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'A love letter to the finest language ever created. ... Gardini explains lucidly, compellingly and passionately how and why Latin is so elegant, beautiful, expressive and succinct.' Susan Hill, Spectator 'Enthrals, illuminates, and convinces. Nobody could possibly describe Latin as a dead or useless language after reading it.' David Crystal Virgil gave us the Aeneid, and Ovid the Metamorphoses; Lucretius analysed the material world and Caesar interrogated how we view reality through the lens of reason - but what does Latin offer us today? Often seen as the bulky relic of school curricula long forgotten, Latin seems to have lost its punch in the popular conscious. Oxford academic Nicola Gardi...
Translation can be seen as producing a text in one language that will count as equivalent to a text in another. It can also be seen as a release of multiple signifying possibilities, an opening of the source text to Language in all its plurality. The first view is underpinned by the regime of European standard languages which can be lined up in bilingual dictionaries, by the technology of the printed book, and by the need for regulated communication in political, academic and legal contexts. The second view is most at home in multilingual cultures, in circumstances where language is not standardised (e.g., minority and dialectal communities, and oral cultures), in the fluidity of electronic ...
Winner of the Viareggio Prize, a vivid portrait of Italy on the brink of social upheaval in the 1970s. Inside an apartment building on the outskirts of Milan, the working-class residents gossip, quarrel, and conspire against each other. Viewed through the eyes of Chino, an impressionable thirteen-year-old boy whose mother is the doorwoman of the building, the world contained within these walls is tiny, hypocritical, and mean-spirited: a constant struggle. Chino finds escape in reading.One day, a new resident, Amelia Lynd, moves in and quickly becomes an unlikely companion and a formative influence on Chino. Ms. Lynd—an elderly, erudite British woman—comes to nurture his taste in literature, introduces him to the life of the mind, and offers a counterpoint to the only version of reality that he’s known. On one level, Lost Words is an engrossing coming-of-age tale set in the seventies, when Italy was going through tumultuous social changes, and on another, it is a powerful meditation on language, literature, and culture.
«Da leggere per capire chi siamo.» Eva Cantarella «La lingua che non parliamo più, ma che ancora ci parla. Un libro da leggere per capire chi siamo.» Eva Cantarella A che serve il latino? È la domanda che continuamente sentiamo rivolgerci dai molti per i quali la lingua di Cicerone altro non è che un’ingombrante rovina, da eliminare dai programmi scolastici. In questo libro personale e appassionato, Nicola Gardini risponde che il latino è – molto semplicemente – lo strumento espressivo che è servito e serve a fare di noi quelli che siamo. In latino, un pensatore rigoroso e tragicamente lucido come Lucrezio ha analizzato la materia del mondo; il poeta Properzio ha raccontato l...
In this exhilarating celebration of human ingenuity and perseverance—published all around the world—a trailblazing Italian scholar sifts through our cultural and social behavior in search of the origins of our greatest invention: writing. The L where a tabletop meets the legs, the T between double doors, the D of an armchair’s oval backrest—all around us is an alphabet in things. But how did these shapes make it onto the page, never mind form complex structures such as this sentence? In The Greatest Invention, Silvia Ferrara takes a profound look at how—and how many times—human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language, traveling back and forth in time and al...
In 1948, the poet Eugenio Montale published his Quaderno di traduzioni and created an entirely new Italian literary genre, the “translation notebook.” The quaderni were the work of some of Italy’s foremost poets, and their translation anthologies proved fundamental for their aesthetic and cultural development. Modern Italian Poets shows how the new genre shaped the poetic practice of the poet-translators who worked within it, including Giorgio Caproni, Giovanni Giudici, Edoardo Sanguineti, Franco Buffoni, and Nobel Prize-winner Eugenio Montale, displaying how the poet-translators used the quaderni to hone their poetic techniques, experiment with new poetic metres, and develop new theories of poetics. In addition to detailed analyses of the work of these five authors, the book covers the development of the quaderno di traduzioni and its relationship to Western theories of translation, such as those of Walter Benjamin and Benedetto Croce. In an appendix, Modern Italian Poets also provides the first complete list of all translations and quaderni di traduzioni published by more than 150 Italian poet-translators.
One of the high-points of Italian Renaissance humanism, Machiavelli’s The Prince immediately transcended the time and culture from which it had sprung, circulating throughout Europe and paving the road to an astonishing variety of discussions on power and liberty for centuries to come. Indeed, one could hardly think of a literary work whose reception has been more controversial and arguably more crucial to the fashioning of modernity. This volume gathers together the proceedings of a conference held in Oxford, in November 2013, to mark the 500th anniversary of the composition of The Prince. It explores pivotal aspects of the text’s complex identity, focusing on three interrelated areas: ...
In medieval culture, the consideration of language is deeply connected to other aspects of the system of knowledge. One interesting connection takes place between theories of language and theories of larger concepts such as love and desire. The Syntax of Desire is an interdisciplinary examination of the interlacing operation of syntax and desire in three medieval 'grammars:' theological, linguistic, and poetic. Exploring three representative aspects of medieval language theory, Elena Lombardi uncovers the ways in which syntax and desire were interrelated in the Middle Ages. She suggests that, in Augustine's theology, the creative act of God in the universe emerges as a syntax that the human ...
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Leading international contributors present a lively and interdisciplinary panorama of the Italian Renaissance as it has developed in recent decades.