Strumenti critici | 2023 | N. 162

The article aims to show how the co-presence of languages becomes a matrix of writing in the two multilingual writers Chamoiseau and Nabokov. Chamoiseau invents a new genre (Une enfance créole) from his experience of languages: if in his childhood Creole and French coexist harmoniously, it will then be the school that introduces the hierarchy between domain language and Creole. For Nabokov, it is the retranslation into English from the Russian of the autobiography, originally written in English, that provokes a posteriori affective reconquest of the mother tongue and animates his writing with the feeling of loss.

E.T.A. Hofmann’s short story The Sandman (1817) has been interpreted from various perspectives, which are all valuable and integrate one another. This essay suggests a further reading by identifying the death anguish as the main thread of the story, which even explains other motifs such as the double and narcissism. Only suicide as a drastic assertion of individualism can release the protagonist Nathanael from his thanatophobia.

The dialogue that Italo Calvino and Leonardo Sciascia had for more than a quarter of the century offers an example of an extraordinary intellectual and literary confrontation, as well as an interesting page in the history of culture. The most significant moments coincide with two occasions for civil, political, and cultural debate of decisive importance in the history of our country, Italy, arising from the reaction of the Left Intelligentsia to the Khrushchev report and from the concerns aroused twenty years later by the opening of the assize process to the Red Brigades preceding the kidnapping of Moro. In some way, these are the two chronological extremes that in fact mark the concrete start and the substantial conclusion of the lively and frank confrontation between Calvino and Sciascia, in both circumstances counterpointed by important narrative and non-narrative pages written by these two authors.

In the extensive inventory of Italo Calvino’s favourite artists (documented by the collections of texts Guardare, recently published), no artist of the time was more attuned to him than Giulio Paolini. La squadratura, the text Calvino dedicated to Polini in 1975, has long been recognized as the decisive “preparatory drawingµ for his “hyper-novelµ Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, published four years later. Less known are Calvino’s further critical pages, currently unpublished, which continue in the direction started with La squadratura and develop it in a narrative direction. This essay also explores the narrative function of the character Irnerio, an artist inspired by Paolini, who acts in the narrative frameworks and has a crucial role in the novel’s plot.

The article takes into examination the Canzoniere italiano, a collection of popular songs and chants in dialect published by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1955. It focuses on the section dedicated to Friuli, and it analyses the choice of typical traditional songs, the so-called villotte, and provides a thematic and stylistic analysis. Furthermore, the article explores how Pasolini translated the Friulian, a dialect which is very difficult to translate. Finally, a final Appendix provides the texts of the villotte that Pasolini published in Academiuta’s Friulian magazines between 1944 and 1947, but that he did not include in the Canzoniere.

This essay compares the protagonists of two of the most important recent novels by Philip Roth, The Sabbath’s Theater and The Dying Animal, with various references to Roth’s previous works. The stories of both Mickey Sabbath and David Kepesh can be both read as the epitaph of the phallocentric and predatory white male, problematic protagonist of Roth’s narrative, at least since The Portnoy’s Complaint.

The unpublished poem by Carlo Levi, Il tuo paese e il mio, Thomas, discovered in a collection of poems by Dylan Thomas edited and translated into Italian by Roberto Sanesi, kept in Amelia Rosselli’s personal library, contains intertextual references to Levi’s masterpiece Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli and to the poems written during his internment. The poem dialogues with Dylan Thomas’ poetry, and it is also significant to interpret Amelia Rosselli’s Impromptu, where the final section echoes the opposition drawn by Levi between ‘Great Literature’ and popular poetry and between History with a capital ‘H’ and the history of humble people.

The essay proposes a new review of the figures and personifications of Jealousy in Torquato Tasso’s definitive collection of love poems, the Mantuan Osanna edition (1591). Firstly, it points out the formal and structural connections which relate a handful of sonnets to the well-known Cura, che di timor ti nutri e cresci, by Giovanni Della Casa. Then, it focuses on the multiform representations of the feeling according to a series of poems placed in the second part of the book (CV-CLXXX), in praise of a woman named Laura, especially by investigating the friction of this main theme with the prevalent idea of a sublime and spiritualized love.