Andrea Giovene

Andrea Giovene di Girasole (born October 10, 1904 in Naples , † July 8, 1995 in Sant'Agata dei Goti, Benevento ), was an Italian writer .

Life

Andrea Giovene came from a ducal family that can be traced back to Baldassare Giovene in the 11th century. From the days of Charles I of Anjou to Alessandro Farnese in the second half of the 16th century, the family's sons fought on the battlefields of Europe and Africa. A family story appeared in print in Lucca as early as 1736 , written by Carlo Nordi . One of the family's possessions was the Cerasole feudal estate, also called Girasole, in the province of Otranto , which was associated with the title of prince. In his Italian diary, Goethe tells of a visit to the Duchess Giuliana Giovene di Girasole , b. Mudersbach-Redwitz in Naples (June 2, 1787). Andrea Giovenes father, Carlo Giovene (1868–1933), Duke of Girasole, was a respected art historian who sponsored the 1922 Naples Biennale and set up museums in Naples and Sorrento .

Andrea Giovene acquired a solid educational foundation from the Benedictines and then completed a law degree at the University of Naples, where he also took courses in mathematics, literature and medicine. Soon afterwards, however, he gave up jurisprudence in order to devote himself to writing. He founded the literary magazine Vesuvio , wrote articles for newspapers and magazines, was deputy editor of Mattino d'Italia and editor-in-chief of the Neapolitan edition of the magazine Tempo .

Giovene lived alternately in southern Italy and Paris , undertook extensive trips in Europe, worked a.o. a. with architecture, painting and collecting antiquarian books.

During the Second World War he was a cavalry officer in Greece , from where he was deported to Poland by the Germans after the armistice between Italy and the Allies . He reports on the war events in his 1953 book Fatti di Grecia, di Polonia e di Germania 1943–1945 . Giovene was initially in the fortress Lvov ( Lvov held captive) and then with 3000 Italian other officers in the bearing Wietzendorf ( Wietzendorf deported). He volunteered for forced labor and was assigned to various farms in northern Germany . From there he fled and saw the end of the war in Berlin .

After the Second World War, Giovene lived partly in Italy and partly in London .

plant

Giovene initially published, partly at his own expense, a few smaller literary works that were only known to a limited audience. So appeared Viaggio (1936) and Incanto (1940). This was followed by other publications La Lesbia di Catullo (a translation of Catullus from Latin with commentary, 1955), a small book on typography and Elegia di Vertunno (1957).

L'autobiografia di Giuliano di Sansevero

His main work, the novel L'autobiografia di Giuliano di Sansevero ( Eng. The House of Houses) was published in five separate volumes by Rizzoli in Milan from 1966 to 1970 . In 1969 Giovene received the L'Aigle d'Or ( L'Aquila d'Oro ) at the International Book Festival in Nice for the best European novel, after which the author was under discussion as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature . The work was translated into Finnish , Swedish , Spanish , French and English shortly after its publication . A German-language edition was planned, but was not implemented. The publication in German could not begin until 2010: Translated from Italian by Moshe Kahn and provided with an afterword by Ulrike Voswinckel, Osburg Verlag Berlin initially published the third volume of the autobiography under the title Das Haus der Häuser .

action

Giovene's great Bildungsroman about the life of Giuliano di Sansevero spans a period from 1903 to the 1950s. In Giuliano's childhood, the highly aristocratic family still lived their traditional traditions as in old times; as the story progresses, the reader will witness the rapid changes brought about by the decline of the family and the dissolution of an old world.

The first-person narrator Giuliano is banished to a strict Benedictine boarding school at the age of nine, while the older brother, Ferrante, is being prepared for life as a representative of the family. Giuliano lives in the alternation between loneliness and the glamorous world, between poetry and active life. He is looking for the absolute, for love - topics that make him despair, but also make him write. In the twenties and thirties he lived in Milan and in the bohemian of Paris, toured Europe and got into a complicated relationship with an actress (Volumes 1 and 2) before he retired to the solitude of Calabria to live in an inherited one Olive grove to build his "house of houses". In the end, his Arcadia , the archaic world of fishermen and farmers, which he had hoped to find in Licudi, a small village on the coast, is threatened with extinction by the unstoppable progress (Volume 3). This is followed by the events of World War II in the fourth volume. Giuliano rebelled against the war as an intellectual, but at the same time believed he was obliged to take part in it. He was at the front in Greece, wounded twice and finally deported by the Germans to Poland after the capitulation of Italy. The last part (volume 5) describes the years 1945 to 1957 and draws a colorful panorama of life in Naples (and Rome) in the post-war period. After Giuliano lived in London for a while and looked in vain for a companion to drive away his loneliness, he traveled back to Italy and retired to a small Sicilian village. There he ends his life.

effect

The novel can be counted among the great literary works of the 20th century. Elio Gianola from the University of Genoa described it as "... most important work of literature to come out of Neapolitan culture this century".

The biography of Giuliano di Sansevero was nourished by memory and, as a work of art, should also point beyond itself. Giovene wrote about her: “I intended to use reality and only this, but I wanted to change it; it was like playing with my building blocks with my sister Chechina as a child: and with these, which had a precise shape and a limited number, I wanted to create a building that was completely true and completely fantastic. "

Works

• Incanto (1941)
• Fatti di Grecia, di Polonia e di Germania 1943–1945 (1953)
• La Lesbia di Catullo. Traduzione dal latino e commento di Andrea Giovene (1955)
• Elegia di Vertunno (1957)
• L'autobiografia di Giuliano di Sansevero (1966–1970) (5 volumes)
• Il terzo giorno (1985)
• Canto (1988)
• Contro canto. Sant'Agata de 'Goti (1990)
• I dipinti di Andrea Giovene nel museo del Sannio (1990)
• Lirica dell'insonnia (1992)

Translations

• Nykyajan aatelismies Giuliano di Sansevero; translated into Finnish by Matti Pyhälä (1967)
• Giuliano di Sansevero's självbiografi; translated into Swedish by Edvard Robert Gummerus (1967–1970)
• Autobiography de Giuliano di Sansevero; translated into French by Lignac et H. Mariassy (1968–1970)
• Un caballero Napolitano; translated into Spanish by Domingo Pruna (1969)
• El poder del Silencio; translated into Spanish by Juan Moreno (1974)
• The Book of Giuliano Sansevero; translated into English by Marguerite Waldman (1970)
• Sansevero; translated into English by Marguerite Waldman and Bernard Wall (1987)
• The Third Day; translated into English by Patience Gray (1996)
• The house of houses; translated into German by Moshe Kahn; Osburg Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-940731-36-4 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Andrea Giovene in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ A. Giovene: Sansevero e l'assoluto. In: Fascicolo 6, Osservatore politico letterario. June 1968.
2. ^ A. Giovene: L'autobiografia di Giuliano di Sansevero. Volume 5, 1970, p. 107.