The history of the reception of Old Norse literature and culture in Italy
presents specific features that make it very different from, for example,
the developments in Germany or in the English-speaking world. As a matter
of fact, until recent times the Italian cultural milieu has conceived of
itself as rooted in the Classical tradition and, more specifically, as a
direct heir to the Latin culture. Consequently, in Italy there has hardly
been any attempt at appropriating the Old Norse heritage as an identity
factor. Nonetheless, despite the “exotic alienness” of
the Old Norse culture—or perhaps thanks to it—medieval Norse texts or
literary motifs have been circulating in Italian literature since an early
period of its history. Even if we do not take into account free rewrites of
Latin sources, such as Torquato Tasso’s tragedy Re
Torrismondo (1587) [King Turismod] and Orazio
Ariosto’s epic Alfeo, which both drew their figures
and plots from Johannes and Olaus Magnus’ Historia de
gentibus septentrionalibus (1555) [A Description of the
Northern Peoples], we
find already in the second half of the eighteenth and at the very beginning of the
nineteenth century some remarkable evidence of the interest of at least some
Italian intellectual circles in the cultural tradition of ancient
Scandinavia. Since then, different factors have influenced the activities of
translating, studying, and rewriting Old Norse texts in Italy, due to both
the development of the Italian literary system, and the different
agendas—cultural, political, religious—of the individual and institutional
actors involved.
The aim of this article is to show how and why Italian culture
“imported” Old Norse texts during the last two
centuries. It is particularly concerned with how different—and sometimes
opposite—projects determined which texts to translate, how to translate them,
and how to present them to an Italian readership. Due to the heterogeneity
of such projects, it will prove impossible to bring back all such operations
to one and the same field of interest. The decision to translate one or more
Norse texts has sometimes been made according to an academic, scientific
project; other times in order to promote specific ethical values, such as
heroism, individualism, or bravery and the disregard of death (and in such
cases the decision to translate a Norse text is very often connected to
political biases). Finally, in more recent times, both the increased
interest in fantasy literature and the spread of new religious cults such as
Odinism and Wotanism have contributed to enhancing the diffusion of Old
Norse topics in Italian popular culture. As this article has been submitted to
a special journal issue concerned with Fóstbræðra saga and its rewrite by Halldór Kiljan
Laxness, more space will be dedicated to the Italian translation of this
saga. This very translation, moreover, serves as an interesting example of
how specific political biases can influence the translation and the
diffusion of an Old Norse saga in Italian contemporary culture.
The first signs that the Italian cultural elites were interested in the old
literature of Scandinavia date back to the second half of the eighteenth century.
That Italian scholars already in this period took interest in the literary
traditions of Scandinavia is demonstrated by a strange poem published by
Francesco Saverio Quadrio in 1751. Entitled “Versi in lingua
runica”
[Verses in the runic language], it may only be a joke, a muddle
of words deprived of any meaning; yet as Andrea Meregalli points out, “it is quite
easy to recognise single words, inflected forms, and
expressions of the Old Norse language” (58). Quadrio had certainly some acquaintance
with the works on Old Norse
literature published abroad, as is revealed by his Indice
universale della storia, e ragione d’ogni poesia (1752)
[Universal index of the history and reason of all poetry],
where he concisely refers to Snorri Sturluson as well as to antiquarians and
scholars in the field, such as Thomas Bartholin, Johann Georg Keißler, Olof
Rudbeck, Henry Spelman, and Ole Worm (Meregalli 60).
Some decades later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, an important role
in spreading information about the international debate on the history and
culture of ancient Scandinavia was played by a Swedish immigrant, Jakob
Gråberg. Gråberg was a man of many interests, and his most important
scientific contributions are within the fields of Statistics and Geography.
Besides his many scientific essays he published a little book about Old
Norse poetry in 1811: Saggio istorico sugli scaldi o
antichi poeti scandinavi
[Historical essay about the skalds, or the ancient Scandinavian
poets]. In this book, Gråberg presents and translates some eddic
and skaldic verses and poems—mainly from the French translations by Pier
Henri Mallet, from the Latin by Johan Isaakszon Pontanus and by Thomas
Bartholin, and from the Swedish by Eric Julius Biörner. Moreover, he also
quotes from previously unpublished translations by other Italian poets, such
as the Somascan Father Bernardo Laviosa and the renowned librettist Felice
Romani. Gråberg’s book thus attests to a
certain knowledge of Old Norse literature within Italian intellectual
circles at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Following in Gråberg’s footsteps, the abbot Francesco Venini included
translations of four Old Norse poems in his anthology of world poetry
Saggi della poesia lirica antica e moderna
[Essays of ancient and modern lyric poetry], published in Milan
in 1818. In the third part of the anthology,
Poesia lirica
de’ Caledonj e degli Scandinavi
[Lyric poetry of the Scots and of the Scandinavians], Venini
republished some stanzas attributed to King Haraldr Harðráði and already
printed in Gråberg’s
Saggio istorico. Moreover, he
published translations of Asbjörn’s death-song from
Orms
þáttr Stórólfssonar
[The Tale of Orm Stórólfsson];
Krákumál
[The Lay of Kraka], and Eyvindr Skáldaspillir’s
Hákonsdrápa
[Hákon’s Poem]. All three new translations were done on
the basis of the Latin translations of Thomas Bartholin, as Francesco Venini
himself explains in the comments that precede each of them. Thus it seems
that the Italian intellectuals during the second half of the eighteenth century
and the first decades of the nineteenth century were exclusively interested in the
poetic genres of Old Norse literature, and widely ignored prose literature.
The important exception was the texts that were regarded as historical
sources: Snorri’s tale about the migration of the ancient Æsir, for example,
or the sagas about the origins of the Scandinavian peoples. It should be
noted, however, that such texts did not belong, according to the Italian
cultural circles of that period, to “literature proper”
but rather to historiography. Yet the sagas were considered untrustworthy as
historical sources, since legends and myths played too great a role in them.
In the words of the historian Virginio Soncini, who in 1825 published a
Storia della Scandinavia ossia Svezia, Danimarca e
Norvegia
[History of Scandinavia, that is Sweden, Denmark, and Norway]:
Niente altro che cose incerte ed oscure ci presenta la parte antica
di quest’istoria, la quale è sì intrecciata colle favole, che più
veramente potrebbe dirsi mitologia. So che la favola è la culla di
tutte le istorie, e che ogni popolo ha collocato i suoi fondatori
tra gli Dei, o almeno tra i Semidei, e vestita la propria origine di
favoloso splendore; ma le altre nazioni hanno relegati quei prodigi
fanciulleschi ne’ più remoti secoli, gli hanno ristretti in brevi
cenni, sì che lo storico non v’impiega che poche pagine: laddove
nell’istoria degli Scandinavi noi troviamo dappertutto le favole a
piene mani e i portenti; e insomma l’infanzia di quella nazione durò
tanto, che fin nel mille e dugento dell’Era nostra vediamo collocati
i racconti fanciulleschi delle Valchirie e delle altre deità
appartenenti alla mitologia scandinava. (8)
[The ancient part of this history shows nothing but uncertain
and murky things: it is so much intertwined with fairy stories
that we should more properly define it as mythology. I know that
fairy tales are the cradle of history, and that every nation has
put its founders among the gods, or at least among the demigods,
and has enveloped its own origins in fabulous magnificence. The
other nations, however, have confined those childish marvels
into their very first centuries and have limited themselves to
some short mentions, so that the historian needs only to write a
few pages about that. In the history of the Scandinavians, on
the contrary, we find everywhere a profusion of fairy tales and
marvels. In conclusion, the childhood of that nation lasted so
long that still in the thirteenth century of our era we find the
childish tales about Valkyries and other deities of Scandinavian
mythology.]
The relative lack of interest that the Italian scholars had in Old
Norse prose literature may be explained by the particular Italian literary
system of the time. Before the extraordinary success of Alessandro Manzoni’s
historical novel
I promessi sposi (1840-42)
[The betrothed], which rapidly rose to the status of a
modern classic of Italian literature, prose works occupied a relatively
marginal position in the literary system, at whose centre stood poetry and
dramatic literature. Indirect evidence of this marginalization of prose
genres is also provided by Melchiorre Cesarotti’s translation of James
MacPherson’s
Poems of Ossian (1772). As a matter of
fact, whilst Macpherson’s pretended translations from Gaelic Scottish are
written in an archaizing, biblical prose, Cesarotti transposes them into
blank hendecasyllables. Even such a radical
restructuring of the Italian literary system as was produced by the
breakthrough of the novel (and in particular of the “historical
novel” genre) around the middle of the nineteenth century did not,
however, seem to affect the attitude of the Italian translators of Old Norse
texts, and Icelandic sagas continued to be neglected also in the second half
of the nineteenth and in the first half of the twentieth century. A survey of the
Italian translations of Old Norse literature from the beginning of the nineteenth
century to 1997 (Radici) shows that only one saga was completely translated into
Italian
before World War II: the
Vǫlsunga saga was
translated into Italian for the first time in 1927 under the title
La saga dei Volsunghi e dei Nibelunghi
[The saga of the Volsungs and the Nibelungs]. The addition of
the reference to the Nibelungs clearly reveals the reason for this choice:
the huge popularity of the Wagnerian version of the legend had aroused an
interest in all its sources, Norse as well as German.
After Venini and Soncini’s works and up until 1917, only eddic poems and
short excerpts from the Vǫlsunga saga were
translated into Italian. The interest in skaldic poetry seems to have
completely vanished after the first decades of the nineteenth century. This should
probably be understood as a consequence of the dominant interest of the
Romantics in what they considered as genuine “popular”
poetry, a concept which hardly was applicable to the refined and complicated
art of the skalds. In the period from 1874 to 1911, we find two different,
partial translations of Hávamál (1874, 1911), three
versions of the Vǫluspá (1887, 1906, 1908), and
some other eddic poems: Atlakviða (1876, 1883),
Sigurðarkviða (1883), Brot af
Sigurðarkviðu (1903), and Þrymskviða
(1906). A broader interest in all genres of
Old Norse literature is manifest only in Guido Fornelli’s book L’Islanda antica (1917) [Ancient
Iceland], in which the author collects translations of Egill
Skallagrímsson’s Hǫfudlausn
[Head’s Ransom] and Sonatorrek
[Loss of Sons], of some stanzas of Hávamál, and of excerpts from Óláfs saga
Tryggvasonar
[The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason]. The period between the wars does
not see a growth of interest in Old Norse literature. On the contrary, in
the years 1918-1945 we find—besides the translation of the Vǫlsunga saga cited above—only a translation of Vǫluspá published in Guido Manacorda’s book La selva e il tempio (1933) [The forest and the
temple] and some translations of eddic and skaldic poetry
contained in a survey of world literature, edited by Ugo Dèttore (Radici 16–17).
The first decades after WWII did not witness a radical change in the
interest that Italian intellectuals had in Old Norse literature. Up to the
beginning of the Sixties there were no translations of an entire saga, but
several translations of eddic and skaldic poetry and excerpts from different
sagas and from Snorra Edda (1220), The
“Prose Edda” attributed to Snorri Sturluson, were
published. What does change is the type of intellectuals involved in the
translations and in the debate on Old Norse literature more generally.
Previously, the Italian translators used as source texts translations from
Old Norse into other languages: Latin or French at first, then also German.
These translators were often men of wide erudition, sometimes writers, but
always amateurs. In the period between the end of WWII and the beginning of
the Sixties, the studies of Old Norse literature and culture were taken over
by university professors who could read the original texts and were aware of
the international scientific discussion (Tagliavini 183–216). The first philologically
reliable translation of all eddic
poems—including the so-called Eddica minora—was
thus published in 1951 by the linguist Carlo Alberto Mastrelli, and in 1962
the Professor of Scandinavian Literatures Mario Gabrieli published an
anthology of skaldic poetry with parallel original texts.
The figures of Mario Gabrieli and of the Germanic philologist Marco Scovazzi
dominated the field of Old Norse studies in Italy during the Sixties and the
Seventies. A rather strange phenomenon in this sphere is that the Italian
scholars passionately participated in the international discussion on the
origins of the Icelandic sagas before any Icelandic saga—with the exception
of
Vǫlsunga saga, as we have seen—was available in
an Italian translation. Scovazzi, in fact, published his book
La saga di Hrafnkell e il problema delle saghe
islandesi
[Hrafnkell’s saga and the question of Icelandic sagas] in 1960,
three years before the first edition of his translation of a collection of
sagas and long before a translation of
Hrafnkels
saga was published in Italian (which happened only in 1997).
Since the book was written in Italian, it did not have a wide international
circulation, and the Italian readership was limited to scholars and
students. Notwithstanding this, the book is particularly interesting as it
clarifies Scovazzi’s interpretation of the sagas as cultural products, an
interpretation that deeply influenced his later presentation of his
collection of translated sagas. First of all, according to Scovazzi, the
original Germanic tradition had been preserved more or less intact in
Scandinavia until the days of King Harald Fairhair. Secondly, Iceland was
colonized by refugees who did not accept the innovations of the new king and
who restored the ancient political and legal institutions in the new
fatherland. Speaking of
Hrafnkels saga, Scovazzi
writes:
nel fondo del suo spirito, l’autore, o rielaboratore, non si è
staccato dalla tradizione, se per tradizione intendiamo il rispetto
di tutto un mondo spirituale, che gli Islandesi avevano
difeso tenacemente, che avevano salvato dalle insidie della
tirannide e che avevano voluto ricostruire intatto nella nuova
patria ricercata e trovata dopo un’avventurosa migrazione. I
caratteri, i contrasti fra gli animi dei vari personaggi, la loro
ansia di primeggiare, la lotta fra l’individuo e la collettività,
sono tutti elementi che dobbiamo far risalire alla più arcaica
manifestazione dello spirito germanico. (56)
[Deep in his spirit, the author, or rewriter, did not move away
from tradition, if we understand tradition as respect for a
whole spiritual world that the Icelanders had tenaciously
defended and saved from the snares of tyranny and that they
wanted to reconstruct intact in the new fatherland they had
looked for and found after an audacious migration. The
personalities, the conflicts between the characters’ souls,
their anxiety to excel, the struggle between the individual and
the community: we have to derive all these elements from the
most archaic manifestation of the Germanic spirit.]
On this ideological basis, it is fully understandable that Scovazzi
was a passionate opponent of the so-called
Buchprosatheorie and that
Sigurður Nordal and Walter Bætke were his main targets. What is more relevant to our discussion, however, is that
Scovazzi’s interpretation of the sagas as faithful testimonies to the most
archaic Germanic culture is clearly expressed in the para-text surrounding
his translation of four Icelandic sagas:
Eyrbyggja
saga
[The Saga of the People of Eyri],
Eiríks saga
rauða
[The Saga of Eric the Red],
Vatnsdœla
saga
[The Saga of the People of Vatnsdal], and
Hallfreds saga
[The Saga of Hallfred]. This collection was first published in
1964 by Multa Paucis, a minor publishing house based in Varese, and then
reprinted in 1973 by the publisher Giulio Einaudi in the very prestigious
series
I Millenni. The series started in 1947 with
the publication of Ernest Hemingway’s tales, and since then it has published
modern as well as ancient and medieval classics of world
literature. The publication of
Scovazzi’s translation in the series thus implies the acceptance of sagas
within the Italian literary canon. It is all the more significant, then,
that Scovazzi, in his introduction to the book, presents the sagas not so
much as literary works, but as testimonies to the historical period they
describe:
Le saghe islandesi non possono essere valutate esclusivamente quali
fenomeni letterari; costituiscono anche una testimonianza cospicua
della fase storica, che contraddistinse la società nordica
medievale. (VII)
[The Icelandic sagas cannot be exclusively considered as
literary phenomena; they are also a remarkable testimony to the
historical period the medieval Norse society went
through.]
These words not only open Scovazzi’s introduction, but they are also
printed on the book-jacket and are thus the first hints the reader gets
about the contents of the volume. Moreover, as in his book on
Hrafnkels saga, Scovazzi reaffirms the unbroken
continuity from archaic Germanic society to Icelandic medieval culture. He
explains that Icelanders consciously preserved this legacy:
Essi intesero salvare … quel patrimonio ideale arcaico, che manteneva
ancora, pressoché inalterati, i valori più schietti, di cui si era
alimentata la società nordica e germanica, trasferendolo – per
quanto possibile – in una sede nuova e destinandolo a una nuova
vita. Le saghe islandesi non sono che la testimonianza e il ricordo,
fedeli e appassionati, di questa trasmigrazione, materiale e
spirituale, dalla Norvegia all’Islanda, e del rinascere, dopo
l’avventuroso trapianto, di un mondo arcaico che non voleva
perire. (VIII)
[They wanted to salvage … that ideal archaic heritage that
still preserved, almost intact, the most genuine values that had
nourished the Norse and the Germanic society; they wanted to
transfer it – as far as possible – into a new land and to
revitalize it. The Icelandic sagas are nothing but the faithful
and passionate testimony to and memory of this material and
spiritual migration from Norway to Iceland, and of the rebirth,
after the adventurous transplantation, of an archaic world that
refused to die.]
Much more cautious and up to date with the international developments
in the field is the other Italian grand old man of Scandinavian studies of
this period: Mario Gabrieli. In his handbook Le letterature
della Scandinavia
[The literatures of Scandinavia], published in 1969, Gabrieli
takes an intermediate position between Freiprosatheorie and
Buchprosatheorie. Indeed, he recognizes the role
played by oral tradition in creating the corpus of sagas, but he also
acknowledges the contribution of the different saga writers, and he
underlines how Old Norse literature developed from the encounter of local
oral traditions with an international, Latin, and Christian
culture.
In spite of Gabrieli’s balanced contribution to the discussion, however,
Scovazzi’s opinions continued to be very influential in the Italian field of
Old Norse studies. In the introduction to her new translations of Eiríks saga rauða
[The Saga of Eric the Red] and Grœnlendinga
saga
[The Saga of the Greenlanders] in 1995, Rita Caprini advances
pretty much the same theses expressed by Scovazzi thirty-five years before (La saga di Eirik il rosso, 9, 20).
The remarkable increase in the number of courses in Germanic Philology in
Italian universities during the Seventies and the Eighties meant not only a
clear upward trend in the number of publications on Old Germanic texts and
cultures, but also a growth in the number of translations from Old Norse
into Italian. Hence, in 1977, another major publishing house, Rusconi,
published the volume edited by Gianna Chiesa Isnardi Storie
e leggende del Nord
[Stories and legends of the north] containing the translations
of Ynglinga saga and Hálfs saga ok
Hálfsrekka.
In 1982 Alessandro Mari Catani edited a book that was a collection of
excerpts from sagas. The title of the book is I vichinghi di Jomsborg e altre saghe del Nord
[The Jomsvikings and other sagas from the North], and it
contains chapters from Jómsvikinga saga, Grettis saga, Njáls saga,
Fóstbræðra saga, Laxdœla
saga, and Egils saga
Skallagrímssonar. This volume was published by a major publishing
house, Sansoni, and thus had a relatively wide circulation. A different case
in point is Vittoria Grazi’s translation of Grettis
saga (1983), which was published by an academic
institution, the Istituto Universitario Orientale of Naples. The length of
the introduction, 100 pages, suggests that the intended readership was
scholars. In it, Vittoria Grazi discusses the sources of the saga, its
textual tradition and structure, the history of the research, and the
different critical approaches. Moreover, quotations by foreign scholars are
never translated, even though they may be in languages, such as Icelandic
and Norwegian, that very few Italian readers were presumably able to
understand. The book in general conveys a different opinion of sagas than
Scovazzi’s collection. In the prefatory remarks by the editorial board of
the series in which the saga is published, what is pointed out is the “profonda, e
spesso raffinata, consapevolezza d’autore” [the deep and often sophisticated authorial
awareness] that distinguishes the saga, and more generally the “qualità strettamente
letteraria delle saghe famose” [the strictly literary quality of the famous sagas]
(7). Vittoria Grazi acknowledges her debt to Marco Scovazzi (10), but she
also emphasizes the “innegabile letterarietà” [undeniable literary character] of Icelandic
sagas (22).
Vittoria Grazi’s translation highlights an issue of paramount importance
concerning the reception of Old Norse literature in Italy. In spite of the
fascinating plot of the saga and the accurate translation, in fact, the book
had almost no circulation at all due to its academic character and to the
irrelevant presence of its publisher in the Italian editorial market. The
same problem cropped up over and over again in the following years: the
circulation of translated sagas, in fact, was largely determined by the
ability of the publishing houses to distribute them. It was only the success
of online booksellers during the Nineties that considerably changed the
terms of the question. Before the end of the Eighties, yet another Icelandic
saga was translated into Italian: in 1985 Jaca Book published La saga di Gísli figlio di Súrr, a translation of
Gísla saga Súrsonar by Gianna Chiesa
Isnardi.
Jaca Book is a medium-sized publishing house, whose fields of interest range
from theology, anthropology, and literature, to economics and politics. For
such a company it is much easier to let its own books circulate than for an
academic publishing house; thus Gianna Chiesa’s translation was able to
reach a broader readership than Vittoria Grazi’s.
Between 1975 and 1990 several important Old Norse texts other than the sagas
mentioned above were published. In 1975, two different (partial)
translations of the Snorra Edda appeared in
Italian: one by Gianna Chiesa Isnardi and one by Giorgio Dolfini. As in the
case of Storie e leggende del Nord, Chiesa
Isnardi’s translation was published by Rusconi, whilst Dolfini’s translation
was published by Adelphi, one of the leading Italian publishers. In 1982,
another leading Italian publishing house, Garzanti, published a new and less
academic translation of the eddic poems in a volume edited by Piergiuseppe
Scardigli and Marcello Meli. A new choice of skaldic poetry was translated
and edited by Ludovica Koch and published by Einaudi in 1984. What may
appear more surprising is that learned texts, such as the Leiðarvísir, the First Grammatical Treatise, and a selection
from the Icelandic Physiologus, were also published
in Italian translation in 1967, 1975, and 1985-1986.
Almost all translators and editors mentioned here were (or would later
become) university professors.
Due to the consolidation of Old Norse studies at Italian universities
and to the consequent increasing number of potential translators from Old
Norse into Italian, we have witnessed an explosion of translations of
Icelandic sagas since the beginning of the Nineties. It is impossible of
course to analyze and discuss each of these translations here, and thus I
will limit myself to making a list of the translated sagas and to pointing
out how different editorial strategies have contributed to the spread of
saga literature within the Italian cultural context. The list is
chronologically organized and does not take into account the subsequent
reprints of the same translation. The names of
the translators are provided in parentheses:
| 1990 |
Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks (Marcello
Meli)
|
| 1993 |
Völsunga saga (Marcello Meli)
Ragnars saga loðbrókar (Marcello
Meli)
|
| 1994 |
Ǫrvar Odds saga (Fulvio Ferrari)
Völsunga saga (Annalisa Febbraro,
Ludovica Koch)
|
| 1995 |
Laxdœla saga (Guðrún Sigurðardóttir)
Egils saga einhenda ok Ásmundar
berserkjabana (Fulvio Ferrari)
Eiríks saga rauða (Rita Caprini)
|
| 1996 |
Nornagests þáttr (Adele
Cipolla)
|
| 1997 |
Hrafnkels saga (Maria Cristina Lombardi)
Okneyinga saga (Marcello Meli)
Egils saga Skallagrímssonar (Marcello Meli)
Njáls saga (Marcello Meli)
|
| 1999 |
Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu (Gianna
Chiesa Isnardi)
|
| 2001 |
Parcevals saga / Valvers þáttr
(Massimo Panza)
|
| 2004 |
Reykjahólabók: Frá
Sancto Nicholao (Simonetta Battista)
Gautreks saga (Massimiliano Bampi)
Bjarnar saga hítdœlakappa (Marusca
Francini)
|
| 2008 |
Kristni saga (Agata Ermelinda
Gangemi)
|
| 2009 |
Bósa saga ok Herrauðs (Giovanni
Fort)
|
| 2010 |
Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss (Lorenzo
Lozzi Gallo)
|
| 2011 |
Íslendingabók (Agata Ermelinda
Gangemi)
|
| 2012 |
Fóstbræðra saga (Antonio
Costanzo)
|
| 2013 |
Heimskringla: Halfdanar saga svarta, Haralds
saga ins Hárfagra (Francesco Sangriso)
|
| 2014 |
Heimskringla: Hákonar saga góða (Francesco Sangriso)
|
| 2015 |
Heimskringla: Haralds saga gráfeldar (Francesco Sangriso)
Laxdœla saga (Silvia Cosimini)
Friðþjófs saga ins frækna (Maria
Cristina Lombardi)
|
| 2016 |
Ynglinga saga (Vidofnir 14)
Hrólfs saga kraka ok kappa hans
(Vidofnir 14)
|
| 2017 |
Ragnars saga loðbrókar (Gabriele Giorgi)
Völsunga saga (Serena Fiandro)
Völsunga saga (Vidofnir 14)
Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks (Vidofnir 14)
Auðunar þáttr vestfirzka (Carla
Cucina)
|
As one can observe from this list, two of the translators who were already active
in the previous decades (Gianna Chiesa Isnardi and, above all, Marcello Meli) still
play a pivotal role in the scene of Italian translations from Old Norse. It is also
interesting to note that the majority of the translators who entered the scene after
1990 belong to the academic world: Massimiliano Bampi, Adele Cipolla, Fulvio Ferrari,
Marusca Francini, and Lorenzo Lozzi Gallo, are all professors of Germanic Philology;
Maria Cristina Lombardi is professor of Scandinavian Languages and Literatures, whilst
Rita Caprini is a professor of Linguistics. Giovanni Fort and Francesco Sangriso,
though not employed in academic positions, have each earned a PhD in Germanic Philology;
whilst Simonetta Battista regularly works at the Arnamagnæanske Kommission in Copenhagen.
The academic training of nearly all the translators explains why the translations
are preceded or followed by introductions, afterwords, critical essays, and bibliographies,
which, in general, show awareness of international research and discussion.
It is also manifest that the Italian interest in Icelandic sagas has greatly expanded
during this period and, besides Family sagas, several other subgenres of saga literature
are represented in the list of translations. Many Legendary sagas (fornaldarsögur) have been translated for the first time or retranslated (e.g. Völsunga saga), but we also find the translation of a chivalric saga, of an hagiographic saga,
and a partial translation of the Heimskringla. Not all of these sagas, of course, have had a wide circulation. In this regard, the
size and profile of the publishing houses have been decisive: an editorial giant like
Mondadori (Njáls saga, Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, Orkneyinga saga) is obviously able to ensure a wide circulation in the bookshops. Yet even small
but specialized publishers can be successful in reaching interested readers: Ragnars saga loðbrókar, Ǫrvar Odds saga, Egils saga einhenda ok Ásmundar berserkjabana, Hrafnkels saga, Gautreks saga, and Laxdœla saga (in Silvia Cosimini’s translation) have been published by Iperborea, a relatively
small publishing house founded in 1987 and specializing in Northern European literatures,
which can count on a faithful readership of enthusiasts of Scandinavian literatures. Völsunga saga (in Annalisa Febbraro and Ludovica Koch’s translation), Eiríks saga rauða (in Rita Caprini’s translation), and Bósa saga ok Herrauðs (in Giovanni Fortʼs translation) were published instead in the “Biblioteca medievale”
series, which addresses a readership of students and scholars interested in the different
literary traditions of the Middle Ages. It is interesting to note that Marcello Meli’s translations of Völsunga saga and Hervarar saga were first published by academic publishers but were both reprinted by Mondadori
in 1997, together with Njáls saga, Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, and Okneyinga saga, in a two-volume edition under the title Antiche saghe nordiche [Old Norse sagas].
Though most translations have been made by scholars in the field, in the last few
years a new phenomenon also seems to have emerged: the popularity of Old Norse literature
and mythology in popular culture. The increasing interest of the Italian readership
in fantasy literature—which more often than not makes use of mythological and heroic
motifs—and the growth of interest in Northern heathenism have caused some amateurs
(Serena Fiandro, Vidofnir 14) with no specific professional training to publish translations
that can easily circulate thanks to the existence of online bookstores. The wotanist
known under the pseudonym Vidofnir 14, for example, has so far published four sagas.
As already mentioned, part of the Fóstbræðra saga was translated by Alessandro Mari Catani in his anthology I vichinghi di Jomsborg e altre saghe del Nord, published in 1982. The book opens with a rather long introduction (5–51) that clearly
addresses a readership of non-experts. In the introduction, Mari Catani
concisely summarizes the history of Iceland and of its literature, discusses the main
stylistic traits of the sagas, and comments on the presence of supernatural phenomena
in saga narratives. As for the debate concerning the literariness of saga literature,
he clearly takes sides with Sigurður Nordal against the Freiprosatheorie (21). In
other aspects, however, Mari Catani proves to be more conservative: he agrees
with the mainstream scholarship of the 19th and of the first half of the twentieth
century by accepting a hierarchization of the saga subgenres that no doubt puts the
Family sagas at the top of the hierarchy (19). Moreover, Mari Catani agrees with
Marco Scovazzi in considering the Christian faith
of the saga writers as superficial and conventional: “il Cristianesimo era appena
una sottile mano di vernice passata su un paganesimo quasi
fisiologico” [Christianity was only a thin coat of paint on an almost physiological
paganism] (35).
Each excerpt in Alessandro Mari Catani’s anthology is preceded by a short presentation
of the saga from which it is taken. In the very concise presentation of Fóstbræðra saga, Mari Catani argues that the work was written at an early date, around 1200, and
he praises its narrative vivacity. Furthermore, he explains that he has chosen two
passages from the Flateyjarbók redaction as edited by Guðni Jónsson in the 6th volume of Íslenzk Fornrít, and finally
he refers to Halldór Laxness’s parodic rewriting of the saga. The first translated episode is contained only in the Flateyjarbók and narrates how Þorgeirr and Þormóðr go to the cliffs to gather angelica together,
and Þorgeirr risks falling into the void. He delays the fall by grabbing at the base
of one of the angelica plants, but refuses to call his friend for help (chapter XIII
in Guðni Jónsson’s edition). The second passage is the final part of the saga, from
the arrival of King Óláfr
and Þormóðr at the Veradal to the very end of the saga (chapter XXIV). Although the
translated part of the saga is rather short (little more than nine
pages in translation), the general translation strategy is quite evident. On the one
hand, Mari Catani makes use of an archaic and elevated style when he translates skaldic
verses: in stanza 38, he translates Old Norse magn (strength) not with the usual Italian word forza but with the antiquated term possanza; in the same way he translates Old Norse hættligr not with the modern Italian form pericoloso, but with the archaic periglioso. In the dialogues, on the other hand, the translator often makes use of a low, sometimes
even vulgar register. He translates the Old Norse word fýlur with the Italian stronzi, the colloquial equivalent to English assholes, and the Old Norse word þjóhnappana with the Italian chiappe [butts].
The title
Fóstbræðra saga is translated by Mari Catani as
La saga dei fratelli giurati [The saga of the sworn brothers]. Antonio Costanzo, in his new translation of the
saga published in 2012, chooses,
instead, the title
La saga dei fratelli di sangue [The saga of the blood brothers]. Each translation is born out of a cultural project
and, as a cultural product, shares
a worldview. As Edwin Gentzler rightly points out:
the translator has never been a neutral party in the translation process but, rather,
an individual with linguistic and cultural skills and her or his own agenda. Ideology
works in funny ways—some of it conscious and some of it unconscious. … Translation
does not simply offer a window onto some unified, exotic Other; it participates in
its very construction. (216)
The case of Antonio Costanzo’s translation of
Fóstbræðra saga, however, is quite extreme: the ideological dimension is already made clear by all
of the para-texts. The biographical note on the book-jacket informs the readers that
Costanzo lives in Reykjavík, that he is one of the organizers of the cultural centre
Nostra Romanitas (something like “Our Roman spirit and traditions”), and that he is
responsible for the
Sunna series of books published by the publishing house Diana Edizioni. Nostra Romanitas
is an organization located in Frattamaggiore, in the province of Naples, and is connected
with the scene of far-right-wing cultural and political organizations. Another organizer
of Nostra Romanitas is Gianfranco Della Rossa, founder of Diana Edizioni and author
of a book interview with Rutilio Sermonti, one of the founders of the Italian neo-fascist
party Movimento Sociale Italiano, which Sermonti later left as he judged it too moderate.
Gianfranco Della Rossa is also the author of a foreword to
La saga dei fratelli di sangue, and Antonio Costanzo has dedicated the book to him. In the colophon on the verso
of the title page, Costanzo writes: “Dedicato al fratello di sangue Gianfranco Della
Rossa” [Dedicated to my blood brother Gianfranco Della Rossa].
In the Sunna series, three books have been published so far, all by Antonio Costanzo: in 2010,
Hávamál. La voce di Odino [Hávamál. The voice of Odin], an annotated translation of the eddic poem with a foreword
by Gísli Sigurðsson;
in 2012, the aforementioned translation of Fóstbræðra saga; and in 2014, Il sacrificio di Odino. Tracce sciamaniche tra i vichinghi [Odin’s sacrifice. Traces of shamanism among the Vikings], an attempt at the interpretation
of Hávamál in the light of the comparison between different religious traditions, above all
Old Norse paganism and Buddhism. In this analysis, Costanzo adopts the traditionalist
approach of the repeatedly quoted fascist philosopher Julius Evola. In Antonio Costanzo’s words: “Nella nostra analisi abbiamo avuto in vista soprattutto
il carattere universale degli
elementi tradizionali comuni alle diverse culture che di volta in volta abbiamo ravvicinato” [In
our analysis we have especially taken into consideration the universal character
of the traditional elements that the different cultures that we have successively
considered have in common] (47).
The text of the translated saga is accompanied by an unusual number of para-texts,
which deserve to be taken into consideration. The book-jacket contains a brief description
of the translator, a concise account of the text, and a completely new subheading:
“Una leggendaria epopea di fratellanza vichinga” [A legendary epic of Viking brotherhood].
The book opens with a “Presentazione” [Presentation] by the renowned historian Franco
Cardini (VII-IX). Cardini is quite a peculiar personality in the Italian cultural
scene. His studies
on medieval history, in particular on chivalry and the crusades, are unanimously considered
as fundamental. However, the political role he played during his life is more controversial.
Although he refuses to be considered as a right-wing intellectual, he was a militant
in the Movimento Sociale Italiano and in Jean-François Thiriart’s Jeune Europe. Yet,
during the 2003 Iraq war, he resolutely opposed the invasion, and afterwards he repeatedly
took positions against the hate campaign directed towards Muslims. In his short “Presentation”
of the book, he points out some parallels between the pair of warriors Þorgeirr/Þormóðr
in the saga and mythical pairs of heroes, such as Gilgamesh/Enkidu, Indra/Arjuna,
Ajax/Diomedes, and so on. He then wonders about the reasons that induced the Icelanders
to preserve the memory of their pagan past and concludes:“A queste domande non sappiamo
rispondere” [To such questions we have no answers]. Cardini’s cautious presentation,
together with his reputation as an historian and
as a nonconforming, right-wing intellectual clearly serves as a legitimation for Costanzo’s
cultural operation.
Cardini’s “Presentation” is followed by Gianfranco Della Rossa’s much more explicit
Foreword (XI-XIV). In
Della Rossa’s style and formulations, the cultural and ideological roots of the publishing
house come clearly to light. According to him, “una natura indomita e bellicosa infiamma
i cuori” [an indomitable and martial nature inflames the hearts] of the blood brothers
(XI), and for them death is an “ospite sempre atteso” [an always awaited guest] (XI).
He writes the words Onore [Honour], Coraggio [Courage], and Temerarietà [Recklessness] with capital letters (XII); in his opinion, the society depicted
in the saga is “non ancora contaminata dalla cultura cristiana” [not yet contaminated
by Christian culture] (XIII), and he concludes by quoting Oswald Spengler: “Una civiltà,
per dirla con Oswald Spengler, in piena fase di Kultur, non priva quindi di una certa barbarie” [A civilization, as Oswald Spenger would
say, which was still in its phase of Kultur,
and therefore not devoid of a certain barbarism] (XIV). Following Della Rossa’s foreword,
a longer “Introduzione filologica” [Philological introduction] by the translator accounts
for the scholarly debate about the saga and presents its
textual tradition. Furthermore, Costanzo explains that he has chosen the version of
the Flateyjarbók as the basis for his translation, then he describes the difficulties faced in translating
the saga, and makes a list of culture-bound terms that have not been translated (XV-XXIX).
After the translated text of the saga (which also includes the Þormódar þáttr) and before the two appendices in which Costanzo comments on the stanzas contained
respectively in Fóstbræðra saga and Þormódar þáttr, yet another para-text is printed: an afterword by the former chairman of the Icelandic
Social Democratic Party, Jón Baldvin Hannibalsson, who limits himself to making some
very general reflections about medieval Icelandic society and to evoking the memory
of an encounter, in his childhood, with Halldór Kiljan Laxness (147–51).
With regard to the translation itself, it is first of all interesting to observe the
alternating use of archaizing words and words belonging to a low register. Examples
of archaizing words are tenebrore (18) instead of tenebra/oscurità/buio for myrkvi [darkness]; venusta (52) instead of bella/avvenente for væn [beautiful]; and saziaronsi (63, in stanza 11) instead of si saziarono for sǫddusk [satisfied their hunger]. In contrast, examples of colloquial use are “Parecchio
si stanno allargando, i fratelli giurati” (24) for “Mjǫk ganga þeir fóstbrœðr nú af sér” [They go too far, the sworn brothers], and “Ci sono delle rogne dietro … ?” (70) for “Eru þér nǫkkur vandræði á hǫndum … ?” [Are there any troubles … ?]. Whereas in Mari Catani’s translation the different linguistic registers were
used
to point out the distance between the highly sophisticated language of poetry and
the ordinary language of daily life, Costanzo’s translation gives the impression of
a linguistic chaos, where archaisms, anachronisms, and slang expressions follow each
other without any apparent reason.
Only the conscious intention to reconnect to the Latin cultural tradition can explain
the use of the archaic and very unusual term viro (from Latin vir, man) in the translations of stanzas 13, 14, 15, and 16. Even more disconcerting, however,
is the use of the Italian term duce in order to translate the Icelandic word hǫfdingi (98, 111). The word duce, in fact, has been used in the past as an archaism derived from the Latin term dux [commander, leader], but after the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini proclaimed himself
“duce del fascismo,” the term connotes far-right-wing policy and culture. In general
terms, we can say
that the language of Antonio Costanzo’s translation is quite distant from the language(s)
of the Italian literary tradition. The odd lexical choices and the peculiar syntactic
organization produced by the effort not to stray too far from the original text result
in a strongly alienating language, which sometimes comes close to incomprehensibility.
If it is true, as André Lefevere maintains, that the translation of literature takes
place “not in a vacuum in which two languages meet but, rather, in the context of
all the
traditions of the two literatures” (6), then it is impossible to consider Antonio
Costanzo’s translation as successful.
Furthermore, the choice to have it published by a small publishing house with deep
political connotations makes it difficult for the translation to reach a wide readership.
To conclude this concise survey of the history of the translations of Old Norse texts
into Italian, it can be useful to summarize the development observed from the second
half of the eighteenth century until today. Although the Italian scholars did not
have the necessary linguistic knowledge to read the Old Norse texts in the original
language in the very first period of this development (from the middle of the eighteenth
to the first decades of the nineteenth century), they had the possibility to read
them in translation, and the curious poem by Francesco Saverio Quadrio, “Versi in
lingua runica,” demonstrates that at least some of them actually did so. Moreover,
the Swedish immigrant
Jakob Gråberg played a pioneering role in spreading the knowledge of Old Norse tradition
and literature in Italy.
Consistently with the state of the Italian literary system of that period, the Italian
intellectual circles showed interest in essentially two genres: poetry and historiography,
whereas as good as no attention was paid to other narrative prose genres. Even the
interest in skaldic poetry vanished quite soon due to the nearly exclusive interest
of the Romantics in the supposed folk-poetry. Basically, this attitude persisted until WWII, despite the evolution of the
Italian literary system. In the long period comprised between the beginning of the
Romantic movement in Italy and WWII, the only major factor that affected the reception
of Old Norse culture in Italy was the great popularity of Richard Wagner’s operas,
which aroused the interest in at least one Norse saga: the Vǫlsunga saga.
The situation changed gradually after WWII, principally in connection with the evolution
of the Italian academic system. The progressive integration into the curricula of
disciplines such as Germanic philology, Scandinavian studies, and Linguistics created
the conditions to develop a new generation of scholars, able both to study the original
texts and to translate them. This development resulted, on the one hand, in a broadening
of the interests of the Italian scholars who began to actively participate in the
scientific international debate, and on the other hand in a closer collaboration between
the academic and the editorial worlds. This collaboration, however, did not lead to
major, comprehensive projects comparable to the translation of all the Sagas of Icelanders
into English (published by the Leifur Eiriksson Publishing in 1997) or to the vast
project of translating as good as the whole of Old Norse literature carried out in
the first half of the twentieth century by the German Thule Sammlung [Thule book series].
The different translation projects, instead, have been largely determined by the
personal contacts of each single scholar/translator with some publishing houses. The
success in spreading knowledge about each specific Old Norse text has thus been mainly
conditioned by the sales force of each publishing house and by its cultural prestige.
Furthermore, particularly during the last decades some new cultural factors have contributed
to modifying the overall picture of the translations from Old Norse into Italian.
The huge popularity of fantasy literature—consistently increased after Peter Jackson’s
Tolkienian trilogy The Lord of the Rings at the beginning of the century (2003–2005)—has induced many fans to go in search
of the primary sources of the literary worlds of which they are so fond, thus promoting
non-professional translations and rewritings. Additionally, TV series such as Michael
Hirst’s Vikings (2013–2018) have contributed to enhance the popularity of some sagas: it is worth
noting that in 2017 not only Marcello Meli’s translation of Ragnars saga loðbrókar was reprinted by the publishing house Iperborea, but also a totally new translation
was published under the telling title Vikings: la saga di Ragnar Lodbrok [Vikings: The saga of Ragnar Lodbrok] by Fanucci, a publishing house specializing
in fantasy, horror, and science fiction
literature.