'Una Modesta Divina Commedià': Dante As Anti-Model in Cesare
https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-02_07 TRISTAN KAY ‘Una modesta Divina Commedià’ Dante as Anti-Model in Cesare Pavese’s La luna e i falò CITE AS: Tristan Kay, ‘‘Una modesta Divina Commedià’: Dante as Anti-Model in Cesare Pavese’s La luna e i falò’, in Metamorphosing Dante: Appro- priations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty- First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, and Fabian Lampart, Cultural Inquiry, 2 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011), pp. 101–22 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-02_07> RIGHTS STATEMENT: Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manip- ulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and © by the author(s) Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragno- This version is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- lati, Fabio Camilletti, and Fabian Lampart, Cul- ShareAlike 4.0 International License. tural Inquiry, 2 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011), pp. 101–22 ABSTRACT: In a 1949 letter, Cesare Pavese describes with great zeal the genesis of a new work — one he compares, albeit with a certain amount of irony, to Dante’s Commedia: / Io sono come un pazzo perché ho avuta una grande intuizione — quasi una mirabile visione (naturalmente di stalle, sudore, contadinotti, verderame e letame ecc.) su cui dovrei costruire una modesta Divina Commedia. Ci penso sopra, e tutti i giorni diminuisce la tensione — che alle visioni siano necessarie le Beatrici? Bah, si vedrà. / This embryonic project would quickly become the novel La luna e i falò, completed in less than two months and published shortly before Pavese’s suicide in 1950. On the surface, there would seem little reason to take seriously the analogy drawn by the author between La luna and the Commedia, for the novel in question contains no explicit references to the medieval poet.
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