Giosuč Carducci

 

Giosuč Carducci (1835-1907) revived Petrarch's vision of poet as vates, and became the unofficial national poet of a unified Italy, receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1906. He was born in Val di Castello in Tuscany, where his father was a doctor and a member of the Carbonari that advocated unification. Politics obliged the family to move several times in Giosuč's boyhood, but in 1856 the young man received his Ph.D. from Pisa University, and took a teaching job at a provincial high school, bringing out his first collection of poetry, Rime, the following year. Until appointed professor of Italian literature at Bologna, Carducci had many financial difficulties, however. He became the head of the household upon the deaths of his father and brother, and his marriage to Elvira Menicucci in 1859 soon produced a family to support. But Carducci turned himself into an energetic and popular lecturer, an uncompromising literary critic and then a leading opponent of church power. His Jacobin verses created many controversies in the 1860s and 70s, though he had settled into supporting the monarchy by 1890, when he was made a senator for life. In his last years, Carducci was active in politics, proselytising for Italian influence and territorial expansion.

Though only a small part of Carducci's output was verse (4 in 30 volumes of collected works), those poems and translations are Carducci's claim to significance. Lyrics in traditional form appeared in Levia gravia (Light and Heavy: 1861-71), Giambi ed epodi (Iambs and Epodes: 1867-69) and Rime nuove (New Verses: 1861-87). He was not merely conventional, however: in Odi barbari (Barbaric Odes: 1877-89), Carducci tried to import Graeco-Latin forms into Italian verse. Much now appears very dated: Carducci's oratory, the passionate declamation on Italy's place in the world, the Roman past. He is the last of the great classical European poets, very different from his contemporaries (Tennyson and Swinburne in England, Baudelaire and Mallarmé in France, and certainly Bécquer in Spain) where late Romanticism was developing into Symbolism and the Modernist concerns of the twentieth century.

Carducci was opposed to the Romantic solipsism of Leopardi, and built a vigorous reaction based on classicism and realism. He believed in the dignity of life, and strove for a poetry that was sane, virile and strong-willed. Inevitably that led to his becoming linked with D'Annunzio and Fascist opinion, and to pouring out homilies that have not worn well. But Carducci's optimism is not false, only oversimple to a century disgraced by war and genocide, one to which Montale — the only modern Italian poet to rival Carducci in popularity — appealed more movingly with his dark view of the agony and solitude in human beings. Classicism celebrates balance, continuity and restraint, and Carducci is not much read today. But he is worth the effort. Many of his shorter pieces do speak poignantly from the heart, particularly those dealing with personal loss and nostalgia for his native Tuscany and other haunts, and those which fuse contemporary situations with their rendering in classical literature.

Recommended translations of Carducci include those by G.L. Bickersteth (1913), M. Holland (1927), W.F. Smith (1939), A. Burkhard (1947) and D.H. Higgins (1994). Italian poetry anthologies usually have a few poems by Carducci, and more material can be found in Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature (1980), S.E. Scalia's Carducci (1937) and J.C. Bailey'sCarducci: The Taylorian Lecture (1926). For recordings there are Golden Treasury of Italian Verse, ilnarratotore and liberliber.

Our suggestion: Oxford Book of Italian Verse St. John Lucas. O.U.P. 1952. $14.95.

Carducci does not generally feature on student reading lists, and translations tend to be dated and/or out of print. This survy of Italian poetry from the 13th to 19th century is an old book, but still very dependable: good selections in an attractive setting. Prose translations follow the Italian text.

 

Italian language resources are here.

 

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Giosuč Carducc

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