Sappho and Catullus in Twentieth-Century Italian and North American Poetry

Going beyond exclusively national perspectives, this volume considers for the first time the reception of the ancient Greek poet Sappho and her first Latin translator, Catullus, as a literary pair who transmit poetic culture across the world from the early 20th century to the present. The 20th and 21st centuries have seen Sappho and Catullus gaining prime positions in literary culture, with a vigorous industry of translations and rewritings of their poetry and biographies driving their intertwined fortune. A slow yet powerful fire, Sappho’s and Catullus’ reception has shaped a transnational network of poets and intellectuals, helping to define ideas of origins, gender, sexuality and national identities. This book shows that across time and cultures translations and rewritings of Sappho and Catullus articulate modernist poetics of myth and fragmentation, forms of confessionalism and post-modern pastiche. A sustained transnational poetic discourse employs the ancient pair to expand notions of literary origins and redefine poetry’s relationship to human existence. The inquiry focuses on Italian and North American poetry as two central yet understudied hubs of Sappho’s and Catullus’ modern reception, also linked by a rich mutual intellectual exchange. Grounded in textual criticism, the analysis combines translation, reception, gender and thing theories to tackle the multifaceted question of the reception of Sappho and Catullus, while positioning the two ancient poets within World Literature. Key case-studies include Giovanni Pascoli, Ezra Pound, H.D., Salvatore Quasimodo, Robert Lowell, Louis Zukofsky, Guido Ceronetti, Rosita Copioli and Anne Carson, and comprise a wide range of unpublished archival material. "Going beyond exclusively national perspectives, this volume considers the reception of the ancient Greek poet Sappho and her first Latin translator, Catullus, as a literary pair who transmit poetic culture across the world from the early 20th century to the present. Sappho's and Catullus' reception has shaped a transnational network of poets and intellectuals, helping to define ideas of origins, gender, sexuality and national identities. This book shows that across time and cultures translations and rewritings of Sappho and Catullus articulate modernist poetics of myth and fragmentation, forms of confessionalism and post-modern pastiche. The inquiry focuses on Italian and North American poetry as two central yet understudied hubs of Sappho's and Catullus' modern reception, also linked by a rich mutual intellectual exchange: key case-studies include Giovanni Pascoli, Ezra Pound, H.D., Salvatore Quasimodo, Robert Lowell, Rosita Copioli and Anne Carson, and cover a wide range of unpublished archival material. Texts are analysed and compared through reception and translation theories and inserted within the current debate on the Classics as World Literature, demonstrating how sustained transnational poetic discourse employs the ancient pair to expand notions of literary origins and redefine poetry's relationship to human existence"-- Provided by publisher Cover page 1 Halftitle page 2 Series page 3 Title page 4 Copyright page 5 Epigraph 6 Contents 8 Acknowledgements 10 Introduction: The Slow Fire 14 World reception/world authors 21 From Italy to North America and Back 27 Who? What? When? And Why? 30 1 Mythical Rewritings 36 Sappho and Catullus at the origins: Pascoli’s poetic laboratory (1877–84) 39 2 Modernist Rites 66 Sappho and Catullus Imagistes 69 Sappho and Catullus beyond Imagism 83 3 Classical Hermeticism 98 Tradition and translation towards a lyric absolute 103 Sappho as a lyric abstraction: Poetic voice in Lirici greci 110 Quasimodo’s elegiac Catullus 115 Lirici greci ’s reception 121 4 The Self and the Object 126 Rewriting the self with Catullus: Lowell’s Life Studies 130 Sappho through a prism 135 Objectivist Catullus: The Zukofskys’ translations 143 5 Body vs Soul 154 Ceronetti’s anti-establishment Catullus 160 Copioli’s spiritual eroticism 169 6 Postmodern Sappho and Catullus 182 Triangulating eros 185 (Un)Knowing Sappho and Catullus: Men in the Off Hours (2000) 187 Floating with Sappho 198 Giving thanatos back to eros: Catullus in Nox (2010) 204 Epilogue 208 Notes 214 List of Manuscripts 232 Audio-visual Material 233 Works Cited 234 Index 256