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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. Shelley no doubt enjoyed the process, which culminated in his only complete self-translation into Italian, entitled “Ode alla Libertà.” I will return to this translation in my conclusion.
If we want to better comprehend and appreciate Shelley’s writings in Italian, we need to recontextualise them, doing away with the biographical readings which, to quote Shelley on the reception of Epipsychidion, “approximate [him] to the circle of a servant girl & her sweetheart” (Letters 363). I believe that Shelley’s translation and composition practice in
Italian cannot be simplistically ascribed to his infatuation with an exceptionally talented girl waiting to be romantically rescued from a convent. This is how Shelley saw Teresa Viviani, 6 and how she has been painted since. The truth, however, was quite different. When the
Shelleys made Teresa Viviani’s acquaintance, she resided as a paying guest in the
Conservatorio di S. Anna, an exclusive convent school in Pisa, where she had previously studied. She was no more of a prisoner than Harriet Westbrook was in her school. Teresa’s talents also seem to have been less exceptional than Shelley and, at least initially, his wife thought them to be. Shelley stated that Teresa “has cultivated her mind beyond what I have ever met with in Italian women” (Medwin, Life 281). Byron, whose knowledge of Italian women was more extensive than Shelley’s, is reported to have once observed that “[t]here is no Italian gentleman, scarcely any well-educated girl, that has not all the finer passages of
Dante at the fingers’ ends” (Medwin, Conversations 160). Teresa Viviani does quote Dante, and Petrarch as well, in her letters to the Shelleys, but these also attest to a flowery and hyperbolic writing style and a good deal of sentimentality.3
I suggest that Shelley’s writings in Italian should be read within the context of his contemporary production in English, both in poetry and in prose. As far as I am aware, attention has never been paid to the fact that the period in which Shelley wrote most in Italian
(December 1820-August 1821) nearly coincides with the time span during which
Epipsychidion, “A Defence of Poetry,” and Adonais were composed. It has been observed that these three works form a continuum, not only because they were written almost consecutively. Each of them is composed in reaction to an actual event (Shelley’s encounter with Teresa Viviani, his reading of Peacock’s essay The Four Ages of Poetry, the death of
John Keats), but each soon becomes independent from its immediate source of inspiration and turns into a reflection on one of three aspects, or moments, of poetic composition:
Epipsychidion is a meditation on the origin of poetry, “A Defence” reflects on its utility,
Adonais on the immortality of a poem, and of the poet (Shelley, Opere poetiche lxxii-lxxiii).
Shelley’s writings in Italian are by no means distinct from this ongoing meta-reflection in his 7 contemporary masterpieces, but they at once inform and are informed by it. In his seminal study of Shelley’s style, William Keach has well illustrated the poet’s contradictory view of language (1-41). Such a view encompasses the language of translation. Shelley’s lifelong practice as a translator from both classical and modern languages into English, and his shorter, but more demanding experience in translating himself into Italian may, rightly, seem at odds with his claim of “the vanity of translation” (Shelley, Poetry and Prose 514) in “A
Defence of Poetry,” and indeed they are. Writing in a foreign language of which he had but an imperfect knowledge Shelley pushed his capabilities to the extreme. The result enhanced his awareness of the limits, as much as of the potential, of language to express thought, which are powerfully juxtaposed in the following lines from the close of Epipsychidion: “The winged words on which my soul would pierce / Into the height of love’s rare Universe, / Are chains of lead around its flight of fire” (ll. 588-90). Shelley acknowledged the “limitedness of the poetical faculty itself” (Shelley, Poetry and Prose 532) in “A Defence of Poetry,” where he represented it through the not unambiguous metaphor of the veil. The idea of language as veil, or vestment, recurs in two of his texts in Italian otherwise very different from one another in content as in form. One is a letter Shelley wrote at Byron’s request to Countess Teresa Gamba
Guiccioli on 10 August 1821, when he had not yet made her acquaintance. The purpose of this letter was to convince Byron’s lover to abandon her plan to move to Geneva with her father and brothers, who had been banished from Ravenna on account of their Carbonarism.
Shelley’s arguments against the Gambas’ (and, consequently, Byron’s) relocation to Geneva rest on the malignity he witnessed its inhabitants, and especially the English residents, displaying against Byron in the famous summer of 1816, when Shelley and his family also had their share of slanders. At the end of his letter, Shelley apologizes for his lame Italian with a postscript that can be thus translated into English: “You will know how to forgive a barbarian for the poor Italian that veils the honest sentiments of my letter.”4 The term 8
“barbarian” (barbaro in Italian), which is twice underlined in the original manuscript, is used by Shelley in its etymological sense of “stutterer,” which connotes more than the writer’s foreignness.5 It suggests a defectiveness in his manner of expression, which is precisely what causes his words to “veil” the thoughts and feelings he wishes to voice, that is, primarily, to conceal and obscure them, but also, since these sentiments are described as “honest,” to make them appear insincere. As a matter of fact, Shelley’s communication proved all but ineffective. Not only did Teresa Guiccioli and her family finally resolve on moving elsewhere, namely to Pisa (where the Shelleys lived), Shelley’s description of the slanderous treatment Byron had received in Geneva made such a strong impression on Teresa Guiccioli that it influenced directly her later account of his residence in Switzerland in her unpublished
Vie de Lord Byron en Italie (32-34). Shelley’s postscript is first and foremost a rhetorical expression of modesty, or excusatio propter infirmitatem. It is nonetheless significant insomuch as the opposition between its form and meaning encapsulates Shelley’s contradictory view of language. The writer’s representation of the language of his letter as an impediment to sincere communication, in fact, is expressed through a faultless, compelling sentence.
The idea of language perverting truth also emerges in a verse fragment in Italian drafted by Shelley in what is sometimes called the “drowned notebook.” Shelley took this notebook with him on his last boat trip, and it was found in the shipwreck of the Don Juan so damaged by seawater that whole gatherings of leaves detached themselves. The few surviving pages have since continued to fade and deteriorate, so that to decipher the manuscripts they contain it is necessary to resort to an early twentieth-century photo-facsimile of the notebook, which is clearer than the original. Not without difficulty, one can read the following lines in the latter: “Così, vestiva in [barbari] accenti, / Il vero affetto a un [Ausonio] / Tirsi” (Bodleian
MS. Shelley adds. e. 20).6 This passage appears to refer to some lines in Italian drafted in the 9 preceding pages of the notebook, which would then be the effusion of Thyrsis, a shepherd in
Greek mythology, to an Ausonian, the ancient name of an inhabitant of Italy. In this fragment the language itself, rather than its user, is “barbarian.” More specifically, since this adjective refers to the noun “accents” (“accenti”), which here means “spoken words” (OED 4b), it is the speaker’s pronunciation which is imperfect, and, like the written language of the letter to
Teresa Guiccioli, conceals the truth of the feelings he would like to express. Unlike in the case of Shelley’s letter, however, there is no certainty that the person uttering “[barbarian] accents” is a foreigner. The character of Thyrsis often figures in eighteenth-century Italian opera, and, what is more important, Italy had been, and was still regarded by European travelers in the Romantic period as an outpost of Greece. The fictional situation that seems to be delineated in this fragment has a parallel in Adonais. In stanza 34 of his elegy for John
Keats, Shelley describes one “Who in another’s fate now wept his own; / As in the accents of an unknown land, / He sung new sorrow” (ll. 300-02). This is evidently a figure of the author.
Arguably, Shelley had his contemporary works in Italian in mind when he thus depicted himself, but not only does his autobiographical character sing “in the accents of an unknown land”. In the next line of the poem, he is referred to as a “Stranger” (l. 303). Taking this appellation in its primary meaning of “foreigner” (OED 1a), I suggest that, as in the fragment quoted above, Shelley may have intended to fashion himself as an Italian in Adonais. This possibility is supported by the fact that in one of his longest original pieces of writing in
Italian, the already mentioned review of Sgricci’s accademia, Shelley explicitly adopted an
Italian persona.
Tommaso Sgricci gave his accademia on 22 January 1821, and internal evidence indicates that Shelley’s review was drafted in the subsequent few days (Dawson 24n26). This makes it one of Shelley’s first works in Italian, perhaps even the very first, if we exclude a few private letters. The fact that Shelley wrote his review from the point of view of an Italian 10 is revealing of his intentions with respect to this as well as his successive works in Italian. A review of a theatrical performance is by its very nature destined for immediate consumption, and it is almost beyond doubt that Shelley meant his review to appear in a local Italian newspaper, as first suggested by Rossetti (Shelley, Poetical Works cxxx n).7 There is no evidence that the surviving draft was finished and published. Nevertheless, its existence is a sufficient proof that Shelley could, and did envision an audience for himself in Italy. The inauguration of his production in Italian with a text intended for immediate publication reveals that he began to write in a new language in order to find a new audience. The strategy of adopting an Italian persona would enable Shelley to win the attention of an audience of native speakers by presenting himself as one of them.
Stephen Behrendt has shown how, since the publication of the Prometheus Unbound volume in the summer of 1820, Shelley became less and less confident in his ability to reach a wide audience, and thus have an impact on British public opinion (161-62). His poetic self- confidence was increasingly shaken by the comparison with Byron—a comparison that would become inescapable after the latter’s arrival in Pisa in early November 1821 (Keach 205-06).
Shelley’s awareness of not having an audience led to his identification with Keats in Adonais.
The very self-referentiality of Epipsychidion, “A Defence of Poetry,” and Adonais is a consequence of this awareness. Writing in Italian is another. Shelley’s model was, again,
Byron. With this I do not mean that Byron ever even thought of writing poetry in Italian, which he used only to write letters and a handful of traditional Italian folk songs, called stornelli, composed to amuse Teresa Guiccioli (512).8 But Byron’s works were immediately translated into Italian, and he was widely read throughout the peninsula.9 Shelley may have hoped similarly to achieve fame abroad after failing at home. In this he may have wished to emulate William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft as well, whose widespread popularity in 11 continental Europe Shelley had praised as early as 1817 in his review of Godwin’s Mandeville
(1817):
It is singular, that the other nations of Europe should have anticipated in this respect the judgment of posterity, and that the name of Godwin, and that of his late illustrious and admirable wife, should be pronounced, even by those who know but little of English literature, with reverence; and that the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft should have been translated and universally read in France and Germany, long after the bigotry of faction had stifled them in our own country. (Prose Works 277)
Shelley may have wanted to effect a change in Italian politics by exerting an influence on the Italian reading public.10 In particular, his decision to translate his “Ode to Liberty” into
Italian manifests his desire to convey a message like the one in Byron’s Prophecy of Dante
(1821), a poem his author “intended for the Italians,” which, once translated, “was looked at in a political light” (Medwin, Conversations 159). Stanzas 14 to 18 of Shelley’s “Ode to
Liberty” urge readers to rise against all forms of oppression—including that of language—in the name of freedom. The passage opens with a direct appeal for Italy to “repress / The beasts who make their dens [its] sacred palaces” (ll. 209-10). It is a characteristic Shelleyan irony that the manuscript leaf containing the draft self-translation into Italian of these stanzas is missing. It is possible that it got inadvertently lost while the complete draft was being circulated among its first readers, which is what probably happened to most of the holograph fair copy of the translation (Poems 97). Neither draft nor fair copy, however, could be published as they stood. Unlike his original verse compositions in Italian, Shelley’s self- translations do not have any meter or rhyme scheme; they are no more than line-by-line literal translations, which he evidently drafted in the hope of finding a professional literary translator, or a writer, willing to set them to poetry. Vincenzo Monti, “gran traduttor dei traduttor d’Omero,”11 reportedly proposed this type of collaboration to Byron (Di Breme 387-
88). Shelley may have looked for a volunteer among, or through, his Pisan acquaintances, who included literati, amateur writers, university professors, and even the leading local 12 publisher, Giovanni Rosini (1776-1855), whose firm—named after his foreman, Niccolò
Capurro—printed Adonais (Pertici 262).
As I have tried to demonstrate, Shelley’s writings in Italian are an integral part of his later production. While the scant evidence available allows us only to make conjectures on the circulation they may have achieved, a close look at them has led to the identification of a precise communicative intention behind them. In Shelley’s literary experiments with Italian we see his lifelong search for an audience take a completely new direction. With his limited command of the language, he was no less admirably quixotic than when he distributed propaganda by means of hot air balloons and bottles dropped into the sea.
1 For an instance of Shelley’s writings in Italian being treated as language exercises see Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound 677. 2 The one exception is represented by Opere poetiche, where, however, the poems in Italian are relegated to an appendix (1173-95). 3 Teresa Viviani’s surviving letters to Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley are preserved in the Abinger Collection at the Bodleian Library. Some appeared in Viviani Della Robbia. 4 My translation is based on Teresa Guiccioli’s own very literal French translation, reprinted in Shelley, Letters 327: “Vous saurez pardonner, madame, à un barbare le mauvais italien qui voile les sentiments honnêtes de ma lettre.” I have also had the opportunity to consult Shelley’s autograph letter in Italian in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the New York Public Library. This will be published for the first time in the forthcoming last set of Shelley and His Circle, accompanied by my linguistic analysis. 5 In the English translation appended to his edition, Frederick L. Jones rendered Guiccioli’s “barbare” simply as “foreigner” (Shelley, Letters 329). 6 “Thus, Thyrsis clothed in [barbarian] accents / His sincere affection for an [Ausonian]” (my translation). The words “barbari” (“barbarian”) and “Ausonio” (“Ausonian”) are both cancelled by the author in the manuscript. 7 Michael Rossington suggests “a Florentine newspaper such as the Gazzetta di Firenze, or the Antologia (a cosmopolitan literary monthly, edited by G. P. Vieusseux, launched in January 1821 with an explicit commitment to publishing translations of reviews and poems from other European languages into Italian)” (241). A short manuscript note by Rossetti in the Angeli-Dennis Collection at the University of British Columbia Library shows that in the first enthusiasm of his discovery he thought that Shelley’s review could “have been actually inserted in some newspaper.” 8 A note by Byron about writing poetry in Italian is transcribed in Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée: “It is not my fault that I am obliged to write in English. If I understood any present language, Italian for instance, equally well, I would write in it:—but it will require ten years, at least, to form a style” (qtd. in Stabler 47). 9 On the reception of Byron’s works in Italy in the early nineteenth century see Zuccato 80-90. 10 Rossington proposes a similar hypothesis (240-41). 11 “Great translator of Homer’s translators” (my translation). The epithet comes from a satirical epigram attributed to Ugo Foscolo (446).
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, for permission to quote from
Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 20. I am also grateful to the School of English Literature, 13
Language and Linguistics of Newcastle University for generously funding my attendance at
NASSR 2018.
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