Italian Lecture Series: Giancarlo Tursi (Dante in Dialect: The Politics of Translation in the Risorgimento)

Please join us for the upcoming Italian Lecture Series talk with Giancarlo Tursi (UC Santa Barbara). 

Abstract:
This lecture will discuss my research on the phenomenon of partial to complete dialectal translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy during the long nineteenth-century period known as the Risorgimento. What are we to make of this phenomenon in light of the language politics of the period? Are we to see these works as conspiring with the unification movement, familiarizing a linguistically diverse population—of which, it is reported, only between 2.5 and 10 percent spoke the so-called standard language—with this foundational work of Italian literature? Or is a more surreptitious gesture afoot such that, in recalling Dante’s own decision to write in Tuscan instead of Latin during the late medieval period, these translators can be seen as leveraging the poet for their own local cause? What emerges from my investigation is a portrait of a nation-in-translation with important implications for contemporary language politics.

RSVP for the Italian Lecture Series Talk by Giancarlo Tursi