Strumenti critici | 2017 | N. 2

As a direct consequence of war and Shoah, Claude Vigée’s poetry and poetics are deeply influenced by the Hebrew tradition, most notably by the figure of the Patriarch Jacob wrestling with the angel of the Lord. Jacob-Israel thus becomes for Vigée the model of the Jew and of the Poet, the archetype of the struggle for a spiritual and ethical life. He will find the ultimate sense of his mission as a Poet in Eretz Israel, the Land of God’s Promise.

Composed by Eugenio Montale in the last, feverish months of 1938, Accelerato features a strong, memorable syntactic and interrogative intensity. The essay presents a new and different reading of this text, with a particular emphasis on the ‘you’, which is crucial for the enunciative impetus of the poem. The identification of the ‘you’ with the author’s sister Marianna, who died on 15 October 1938, is not merely anecdotal, but sheds fuller light on the whole poem, on its sentimental humus and its placement within “Le occasioni”. It also allows us to trace links and similarities between “Accelerato” and subsequent poems in “La Bufera” (“L’arca”, “A mia madre”).

Although rather neglected by critics, Montale’s translation of a few ‘fragments’ from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” proves extremely interesting, especially in light of the deep interaction between Montale’s translation and poetic creation. A study of these “Frammenti” reveals how the poet reads, interprets and recreates the original text through his poetic experience, giving life to something that, while preserving a Shakespearean heart, can be considered a Montalean work.

Together with the Bible and the writings of Jens Peter Jacobsen, St Augustine’s “Confessions” can be numbered among those books that Rilke cannot do without. They are certainly the focus of the poet’s attention in the years following the publication of the “Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge”. Although his acquaintance with the “Confessions” dates back to his early youth, as his letters reveal, 1911 proves to be a crucial year for Rilke’s reading of St Augustine. The essay focuses on Rilke as a reader of the “Confessions” in the “Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge” and explores the poet’s personal quest for God within the context of his correspondence and his poetry.

A distinctive feature of Lampedusa’s “The Leopard” is a structural contrast. At the level of events, a system of anticipations, duplications, and iterations give the impression that nothing unexpected or unprecedented may ever occur. At the level of representation, there is a careful succession of told and untold, of empty and full: both the protagonist and the narrator prefer what is tacitly assumed or just hinted at, according to Stendhal’s ‘syncope method’. On the other hand, the novel claims that in Sicily the truth of facts is always submerged by talk. Gossip, rumours and insinuations create a powerful misleading machine that makes reality unattainable. The prince of Salina tries to keep his distance from this social phenomenon, which in fact the novel only evokes (the reader only perceives muffled echoes). The consequence is paradoxical: in the world of “The Leopard” everything seems unavoidable, but nothing is clear.

A few letters sent by Vittorio Sereni to Enrico Falqui in 1945-46 contain important information regarding the writing processes of his poetry collection “Diario d’Algeria” (1947). Sereni also enclosed a number of poems within his letters, one of which is entitled “Algeria”. Being quite different from the final version published in 1947, this text offers interesting elements for a philological analysis.

This article conceptualises the issue of “marginality” in nineteenth-century British reception of Dante and tackles it from the unexplored prospective of the life and works of a minor Victorian dantista, Philip Henry Wicksteed. It reassesses the pivotal role he had in the dissemination and popularisation of Dantean scholarly knowledge between the late 1870s and the 1910s, through the unconventional – and yet, extremely successful – cycles of sermons and series of lectures for the University Extension Movement.

This essay aims to illustrate the use of the history of Italian and more in general Western ideas in the teaching of culture, art and literature. Its practical aim is to present some reflections and suggestions on the approach of the history of ideas in the teaching of Western culture in Asian universities.