Sappho and Catullus in Twentieth-Century Italian and North American Poetry

273 Pages·2021·2.398 MB·English

by  Cecilia Piantanida

Sappho and Catullus
in Twentieth-Century Italian
and North American Poetry
i
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ii
Sappho and Catullus
in Twentieth-Century Italian
and North American Poetry
Cecilia Piantanida
iii
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in Great Britain 2021
Copyright Cecilia Piantanida, 2021

Cecilia Piantanida has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be iden tifi ed as Author of this work.
For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Piantanida, Cecilia, 1985- author.
Title: Sappho and Catullus in twentieth-century Italian and
North American poetry / Cecilia Piantanida.
Other titles: Bloomsbury studies in classical reception.
Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Series: Bloomsbury studies in classical
reception | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Going beyond exclusively national
perspectives, this volume considers the reception of the ancient Greek poet Sappho and her fi rst Latin
translator, Catullus, as a literary pair who transmit poetic culture across the world from the early 20th
century to the present. Sappho’s and Catullus’ reception has shaped a transnational network of poets and
intellectuals, helping to defi ne ideas of origins, gender, sexuality and national identities. This book shows
that across time and cultures translations and rewritings of Sappho and Catullus articulate modernist
poetics of myth and fragmentation, forms of confessionalism and post-modern pastiche. The inquiry
focuses on Italian and North American poetry as two central yet understudied hubs of Sappho’s and
Catullus’ modern reception, also linked by a rich mutual intellectual exchange: key case-studies include
Giovanni Pascoli, Ezra Pound, H.D., Salvatore Quasimodo, Robert Lowell, Rosita Copioli and Anne Carson,
and cover a wide range of unpublished archival material. Texts are analysed and compared through
reception and translation theories and inserted within the current debate on the Classics as World
Literature, demonstrating how sustained transnational poetic discourse employs the ancient pair to expand
notions of literary origins and redefi ne poetry’s relationship to human existence”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2020034501 (print) | LCCN 2020034502 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350101890 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9781350101906 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350101913 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Sappho--Infl uence. | Catullus, Gaius Valerius--Infl uence. | Poetry, Modern--20th
century--History and criticism. | Italian poetry--20th century--History and criticism. | English poetry--North
America--20th century--History and criticism. | Italian poetry--20th century--Classical infl uences. | English
poetry--North America--20th century--Classical infl uences.
Classifi cation: LCC PN1271 .P53 2021 (print) | LCC PN1271 (ebook) | DDC 884/.0109--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034501
LC ebook record available at h ttps://lccn.loc.gov/2020034502
ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-0189-0
ePDF: 978-1-3501-0190-6
eBook: 9 78-1-3501-0191-3
Typeset by Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
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iv
Ai miei genitori
v
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Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction: Th e Slow Fire 1
Th e poets and their texts 4
World reception/world authors 8
Global palimpsests 8
Poetry is Sappho and Catullus 12
Th e ‘translocal stretch’ 13
From Italy to North America and Back 14
Who? What? When? And Why? 17
1 Mythical Rewritings 23
Sappho and Catullus at the origins: Pascoli’s poetic laboratory
(1877–84) 26
Sappho 26
Catullus 33
Modern myths: 1895–1899 36
Sappho and the blooming fl owers of dusk 36
Catullus and the perpetual ritual of lyric 42
2 Modernist Rites 53
Sappho and Catullus I magistes 56
Angels and drabs in Pound’s L ustra (1917) 58
H.D.’s Sappho in the Imagist period 66
Sappho and Catullus beyond Imagism 70
Erotic ritualism: H.D.’s H ymen (1921) and Heliodora (1924) 70
Th e second phase in Pound’s reception: Th e two masks of Eros 79
Th e third phase in Pound’s reception: Private and public poetry 81
3 Classical Hermeticism 85
Tradition and translation toward a lyric absolute 90
Sappho as a lyric abstraction: Poetic voice in Lirici greci 97
Quasimodo’s elegiac Catullus 102
Lirici greci ’s reception 108
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viii Contents
4 Th e Self and the Object 113
Rewriting the self with Catullus: Lowell’s Life Studies 117
Sappho through a prism 122
Objectivist Catullus: Th e Zukofskys’ translations 130
5 Body vs Soul 141
Ceronetti’s anti-establishment Catullus 147
Th e brightness of Sappho and Catullus 153
Copioli’s spiritual eroticism 156
6 Postmodern Sappho and Catullus 169
Triangulating eros 172
(Un)Knowing Sappho and Catullus: M en in the Off Hours (2000) 174
Sappho disappears 174
Catullus beyond himself 178
Floating with Sappho 185
Giving thanatos back to eros: Catullus in N ox (2010) 191
Epilogue 195
Notes 201
List of Manuscripts 219
Audio-visual Material 220
Works Cited 221
Index 243
Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge a Jermyn Brooks Graduate Award, a Lord Crewe
Graduate Scholarship, and funding received from Lincoln College (Oxford),
which allowed the project at the core of this book to take shape during my
doctoral studies at the University of Oxford. I am also honoured to have received
from the Isaiah Berlin Fund and the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages
of the University of Oxford a scholarship and several travel grants to spend three
months of extremely productive research in Italian libraries and archives.
Several publishers have kindly granted permissions to print extracts or
images:
Extracts from ‘Canto IV’ By Ezra Pound, from Th e Cantos of Ezra Pound ,
©1934 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions
Publishing Corp.
Extracts from ‘Canto V’ By Ezra Pound, from Th e Cantos of Ezra Pound , ©1934
by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing
Corp.
‘April – 12. Sappho’, excerpts from ‘Aft erthought’ from N otebook by Robert
Lowell; ‘Words for Hart Crane’, ‘Sappho to a Girl’, excerpts from
‘Preface’, ‘Th ree Letters to Anaktoria’ and ‘Hamlet in Russia, A
Soliloquy’ from Imitations from C ollected Poems by Robert Lowell,
© 2003 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell. Reprinted by
permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
‘Catullus: Carmina’, ‘TV Men: Sappho (1)’, and ‘TV Men: Sappho (2)’ from M en
in the Off Hours © 2000 by Anne Carson. Used by permission of
Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing
Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Extracts from Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson published by
Jonathan Cape, reprinted by permission of Th e Random House Group
Limited © 2000. Extracts from Nox , © 2010 by Anne Carson.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Egidio Fiorin very helpfully sent, and gave me permission to print, the image of
Merini, A. and E. Baj (1999–2000), L’uovo di Saff o , © Colophonarte.
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