Ada Negri

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Ada Negri (born February 3, 1870 in Lodi , Italy; † January 11, 1945 in Milan ) was an Italian writer who was best known for her early lyrical work on social issues.

Ada Negri

life and work

Ada Negri came from a poor background; the father, who died young, was a laborer, the mother a textile worker. Thanks to her mother's support, Ada was able to study and become an elementary school teacher. From 1888 she taught an 80-person elementary school class in Motta Visconti (near Pavia ). During this time, her first poems appeared in daily newspapers, which a publisher finally compiled into the volume Fatalità (1892); the new social dimension in the poetry of this time made Ada Negri famous in a short time - even beyond the borders of Italy.

After the publication of Fatalità, the Florentine Emilia Peruzzi Ada Negri helped to earn a ten-year "honorary salary" of 1,700 Swiss francs .

In the foreword to the 5th edition (1900) of the German-language edition Schicksal , which appeared for the first time two years later , the translator writes:

“We know what an impression this little book made in Italy and how Ada Negri suddenly joined the ranks of the first living poets in her fatherland. - A turn of her fate was preparing. At the instigation of a noble woman, Emilia Peruzzi in Florence, who was enthusiastic about everything high, Ada Negri received the honorary salary that the Neapolitan poet Giannina Milli had received before her, d. H. for ten years the sum of 1700 lire annually. At the same time, she was appointed to teach literature at the Scuola Normale Gaetana Agnesi in Milan, a kind of seminar in which young girls are trained to be teachers. "

- Hedwig Jahn

“If there is poetry that is felt by everyone, then it is that of Ada Negri, which is particularly modern and popular. In it lies the stormy present, here the infinite wave of voices really swells, which fill us with astonishment and pity, inflame us to enthusiasm and sadden us to the point of death. "

- Sofia Bisi Albini

“My feeling was like the amazement and delight with which one would suddenly see a nest of flowers on a normal walk, perhaps across a meadow, whose beauty in color and shape would be completely new to us. Nothing strange, strange, or glaring in these flowers, but simple beauty. Beauty of thought, language, sensation. And at the same time a fragrance that expresses a feeling of childlike joy in existence, mixed with touching but gentle pain about one's own and another's fate. This is where the 'modernity' of these seals, which we confidently appeal to, lies. "

- Herman Grimm on the volume of poems Fate

In her second volume of poems Tempeste (1894, German Stürme , 1896), Ada Negri also gave the poor, disenfranchised and disadvantaged a voice with her powerful poetry. In March 1896 she married the wealthy factory owner Federico Garlanda; Their daughter Bianca was born in 1904 (a second daughter died soon after the birth). Nevertheless, Ada Negri's lyrical impetus remains combative in her third volume of poetry Maternità (1904, German Mutterschaft , 1905) - despite the eponymous new dimension in her life:

Christmas lullaby

[…] and tomorrow
    the bells will announce at dawn : Peace on earth and bread
and goodwill to people! ... but
everything is just a terrible lie.

[…] One day they all stand up by the millions,
    with flashes of lightning and thunder,
the prophets, and
the old world falls, shattered, destroyed by their strokes ;

the gospel is then only to be the
    law for human life;
and then peace really be on earth
and people will be pleased! ...

and on our poor and wretched bosom,
    weakened by the lot of the lower classes,
by hardship and silent slavery,
God shows his miracles eternal power. [...]

After separating from her husband in 1913, Ada Negri lived mainly abroad, mainly in Zurich ; Her fifth volume of poetry, Esilio (Exile), dates from this time . With the beginning of the First World War she returned to Italy; In the following years the socialist ideas of her early work faded into the background, her poetry now mainly dealt with more intimate topics such as love, motherhood, faith, loneliness and death.

In 1921 her autobiographical novel Stella Mattutina was published , which was fatefully reviewed by one of her former companions from socialist circles, Benito Mussolini . In the German edition of the book ( Frühdämmerung. Die Geschichte einer Jugend , 1938) Mussolini's relatively meaningless and awkward text was included as a foreword, which led to the poet's being discredited in Germany after the end of National Socialism.

Tomb of Ada Negri in the Chiesa di San Francesco in Lodi

Ada Negri died in Milan in 1945, where she was buried in the Famedio des Cimitero Monumentale . On April 3, 1976, her remains were transferred to Lodi and buried in the Chiesa di San Francesco.

Honor and aftermath

Memorial plaque on the house where Ada Negri was born at the former Palazzo Barni (today Casa Cingia-Barni) in Lodi, Corso Roma 123–135 (then Corso di Porta Cremonese 59)

In 1940 Ada Negri was the first woman to be accepted into the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei . All over Italy schools ( Cagliari , Lodi, Rome , Palermo , Villaricca etc.) and streets ( Via Ada Negri in Anzio , Brescia , Desio , Lodi, Milan, Prato , Rome, Turin etc.) were named after her.

In 1946 the Hessenring in the Fliegerviertel in Berlin-Tempelhof was supposed to be renamed Ada-Negri-Ring; a corresponding city map had already been printed, but the initiative “pacifists against aviators” failed at the last moment.

Since the turn of the millennium, the city and municipality of Lodi has been awarding the multi-part Premio Internazionale “Sulle Orme di Ada Negri” (International Prize “In the footsteps of Ada Negri”, or Premio Ada Negri for short ). a. went to the writer and literary scholar Harald Hartung .

There are hundreds of settings of Ada Negri's poems by Italian composers, but also some works by non-Italian composers based on translations into other languages.

The actress Barbara Apolonia Chałupiec (1897–1987) chose the stage name Pola Negri out of admiration for the Italian poet .

Why Ada Negri has to be called "The forgotten queen of Italian poetry" nowadays, a quote from the scientific (!) Essay Rilke and the Italian by the Germanist Prof. Dr. Alberto Destro (Bologna) illustrate: “[…] Rilke continues to read and translate poems by Ada Negri, who is mainly known as a narrator [sic; seven (!) volumes of poetry were published by 1920, but only one (!) volume of novels by Ada Negri] and, as a poet, is hardly readable today because of her emotional showmanship. One of her novels, Tempeste (Storms) [sic; Tempeste is a volume of poetry, not a novel], is in Rilke's estate library [...]. "

Works

  • Fatalità (1892), poems
    • German-language edition: Schicksal (1894, translated into German by Hedwig Jahn )
  • Tempeste (1894), poems
    • German-language edition: Stürme (1896, German by Hedwig Jahn)
  • Maternità (1904), poems
    • German-language edition: Mutterschaft (1905, German by Hedwig Jahn)
  • Dal Profondo ("From the depth" or Latin "De profundis", 1910), poems
  • Esilio (“Exile”, 1914), poems
  • Le solitarie ("The lonely [women]", 1917), short stories
  • Orazioni (“Reden”, 1918), 3 speeches
  • Il libro di Mara ("The Book of Mara", 1919), poems
    • English language edition: The Book of Mara (New York 2011, translated by Maria A. Costantini)
  • Stella mattutina ("The Morning Star", 1921), literary autobiography
    • German-language edition: Frühdämmerung. The Story of a Youth (1938, translated by Kurt Stieler )
    • English language edition: Morning star (New York 1930, translated by Anne Day)
  • Finestre old ("High Windows", 1923), short stories
  • I canti dell'isola (“The songs from the island”, 1924), poems
    • English edition: Songs of the Island (New York 2011, translated by Maria A. Costantini)
  • Le strade (“The Streets”, 1926), prose
  • Sorelle ("Sisters", 1929), prose
  • Vespertina (about "Early Evening", 1930), poems
  • Di giorno in giorno (“From day to day”, 1932), travel sketches and portraits
  • Il dono ("The Gift", 1936), poems (awarded the Premio Firenze )
  • Erba sul sagrato. Intermezzo di prose ("Grass in the churchyard. Prose-Intermezzo", 1939), prose
  • Fons amoris (lat. "Born of love", 1946), postponed poems (1939–1943)

Work editions

  • Work edition in 2 volumes: Poetry (1948) and Prose (1954)
  • Selected poetry and prose: poetry e prose , selected, introduced and commented by Pietro Sarzana (Mondadori, Milan 2020)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ada Negri. Schweizerische Lehrerinnen-Zeitung, April 15, 1897, accessed on June 27, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Emilia Peruzzi was the widow of the politician Ubaldino Peruzzi (1822-1891).
  3. ↑ For Giannina Milli (1825–1888) see Italian Wikipedia .
  4. ^ From: Foreword to Destiny , 5th edition, Duncker, Berlin 1900 [p. 4].
  5. ^ From: Foreword to Destiny , 1st edition, Duncker, Berlin 1894, p. X; with the opposite ending (“... and foreshadowing the dawn of a new, more beautiful time.”) in: Arbeiter Zeitung (Vienna) of October 6, 1895, p. 159 ( digitized by ANNO ).
  6. ↑ From: Fragments , Vol. 1, Spemann, Berlin a. Stuttgart 1900, p. 326.
  7. ↑ From: Mutterschaft , poem № 16, verses 9 and 13–15, in German by Hedwig Jahn (born on January 28, 1845 in Neustrelitz , date of death unknown; see Stephan Sehlke: Pädagogen - Pastoren - Patrioten. Biographisches Handbuch zum Druckgut für Children and young people by authors and illustrators from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania from the beginning up to and including 1945. BoD / Books on Demand, 2009).
  8. ^ In "Popolo d'Italia" of July 9, 1921.
  9. ↑ dawn. The story of a youth. With an appreciation of the book by Benito Mussolini. F. Bruckmann Verlag, Munich 1938, pp. 5-9.
  10. ↑ Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt e. V .: The Hessenring should be called Adra-Negri-Ring. In: Wasn't that much beginning ?! After the end of the war in Berlin in 1945 (Chapter “Pacifists against Fliers” - a city district with new street names that never came up , pp. 77–101, here p. 89; see also the 1946 map on p. 80); PDF (4.7 MB) .
  11. ↑ For the volume of poetry dreaming slower , see Città di Lodi : Festival Da Donna a Donna: i vincitori del premio "Sulle Orme di Ada Negri" , press release of September 26, 2012, accessed on March 24, 2018.
  12. ↑ For an overview of the literature, see Italian Wikipedia .
  13. ↑ For example, here all alone , Op. 66, by Julius Rünger from 1916 based on the poem Te solo in the post-poetry alone with you (published in the volume Fate as a poem № 23) by Hedwig Jahn; Score (PDF, 670 kB) on the IMSLP website .
  14. ↑ A. Destro: Rilke and the Italian. In: Volker Kapp et. al. (Ed.): Literary Studies Yearbook , Volume 51 . Duncker & Humblot , Berlin 2010, p. 213.
  15. ^ Il "Premio Firenze" ad Ada Negri solennemente consegnato a Palazzo Vecchio. In: Nuovo Giornale of July 24, 1936.
  16. ↑ Preview of the eBook on mondadoristore.it.
personal data
SURNAME Negri, Ada
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 3, 1870
PLACE OF BIRTH Lodi , Italy
DATE OF DEATH January 11, 1945
Place of death Milan , Italy