Simone Marchesi
Simone Marchesi (Laurea, University of Pisa; M.A. University of Notre Dame, Italian Studies; Ph.D. Princeton University, Comparative Literature) is Professor of French and Italian.
His main research area is the dialogue with classical and late-antique texts engaged by Italian medieval writers, especially Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Published work on medieval authors includes two monographs: Stratigrafie decameroniane (Olschki, 2004), Dante and Augustine: Linguistics, Poetics, Hermeneutics (UToronto Press, 2011), and several articles and chapters in collections. Other interests include Italian cantautori (in 2005, he has published an annotated edition of the lyrics of a rock band from Livorno: Traccia fantasma. Testi e contesti per le canzoni dei Virginiana Miller) as well as translation studies (in 2009, Le Lettere has published Un’America, an edition and translation into Italian of Robert Pinsky’s 1979 long poem An Explanation of America). Most recently, he has edited and translated into Italian Robert Hollander's full commentary to Dante's Commedia (Olschki, 2011), of which Loescher has published a high-school annotated edition in 2016.
In collaboration with Ilaria Marchesi, he has published the autobiofictional essay Live in Pompeii for the Contromano series (Laterza, 2016). In collaboration with Roberto Abbiati, he has published A proposito di Dante (Keller Editore, 2021), a volume collecting one hundred tercets from the Divine Comedy together with as many glosses and graphic illustrations.
Most recently, he has co-edited three collections of essays: Volume IX in the Lectura Boccaccii series (UTP, 2022), with Susanna Barsella; Dante Alive, with Francesco Ciabattoni (Routledge, 2022); and the two-volume proceedings of the 2019 ABA Triennial Conference Boccaccio Today: Documenting, Interpreting, Responding in the journal Letteratura Tardogotica e Quattrocentesca (2022-20223).
His monograph Vernacular Edens: Tropes of Translation in Medieval European Fictions is forthcoming with UTPress in 2024.
His main research area is the dialogue with classical and late-antique texts engaged by Italian medieval writers, especially Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Published work on medieval authors includes two monographs: Stratigrafie decameroniane (Olschki, 2004), Dante and Augustine: Linguistics, Poetics, Hermeneutics (UToronto Press, 2011), and several articles and chapters in collections. Other interests include Italian cantautori (in 2005, he has published an annotated edition of the lyrics of a rock band from Livorno: Traccia fantasma. Testi e contesti per le canzoni dei Virginiana Miller) as well as translation studies (in 2009, Le Lettere has published Un’America, an edition and translation into Italian of Robert Pinsky’s 1979 long poem An Explanation of America). Most recently, he has edited and translated into Italian Robert Hollander's full commentary to Dante's Commedia (Olschki, 2011), of which Loescher has published a high-school annotated edition in 2016.
In collaboration with Ilaria Marchesi, he has published the autobiofictional essay Live in Pompeii for the Contromano series (Laterza, 2016). In collaboration with Roberto Abbiati, he has published A proposito di Dante (Keller Editore, 2021), a volume collecting one hundred tercets from the Divine Comedy together with as many glosses and graphic illustrations.
Most recently, he has co-edited three collections of essays: Volume IX in the Lectura Boccaccii series (UTP, 2022), with Susanna Barsella; Dante Alive, with Francesco Ciabattoni (Routledge, 2022); and the two-volume proceedings of the 2019 ABA Triennial Conference Boccaccio Today: Documenting, Interpreting, Responding in the journal Letteratura Tardogotica e Quattrocentesca (2022-20223).
His monograph Vernacular Edens: Tropes of Translation in Medieval European Fictions is forthcoming with UTPress in 2024.
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Books by Simone Marchesi
http://www.loescher.it/dettaglio/opera/o_30440/la-commedia?search&st=all
A chi già conosce gli album dei Virginiana – Gelaterie sconsacrate, Italiamobile e La verità sul tennis – queste pagine si offrono come chiave di accesso al significato dei loro testi. Per chi li incontra solo ora, sono un invito a scoprire l’armonia tra parole e musica che anima le loro canzoni.
Per questa vocazione a comporre e relazionare l’eterogeneo, An Explanation of America si candida come erede legittima di The Waste Land e Pinsky, poeta–critico lui stesso, come colui che ha meglio compreso, ben oltre qualunque indulgenza ai manierismi facili, la profondità della lezione eliotiana.
L’idea di proporre al pubblico italiano la traduzione del poema a trent’anni dall’uscita, nasce dalla radicata convinzione dei traduttori che la “spiegazione” pinskyana possa rappresentare un modello particolarmente utile proprio ai poeti italiani che verranno e ad una generazione di lettori che ci auguriamo voglia chiedere anche alla poesia una rappresentazione perspicua del mondo là fuori. Dopo aver imparato a guardar dentro noi stessi, come da tradizione, non sarebbe forse sbagliato che apprendessimo (anche in versi) questa capacità radicalmente ‘democratica’ di guardarci attorno.
In Dante's intellectual history, Augustinian ideas may be found at the root of three easily observable (and often observed), interconnected phenomena: first, the shift from his experimentation with self-commentary to the writing of independent prose and poetry; second, the shift from his (strategically invoked) skepticism about the ability of poetry to communicate fully with its readership to his investiture of the reader with the production of an active and ultimately salvific reading of his text; and third, the shift from his reliance on the authority of the author to the profession of a poetics of inspiration, in which poetic texts are products to which “heaven and earth have set their hands.” This book argues that Augustine's meditations on language, style, and interpretation helped achieve all three transitions.
Augustine provided Dante with a model for the essence and goals of human language that could counteract his professed reliance on the conceptualist linguistic framework most radically advocated in De vulgari eloquentia; a radical alternative to the reductionist philosophical poetics that Dante avowedly evoked in Convivio, a theory of poetry based on the split between artistic form and intellectual content; and finally a hermeneutic model coherent with a poetics of inspiration that could endow his texts with a higher authority than the limited, all-too-human prestige of its author, a notion that may be found in embryo in Vita nuova, but that only the Commedia fully develops.
Teaching Documents by Simone Marchesi
Papers by Simone Marchesi
http://www.loescher.it/dettaglio/opera/o_30440/la-commedia?search&st=all
A chi già conosce gli album dei Virginiana – Gelaterie sconsacrate, Italiamobile e La verità sul tennis – queste pagine si offrono come chiave di accesso al significato dei loro testi. Per chi li incontra solo ora, sono un invito a scoprire l’armonia tra parole e musica che anima le loro canzoni.
Per questa vocazione a comporre e relazionare l’eterogeneo, An Explanation of America si candida come erede legittima di The Waste Land e Pinsky, poeta–critico lui stesso, come colui che ha meglio compreso, ben oltre qualunque indulgenza ai manierismi facili, la profondità della lezione eliotiana.
L’idea di proporre al pubblico italiano la traduzione del poema a trent’anni dall’uscita, nasce dalla radicata convinzione dei traduttori che la “spiegazione” pinskyana possa rappresentare un modello particolarmente utile proprio ai poeti italiani che verranno e ad una generazione di lettori che ci auguriamo voglia chiedere anche alla poesia una rappresentazione perspicua del mondo là fuori. Dopo aver imparato a guardar dentro noi stessi, come da tradizione, non sarebbe forse sbagliato che apprendessimo (anche in versi) questa capacità radicalmente ‘democratica’ di guardarci attorno.
In Dante's intellectual history, Augustinian ideas may be found at the root of three easily observable (and often observed), interconnected phenomena: first, the shift from his experimentation with self-commentary to the writing of independent prose and poetry; second, the shift from his (strategically invoked) skepticism about the ability of poetry to communicate fully with its readership to his investiture of the reader with the production of an active and ultimately salvific reading of his text; and third, the shift from his reliance on the authority of the author to the profession of a poetics of inspiration, in which poetic texts are products to which “heaven and earth have set their hands.” This book argues that Augustine's meditations on language, style, and interpretation helped achieve all three transitions.
Augustine provided Dante with a model for the essence and goals of human language that could counteract his professed reliance on the conceptualist linguistic framework most radically advocated in De vulgari eloquentia; a radical alternative to the reductionist philosophical poetics that Dante avowedly evoked in Convivio, a theory of poetry based on the split between artistic form and intellectual content; and finally a hermeneutic model coherent with a poetics of inspiration that could endow his texts with a higher authority than the limited, all-too-human prestige of its author, a notion that may be found in embryo in Vita nuova, but that only the Commedia fully develops.