Journal articles on the topic 'Matteo Bandello'

A lo largo del presente artículo intentaremos desgranar las razones por las que Vicente de Millis tradujo las Novelle (1554) de Matteo Bandello a partir de la traducción francesa de Pierre Boaistuau y François de Belleforest; de qué manera manipuló el texto de partida y qué cambios separan las Historias trágicas ejemplares (1589) de las Histoires tragiques (1559) y las Novelle. Para ello, nos centraremos en el cotejo de algunas escenas particularmente violentas y sus desenlaces, verdadero muestrario de las estrategias utilizadas por Boaistuau, Belleforest y, finalmente, Millis, para la adaptación truculenta de la materia italiana al nuevo contexto desde el que escriben y traducen.

The anonymous thirteenth-century poem La Châtelaine de Vergy, a courtly love story that ends in bloodshed after its central secret is divulged, was adapted as the 70th novella in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron (published 1558–1559). Matteo Bandello’s Italian adaptation of this version of the story (in his posthumously published Quarta parte delle novelle [1573]) introduces an important change by specifying that the lovers are now clandestinely married; this detail is retained in an anonymous French translation of Bandello’s reworking, which appeared in one of the volumes of the popular Histoires tragiques. While critics have been puzzled at this apparent narrative flaw (marriage needs no secrecy), this essay argues that the shift is intentional by considering it in light of the problem of clandestine marriages and post-Tridentine matrimonial reform. While Marguerite’s novella already recasts the Châtelaine de Vergy story in matrimonial terms, Bandello further exploits its drama of speech, in which tragic events are triggered through speaking and divulging secrets, to question the Church tradition of contracting matrimony merely by the partners’ spoken words. A number of textual ambiguities in the French translation reveal furthermore that the story has subsequently been re-interpreted from a new perspective on betrothal as a non-binding spoken promise that gained ground during the Counter-Reformation. The textual transformations introduced into these three versions, moreover, are examined in the context of the development of the “histoire tragique” as a literary genre during the second half of the sixteenth century. This study thus identifies a correlation between the characteristics of the “histoire tragique” and matrimony’s socio-historical dynamics.

The subject of analysis in this paper consists of two renaissance novellas: the author of the first novella is the Italian renaissance writer Matteo Bandello, while François de Belleforest is the author of its French translation/adaptation and the author of the second novella which will be analyzed, and which was inspired by a renaissance tragedy. The main theme of both of the stories is the elimination of a potential pretender to the throne of the Ottoman empire: the first story details the fratricide which took place when Mehmed II took the throne, while the other tells of Suleiman the Magnificent's execution of his son Mustafa because of an alleged betrayal. After pointing out the basic characteristics of Bandella's renaissance novella, as well as the newly made "tragic tale" subgenre it belongs to, special attention will be paid to the ways in which Bandello and de Belleforest tell of historical events: storied of the cruelty and depravity of Turkish sultans are a special - even if only literary - way of dealing with the objective threat which the Ottoman empire posed to Europe. Aside from the visible ideological motives, in the case of these authors, and especially François de Belleforest, there is a detectable tendency towards approaching the genre of tragedy. In this case, tragedy is, first and foremost understood as the display of pathetic and painful images; which is displayed through the aesthetic of suffering and the emphasis on such images within the narrative.

The effect of Apelles's literary image on the telling of events in an artist's life is nowhere better illustrated than in the Vite dei pittori antichi (Florence, 1667) by Carlo Roberto Dati. Specifically, in his commentary on Pliny's famous tale ( Natural History, 35.81–83) about a contest between Apelles and one of his rivals, Protogenes, Dati repeats two closely related stories about Michelangelo, each of which implies his likeness to Apelles. One of those stories also demonstrates the importance of another literary tradition for shaping an artist's image, the beffe or comical stories told by Giovanni Boccaccio, Matteo Bandello and others. The combination of classical and burlesque elements in a single tale influenced subsequent authors, who also told stories that are structurally similar to both Pliny's tale of Apelles and Protogenes and Dati's comic anecdote about Michelangelo.

The following article takes into consideration two cases of early modern female ‘monstrosity’ drawn from the Italian collection of Novelle published by Matteo Bandello in 1554. The events recount the stories of two mothers who, seized by ‘unnatural’ folly, kill in cold blood their own offspring. The article tackles the conflicting concepts of normality and malady, putting this ambiguous opposition in relation with the consequent translations of the Novelle in French and in English. The shifts that appear in the translations reveal a deep preoccupation with definitions of malady, be they physical or cultural. Through a close analysis of the original Italian text and its English rendition written by Geoffrey Fenton in 1567, this article sheds light on the troubled relationship of English translators with ‘Italianated’ thus ‘degenerate’ customs, and on their authorial and textual strategies to pre-empt the infectious potential of their Italian sources.

The story of Romeo and Juliet has been reinvented in a number of musical adaptations. One of the boldest and most sophisticated attempts is Giulietta e Romeo (2007), a two-act Italian production with the music of the French-Italian singer and composer Riccardo Cocciante and with a libretto by the poet Pasquale Panella. As Cristina Paravano argues in this article, the work offers a unique opportunity to rethink Shakespeare and Italy from a suggestive contemporary Italian perspective. What distinguished this production from other musical adaptations was its strong intertextuality on a musical and textual level. By embracing forms of re-creation and re -vision, it created a profoundly and intrinsically Italian version of the story, drawing on and combining Italian musical, literary, and cultural traditions. The result was a combination of Cocciante's pop-rock background, contemporary pop-electronic music, operatic conventions and techniques, and Italian musical tradition, all filtered through the memory of Nino Rota's tunes written for Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. On the other hand, Panella's libretto taps into Shakespeare's Italian sources: while keeping to the Shakespearean plot line, the author adds interpolations from Luigi da Porto's Istoria novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti (1530) and Matteo Bandello's novella (1554, 2: IX). The present paper evaluates how this innovative rendition enacts a further exchange between England and Italy so that metaphorically Italy ‘reappropriates'’ its own story.

The publication from the series “Literary Monuments” traditionally consists of three sections. The first presents the text of Shakespeare’s play and its translation (bilingualism in “Literary Monuments” is still the exception rather than the rule). Boris Pasternak’s translation is presented by the variant restored by the glassgrapher of 1943. The second section shows the main plot sources of Romeo and Juliet, namely novellas by Masuccio, Luigi Da Porto, Matteo Bandello, William Painter, and Arthur Brooke’s poem (most of them were translated into Russian specifically for this edition). The third section contains two articles, notes to the original text (a historical and cultural commentary reflecting the realities of Elizabethan times and the complexity of Shakespeare’s language), as well as a textual commentary on the translation. The first article, “The Tragic Laughter of William Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet,” discusses the history of the play, the sources of the tragic plot and the changes made by Shakespeare, “synthetic genre” of the play, its experimental character and language. The second article is devoted to the history of Romeo and Juliet translations into Russian and related issues: “...is it possible to translate Shakespeare correctly?” A problem statement and solution are typical for the Russian philological school, and the achievements of Enslish-speaking specialists are also taken into account.

La specializzazione vitivinicola della Valtellina (Alpi Retiche, Lombardia, Italia) è una costante che ha caratterizzato le vicende della valle e del suo popolamento fin dal suo affacciarsi alla storia documentata. Peculiarità che si è affermata nel tempo con la sistemazione del versante retico (esposto a sud e dalle condizioni ambientali favorevoli alla vite, ma impervio), mediante l’opera ciclopica e plurisecolare di terrazzamento artificiale, che ha promosso lo sviluppo di una vitivinicoltura di qualità dall’Alto Medioevo (nei possessi di grandi monasteri o enti ecclesiastici), pur con momenti di crisi per motivi ambientali, economici, bellici, fitopatologici. La specificità di questi terrazzamenti risiede nell’espansione areale, continuità territoriale, estensione altimetrica, intensità costruttiva, antichità cronologica, durata temporale: caratteri che si sostanziano in una quantità e qualità dei manufatti tale da costituire un unicum nell’intero sistema alpino.La realizzazione dei terrazzamenti ha prodotto la totale artefazione del territorio del versante retico, rendendolo grandemente produttivo e generando uno scarto tra valore naturale dei suoli (spesso nullo, essendo nuda roccia) e loro capacità produttiva, dando vita a una filiera economica (coltura - vinificazione - commercio) che ha dominato la vita locale dal XV secolo al XX.Le pratiche agronomiche di costruzione e uso dei terrazzamenti viticoli, in quanto basilari nell’organizzazione economica e sociale, sono state essenziali per la formazione e l’esistenza della società valtellinese, imprimendole speciali caratteri e connettendone tutte le componenti: i coltivatori, impegnati nella realizzazione dei manufatti con cospicue forme di auto-sfruttamento; i proprietari, la cui ricchezza dipendeva dalle rendite fondiarie della sovra-produzione ottenuta su terreni poveri e scarsi; i professionisti (medici, avvocati, notai), artigiani e artisti, non legati alla terra, traevano i loro guadagni dalla ricchezza messa in circolazione dalla domanda di beni e servizi dei proprietari fondiari. Tutte le espressioni della società, perciò, sono state legate al fenomeno del terrazzamento artificiale: giuridiche (contratti agrari) e agronomiche (tipologie colturali, sistemi produttivi, cicli ergonomici), “cultura materiale” contadina (dimora, edifici utilitari come i torchi comunitari, attrezzi del lavoro), infrastrutture (mobilità viaria, controllo delle acque), edilizia civile e religiosa; dalle difficili condizioni di vita degli agricoltori al benessere dei proprietari, tutto è dipeso, fino a un passato recente, dal plusvalore che solo il terrazzamento artificiale di ambienti morfologicamente ostili consentiva all’agricoltura locale tramite la coltivazione della vite e la produzione di vini di qualità. Il principale mercato di sbocco è stato sempre a Nord delle Alpi, soprattutto dopo l’aggregazione alle Leghe Grigie (1512-1797).Di tale caratteristica testimoniano non solo la documentazione d’archivio, ma anche una bibliografia molto varia, opera di studiosi, letterati e intellettuali di vario rilievo, italiani e stranieri (da Leonardo da Vinci a Matteo Bandello a Conrad Ferdinand Meyer a Hermann Hesse), che hanno contribuito alla diffusione europea della fama del vino di Valtellina secondo un modello basato su fama, eccellenza, valore economico, territorialità del prodotto (armonia col terroir e i suoi caratteri peculiari).