November 22, 2010

Given the circumstances, it is not surprising that an initiative to diffuse accurate English editions of one hundred Italian classics was inspired by, and took its name from such a man: the Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library was created some years ago, and has now reached its half-way point.  The works to be translated are chosen among those which have had great influence abroad, but which today, for various reasons, are no longer read or well known.  We are not speaking of Dante’s Comedy, then, neither Orlando Furioso; instead attention is being brought to Ariosto’s lesser-known Letters, Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments, Benedetto Croce’s Breviary of Aesthetics, and the writings of Norberto Bobbio, among others.  The volumes are published by the University of Toronto Press, the university publishing house most attentive to Italian authors and the most important in North America-also in regard to its size- that manages to easily put books on the shelves in bookstores.

For example, as Luigi Ballerini of UCLA (who along with his colleague Massimo Ciavolella is the General Editor of the series) reminds us, 500 copies of the first volume of the series, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well by Pellegrino Artusi, are reprinted every year, after the first edition sold out in a short amount of time.  Obviously, these copies ended up in the hands of an elite and not the general public, but it is precisely for this reason that they should be considered a bit “heavier”; that is, more profound. “We are reintroducing these books because they have interacted significantly with the cultures of other countries,” Ballerini explains. “Think of Beccaria’s influence on English law, or the fact that of John Florio inspired Shakespeare with his English-Italian dictionary, A World of Words.”  These books are primarily destined for university courses, especially in a country like America, where, according to Ballerini, “Italian as a language continues to be in demand, even though the literature has been suffocated by the proliferation of cross-disciplines, like Gender Studies.  But this happens in our country as well.”

The Da Ponte Italian Library was created by Ambassador Gian Franco Facco Bonetti, at that time the Director of Cultural Promotion for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and is endorsed by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and the Cassamarca Foundation.  It started ten years ago with a budget of 300 million liras that would serve to publish the first twenty-five books.  Now there are already sixteen volumes published, five awaiting publication, and ten in preparation. “It has saved itself,” says Ballerini, but the operation, even with a bare-bones budget, is not yet financially independent. “In order to manage by ourselves we would need a catalogue of at least fifty available titles,” explains the expert.  For this reason a new endorsement would be necessary.  He will speak about it Thursday at the Vecelliana Library in Chiesa Nuova Square in Rome, with all of the principal players of this great enterprise.

From Da Ponte, the Seducer’s Classics by Mario Baudino

November 16, 2010

The project will be launched today in Italy, but abroad it has already been in the works for ten years.  One needs only to take a look at the catalogue in order to appreciate the significance of the initiative: the list of works already published reveals the astonishing gap that they will be filling.  Among the titles that have been given new life, there are milestones of Italian thought that have had global influences, such as On Crimes and Punishments by Cesare Beccaria, Breviary of Aesthetics by Benedetto Croce and Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well by Pellegrino Artusi.  Forthcoming titles that will be presented at the press conference include works by Giordano Bruno, Carlo Goldoni, and Amerigo Vespucci.

The Library is named after the great librettist of Mozart, who established the first American professorship of Italian in New York in the nineteenth century.  The Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library was created by an initiative of Ambassador Gian Franco Facco Bonetti, Chief Executive of Cultural Promotion and Cooperation for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  It is endorsed by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and the Cassamarca Foundation, and is directed by two leading figures of the academic and cultural world, Professors Luigi Ballerini and Massimo Ciavolella of UCLA.

The Vallicelliana Library meeting is coordinated by the director, Maria Concetta Petrollo Pagliarini, and will be attended by Ambassador Gian Franco Facco Bonetti, Director-general of the Department of books, Cultural Institutions and Copyright Maurizio fallace, Vice-director of Cultural Promotion and Cooperation Vincenza Lomonaco, President of the Cassamarca Foundation Dino de Poli, General Editors of the Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library Massimo Ciavolella and Luigi Ballerini, and, representing the Library’s Scientific Committee, Remo Bodei.

In times like these, when we often hear complaints about the state of culture in Italy and elsewhere, we can affirm for once: Anche questa è Italia-luckily, this, too, is Italy.

From Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library: One Hundred Titles of Italian Excellence by Giulia Masperi

November 18, 2010

From Classics: Rediscoveries in English by Renzo M. Grosselli

December 2, 2010

From around 1800, shortly before Pasquale Galluppis first book, until 1950, just before Benedetto Croce died, the most formative influences on Italian philosophers were Kant and the post-Kantians, especially Hegel. In many ways, the Italian philosophers of this period lived in turbulent but creative times, from the Restoration to the Risorgimento and the rise and fall of Fascism.

From Kant to Croce is a comprehensive, highly readable history of the main currents and major figures of modern Italian philosophy, described in a substantial introduction that details the development of the discipline during this period. Brian P. Copenhaver and Rebecca Copenhaver provide the only up-to-date introduction in English to Italys leading modern philosophers by translating and analysing rare and original texts and by chronicling the lives and times of the philosophers who wrote them. Thoroughly documented and highly readable, From Kant to Croce examines modern Italian philosophy from the perspective of contemporary analytic philosophy.

Cloth: ISBN 9781442642669 $ 115.00 US plus S&H

Introduction by Luigi Ballerini Notes by Federica Santini

No postwar literature has been as fundamentally and relentlessly experimental as Italian poetry since the mid-1950s. In the forefront of this renewed interest in experimentation were five neo-avant-garde poets called the Novissimi, from the 1961 publication of their anthology of the same name. Their work exploded the aesthetic conventions and tolerances of their contemporaries, fostering wave after wave of innovative poets and fiction writers in Italy and other countries. The five poets of the Novissimi Nanni Balestrini, Alfredo Giuliani, Elio Pagliarani, Antonio Porta, and Edoardo Sanguineti shared a definite sense of linguistic crisis, demanding of poetry a life within the critical moment. This newly annotated bilingual edition of I Novissimi features both the original 1961, and the 1965 introduction by Alfredo Giuliani, as well as his foreword for the first North American edition of the anthology (Sun and Moon Press, 1995). Included are also the poets statements on poetics that have accompanied the anthology since its inception. I Novissimi is an invaluable tool in the recontextualization of the critical debate on Poetry that has pervaded Europe in the second half of the twentieth century.

Edited with an Introduction by Peter Mentzel and Filippo Sabetti

Contarini (1483-1542) served Venice and the Catholic church in multiple capacities. His book places in sharp relief the constitutional and institutional dynamics that made the Republic of Venice the longest-lived, self-constituted commercial republic. The book remained a primary source of knowledge about Venice since it was first published in 1543. The publication in English in 1599 helped to make it famous beyond the Latin-reading public in Europe. More recently, Eisabeth G. Gleason has written an engaging biography of Contarini entitled Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome and Reform (University of California Press, 1993); in his study of Controlling the State: Constitutionalism from Ancient Athens to Today (Harvard University Press, 1999), Scott Gordon draws heavily on Contarini to discuss how controlling the state happened in Venice. Contarini’s The Commonwealth and Government of Venice is an invaluable tool for connecting modern readers to the richness of the Italian political tradition.

A Critical Edition with an Introduction, by Herman W. Haller

A Worlde of Wordes is the first comprehensive large-size bilingual Italian-English dictionary published in 1598 by John Florio, one of the most prominent linguists and educators in Elizabethan England. As a genuine work of art the dictionary is a reflection of Florios three major endeavors, namely his work as a collector of words and proverbs, as teacher of Italian and grammarian, and as translator and creative writer. The dictionarys 46,000 Italian entries and its exuberant wealth of English definitions made it possible for cultivated English readers to access for thr first time Italys rich Renaissance literary and scientific culture, and to appreciate different social registers, dialect forms, erotic terminology, colloquial phrases, and proverbs of the Italian language in one of its most crucial moments, just a few years before the authoritative monolingual dictionary of the Academia della Crusca. The semi-diplomatic edition of A Worlde of Wordes is aimed at showing John Florio at work at the time of great popularity of the Italian language in England, highlighting his proficency as a polyglot, his didactic and encyclopedic interest, as well as some imperfections owed to early bilingual lexicography. While anticipating the famed translation of Montaignes Essais by a few years, the dictionary evokes Florio’s linguistic passion and love of words, and his enthusiastic life-long dedication to promoting Italian language and culture abroad.