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Giosuè
Carducci |
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Giosuè
Carducci (1835-1907) revived Petrarch's
vision of poet as vates,
and became the unofficial
national
poet of a unified Italy, receiving the Nobel
Prize for Literature
in 1906.
He was born in Val di Castello in Tuscany,
where his father was a doctor and a member of the Carbonari
that advocated unification. Politics obliged the family
to move several times in Giosuè's boyhood, but in
1856 the young man received his Ph.D. from Pisa University,
and took a teaching job at a provincial high school, bringing
out his first collection of poetry, Rime, the following
year. Until appointed professor of Italian literature at
Bologna,
Carducci had many financial difficulties, however. He became
the head of the household upon the deaths of his father
and brother, and his marriage to Elvira Menicucci in 1859
soon produced a family to support. But Carducci turned himself
into an energetic and popular lecturer, an uncompromising
literary critic and then a leading
opponent
of church power. His Jacobin verses created many controversies
in the 1860s and 70s, though he had settled into supporting
the monarchy by 1890, when he was made a senator
for life. In his last years, Carducci was active in politics,
proselytising for Italian influence and territorial expansion.
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Carducci's
poetry |
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Though
only a small part of Carducci's
output was verse (4 in 30 volumes of collected works), those
poems
and translations
are Carducci's claim to significance. Lyrics in traditional
form appeared in Levia gravia (Light and Heavy: 1861-71),
Giambi
ed epodi (Iambs and Epodes: 1867-69) and
Rime
nuove (New Verses: 1861-87). He was not merely conventional,
however: in Odi
barbari (Barbaric Odes: 1877-89), Carducci tried
to import
Graeco-Latin forms into Italian verse: interesting experiments
at least (as were Darío's
similar
attempts in Spanish). Much now appears very dated: Carducci's
oratory, the passionate declamation
on Italy's place
in the world, the Roman past. He is the last of the great
classical European poets, very different from his contemporaries
(Tennyson
and Swinburne
in England, Baudelaire
and Mallarmé
in France, and certainly Bécquer
in Spain) where late Romanticism was developing into Symbolism
and the Modernist concerns of
the twentieth century.
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Carducci
and classical poetry |
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Carducci was opposed
to the Romantic solipsism of Leopardi,
and built a vigorous reaction
based on classicism
and realism.
He believed in the dignity
of life, and strove for a poetry that was sane, virile
and strong-willed. Inevitably that led to his becoming linked
with
D'Annunzio
and Fascist
opinion,
and to pouring out homilies that have not
worn well. But Carducci's optimism is not false, only oversimple
to a century disgraced by war and genocide, one to which
Montale
— the only modern Italian poet to rival Carducci in
popularity — appealed more movingly with his dark
view of the agony and solitude in human beings. Classicism
celebrates balance,
continuity
and restraint, and it's hardly surprising that Carducci
is not much read today. But he is worth the effort. Many
of his shorter pieces do speak poignantly from the heart,
particularly those dealing with
personal
loss and nostalgia
for his native
Tuscany
and other haunts,
and those which fuse contemporary situations with their
rendering in
classical
literature.
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Reading the Italian |
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Italian is an attractive tongue and many internet sites
will help you learn or brush up your skills: chiappetti,
cyberitalian,
languagequest,
dealtime,
abroadlanguages,
worldlanguage,
pimsleur
and others listed on the search engines. Those with time
and funds might consider study abroad: e.g. worklink,
scuolainsieme,
webitaly,
ilrittrato,
italycommunity,
centropuccini,
italian.org,
c.l.
centre and belforte.
Recommended translations of Carducci include those by G.L.
Bickersteth (1913), M. Holland (1927), W.F. Smith (1939),
A. Burkhard (1947) ad D.H. Higgins (1994). Italian
poetry
anthologies
usually have a few poems by Carducci, and more material
can be found in Columbia Dictionary of Modern European
Literature (1980), S.E. Scalia's Carducci (1937)
and J.C. Bailey Carducci: The Taylorian Lecture (1926)
and in the bibliographies listed at books
and writers and Giosuè
Carducci. For recordings there are Golden
Treasury of Italian Verse, ilnarratotore
and liberliber.
Useful sites for Carducci include casacarducci,
geometry
net, fordham,
ucl,
vos
and Giosuè
Carducci, the last two in Italian. The New Princeton Encyclopedia
of Poetry and Poetics (1993) has brief entries under
Italian Poetry and Classicism.
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