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At the start of 1987, Primo Levi took part in a remarkable series of conversations about his early life with a friend and fellow writer, Giovanni Tesio. This book is the result of those meetings, originally intended to be the basis for an authorized biography and published here in English for the first time. In a densely packed dialogue, Levi responds to Tesio’s tactful and never too insistent questions with a watchful readiness and candour, breaking through the reserve of his public persona to allow a more intimate self to emerge. Following the thread of memory, he lucidly discusses his family, his childhood, his education during the Fascist period, his adolescent friendships, his reading...
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Italy possesses two literary canons, one in the Tuscan language and the other made up of the various dialects of its many regions. The Other Italy presents for the first time an overview of the principal authors and texts of Italy's literary canon in dialect. It highlights the cultivated dialect poetry, drama, and narrative prose since the codification of the Tuscan literary language in the early sixteenth century, when writing in dialect became a deliberate and conscious alternative to the official literary standard. The book offers a panorama of the literary dialects of Italy over five centuries and across the country's regions, shedding light on a profoundly plurilingual and polycentric civilization. As a guide to reading and research, it provides a compendium of literary sources in dialect, arranged by region and accompanied by syntheses of regional traditions with selected textual illustrations. A work of extraordinary importance, The Other Italy was awarded the Modern Language Association of America's Aldo and Jean Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies. It will serve scholars as an indispensable resource book for years to come.
This first study in English of the complete writings of Italo Calvino (1923-85) offers new interpretations of Calvino's main works, taking into account some important unpublished material, and analyses Calvino's intertextual links with major writers of world literature (Conrad, Stevenson, Hemingway and Borges). Postmodern elements in his texts are assessed, and a chapter on Calvino's critical essays shed important light on his creative process.
Primo Levi has been identified in the public mind as the supreme witness to the barbarism that was the Nazi Holocaust but he was ambivalent about having that role thrust upon him. He also wished to be judged as a writer who, in addition to the autobiographical works on his experiences in the death camps, wrote poetry, produced volumes of sci-fi stories, authored novels and contributed critical essays to newspapers on a range of topics and writers. No one has the right to ignore or downplay the 'testimony' Primo Levi offered, but it is time to examine the wider vision inherent in his work and to explore the tradition in which he operated. Levi was one of the great wisdom writers of his age, whose ethical authority, somewhat to his own embarrassment, was accepted in many fields. Several contributors to this collection of essays see him as a proponent of Enlightenment values, or as heir to a longer Humanist tradition. Even after enduring Auschwitz, he held fast to a notion of the dignity of the human person, and no man did more to re-establish, however quizzically, the secular basis for such beliefs. His overall standing as writer is the subject of this book.
One of twentieth-century Italy's greatest thinkers, Primo Levi (1919-1987) started reflecting on the Holocaust almost immediately after his return home from the year he survived in Auschwitz. Levi's powerful Holocaust testimonials reveal his preoccupation with processes of translation, in the form of both embedded and book-length renderings of texts relevant to Holocaust survival. In Arduous Tasks, Lina N. Insana demonstrates how translation functions as a metaphor for the transmission of Holocaust testimony and broadens the parameters of survivor testimony. The first book to study Levi and translation, Arduous Tasks overcomes the conventional views of the separation between his own personal memoirs and his translations by stressing the centrality of translation in Levi's entire corpus. Examining not only the testimonial nature of his work, Insana also discusses the transgressive and performative aspects of transmission in his writings. Arduous Tasks is a superb and innovative study on the importance of translation not only to Levi, but also to Holocaust studies in general.
Poetry. Translated from the Italian by Andrew Frisardi. After World War II dialect poetry became widespread in Italy, withthe Milanese poet Franco Loi being one of its most prominent and masterful practitioners. In the 1970s, a leading critic called Loi "the most powerful poetic personality of recent years," and since then Loi has been considered one of the most distinguished living Italian poets. The present volume, translated and edited by Andrew Frisardi, provides a selection of Loi's shorter lyrical poems, drawn from the full span of his career, as well as an extraordinary interview with Loi in which he discusses poetry, religion, politics, writing in dialect, and the shaping experience of living through wartime Milan.
Primo Levi, Holocaust survivor and renowned memoirist, is one of the most widely read writers of post-World War II Italy. His works are characterized by the lean, dispassionate eloquence with which he approaches his experience of incarceration in Auschwitz. His memoirs--as well as his poetry and fiction and his many interviews--are often taught in several fields, including Jewish studies and Holocaust studies, comparative literature, and Italian language and literature, and can enrich the study of history, psychology, and philosophy. The first part of this volume provides instructors with an overview of the available editions, anthologies, and translations of Levi's work and identifies other...
Discloses the richness of ideas and sheds light on the controversy that characterized the transition from fascism to democracy, examining authors, works and memories that were subsequently silenced by Cold War politics. How a shared memory of Fascism and its cultural heritage took shape is still today the most disputed question of modern Italy, crossing the boundaries between academic and public discourse. Against Redemption concentrates on the historical period in which disagreement was at its highest: the transition between the downfall of Mussolini in July 1943 and the victory of the Christian Democrats over the Left in the 1948 general elections. By dispelling the silence around the rang...