Huon of Bordeaux published

We are pleased to announce the publication of Huon of Bordeaux in its first modern English translation by Catherine M. Jones and William W. Kibler.

The adventures of Huon of Bordeaux have been perennial favorites since their first appearance in the thirteenth century as a French chanson de geste. Within decades there were spin-offs and a prequel. The story was reprinted, popularized, and translated from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. It became a staple of children’s literature as well as the basis for theatrical and operatic works. By the twentieth century, it had become the inspiration for fantasy writers.

Jones and Kibler’s verse translation sings with grace, humor, and wit. For both teaching and for pure literary enjoyment, this first modern English translation of Huon of Bordeaux will be a major complement to the corpus of medieval French epic literature. 

“Huon of Bordeaux is on a much higher level. We do not feel that it is simply being made up out of the author’s head. It has its roots in legend and folklore, without which it is hard for romance to have the necessary solidity.” 

— C. S. Lewis

First modern English translation.
Introduction, notes, bibliography, 
glossary, and list of characters.
354 pp.

Federico De Roberto’s “Agony” to be published in English, January 1, 2021

Italica Press is happy to announce the forthcoming publication (January 1, 2021) of the first English translation of Federico De Roberto’s classic detective novel, Agony (Spasimo), translated, with an introduction, by Andrew Edwards.

The beautiful, young Countess Fiorenza d’Arda has died dramatically at her villa near Lake Geneva. Judge François Ferpierre, the senior magistrate assigned to Lausanne’s central court, arrives to investigate whether it was murder  or suicide. In either case, who is responsible? A diverse set of characters — including two Russian anarchists and a melancholy young poet, each struggling with their own complex moral, political and artistic dilemmas — all become suspects. Ferpierre works on shifting ground as each new revelation uncovers another aspect of the case, another quandary shedding new light on intertwining motivations. 

Agony is the first English-language translation of Federico De Roberto’s Spasimo, a psychological-detective novel. Here, for the first time, a Sicilian author has written a detective procedural. De Roberto, a master of verismo, is celebrated today for his acute political, social, and psychological insights.  His work was held in high esteem by Leonardo Sciascia, who deemed De Roberto’s I Viceré the greatest Italian novel after Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi.

“If we are who we are today, we owe it in part to characters just like those portrayed in the novels of De Roberto.” 
Stefania Auci, author of I Leoni di Sicilia, La Repubblica

“In entering the ‘human abyss’ … chasing clues even in the most inaccessible recesses of the psyche … giving an account of all this, De Roberto as usual is a true master.”
Salvatore Ferlita, La Repubblica

Please have a look, here.

Irving Lavin’s Art of Commemoration Published

We are happy to announce the publication of Irving Lavin’s The Art of Commemoration in the Renaissance. 

In the early 1980s, Irving Lavin was invited to deliver The Slade Lectures at Oxford University, and he took it as an opportunity to develop an idea he had long considered but never articulated: that the Italian fifteenth-century revival of ancient art was an outward sign of fundamental changes in humanity’s perception of the inner self. The change started when the individual emerged from the Middle Ages and began to exhibit a previously unknown awareness of the past as opposed to the present. The individual became a person who could make choices about existence on the basis of a new internal consciousness.

What the Renaissance called the “new man” chose what he saw in the classical world as of a higher culture and, having absorbed and transformed it, adopted it. The new mode of being not only transformed human actions, it also became the basis for a new manifestation in the arts in a style we term “Renaissance.”

To develop this idea, in what Irving Lavin called The Art of Commemoration in the Renaissance, he studied the Renaissance contribution under several rubrics that form the basis of this collection. Revising and developing through the years and until his death in 2019, Irving Lavin continued to expand, contract, and update this extravagant array of objects and ideas. Chapters include:

1. Memory and the Sense of Self: On the Role of Memory in Psychological Theory from Antiquity to Giambattista Vico
2. On the Sources and Meaning of the Renaissance Portrait Bust
3. On Illusion and Allusion in Italian Sixteenth-Century Portrait Busts
4. Great Men Past and Present
5. Equestrian Monuments: The Indomitable Horseman
6. Collective Commemoration and the Family Chapel.

These essays have now been edited in their final form, with updated notes and bibliography, by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin. Please have a look here.

 

Catalog 58 Now Available

Our Italica Press Catalog 58 for Fall 2019 is now available and ready for download. It contains six new titles and our complete backlist.

This season’s new offering include New Italian Voices, translated and edited by Cinzia Sartini Blum and Deborah L. Contrada. This major new collection includes Italian writers from India and Syria, Eastern Europe, North and sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Italy. This volume brings together a group of accomplished, award-winning authors of growing international acclaim.

We are pleased to announce the publication of the next volume in our Documentary History of Naples series. Volume editors Charlotte Nichols & James H. Mc Gregor present Renaissance Naples: A Documentary History 1400–1600. They offer the first comprehensive English-language collection of sources to treat the city of Naples from the end of the medieval to the early modern period. This book presents 169 readings in English translation drawn from historical, biographical, financial, literary, artistic, religious and cultural documents starting with the later Angevin dynasty and ending at the 17th century.

Eileen Gardiner also offers the next volume in her ongoing Hell-on-Line series of transcultural texts describing the infernal otherworld. Greek & Roman Hell: Visions, Tours and Descriptions of the Infernal Otherworld includes seventeen texts that range from epic poems by Homer and Virgil to plays by Aristophanes and Seneca, dialogues by Plato, satirical pieces by Lucian of Samosata, to novels and narrative poems. It provides a comprehensive overview of the nature of Greek and Roman hell.

Also new is The Miracles and Translatio of Saint James, books 2 and 3 of the Liber Sancti Jacobi. This presents a translation, with introduction, commentaries and notes by Thomas F. Coffey and Maryjane Dunn. This is the fourth of a projected five-volume series publishing modern English translations and commentary in our complete Compostela Project.   

Kiril Petkov brings us another important Mediterranean text with his From Cyprus to Lepanto, an annotated translation of the History of Giovanni Pietro Contarini. Written in Italian, Contarini’s account of the battle of Lepanto in 1571 and the events leading up to it offers a humanist historical narrative with keen and consistent reflections on the political philosophy of conflict in the context of the Ottoman-Catholic confrontation in the early modern Mediterranean. 

Finally, we’ve published another important title by Nobel Prize winning novelist Grazia Deledda: Ivy, translated from the Italian, with introduction, by Mary Ann Frese Witt and Martha Witt. Many consider Ivy to be Deledda’s best work, surpassing even Elias Portolu and Reeds in the Wind (Canne al vento). Here she deeply probes the misguided but altruistic motivation of a woman totally dependent on others who lack her own moral fortitude.

New Italian Voices Published

We are happy to announce the publication of New Italian Voices, a major new collection of Italian writers from India and Syria, Eastern Europe, North and sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Italy, edited and translated by Cinzia Sartini Blum and Deborah L. Contrada. They have brought together a group of accomplished, award-winning authors of growing international acclaim. New Italian Voices is an eclectic and vibrant collection of poetry, short stories, essays, theater, and prose by twenty authors from fifteen countries writing today in Italy, in Italian.   

Over the past three decades, Italy has become a destination for people driven from their homelands by economic, political, and cultural forces. The resulting demographic and social changes have largely been defined negatively by Italian media. Scaremongering headlines paint a picture of assault on the Italian coasts, a mass invasion disassociated from news about the labor market and linked instead to growing concerns about security.  

Excluded and objectified in political, legal, and media narratives, migrants challenge those discourses with literary narratives, and their new voices offer a variety of transnational experiences and transcultural sensibilities, exemplifying a broad range of themes and literary strategies. Please have a look at http://www.italicapress.com/index517.html!