Journal of Italian Translation - Brooklyn College - Academic Home ...

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Journal of Italian Translation
bibliografia critica in chiusura, che conferma la portata e l’ampiezza
della competenza e delle conoscenze dell’Autore di questi studi, sia
nel campo della traduttologia che dello specifico contesto
dell’Umanesimo civile della Firenze tre-quattrocentesca. Quella
Firenze che pagherà cara, sostiene Baldassarri anche contro illustri
pareri (cfr. p. 22), l’assoluta predilezione per il recupero greco-latino
della classicità, a scapito di un uso colto del volgare, perdendo presto
il suo scettro a livello nazionale nel contesto della letteratura in
volgare del Rinascimento.
Carla Chiummo
Università di Cassino
Artemisia by Anna Banti; Translated & with an afterword by
Shirley D’Ardia Caracciolo; With a new introduction by Susan
Sontag; University of Nebraska Press, 2004. pp. 219.
Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653) was a distinguished painter
at the courts of Florence, Naples and London, and yet remained
unduly forgotten until Roberto Longhi rediscovered her in the early
20 th century. Thereafter, as art historians began to re-examine this
gifted artist’s work, Anna Banti 1 — Longhi’s wife — set out to write
a historical novel about her. Among the information that Banti uncovered
was that Artemisia’s fame and success had not protected
her from enduring immense hardship. Raped by her painting instructor
Agostino Tassi and forced to undergo torture at the trial
against him, the young Artemisia was married off to a man who
eventually abandoned her. Of the four children she bore with him,
only one survived to adulthood. As the fates would have it, Banti’s
original manuscript was destroyed during the German bombings
of Florence in 1944. Nevertheless, she was determined to salvage
the book by working from memory alone, a tumultuous experience
which she documents in her 1947 novel Artemisia, presenting herself
as the narrator, and thereby inviting the reader to witness both
Artemisia Gentileschi’s turbulent life journey and her own struggle
recomposing that story.
Shirley D’Ardia Caracciolo was the first to translate Artemisia
into English in 1988, in a book of the same title which was published
by the University of Nebraska Press. A solid work that faithfully
and very literally adheres to the Italian original while also