Canto (literature)

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Canto (plural canti from ital . Canto "singing", originally from Latin . Canto "I sing") refers to a unit of long poems in literature, especially epics .

The name goes back to the division of Homer's epics Iliad and Odyssey into 24 books each, which have been called chants since Johann Heinrich Voss ' translation. This classification was adopted from other ancient epics, in particular Virgil's Aeneid , which in turn is the template for Dante's Divine Comedy (100 Canti). Other well-known examples of epic poems that work with the Canto division are Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage , Valmiki's Ramayana (500 Canti) and Ezra Pounds The Cantos (117 Canti). Even Giacomo Leopardi wrote Canti.

The term describes a unique piece in Pablo Neruda's Canto General , which was set to music by Mikis Theodorakis .

literature