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Book Reviews
trees, make it a blissful Eden. In addition, the garden emanates
seductive perfumes. The lavender borders, planted here and in the
cloisters by a talented horticulturist, emanate a light and delicate
perfume that caresses and offers solace, creating an air of indefinable
well being: a caress for the olfactory glands.”
The translation is faithful without being slavish and succeeds
in rendering in a smooth fashion Quatriglio’s style, characterized
by frequent asides and numerous subordinate clauses. Were the
translators less skilled, the translation would result in a choppy
and staccato reading. Quatriglio’s L’isola dei miti, which is enjoyable
excursus into the Sicilian imagination, can now be enjoyed in
its English dress thanks to Russo and Cipolla.
391
Antonio Pagano
Transmitting & Translating Italy’s 150th Anniversary: Two
Recent Publications. Herein discussed: “Politics and Art in Italy,”
Frieze, no. 140, June – August 2011 and “The Many Voices of Italian
Literature,” World Literature Today, vol. 85, no. 4, July-August 2011.
It seems that only certain forms of more or less essential,
or more or less sacred, or more or less renowned Italian cultural
products lend themselves, in general, to more or less objective
review. Cuisine, fashion, design, tourism and sports (and by that I
suppose I mean calcio), for example, are rarely if ever analytically
linked to Italy’s frequently – and indeed currently – fraught, as it
goes, sociopolitical milieu that nonetheless includes such products,
at some point, too. Or at any rate, cultural products such as these
do not seem to require metacontextualized treatment in surveys
or profiles for audiences outside of Italy. And at any rate, that is
basically fine. That such modes of cultural expression might persist
and flourish despite difficult political climes should come as no
surprise. Italian soccer clubs do a fine enough job of scandalizing
themselves, after all, and penne all’arrabbiata have been known
to be self-reflexively enraged for quite some time.
Italian letters and fine arts, however, occupy a quite different,