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This Is an Original Manuscript/Preprint of An 1 This is an original manuscript/preprint of an article published by Taylor & Francis in European Romantic Review 30 (2019), available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10509585.2019.1612570. “[T]he accents of an unknown land”: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Writings in Italian Valentina Varinelli* School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK Abstract Shelley scholars have largely overlooked the poet’s verse and prose writings in Italian— originals and (self-)translations—on the assumption that they were written solely for Teresa “Emilia” Viviani, the dedicatee of Epipsychidion (1821), and have thus reduced them to a by- product of Shelley’s brief infatuation with the young girl. Such a reading does not account for the complexity of these writings, which are by no means distinct from Shelley’s contemporary production, and indeed can help to elucidate his ongoing theoretical reflections on language and translation. Nor can a purely biographical approach provide a rationale for the unusualness of a poet composing in and translating himself into a foreign language. But why did Shelley actually do so? What did he intend to do with his writings in Italian? And what is their place in Shelley’s canon? Percy Bysshe Shelley’s writings in Italian constitute a small but by no means insignificant corpus, which so far has received limited scholarly attention. It includes Shelley’s translations from a number of his poems as well as original verse and prose compositions. Many of these writings have survived only in draft form. None of them were published in the poet’s lifetime. Why did Shelley translate his own works into Italian? What prompted him to write poetry and * [email protected] 2 prose in that language? What did he intend to do with his self-translations and original compositions in Italian? Did he share them with anyone in his circle? Did he circulate them beyond it? Were they meant for publication? These are the questions I am going to address in this paper to understand the rationale behind Shelley’s writings in Italian and determine what place they occupy in the poet’s canon. Shelley does not seem to have followed any particular criterion in his choice of which of his works to translate into Italian. He drafted an Italian version of the opening lines of his stilnovistic poem Epipsychidion (1821) and of the satirical stanzas “To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]” (written in late October-early November 1819); he translated three passages from his “lyrical drama” Prometheus Unbound (1820), an excerpt from his epic poem, The Revolt of Islam (1818), and the entire “Ode to Liberty” (1820). Interestingly, Shelley translated only one short passage from an English author other than himself, that is three lines from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale” describing its heroine, Emelye (ll. 1035-37). The latter translation was probably a homage to Teresa Viviani, the young Florentine girl to whom Shelley dedicated Epipsychidion, whose nickname was “Emilia.” Shelley also made an Italian version of his 1819 lyric “Goodnight,” which is a less literal rendition than his other self-translations, and he attempted at least one original poem in Italian, which appears from its surviving draft to be composed in terza rima, the three-line stanza form of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Shelley experimented with this form in English as well, and achieved unparalleled mastery of it in his last, unfinished work, “The Triumph of Life.” Until recently, a short verse composition in Italian contained in one of Shelley’s working notebooks was thought to be his self-translation of the lyric beginning “Thy gentle face,” drafted in the same notebook (Poems 51). In fact, the opposite is true. I have been able to identify the Italian text as a canzonetta by a little-known Italian man of letters, which Shelley transcribed and then translated into English. So now we have one “new” English translation by Shelley, but one less self- 3 translation into Italian. On the other hand, a few short manuscript verse fragments in Italian in Shelley’s hand, one of which is so deteriorated as to result almost illegible (Poems 54), are still unidentified, and may be original. As for Shelley’s prose writings in Italian, they consist of the unfinished draft review of an accademia given by the famous improvvisatore—and member of the Shelleys’ circle in Pisa—Tommaso Sgricci (1789-1836), and an equally unfinished fable, “Una Favola,” which has close thematic affinities with Epipsychidion. The spectrum of Shelley’s production in Italian is completed by a handful of letters to Italian recipients, some of which exist only as rough drafts. The short span of time in which Shelley’s writings in Italian were produced is no less remarkable than their variety. Except for one letter of introduction to a Roman lady, Marianna Candidi Dionigi (1756-1826), that Shelley wrote for his uncle’s ward, Sophia Stacey, in December 1819 (Letters 167-68), the whole of his production in Italian was concentrated in the period December 1820-August 1821. This fact has significant implications. First, it provides strong evidence against regarding Shelley’s self-translations and original compositions in Italian as mere exercises to learn the language, as one may be tempted to do after a superficial consideration.1 E. B. Murray aptly observed that “after two-and-a-half years in Italy” Shelley must have needed some “further incentive” (Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts 364). It is also worth remembering that Shelley was already conversant with Italian when he moved to Italy in March 1818. In his Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Jefferson Hogg recalled that between 1813 and 1814 Shelley and himself were tutored in Italian by two female acquaintances, Mrs. Boinville and her daughter, and together they read Italian authors, especially Tasso and Ariosto (376-80). The dating of Shelley’s works in Italian to the winter 1820-1821 and the following spring has been used in support of the predominant biographical readings of them. It is a point of scholarly consensus that Shelley started writing in Italian after being introduced to Teresa 4 “Emilia” Viviani at the beginning of December 1820, and that his works in the young lady’s language were chiefly written for her. Shelley’s extremely unconventional practice of self- translation into a foreign language and his no less uncommon foreign language composition practice have thus been reduced to a by-product of his “Italian platonics” (223), as Mary Shelley caustically dismissed her husband’s involvement with Teresa Viviani. Mary Shelley herself seems to have held such a reductive view, although she never explicitly mentioned Shelley’s production in Italian—but, after all, she never mentioned Epipsychidion either. Shelley’s writings in Italian were not included in Mary Shelley’s editions of his works, even though in her Preface to Posthumous Poems (1824) she declared: “I have been more actuated by the fear lest any monument of his genius should escape me, than the wish of presenting nothing but what was complete to the fastidious reader” (viii). However, after Shelley’s death Mary Shelley did transcribe one of his original fragments in Italian (Shelley, Poems 198-200), which suggests that she may have considered publishing that part of his production as well. If Mary Shelley’s editorial choice may be justified by an understandable desire to draw the attention of the audience away from Shelley’s, and her own, private affairs, the neglect of later editors cannot be thus excused. To give one example, William Michael Rossetti first mentioned the existence of Shelley’s draft review of Sgricci’s performance in 1870 (Shelley, Poetical Works cxxx n), but the text was only published in 1981 (Dawson 24-27). Most modern editions of Shelley’s works do not include any item in Italian.2 The editors of the fourth volume of the Longman complete edition of Shelley’s poems have the merit of having published all the poet’s known verse compositions in Italian alongside his English production. However, they have not always avoided the risk of making them appear marginal. For instance, Shelley’s two brief self-translations from Epipsychidion are not recognized as such, but are printed under the heading “Fragments connected with Epipsychidion” (173) together with several unused verses in English preceding—even by several months—the composition 5 of the poem. This also betrays a reluctance to contradict Edward John Trelawny’s claim, recorded by Rossetti, that “Epipsychidion was printed in Italy, in a version of Italian poetry written by Shelley himself for Emilia (Viviani) to read” (Diary 196)—a statement which in the absence of supporting evidence must remain questionable. The case of Shelley’s self-translations is paradigmatic of the prevalent scholarly attitude towards his production in Italian at large. Timothy Webb expressed a commonly held view when he described the self-translations as originating from Shelley’s “need to convey to Emilia the essence of what he had already written in English” (307). Even before one begins to wonder whether Teresa Viviani’s knowledge of Western history was sufficient to make her appreciate Shelley’s “Ode to Liberty,” or if she had ever heard of Lord Sidmouth and Lord Castlereagh, the notion of Shelley’s translating samples of his poetry into Italian for the benefit of one person is not entirely convincing. It clashes with the serious effort Shelley put into the task, which is evident from his painstaking revisions of the surviving drafts. Rather than a poetic self-portrayal, what emerges from taking together Shelley’s self-translations is the poet’s growing confidence in his skills as a translator, as he moves from virtually improvised renditions, started for fun, as it were, and put aside after two or three lines, to longer, more carefully crafted translations.
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