Journal of Italian Translation

28 Journal of Italian Translation
in Chapman’s Iliad, and will settle only much later, in the sobriety
of Dryden and Hobbes.
Eliot reads the translations in the Tenne Tragedies as a historical
passage from the old Tudor language, still chained to Chaucerian
models, to the Elizabethan one, based on Seneca. Violence, excess,
passion, and rhetorical are all linked to a sophisticated ‘foreigness’,
that of Italy, following an ideological move which can be indeed
traced back to the Elizabethan period. From Webster to Shakespeare,
from Byron’s carnival to Forster’s Tuscany, ‘italianità’, excess, passion,
violence, and rhetoric remain closely connected, and opposed
to an idea of ‘Englishness’ as decorum, measure, but – surely – also
as a limitation. 7
Eliot thus redefines a central historical period through a theory
of translation in which the influence of an Italianised Seneca and
the invention of a Seneca of ‘horrors’, and ‘dramatic theatre’ are at
the origins of the renewal of versification. Such a renewal is not
only formal but also semantic, lexical, and epistemological. Eliot
develops a notion of English tradition by distinguishing on the one
hand its Anglosaxon past, a non-dramatic past, and on the other
the foreign influence, or, even better, the Latin influence (a term
which in this essay spans from ancient Rome to the Italian Renaissance).
If the ‘latinità’ is a justification for the ‘bombast’ of Seneca,
it is again the ‘latinità’, reincarnated into Italianness, which justifies
the excesses of the Tragedies of Blood.
The birth of Englishness coincides with the birth of theatre, or,
better, of a ‘theatrical drama’, a drama of action and not only of
language, and prepares the ground for a Shakespeare who would
be unthinkable without such translations. The Elizabethan period
is thus the foundation of a notion of Englishness, 8 it is the historical
locus in which tradition recognises its own origins. Tradition springs
out of a cultural innovation which translation makes possible. Since
for Eliot ‘few things that can happen to a nation are more important
then the invention of a new form of verse’, 9 when he introduces
Pounds’ Selected Poems he links his own free verse to the Elizabethan
theatre, establishing a connection between his own originality
and a period which simultaneously represents the origin, the
change, and the development of a nation. 10
II. Pictorial visibility, translation and totalitarianism: Ezra