Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- I A Poetics of Fusion: Cultural Appropriation, Multilingualism, Translingual Writing
- II Translators as Transcultural Negotiators
- III D’Annunzio’s Global Fin-de-siècle Reception
- IV Complex Legacies
- D’Annunzio in the Twenty-First Century
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - ‘The essence of the race’: La figlia di Iorio and Italian Dialects
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 March 2025
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- I A Poetics of Fusion: Cultural Appropriation, Multilingualism, Translingual Writing
- II Translators as Transcultural Negotiators
- III D’Annunzio’s Global Fin-de-siècle Reception
- IV Complex Legacies
- D’Annunzio in the Twenty-First Century
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
On 6 November 1906, the philosopher and poet from Gorizia, Carlo Michelstaedter, an Austrian national of Jewish extraction with a central European education, attended the staging of ‘A figghia di Joriu by the Compagnia Drammatica Siciliana at Florence's Teatro Niccolini. That same night, ‘completely drained due to the feelings experienced’ and still prey to ‘the anxiety that grows and makes one truly suffer, constricting one's throat’, he conveyed his strong emotions to his family:
Grasso is powerful in his every gesture and emphasis. He has one of those intense and fervent voices that make one's head spin. In particular, the story he tells to the saint in the second act, where in the Sicilian version there is nothing lyrical and all the poetic beauty has been removed, is a masterpiece. He seemed to be reliving the earlier scenes in all their intensity. I had experienced a similar feeling when I saw Tumiati perform, but to a lesser degree: Grasso is natural, and more absolute. Aguglia cannot always maintain the same high level; I did not like her final cry, ‘you cannot, you must not’, and ‘the flame is beautiful’. But otherwise, she and the whole company are marvellous, and certainly better as an ensemble than any company not using dialect. They create the impression that the play, in Sicilian like this, is the original, and the Italian version the translation, and surely D’Annunzio conceived of it just as we hear it from Grasso.
This assessment hit the mark, for La figlia di Iorio (Iorio's Daughter) was largely indebted to the attraction of dialect and the appeal of Giovanni Grasso, judged to be the world's greatest tragic actor by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Isaac Babel, Gordon Craig, Lee Strasberg and Vsevolod Meyerhold.
This chapter documents the transformations of La figlia di Iorio during its ‘second life’ in dialect, including translations into Sicilian by Giuseppe Antonio Borgese and into the Abruzzo dialect by Cesare de Titta, and the parody in Neapolitan by Eduardo Scarpetta. Why was the play so well suited to dialect translations? What did dialect mean for Gabriele D’Annunzio, and how did he contribute to these translations and their staging?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Gabriele D'Annunzio and World LiteratureMultilingualism, Translation, Reception, pp. 85 - 101Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2023