Italian Literature

Ok since I have waaaay too much free time in my hands, I'll ask this question I've had in mind for ages...
What do you know of Italian lit.?
I'm quite surprised to see how many people around the world read Dante, I had no clue it was that popular!
Another surprise was Calvino... Then I remember people mentioning Machiavelli... and Eco, but this was less surprising. Anything else? Petrarca for example? I'd like to be able to give some lessons, but I'm not a good teacher and it's 3 years since I last studied Italian lit. at school, so I don't remember many details, and there's a lot I don't know of course...
So...well...answers, thoughts, ways to get this thread completely off topic? :D Anything is appreciated :)
(i feel a bit like a bartender :D)

Hehehe. I can't think of any Italian literature I've actually read. I had "The Prince" in my shelf for a while, and was planning to read it next, but never did, and now it's back in my dad's shelves. Still haven't read Dante either. :( So..none.

I can't think of any modern Italian authors...as in, within the last 200 years! Tell me some good ones, Koa.

The problem is that I don't have a clue of what has been translated, so quoting all I liked from school (I'm not really into contemporary stuff...) would be pointless and noone would understand me... That's also why I was asking..
Calvino, the author Abdo loved (for those who remember about Abdo) is from the 1900s and is apparently rather popular cos I've heard him mentioned sometimes...

edit: this is Abdo's thread:
http://www.online-literature.com/for...hlight=calvino
but if you search there are others...

re-edit: PS I don't see why someone should read Dante...I can see some sense in doing so for an Italian, but I'm really surprised to see it's considered such a worthy reading... I thought noone knew it! ;) That's why I'm also asking to those who read it what are they finding in it... I think that Paradise Lost, for example, has more of a universal meaning, while the Comedy seems to me so linked to its time and place, so its importance seems historic, and then linguistic... Mah, someone enlighten me ;)

Apart from Umberto Eco, Petrarca and Dante I also heard of Marini (Marino?), Manzoni and Marinetti. Actually during the classes we read a lot about the Italian renaissance. Marini was connected with baroque. With Manzoni I only associate "questione della lingua" and the book The Betrothed. Finally Marinetti created Italian futurism.
As for Dante I really enjoyed his Divine Comedy, although I haven't managed to read it to the end.

The Bethroted!!! Now that's lovely, I've always wondered if it existed a translation of that, and how it was translated! Like Dante's Comedy, it's one of the things we study more in details, and therefore it's hated by every student :D It's infact incredibly boring, I never managed to read it all and I dont think I know anyone who did...

Marini is surely a minor poet, I have heard this name only vaguely, the baroque period is not really considered much, or at least it wasn't by my teacher.

Marinetti and Futurism of course, I guess the Italian futurism was one of the most important futurism movements, if not the main...

Very strange though Monica, I didn't expect people to know these things... :) Interesting!!!

I love Petrarca...there's an exhibition in Padova, the city near where he lived part of his life, which is just 2 hour of train from me...I must go and see it, there are manuscipts etc...cos it's the 700th anniversary of his birth :D

I still can't get how can the Comedy be really enjoyed... Btw, what kind of translation do you read? Modern? For us it's so weird, such an oooold language, most owrds are different from nowadays. And, at least in the kind of school I was at, we studied that for 3 years, enough to bore everyone... Infact I didnt really hate it at first, but by the 3rd year Dante-lesson was a good sleep (Hell is fun, Purgatory is quite flat, Paradise is so boring!)...I remember there's a line in Paradise where there's a bad word, the teacher 'translated' it in current Italian without any problems and everybody woke up! You could see all the heads getting up from the desks where they were lying in sleep... ;) :D ;)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Koa

re-edit: PS I don't see why someone should read Dante...I can see some sense in doing so for an Italian, but I'm really surprised to see it's considered such a worthy reading... I thought noone knew it! ;) That's why I'm also asking to those who read it what are they finding in it... I think that Paradise Lost, for example, has more of a universal meaning, while the Comedy seems to me so linked to its time and place, so its importance seems historic, and then linguistic... Mah, someone enlighten me ;)

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It's very worth reading, and as a tale on human pilgrimage, it's probably even more so than Paradise, even though I loved that one as well. It has more details to it, and I didn't feel I was reading something off place. The hell part is astounding to read, and the heaven part is a tough one to understand, but that's part of the challenge. Besides, Dante's Comedy is highly regarded among authors, if you're looking for aditional motives for reading it.

Oop -- iddying off to get my dad's copy and see what the language is like...okay, okay, and also to get an eclair. :p

Okay. I have here Dante Alighieri / THE DIVINE COMEDY: The Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso / A New Translation into English Blank Verse by Lawrence Grant White / with Illustrations by Gustave Doré / New York: Pantheon Books MCMXLVIII.

Translator's note: "...The luckless translator can never recapture the beauty of Dante's music. He must try to convey the meaning, often obscure, as musically as he can in another tongue. In this version the aim has been to tell Dante's story as simply and accurately as possible. Any archaic and unfamiliar constructions that would impede the swift pace of the narrative have been avoided ... As the terza rima form of the original is alien to English, blank verse has been chosen, the form used by Milton in Paradise Lost."

And we begin:
"Midway up on the journey of our life
I found that I was in a dusky wood;
For the right path, whence I had strayed, was lost.
Ah me! How hard a thing it is to tell
The wildness of that rough and savage place,
The very thought of which brings back my fear!
So bitter was it, death is little more so:
But that the good I found there may be told,
I will describe the other things I saw..."

So, a pretty modern style of language. And yes, it's quite famous. It's one of those you hear a lot of references to in popular culture, and just grow up being aware of, like Shakespeare. Well, the Inferno, anyway. I think a lot of people think "The Inferno" is the name of the book. :p

Ok, I didn't really think that it was often referred to in culture, I thought it was an obscure stuff that only very educated people could know... I like that archaic and unfamiliar constructions that would impede the swift pace of the narrative have been avoided cos at times it can get pretty much unreadable...Anyway that guy (Dante) was very sick to imagine such a story and most of all to write it ALL with that rhyme pattern (at school we often wonder which drugs he took and where could we find them nowadays ;) :D). Uhm do you know that during his exile he stayed in Verona too, then dedicated the Paradise (if I'm not wrong) to the guy who hosted, and also a few lines in don't remember where. Now there's a statue of him in one of the most beautiful squares :)

I learnt by heart the first 4th stanzas some 10 years ago at school and never forgot them (well everybody knows at least the first 2-3 lines, also in funny variations ;)), but some decades ago people were forced to learn whole pages ouch!

http://digilander.libero.it/bepi/ Here you can find the text just incase...(btw, he's under Alighieri, not just Dante)
http://www.mediasoft.it/dante/ here it has a better layout... and also has footnotes like the books we use at school, they have more footnotes than text sometimes, sometimes just to explain what the hell (;)) he's saying - when I got distracted at lessons I had a hard time in finding out the meaning.

Btw, he called it just Comedy to make it clear he was talking of an universal topic, using the 'low' language of comedies...then someone (I think it was Boccaccio, another important author (which I really don't like) who lived not long after Dante and was one of the first commentators of his work) added the Divine in fron of it...