Journal articles on the topic 'Italian Epigrams'

In the present essay I want to broaden the sphere of potential textual and ideological sources of the epigraph to the first chapter of Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights,” to make precise the genealogy of the French witticism that reached the Russian poet and served as the basis for his epigraph, and to offer a social and cultural interpretation of it in the context of Pushkin’s work. I argue that the witticism does not have a direct relationship to the genre of the verse epigram but rests on a humorous prose tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which included jokes about the pants of hapless musicians, which in turn derived from Renaissance anecdotes and Italian commedia dell’arte

Birds function in Polish literature of Renaissance and Baroque in three paradigms. Mostly they appear as creatures gifted with a symbolic (allegoric) meaning, seen through the prism of the tradition reaching to Aristotle’s Zoology, Physiologist, and later symbological compendia. The second category is describing birds as food or pests (especially in hunting and agricultural literature). Apart from this ‘practical’ paradigm, there is also a third one: birds as a source of an aesthetic thrill, fascination with them includes both lyricism and a ludic element. The first two categories fit into a more general utilitarian paradigm. Handbooks, treaties, sermons, fairy tales, paroemias and animal epigrams showcase birds almost exclusivelyas tools of moral, religious and conventional reflection, or as objects to be obtained and consumed. Interestingly, the symbological activity of the creators does not cease in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, the representatives of avifauna are burdened with new meanings, while the fantastic creatures slowly disappear from the creators’ fields of view. In the third group of works distinguished here, one can notice the phenomenon of the emancipation of birds as objects of interest just as they are, although their voice is heard mostly in the digressions scattered throughout the big epic works. The autonomy of birds in the literature of Renaissance and Baroque is not linear, the way of perceiving them is determined by the individual sensitivity of the authors, the most prominent of whom are Hieronim Morsztyn (early 17th century) and an anonymous translator of the Italian Adon (2nd half of the 17th century).

The acculturation Ashkenazic Jews in Italy is the focus of the present discussion. By 1500 Jews had been living in Padua for centuries, but their cemeteries were destroyed in the 1509. Four cemeteries remained with over 1200 inscriptions between 1530–1860. The literary features of the inscriptions indicate a shift from a preference for epitaphs written in prose, like those of medieval Germany, to epitaphs in the form of Italian Jewry's occasional poetry. The art and architecture of the tombstones are part and parcel of the Renaissance ambient, with the portals and heraldry characteristic of Palladian edifices. The lettering, too, presents a shift from the constituency's medieval Ashkenazic origins to its Italian setting. These developments are situated in the broader context of Italian Jewish art and architecture, while the literary innovations are shown to reflect the revival of the epigram among poets of the Italian Renaissance.

The Background to Kellgren’s ”On a bust of Propertius”. This article examines the Swedish eighteenth-century poet Johan Henric Kellgren’s widely celebrated epigram “On a bust of Propertius” (“Öfver Propertii Buste eller Porträt”), published posthumously. An attractive but fanciful story about the poem as Kellgren’s autobiographical reflection and personal farewell on his deathbed has triggered an unwillingness among scholars to explore what the writer himself declares: that the piece is a translation of the epigram In statuam Propertii by the virtually unknown Italian Renaissance poet Guido Postumo Silvestri of Pesaro. The first section of the article surveys the intertextual field of Postumo’s poem and analyses its fusion of common tropes and motifs in the Greco-Roman and Neo-Latin ekphrastic epigram traditions. The second section traces the subsequent textual history of Postumo’s poem and the changes it underwent in reprints as well as in the eighteenth-century Danish philologist Frederik Plum’s translation into his native language. The third and final section focuses on Kellgren’s interpretation of the Danish text. It was through a process in several steps of reproductions and translations that the Neo-Latin creation was strained of its manierism, mythological references and allusions to late antique poetry, producing this pathos-driven swansong.

In 1531 the Italian jurist Andrea Alciato (1492-1550) published Emblematum liber, a work that had a great influence on Europe. Alciato's work consisted of an anthology of poems that were illustrated, each of which had a title or theme. The purpose of the illustration and the title was intended to facilitate the understanding and interpretation of the text by the reader. Emblematum liber is considered the starting point of the emblematic which later gave rise to the emblematic literary genre.Alciato's work encouraged many authors to follow the path of the emblems. The correspondence between the title (inscription), image (pictura), and explanatory text (subscriptio or epigrama) gave rise to a consolidated gender that spread rapidly throughout Europe. The purpose of this paper is to present the influence that emblematic had on Spanish economic thought of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in particular on the works of Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera (1556-1620) and Diego Saavedra Fajardo (1584-1648).

Poem 2 of the Liber Catullianus – the first of the passer poems – was probably the poet's most famous piece. The poem presents a charming and fascinating picture of a Roman matron who is said by the poet to divert her mind from her passion by playing with her pet bird. Of this seemingly innocent picture a peculiar esoteric interpretation was offered in the time of the Italian Renaissance. Toward the end of the fifteenth century, the Florentine scholar Angelo Poliziano suggested that Catullus had woven an obscene allegory into his poem, and he supported his argument by reference to the sixth epigram of Martial's eleventh book. This epigram is a vulgar poem that ends with the words ‘passerem Catulli’. It will figure prominently in our discussion below. Poliziano only hinted at an indecent meaning. The Dutch scholar, Isaac Voss, in his Observations on Catullus published in 1684, makes the matter explicit. The Greeks, he alleges, often used the names of birds to refer to a man's penis, and similarly passer in poem is ambiguous and at one level represents the poet's penis. By this obscene interpretation, the basic allegory of the poem would be something like this. Lesbia has great familiarity with the poet's male member. She delights in playing with it and in this way seems to satisfy her erotic impulses. The poet by means of similar play would like to take similar satisfaction for himself. He cannot because masturbation gives him no pleasure. According to Voss, this allegory continues in poem 3, the famous dirge for the dead passer. Here, he declares, we should suppose that the poet wishes to represent himself as ‘confectum et exhaustum lucta Venerea et funerata… ea parte quae virum facit’ (‘worn out and exhausted by a physical exertion erotic and deadly in regard to that part which makes a person a man’).

The study of the military in the Roman provinces of Judaea is not the most accessible topic. Though the data upon which scholars rely is familiar (e.g., epigraphs, papyri, ancient historians), its study requires significant methodological deviations from biblical studies. This article summarizes key points relevant for scholars of both Jewish antiquity and early Christianity. First, it provides a summary of recent developments in the social history of the Roman army in the Near East, attending especially to the question of the role and function of soldiers in that region. Second, this article provides a brief social history for all military units in Judaea before it was renamed Syria Palaestina in 130 ce (four legions, 14 infantry cohortes, and five cavalry alae), based on the latest discoveries. Finally, the article concludes with a section discussing two issues specific to New Testament studies: the presence of an Italian cohort in Judaea (Acts 10) and the issue of the Augustan cohort in Judaea and Batanaea (Acts 27).

Sono numerosi gli studi dedicati ai processi di trasformazione delle cittŕ italiane, avvenuti dopo l'unitŕ del Paese. In particolare, si tratta di ricerche che hanno indagato gli aspetti quantitativi di tale fenomeno, che riguardano lo sviluppo territoriale dei centri abitati, la dotazione di nuove infrastrutture, quali strade, ferrovie, porti, ecc, o la realizzazione di grandi opere pubbliche con finalitŕ di carattere sociale. Meno numerosi sono invece gli studi dedicati alle trasformazioni dei centri abitati e dei territori prodotte da quel fenomeno che si definisce di "costruzione dell'identitŕ nazionale". Lo scritto delinea il contesto in cui prende forma tale progetto e inquadra i temi che ne costituiscono la concretizzazione. Si tratta, nello specifico, di individuare quella "geografia" (costituita da un numero infinito di monumenti commemorativi del Risorgimento, di luoghi simbolici, di targhe in ricordo di eventi insurrezionali, di lapidi con epigrafi dedicatorie, di toponomastiche e itinerari d'ispirazione patriottica, di restauri dei cosiddetti "monumenti nazionali") in cui prende forma tale progetto e di evidenziarne i caratteri specifici. Tale rappresentazione dell'identitŕ nazionale costituisce oggi un tratto imprescindibile del volto delle cittŕ italiane, e richiede politiche di tutela e valorizzazione.

The Reserved Collection of the National Library of Mexico holds a previously unpublished manuscript (Ms 1594) that contains the Latin and Greek works of a New Spanish poet, José de Villerías y Roelas (1695-1728). It is undoubtedly the most important document known to us, written in Greek and produced in New Spain during the colonial period. To date, no other New Spanish materials containing original compositions in Greek have been located or studied; nor are we aware of any collection of Greek poems anthologised by a New Spanish Hellenist. Hence the manuscript stands as a kind of codex unicus for New Spanish Hellenism. In this paper, I publish and analyse one of the poems, the longest of Villerías' collection of Greek poetry, and his Latin translation. In the manuscript, the epigram in question is attributed to the distinguished and renowned humanist of the Italian Quattrocento, Alessandra Scala, who composed it in response to one of Angelo Poliziano’s poems dedicated to her. Before analysing Villerías’ text and translation, I trace Poliziano's reception in New Spain and explore Villerías’ possible engagement with Poliziano's Liber Epigrammatum Graecorum. Finally, I discuss the various approaches to the translation of Greek texts in Mexico from the colonial period to the present day. The aim is to stimulate debates about classical reception in post-colonial and peripheral contexts and to present the politics in which classicism became institutionalised in contemporary Mexico.

Introduction. Given article considers R. Schumann’s “Zwei Venetianische Lieder” / “Two Venetian Songs” (ор. 25, №17–18) on poems by T. Moore, in F. Freiligrath translation. Often the creation of the Venice ambience in art works was due to trips and impressions on this city. In 1829, R. Schumann, as a student of Heidelberg University, went on a trip to Switzerland and Italy during his study vacation. One of the cities on the travel map was Venice. R. Schumann “resurrected” the city ambience only eleven years after in the “Zwei Venetianische Lieder” (“Two Venetian Songs”), which became part of the song cycle “Myrthen” (1840). How do these two vocal miniatures, that are one of the first in the composer’s vocal creativity, reflect the individual style of his writing? Do they correlate with the nature of the “true” Schumann, who is known for his famous works, such as the cycle “A poet’s Love”? Objective. The purpose of the article is to comprehend composer methods of Venice image embodiment in “Zwei Venetianische Lieder” in the context of creative tradition of the Austro-German romantic song. Methods used in the research: 1) historical method, allowing to comprehend the selected material in the perspective of the development of Austro-German song of the 19th century; 2) intonational method, which involves the study of vocal melody in terms of melodic reactions to figurative content; 3) genre method, caused by the features of chamber vocal lyrics; 4) stylistic method, corresponding to a specific opus consideration in the general context of the composer’s creative work. The results of the study. “Zwei Venetianische Lieder” were grown up in the artistic climate of its era. The popularity of traveling in the circles of well-educated youth was a practical realization of spiritual impulses and the inner need to push the boundaries of the information space for awareness of the nature of self-own identity through a meeting with a different culture and worldview. Italy, and the entire Mediterranean areal, as the cradle of the Christian humanist culture, was a center of attraction for the German romantics. The creation of the artistic and aesthetic archetype of Italy and Venice by J. W. Goethe in “Italian Travels” and “Epigrams” has created a tradition of perception these themes not only in German literature, but also in music. R. Schumann was one of the first to respond to this creative idea. He was also the first among German composers to turn to the “poetic” Venice of the Englishman Thomas Moore and initiated the appearance of a series “Venetianische Lieder” in Austro-German music of the 19th century. A number of authors were involved in the creation of this series – F. Mendelssohn Bartholdi, A. Fesca, С. Dekker, and others. The melancholic mood of the many “Venetianisches Gondellied” written by German composers was the result of the process of mythologizing the image of Venice. The creative people (poets, writers, composers, painters) were involved in this process. They perceived this city through the prism of artistic relations, associations, and sought in its canonical symbols (channels, gondolas, sea, mirror, mask) new semantic dimensions, means of the expression of self-reflection. “Zwei Venetianische Lieder” from the song cycle “Myrthen” by R. Schumann stand apart on this list as not only the first, but also as the works distinguished by its originality. 1840 year is considered as the “song year” in the composer’s work. In this year 138 songs and the best of song cycles were written by the composer: “Liederkreis” ор. 24, “Myrthen” ор. 25, “Liederkreis” ор. 39, “Frauenliebe und Leben” ор. 42, “Dichterliebe”, ор. 48. After the “piano decade” (1829–1839) Schumann’s appeal to the song came a surprise, in particular, for the author himself. This led to the change in his musical aesthetics, to the revision of the hierarchy entrenched in the consciousness, about the primacy of music over other arts and the instrumental music over the vocal. Although the cycle “Myrten” op. 25 (1840) is one of the first in the vocal works by R. Schumann, it is distinguished by the maturity of style writing. R. Schuman’s psychological sensitivity to the poetic word is conveyed in the intonational nature of the songs, careful selection of harmonic means, finely tuned tonal plans that can emphasize both, contemplation and rebelliousness. Musical and poetic integrity is also ensured by the increased importance of the accompaniment and the piano part in whole that include the expressive instrumental introductions and postludes aimed at revealing of an image. Conclusion. The study of R.Schumann’s “variations” on Thomas Moore’s “Venice” as a separate scientific topic makes it possible to realize the scale of the creative competition established by the outstanding composer in his “Zwei Venetianische Lieder” from the vocal cycle “Myrthen”.

The Italian seismic compilations are among the most complete and back-in time extended worldwide, with earthquakes on record even before the Common Era. However, we have surely lost the memory of dozen strong events of the historical period, mostly in the first millennium CE. Given the lack of certain or conclusive written sources, besides paleoseismological investigations, a complementary way to infer the occurrence of lost earthquakes is to cross-check archaeoseismic evidence from ancient settlements. This usually happens by investigating collapses/restorations/reconstructions of buildings, the general re-organization of the urban texture, or even the abrupt abandonment of the settlement. Exceptionally, epigraphs mentioning more or less explicitly the effects of the earthquake strengthened the field working hypothesis. Here, I deal with both paleoseismological clues from the Monte Marzano Fault System (the structure responsible for the catastrophic, Mw 6.9 1980 earthquake) and archaeoseismological evidence of settlements founded in its surroundings to cast light on two poorly known earthquakes that occurred at the onset and at the end of the first millennium CE, likely in 62 and in 989 CE. Both should share the same seismogenic structure and the size of the 1980 event (Mw 6.9).

Flaminio Rota was a 16th century anatomist and medical figure at the University of Bologna. He was highly praised, despite his poor scientific production. As a matter of fact, Rota competed with scientific activities in different anatomical arguments, but he did not publish any important research. Nevertheless, we know the principal results of his scientific activity because indirect information can be found in other publications, where some of his studies were emphasized by his contemporary colleagues. Henning Witte even mentioned Rota as a very famous Italian medical figure, together with Galilei and Santorio. On the other hand, Rota was a highly esteemed teacher. The best evidence of his recognition is well-documented in the Palace of Archiginnasio in Bologna, where Rota’s teaching activity was praised with six memorial epigraphs. In the south-eastern outskirts of Bologna, there is an 18th century villa, including a more ancient annex, that belonged to Rota. At this location, the upper parts of the walls and the ceiling are decorated with a pictorial cycle illustrating medical scenes. In this paper, we theorize regarding his scientific thinking by analyzing the pictorial cycle he commissioned.

<p>En la <em>Antología Palatina</em>, representantes de distintas escuelas literarias, algunos más célebres que otros, junto con autores anónimos, recuerdan las ciudades antiguas –en Grecia y luego en Roma, además de las zonas de influencia de ambas–, como cuna de inolvidables referentes históricos o míticos, foco de contiendas bélicas o de victorias en competencias y juegos, epicentros de curación o modelos de paisaje natural o urbano, entre otros motivos de inspiración. En el marco del proyecto SIIP 2019-2021, “La política como eje vertebrador en la Grecia Antigua. Expresiones discursivas en fuentes diversas”, se examina una de ellas, Corinto y su ciudadela Acrocorinto, presentes en alusiones de unos versos o en poemas completos de la compilación. Previa traducción directa personal de la fuente original y de la confrontación de diversas traducciones (latina –que se transcribe–, española, inglesa e italiana), se sistematizan los rasgos que el imaginario colectivo retuvo, en consonancia con las posibles causas movilizadoras que inspiraron a sus creadores. Se han consignado las notas filológicas consideradas más oportunas. La consulta de Homero, Hesíodo, Heródoto, Píndaro, Pausanias, Estrabón, Higino, Cicerón, Alcifrón, Elio Arístides y Diógenes Laercio corrobora, complementa y amplía el contenido de los epigramas, para la mejor comprensión de la πόλις en la geografía, la historia, la filosofía, el arte, el deporte, la religión, el mito y las costumbres, verificando también los lazos jerárquicos con el resto de Grecia y con Roma.</p>

The essay explains the intertextual connection of a satiric epigram of Magnus Felix Ennodius, carm. 2.97 H. = 217 V. De anu quadam with the description of the miraculous pregnancy of Sara, Isaac’s mother, in Sedulius’ Carmen Paschale. Furthermore, the article provides an Italian translation of the poem to explain the allusion to the menopause of the old woman at l. 3.

Abstract This essay tracks Karl Marx’s famous line, “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented,” as it travels from a translated epigraph in Edward Said’s Orientalism to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” What follows from this minor textual detail is a broader exploration of how “other” languages take place in postcolonial theory—not only Said and Spivak’s German, but Abdelfattah Kilito’s Italian and Frantz Fanon’s Arabic. What is the place of translation in self-representation? How do instances of textual citation complicate the self of self-representation? In the ricochet between citation and translation, language matters not necessarily as a sign of fluency, but as part of a pragmatics of critique, positionality, and ultimately solidarity. Each instance of language-use (German, Italian, Arabic) highlights the potentials of re-use, citation, and re-imagination for consolidating the bonds of anticolonial struggle and a vision of a postcolonial future. Shifting from translation to resonance and from language to voice, the essay ultimately engages the poetic potentials of translation as part of a pragmatics of anticolonial solidarity, integral to and beyond the self at the heart of self-representation.

The project consists of a textual and bibliographical update of Peter Allan Hansen’s Carmina Epigraphica Graeca. The research is divided into two parts: a first section is dedicated to the bibliographical update of inscriptions already published by Hansen. There are many sections that differ as for lemmi, textual contributions, epigraphical, historical or archaeological information. In the second section of our research, indeed, we will catalogue the new inscriptions with archaeological, literary, historical, epigraphical, metrical and cultural data in order to provide a right interpretation of the epigraphy without leaving anything out. The inscriptions have been studied with in-depth analyses, drawings and considerations of an epigraphic nature. We have used excavation materials and contexts to provide a complete point of view of the main archaeological features. The cards are correlated with metrical and linguistic analyses, translations into Italian and other languages (if they are present), as well as all the main aspects of the epigraphical support. Finally, there is a discussion about the chronology of the epigraph and a detailed commentary that traces in many cases the history of the inscription’s study and analyses the main issues.

Biology teaches us that organisms adapt—or don’t; sociology claims that people adapt—or don’t. We know that ideas can adapt; sometimes even institutions can adapt. Or not. Various papers in this issue attest in exciting ways to precisely such adaptations and maladaptations. (See, for example, the articles in this issue by Lelia Green, Leesa Bonniface, and Tami McMahon, by Lexey A. Bartlett, and by Debra Ferreday.) Adaptation is a part of nature and culture, but it’s the latter alone that interests me here. (However, see the article by Hutcheon and Bortolotti for a discussion of nature and culture together.) It’s no news to anyone that not only adaptations, but all art is bred of other art, though sometimes artists seem to get carried away. My favourite example of excess of association or attribution can be found in the acknowledgements page to a verse drama called Beatrice Chancy by the self-defined “maximalist” (not minimalist) poet, novelist, librettist, and critic, George Elliot Clarke. His selected list of the incarnations of the story of Beatrice Cenci, a sixteenth-century Italian noblewoman put to death for the murder of her father, includes dramas, romances, chronicles, screenplays, parodies, sculptures, photographs, and operas: dramas by Vincenzo Pieracci (1816), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819), Juliusz Slowacki (1843), Waldter Landor (1851), Antonin Artaud (1935) and Alberto Moravia (1958); the romances by Francesco Guerrazi (1854), Henri Pierangeli (1933), Philip Lindsay (1940), Frederic Prokosch (1955) and Susanne Kircher (1976); the chronicles by Stendhal (1839), Mary Shelley (1839), Alexandre Dumas, père (1939-40), Robert Browning (1864), Charles Swinburne (1883), Corrado Ricci (1923), Sir Lionel Cust (1929), Kurt Pfister (1946) and Irene Mitchell (1991); the film/screenplay by Bertrand Tavernier and Colo O’Hagan (1988); the parody by Kathy Acker (1993); the sculpture by Harriet Hosmer (1857); the photograph by Julia Ward Cameron (1866); and the operas by Guido Pannain (1942), Berthold Goldschmidt (1951, 1995) and Havergal Brian (1962). (Beatrice Chancy, 152) He concludes the list with: “These creators have dallied with Beatrice Cenci, but I have committed indiscretions” (152). An “intertextual feast”, by Clarke’s own admission, this rewriting of Beatrice’s story—especially Percy Bysshe Shelley’s own verse play, The Cenci—illustrates brilliantly what Northrop Frye offered as the first principle of the production of literature: “literature can only derive its form from itself” (15). But in the last several decades, what has come to be called intertextuality theory has shifted thinking away from looking at this phenomenon from the point of view of authorial influences on the writing of literature (and works like Harold Bloom’s famous study of the Anxiety of Influence) and toward considering our readerly associations with literature, the connections we (not the author) make—as we read. We, the readers, have become “empowered”, as we say, and we’ve become the object of academic study in our own right. Among the many associations we inevitably make, as readers, is with adaptations of the literature we read, be it of Jane Austin novels or Beowulf. Some of us may have seen the 2006 rock opera of Beowulf done by the Irish Repertory Theatre; others await the new Neil Gaiman animated film. Some may have played the Beowulf videogame. I personally plan to miss the upcoming updated version that makes Beowulf into the son of an African explorer. But I did see Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf and Grendel film, and yearned to see the comic opera at the Lincoln Centre Festival in 2006 called Grendel, the Transcendence of the Great Big Bad. I am not really interested in whether these adaptations—all in the last year or so—signify Hollywood’s need for a new “monster of the week” or are just the sign of a desire to cash in on the success of The Lord of the Rings. For all I know they might well act as an ethical reminder of the human in the alien in a time of global strife (see McGee, A4). What interests me is the impact these multiple adaptations can have on the reader of literature as well as on the production of literature. Literature, like painting, is usually thought of as what Nelson Goodman (114) calls a one-stage art form: what we read (like what we see on a canvas) is what is put there by the originating artist. Several major consequences follow from this view. First, the implication is that the work is thus an original and new creation by that artist. However, even the most original of novelists—like Salman Rushdie—are the first to tell you that stories get told and retold over and over. Indeed his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, takes this as a major theme. Works like the Thousand and One Nights are crucial references in all of his work. As he writes in Haroun and the Sea of Stories: “no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born of old” (86). But illusion of originality is only one of the implications of seeing literature as a one-stage art form. Another is the assumption that what the writer put on paper is what we read. But entire doctoral programs in literary production and book history have been set up to study how this is not the case, in fact. Editors influence, even change, what authors want to write. Designers control how we literally see the work of literature. Beatrice Chancy’s bookend maps of historical Acadia literally frame how we read the historical story of the title’s mixed-race offspring of an African slave and a white slave owner in colonial Nova Scotia in 1801. Media interest or fashion or academic ideological focus may provoke a publisher to foreground in the physical presentation different elements of a text like this—its stress on race, or gender, or sexuality. The fact that its author won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for poetry might mean that the fact that this is a verse play is emphasised. If the book goes into a second edition, will a new preface get added, changing the framework for the reader once again? As Katherine Larson has convincingly shown, the paratextual elements that surround a work of literature like this one become a major site of meaning generation. What if literature were not a one-stage an art form at all? What if it were, rather, what Goodman calls “two-stage” (114)? What if we accept that other artists, other creators, are needed to bring it to life—editors, publishers, and indeed readers? In a very real and literal sense, from our (audience) point of view, there may be no such thing as a one-stage art work. Just as the experience of literature is made possible for readers by the writer, in conjunction with a team of professional and creative people, so, arguably all art needs its audience to be art; the un-interpreted, un-experienced art work is not worth calling art. Goodman resists this move to considering literature a two-stage art, not at all sure that readings are end products the way that performance works are (114). Plays, films, television shows, or operas would be his prime examples of two-stage arts. In each of these, a text (a playtext, a screenplay, a score, a libretto) is moved from page to stage or screen and given life, by an entire team of creative individuals: directors, actors, designers, musicians, and so on. Literary adaptations to the screen or stage are usually considered as yet another form of this kind of transcription or transposition of a written text to a performance medium. But the verbal move from the “book” to the diminutive “libretto” (in Italian, little book or booklet) is indicative of a view that sees adaptation as a step downward, a move away from a primary literary “source”. In fact, an entire negative rhetoric of “infidelity” has developed in both journalistic reviewing and academic discourse about adaptations, and it is a morally loaded rhetoric that I find surprising in its intensity. Here is the wonderfully critical description of that rhetoric by the king of film adaptation critics, Robert Stam: Terms like “infidelity,” “betrayal,” “deformation,” “violation,” “bastardisation,” “vulgarisation,” and “desecration” proliferate in adaptation discourse, each word carrying its specific charge of opprobrium. “Infidelity” carries overtones of Victorian prudishness; “betrayal” evokes ethical perfidy; “bastardisation” connotes illegitimacy; “deformation” implies aesthetic disgust and monstrosity; “violation” calls to mind sexual violence; “vulgarisation” conjures up class degradation; and “desecration” intimates religious sacrilege and blasphemy. (3) I join many others today, like Stam, in challenging the persistence of this fidelity discourse in adaptation studies, thereby providing yet another example of what, in his article here called “The Persistence of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today,” John Connor has called the “fidelity reflex”—the call to end an obsession with fidelity as the sole criterion for judging the success of an adaptation. But here I want to come at this same issue of the relation of adaptation to the adapted text from another angle. When considering an adaptation of a literary work, there are other reasons why the literary “source” text might be privileged. Literature has historical priority as an art form, Stam claims, and so in some people’s eyes will always be superior to other forms. But does it actually have priority? What about even earlier performative forms like ritual and song? Or to look forward, instead of back, as Tim Barker urges us to do in his article here, what about the new media’s additions to our repertoire with the advent of electronic technology? How can we retain this hierarchy of artistic forms—with literature inevitably on top—in a world like ours today? How can both the Romantic ideology of original genius and the capitalist notion of individual authorship hold up in the face of the complex reality of the production of literature today (as well as in the past)? (In “Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past”, Steve Collins shows how digital technology has changed the possibilities of musical creativity in adapting/sampling.) Like many other ages before our own, adaptation is rampant today, as director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman clearly realised in creating Adaptation, their meta-cinematic illustration-as-send-up film about adaptation. But rarely has a culture denigrated the adapter as a secondary and derivative creator as much as we do the screenwriter today—as Jonze explores with great irony. Michelle McMerrin and Sergio Rizzo helpfully explain in their pieces here that one of the reasons for this is the strength of auteur theory in film criticism. But we live in a world in which works of literature have been turned into more than films. We now have literary adaptations in the forms of interactive new media works and videogames; we have theme parks; and of course, we have the more common television series, radio and stage plays, musicals, dance works, and operas. And, of course, we now have novelisations of films—and they are not given the respect that originary novels are given: it is the adaptation as adaptation that is denigrated, as Deborah Allison shows in “Film/Print: Novelisations and Capricorn One”. Adaptations across media are inevitably fraught, and for complex and multiple reasons. The financing and distribution issues of these widely different media alone inevitably challenge older capitalist models. The need or desire to appeal to a global market has consequences for adaptations of literature, especially with regard to its regional and historical specificities. These particularities are what usually get adapted or “indigenised” for new audiences—be they the particularities of the Spanish gypsy Carmen (see Ioana Furnica, “Subverting the ‘Good, Old Tune’”), those of the Japanese samurai genre (see Kevin P. Eubanks, “Becoming-Samurai: Samurai [Films], Kung-Fu [Flicks] and Hip-Hop [Soundtracks]”), of American hip hop graffiti (see Kara-Jane Lombard, “‘To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious’: The Adaptation of Hip Hop Graffiti to an Australian Context”) or of Jane Austen’s fiction (see Suchitra Mathur, “From British ‘Pride’ to Indian ‘Bride’: Mapping the Contours of a Globalised (Post?)Colonialism”). What happens to the literary text that is being adapted, often multiple times? Rather than being displaced by the adaptation (as is often feared), it most frequently gets a new life: new editions of the book appear, with stills from the movie adaptation on its cover. But if I buy and read the book after seeing the movie, I read it differently than I would have before I had seen the film: in effect, the book, not the adaptation, has become the second and even secondary text for me. And as I read, I can only “see” characters as imagined by the director of the film; the cinematic version has taken over, has even colonised, my reader’s imagination. The literary “source” text, in my readerly, experiential terms, becomes the secondary work. It exists on an experiential continuum, in other words, with its adaptations. It may have been created before, but I only came to know it after. What if I have read the literary work first, and then see the movie? In my imagination, I have already cast the characters: I know what Gabriel and Gretta Conroy of James Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” look and sound like—in my imagination, at least. Then along comes John Huston’s lush period piece cinematic adaptation and the director superimposes his vision upon mine; his forcibly replaces mine. But, in this particular case, Huston still arguably needs my imagination, or at least my memory—though he may not have realised it fully in making the film. When, in a central scene in the narrative, Gabriel watches his wife listening, moved, to the singing of the Irish song, “The Lass of Aughrim,” what we see on screen is a concerned, intrigued, but in the end rather blank face: Gabriel doesn’t alter his expression as he listens and watches. His expression may not change—but I know exactly what he is thinking. Huston does not tell us; indeed, without the use of voice-over, he cannot. And since the song itself is important, voice-over is impossible. But I know exactly what he is thinking: I’ve read the book. I fill in the blank, so to speak. Gabriel looks at Gretta and thinks: There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. … Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. (210) A few pages later the narrator will tell us: At last she turned towards them and Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart. (212) This joy, of course, puts him in a very different—disastrously different—state of mind than his wife, who (we later learn) is remembering a young man who sang that song to her when she was a girl—and who died, for love of her. I know this—because I’ve read the book. Watching the movie, I interpret Gabriel’s blank expression in this knowledge. Just as the director’s vision can colonise my visual and aural imagination, so too can I, as reader, supplement the film’s silence with the literary text’s inner knowledge. The question, of course, is: should I have to do so? Because I have read the book, I will. But what if I haven’t read the book? Will I substitute my own ideas, from what I’ve seen in the rest of the film, or from what I’ve experienced in my own life? Filmmakers always have to deal with this problem, of course, since the camera is resolutely externalising, and actors must reveal their inner worlds through bodily gesture or facial expression for the camera to record and for the spectator to witness and comprehend. But film is not only a visual medium: it uses music and sound, and it also uses words—spoken words within the dramatic situation, words overheard on the street, on television, but also voice-over words, spoken by a narrating figure. Stephen Dedalus escapes from Ireland at the end of Joseph Strick’s 1978 adaptation of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with the same words as he does in the novel, where they appear as Stephen’s diary entry: Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. … Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. (253) The words from the novel also belong to the film as film, with its very different story, less about an artist than about a young Irishman finally able to escape his family, his religion and his country. What’s deliberately NOT in the movie is the irony of Joyce’s final, benign-looking textual signal to his reader: Dublin, 1904 Trieste, 1914 The first date is the time of Stephen’s leaving Dublin—and the time of his return, as we know from the novel Ulysses, the sequel, if you like, to this novel. The escape was short-lived! Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has an ironic structure that has primed its readers to expect not escape and triumph but something else. Each chapter of the novel has ended on this kind of personal triumphant high; the next has ironically opened with Stephen mired in the mundane and in failure. Stephen’s final words in both film and novel remind us that he really is an Icarus figure, following his “Old father, old artificer”, his namesake, Daedalus. And Icarus, we recall, takes a tumble. In the novel version, we are reminded that this is the portrait of the artist “as a young man”—later, in 1914, from the distance of Trieste (to which he has escaped) Joyce, writing this story, could take some ironic distance from his earlier persona. There is no such distance in the film version. However, it stands alone, on its own; Joyce’s irony is not appropriate in Strick’s vision. His is a different work, with its own message and its own, considerably more romantic and less ironic power. Literary adaptations are their own things—inspired by, based on an adapted text but something different, something other. I want to argue that these works adapted from literature are now part of our readerly experience of that literature, and for that reason deserve the same attention we give to the literary, and not only the same attention, but also the same respect. I am a literarily trained person. People like me who love words, already love plays, but shouldn’t we also love films—and operas, and musicals, and even videogames? There is no need to denigrate words that are heard (and visualised) in order to privilege words that are read. Works of literature can have afterlives in their adaptations and translations, just as they have pre-lives, in terms of influences and models, as George Eliot Clarke openly allows in those acknowledgements to Beatrice Chancy. I want to return to that Canadian work, because it raises for me many of the issues about adaptation and language that I see at the core of our literary distrust of the move away from the written, printed text. I ended my recent book on adaptation with a brief examination of this work, but I didn’t deal with this particular issue of language. So I want to return to it, as to unfinished business. Clarke is, by the way, clear in the verse drama as well as in articles and interviews that among the many intertexts to Beatrice Chancy, the most important are slave narratives, especially one called Celia, a Slave, and Shelley’s play, The Cenci. Both are stories of mistreated and subordinated women who fight back. Since Clarke himself has written at length about the slave narratives, I’m going to concentrate here on Shelley’s The Cenci. The distance from Shelley’s verse play to Clarke’s verse play is a temporal one, but it is also geographic and ideological one: from the old to the new world, and from a European to what Clarke calls an “Africadian” (African Canadian/African Acadian) perspective. Yet both poets were writing political protest plays against unjust authority and despotic power. And they have both become plays that are more read than performed—a sad fate, according to Clarke, for two works that are so concerned with voice. We know that Shelley sought to calibrate the stylistic registers of his work with various dramatic characters and effects to create a modern “mixed” style that was both a return to the ancients and offered a new drama of great range and flexibility where the expression fits what is being expressed (see Bruhn). His polemic against eighteenth-century European dramatic conventions has been seen as leading the way for realist drama later in the nineteenth century, with what has been called its “mixed style mimesis” (Bruhn) Clarke’s adaptation does not aim for Shelley’s perfect linguistic decorum. It mixes the elevated and the biblical with the idiomatic and the sensual—even the vulgar—the lushly poetic with the coarsely powerful. But perhaps Shelley’s idea of appropriate language fits, after all: Beatrice Chancy is a woman of mixed blood—the child of a slave woman and her slave owner; she has been educated by her white father in a convent school. Sometimes that educated, elevated discourse is heard; at other times, she uses the variety of discourses operative within slave society—from religious to colloquial. But all the time, words count—as in all printed and oral literature. Clarke’s verse drama was given a staged reading in Toronto in 1997, but the story’s, if not the book’s, real second life came when it was used as the basis for an opera libretto. Actually the libretto commission came first (from Queen of Puddings Theatre in Toronto), and Clarke started writing what was to be his first of many opera texts. Constantly frustrated by the art form’s demands for concision, he found himself writing two texts at once—a short libretto and a longer, five-act tragic verse play to be published separately. Since it takes considerably longer to sing than to speak (or read) a line of text, the composer James Rolfe keep asking for cuts—in the name of economy (too many singers), because of clarity of action for audience comprehension, or because of sheer length. Opera audiences have to sit in a theatre for a fixed length of time, unlike readers who can put a book down and return to it later. However, what was never sacrificed to length or to the demands of the music was the language. In fact, the double impact of the powerful mixed language and the equally potent music, increases the impact of the literary text when performed in its operatic adaptation. Here is the verse play version of the scene after Beatrice’s rape by her own father, Francis Chancey: I was black but comely. Don’t glance Upon me. This flesh is crumbling Like proved lies. I’m perfumed, ruddied Carrion. Assassinated. Screams of mucking juncos scrawled Over the chapel and my nerves, A stickiness, as when he finished Maculating my thighs and dress. My eyes seep pus; I can’t walk: the floors Are tizzy, dented by stout mauling. Suddenly I would like poison. The flesh limps from my spine. My inlets crimp. Vultures flutter, ghastly, without meaning. I can see lice swarming the air. … His scythe went shick shick shick and slashed My flowers; they lay, murdered, in heaps. (90) The biblical and the violent meet in the texture of the language. And none of that power gets lost in the opera adaptation, despite cuts and alterations for easier aural comprehension. I was black but comely. Don’t look Upon me: this flesh is dying. I’m perfumed, bleeding carrion, My eyes weep pus, my womb’s sopping With tears; I can hardly walk: the floors Are tizzy, the sick walls tumbling, Crumbling like proved lies. His scythe went shick shick shick and cut My flowers; they lay in heaps, murdered. (95) Clarke has said that he feels the libretto is less “literary” in his words than the verse play, for it removes the lines of French, Latin, Spanish and Italian that pepper the play as part of the author’s critique of the highly educated planter class in Nova Scotia: their education did not guarantee ethical behaviour (“Adaptation” 14). I have not concentrated on the music of the opera, because I wanted to keep the focus on the language. But I should say that the Rolfe’s score is as historically grounded as Clarke’s libretto: it is rooted in African Canadian music (from ring shouts to spirituals to blues) and in Scottish fiddle music and local reels of the time, not to mention bel canto Italian opera. However, the music consciously links black and white traditions in a way that Clarke’s words and story refuse: they remain stubbornly separate, set in deliberate tension with the music’s resolution. Beatrice will murder her father, and, at the very moment that Nova Scotia slaves are liberated, she and her co-conspirators will be hanged for that murder. Unlike the printed verse drama, the shorter opera libretto functions like a screenplay, if you will. It is not so much an autonomous work unto itself, but it points toward a potential enactment or embodiment in performance. Yet, even there, Clarke cannot resist the lure of words—even though they are words that no audience will ever hear. The stage directions for Act 3, scene 2 of the opera read: “The garden. Slaves, sunflowers, stars, sparks” (98). The printed verse play is full of these poetic associative stage directions, suggesting that despite his protestations to the contrary, Clarke may have thought of that version as one meant to be read by the eye. After Beatrice’s rape, the stage directions read: “A violin mopes. Invisible shovelsful of dirt thud upon the scene—as if those present were being buried alive—like ourselves” (91). Our imaginations—and emotions—go to work, assisted by the poet’s associations. There are many such textual helpers—epigraphs, photographs, notes—that we do not have when we watch and listen to the opera. We do have the music, the staged drama, the colours and sounds as well as the words of the text. As Clarke puts the difference: “as a chamber opera, Beatrice Chancy has ascended to television broadcast. But as a closet drama, it play only within the reader’s head” (“Adaptation” 14). Clarke’s work of literature, his verse drama, is a “situated utterance, produced in one medium and in one historical and social context,” to use Robert Stam’s terms. In the opera version, it was transformed into another “equally situated utterance, produced in a different context and relayed through a different medium” (45-6). I want to argue that both are worthy of study and respect by wordsmiths, by people like me. I realise I’ve loaded the dice: here neither the verse play nor the libretto is primary; neither is really the “source” text, for they were written at the same time and by the same person. But for readers and audiences (my focus and interest here), they exist on a continuum—depending on which we happen to experience first. As Ilana Shiloh explores here, the same is true about the short story and film of Memento. I am not alone in wanting to mount a defence of adaptations. Julie Sanders ends her new book called Adaptation and Appropriation with these words: “Adaptation and appropriation … are, endlessly and wonderfully, about seeing things come back to us in as many forms as possible” (160). The storytelling imagination is an adaptive mechanism—whether manifesting itself in print or on stage or on screen. The study of the production of literature should, I would like to argue, include those other forms taken by that storytelling drive. If I can be forgiven a move to the amusing—but still serious—in concluding, Terry Pratchett puts it beautifully in his fantasy story, Witches Abroad: “Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling.” In biology as in culture, adaptations reign. References Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Bruhn, Mark J. “’Prodigious Mixtures and Confusions Strange’: The Self-Subverting Mixed Style of The Cenci.” Poetics Today 22.4 (2001). Clarke, George Elliott. “Beatrice Chancy: A Libretto in Four Acts.” Canadian Theatre Review 96 (1998): 62-79. ———. Beatrice Chancy. Victoria, BC: Polestar, 1999. ———. “Adaptation: Love or Cannibalism? Some Personal Observations”, unpublished manuscript of article. Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: CBC, 1963. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Hutcheon, Linda, and Gary R. Bortolotti. “On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success”—Biologically.” New Literary History. Forthcoming. Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1916. New York: Viking, 1967. ———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1960. Larson, Katherine. “Resistance from the Margins in George Elliott Clarke’s Beatrice Chancy.” Canadian Literature 189 (2006): 103-118. McGee, Celia. “Beowulf on Demand.” New York Times, Arts and Leisure. 30 April 2006. A4. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, 1988. ———. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta/Penguin, 1990. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 160. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Cenci. Ed. George Edward Woodberry. Boston and London: Heath, 1909. Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 1-52. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hutcheon, Linda. "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>. APA Style Hutcheon, L. (May 2007) "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>.