lot of opportunities to study the strategies and working methods of translator, as well as the relationships between intellectuals and cultural policies, on a global scale. 1955 was the ‘Adam Mickiewicz Year’, proclaimed to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the death of the great Polish poet. Celebrations in honour of the poet took place in 1955 and 1956, both in Poland and abroad, with the Polish cultural diplomacy playing a key role. The main celebrations in Warsaw were also attended by an Italian delegation of intellectuals, friends of Poland and experts in Polish literature, such as Salvatore Quasimodo. For the occasion, Quasimodo had translated a few poems by Mickiewicz, which were later included in Mondadori’s edition of the collection Il falso e vero verde (1956). The autograph translations of Mickiewicz’s poems are in the Fondo Quasimodo in Pavia : five drafts of When My Corpse (four manuscripts with variant readings and a typewritten draft with handwritten corrections), two draft manuscripts (with variant readings) of Alushta By Night, and one draft of Alushta By Day. The manuscript of My Tears were flowing…, the translator’s favourite poem, according to the Breza report, is missing. The autograph texts from Pavia, which have not been thoroughly investigated yet, provide an extremely precious insight into Quasimodo’s interpretative and creative quest. Crammed with corrections and variant readings, as well as notes about metrics and stress patterns, they give readers a close look into the Italian poet’s translating method.

In this article, unpublished or partly-unknown epistolary records are used to describe a little episode regarding the literary society of the Fifties and calls the experts to focus their attention once again on the beginnings and career of Luciano De Giovanni, a poet and a shy plumber who could count on the high esteem and acquaintances of Carlo Betocchi and on an encouraging comment from Vittorio Sereni. A selection from the first collection of De Giovanni’s poems can be found in the Addendum.

Cryptic broken conversations, full of subtexts, literary correspondence is often more telling in its tone than in its bio-bibliographic details : in the correspondence between Erba and Scheiwiller, which I tried to bring together in this article, Vanni Scheiwiller does not dispel the myth of the publisher who is always on the run, with lots of things to do, books to read (« In ‘63 I published 53 booklets – one a week – and by the end of the year I was exhausted ») and plans to follow through. He hammered Erba into bundling the few unpublished works he has received, some extravagantes poems and Erba’s translations of Jean de Sponde into a booklet – Rorate coeli ed altre poesie – which, despite Scheiwiller’s firm resolve, would ideally add to the long list of that « catalogue of books I have not published, the opportunities I have missed, the expectations I have failed », which the « useless » publisher would often regret not having issued.

The text is split into two parts. The first part, which is divided into sections, tries to understand Pasolini’s works through an indepth, far-ranging chronicle of the events that took place in his time: all of Pasolini’s works, from his first poems to his films, from his drawings to his journalism, is approached as the result of a never-ending poetic and artistic quest, and as an attempt to establish a dialogue with the community of his time. Once the work and its complexity have been fully described, the Addendum explains the way the records are preserved in the archives and how Pasolini’s legacy is dealt with by different specialist institutions.