Rivista di letteratura comparata italiana, bizantina e neoellenica | 2017 | N. 1

Aristotle’s reception, beginning with the era of the translation movement (viii and ix century CE), in the Islamic Orient certainly had a crucial role and was conditioned by various events and elements, including political and scientific preferences. The works of Aristotle Peri; poihtikh`~ and Peri; rJhtorikh`~ were hampered by significant errors of interpretation, caused by imprecise and obscure translations from Syriac. They came to the hands of Persian philosophers such as Farabi and Avicenna, in order to be analyzed furtherly by Ebn-e Roshd (Averroes). The aforementioned works were mostly perceived and read by Oriental philosophers with a logical or political point of view. In this article we have tried to compare the rhetorical structure of simile in dolce stil novo, with the structure of this figure of speech in Persian classical poetry, influenced somehow through the Greek rhetoric treaties (Aristotle) and subsequently translated into Persian and Arabic by bilingual authors. Through this comparison we can also analyze an important part of imagery in medieval Italian literature, characterized by clarity and transparency in relation to the criteria of the Persian ars rimandi, namely formal delicacy and grace of language.

This article makes three claims. First, it proposes that Hellenists should go beyond the idea that Renaissance writers, such as the Cretan Vitsentsos Kornaros, worked by committing themselves faithfully to following a single archetype : instead, they felt free to absorb freely from multiple, often unacknowledged, sources, a culture of fluidity which they inherited from traditional medieval plurality. Second, it suggests that the mythological idyll Il pianto d’Aretusa (Venice 1580) by Bernardino Martirano (1490-1548), might have been one of the unacknoledged sources on which Kornaros drew for his Erotokritos and Aretousa, a fundamental Early Modern Greek romance. The third claim the article makes is that Kornaros could have been interested in Martirano’s work on two grounds : a) a nobleman, like Martirano himself, Kornaros was concerned with a rethink of the role of aristocracy within the broad social changes of incoming Renaissance; b) just as Martirano resisted the ‘modern’ tendency for standard Italian, and wrote in his local Calabrian, which secured the traditional polyphony the Middle Ages had enjoyed, Kornaros revisited a, socially dated, literary form, the heroic courtly romance, in order to create a new, more personal, hero in Greek romance. His frame of mind is dubbed ‘conservative modernity’.

A mature Vittorio Alfieri, already a very successful lyric and tragic poet, commenced in 1796 his endeavours to learn Greek. The language would allow him to get to know the ancient literature as well as broaden his horizons and experiment in a fresh and authentic style, in a perfect and clear verse which was worthy of the great classics. He was about to conquer a new tool of expression conducive both to satirical poetry and to creating an especially powerful comic language.

The article examines the reception of Giacomo Leopardi in Greece since 1837, the year of the Italian poet’s death, until the middle of the 19th century. Focusing on the first critical texts on the work of Leopardi which were published in Greece in the above period, the author presents a different point of view on the subject than the one that the bibliography had provided until the early years of the 2000s. The article is completed with some remarks on the relationship between Leopardi’s first Canzoni and one of the most important representatives of Modern Greek poetry in the first half of the 19th century, Andreas Kalvos, trying to deliver a first parallel reading the two poets’ work.

Dionysios Solomòs wrote many poems in Italian, the total number is almost one hundred, as most of the poets of the Ionian Islands did. Thirty are the sonnets entitled Rime Improvvisate (1822) which he composed as exercises in improvisation on themes and rhymes (rime obligate) suggested to him by friends. Thirteen of those sonnets draw on the Song of Songs, as do another nine sonnets which were not finally included in Rime Impovvisate. It is extremely interesting how the specific scriptural book inspired the Greek national poet who, then, expressed himself in Italian.

The article deals with a Greek manuscript of a text that Niccolò Tommaseo included, in a later Italian version, in his prosimetrum entitled Scintille (1841). The aim of the study is to give information on the manuscript and to evaluate the variations between the two redactions. The original text, defined by Tommaseo as a « Greek aphorism », was included in his letter to Emilio de Tipaldo written between the 3rd and the 4th June 1840. The analysis starts with the contextualization of the original text and continues with the transcription of its first Greek redaction. The corrections of Tommaseo’s ortography made by de Tipaldo’s young daughter Eloisa are also offered along with Tommaseo’s Italian self-translation included in the letter to his friend. This Italian version is finally compared to the one published the following year in the Scintille, with a particular attention to the differences in images and rhythm.

The aesthetics of the Grotesque comprises two heterogenous elements : the tragicomic including the mysterious, and the frightening wich might contain the hideous. From this pair, and their parallel struggle, disharmony and the sense of paradox are created. Historically, the term grotesque is met in visual arts, when it was given to the phantasmagoric frescoes found in apartments, (grotte : crypts) of Roman buildings in the end of the 15th century. During the 16thcentury, the term is used in Italy to describe the art of painting and the more general artistic culture in which actual natural symbols decompose and their members are redistributed in an imaginary way. Later, it is included into the new-born art of scenography (stage design), thanks to the work of eminent Italian architects, such as Sebastiano Serlio (1475-1554), Bastiano da Sangallo (1481-1551), or Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), until in the 20th century, it is met in the typically Italian theatrical and artistical movement of grottesco, which also flourishes in Greece.

Yannis Ritsos is one of the most famous Modern Greek poets of the so-called «Generation of the 1930s», acclaimed worldwide. However, his poetry has particularly attracted the attention of the intellectuals and public in Italy, and, interestingly enough, so have his plays. Ritsos’s work has been translated into Italian and the poet was awarded a number of International Prizes in Italy and travelled to the country for at least seven times between 1976 and 1990, visiting more than 20 places there. During his trips, either he wrote down notes, as if he kept a diary, with his impressions or he composed relevant verses on the spot. Three collections of poems came as a result of those verses Ritsos’ trips to Italy inspired him, which form the Italian Triptych. Nonetheless, not only did Ritsos draw inspiration from Italy but so did some contemporary Italian authors, who were particularly interested in his poetry and biography and incorporated several aspects of them into their work.

Stefano Terra (1917-1986) spent many years as a reporter in the Middle East and Greece and wrote about WWII and post-war important events. Greece became his second homeland and inspired his literary production (poetry and novels), unjustly forgotten nowadays. In my paper I focus on Alexandra (Campiello Prize 1974), a lyric novel set in a Greek island, vibrant with memory, eros and thanatos. An apparently marginal character, the Duchess of Plaisance, a notable historical figure in xix century Athens, becomes prominent and the narrator is captivated by her strange story. Also in this novel Terra reveals that Greece is a landscape of his soul.