Poetry, Constitution and The Liberal Trienium: English, German, Italian, Portuguese and French literary texts on the Spanish Liberal Revolution (1820-1823)

Recensión de / Review of - Ingrid Cáceres Würsig and Remedios Solano, Kings and peoples German Poetry of the Liberal Triennium. Analysis and Bilingual Annotated Corpus. Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, Colección Aquilafuente nº 273, Salamanca, 2019, 334 pp. - Gabriela Gândara Terenas and Beatriz Peralta García, Tell the Spaniards: Portuguese Poetry of the Liberal Triennium. Analysis and Bilingual Annotated Corpus. Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, Colección Aquilafuente nº 274, Salamanca, 2019, 311 pp. - Cristina Clímaco and Lola Bermúdez Medina, Spain’s Tears: French Poetry of the Liberal Triennium. Analysis and Bilingual Annotated Corpus. Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, Colección Aquilafuente nº 275, Salamanca, 2019, 607 pp. - Vicente González Martín and Mercedes González de Sande, A desired Constitución: Italian Poetry of the Liberal Triennium. Analysis and Bilingual Annotated Corpus. Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, Colección Aquilafuente nº 276, Salamanca, 2019, 605 pp. - Agustín Coletes Blanco and Alicia Laspra Rodríguez, Romantic Land: English Poetry of the Liberal Triennium. Analysis and Bilingual Annotated Corpus. Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, Colección Aquilafuente nº 277, Salamanca, 2019, 476 pp Fecha de envío / Submission date: 23/10/2020 Fecha de aceptación / Acceptance date: 3/01/2021

In poetry, if meter has to help memory, it takes its time

To test the idea that poetic meter emerged as a cognitive schema to aid verbal memory, we focused on classical Italian poetry and on three components of meter: rhyme, accent, and verse length. Meaningless poems were generated by introducing prosody-invariant non-words into passages from Dante’s Divina Commedia and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. We then ablated rhymes, modified accent patterns, or altered the number of syllables. The resulting versions of each non-poem were presented to Italian native speakers, who were then asked to retrieve three target non-words. Surprisingly, we found that the integrity of Dante’s meter has no significant effect on memory performance. With Ariosto, instead, removing each component downgrades memory proportionally to its contribution to perceived metric plausibility. Counterintuitively, the fully metric versions required longer reaction times, implying that activating metric schemata involves a cognitive cost. Within schema theories, this finding provides evidence for high-level interactions between procedural and episodic memory.

In Poetry, if Meter has to Help Memory, it Takes its Time

To test the idea that poetic meter emerged as a cognitive schema to aid verbal memory, we have focused on classical Italian poetry and on its three basic components of meter: rhyme, accent and verse length. Meaningless poems were generated by introducing prosody-invariant non-words into passages from Dante's Divina Commedia and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, which were then further manipulated by selectively ablating rhymes, modifying accent patterns or altering the number of syllables. The resulting four versions of each non-poem were presented in a fully balanced design to cohorts of high school educated Italian native speakers, who were then asked to retrieve 3 target non-words. Surprisingly, we found that the integrity of Dante's meter has no significant effect on memory performance. With passages derived from Ariosto, instead, removing each component downgrades memory by an amount proportional to its contribution to perceived metric plausibility, with rhymes having the strongest effects, followed by accents and then by verse length. Counterintuitively, the fully metric versions required longer reaction times, implying that activating metric schemata involves a cognitive cost. Within schema theories, this finding provides evidence for high-level interactions between procedural and episodic memory.

Giuseppe Ungaretti Reading of the Correspondence with Pea, Prezzolini, Soffici and Papini from a New Perspective

Giuseppe Ungaretti is one of the major representatives of 20th century Italian poetry. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1888, where he also pursued his first studies. Our claim, which is in contrast with what has been argued so far by literary critics, is that the Egyptian environment in which he grew up and formed his personality played a role in shaping the author’s ‘colonialist’ attitude. This emerges in a more detailed reading of his correspondence from the decade between 1909 and 1919. The main goal of this study is therefore to analyse a selection of these letters in order to highlight how the period in Egypt deeply influenced the author, leading him to internalize French and English colonial culture. We argue that this later induced the poet to make particular political choices such as backing Italian participation in the First World War and supporting Fascism.

Lo spazio dell’etica nella poesia contemporanea

The first, theoretical part of this essay engages a recent publication by Maria Borio, dedicated to Italian poetry from the 1970s to the 1990s. Borio’s volume analyzes some methodological issues, and while she attempts to establish a poetical canon, she also deals with its correlation to a form of ethical and lyrical knowledge. The second part of the essay analyzes the ethical dimension of some choice poetic collections published between the late 1990s and the early 2000s; here, Brancati explores poetry by Antonella Anedda, Franco Buffoni, and Mario Benedetti, in which the need of the lyrical subject to foster a genuine representation of a given experience determines a reformulation of the author’s style.

La parola alle cose. Alcuni esempi nella poesia italiana del Novecento

The article discusses the presence of matter (organic as well as inorganic) in twentieth-century Italian poetry. The paper offers a diachronic survey of some exemplary authors and texts (Marinetti, Gozzano, Montale, Giudici, Caproni, and Sereni), highlighting the different utilisations of objects and things within literary texts. Objects and things define spaces and places in subjects’ lives, support their identity, and document various ages and generations. The death of their owners makes things and objects lose their original purpose and find different functions with new subjects. In this context, they appear as miniature eternities always ready for a connection with new subjects.

In Fortune Fair and Foul

This article focuses on the idiosyncratic conception of happiness Sir Kenelm Digby develops in the letters he wrote after the death of his wife in 1633. It contextualises Digby’s vision of happiness through an examination of the different traditions he revisits and appropriates to develop his personal and subjective ethics of self-care, mainly Renaissance Neoplatonism, the idealisation of conjugal love, the idealism of Italian poetry, and an ascetic model of widowhood linked to the tradition of spiritual mourning. It analyses how Digby’s conception of happiness, through its vindication of subjectivity and excess, challenges the early modern ethos of consolation and speculates on the reasons that may have led Digby to present his readers with such an extraordinary self-portrait.

Canzoniere Francesco Petrarch in a new translation by Vladimir Maransman

The review presents a new book by Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Education Vladimir Georgievich Maransman — a translation from Italian of the Book of Songs (Canzoniere) by Francesco Petrarch. This translation is a real event in the history of modern Russian culture, since it turned out to be one of the first full translations into Russian of the main book of the great Italian poet of the Renaissance, the first lyric poet in the history of European poetry — Petrarch, made by one translator. The translation was carried out taking into account the long tradition of Russian translations of Petrarch poetry and has a significant amount of author's text (poet's property). The translation uses the original method of V. G. Marantsman, already used in his previous work — the full translation of Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, and which has been recognized by many readers and critics; a method of conveying the stylistic features of Italian poetry of the era of its occurrence by similar means of the Russian language.