The leopard (novel)

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The leopard (ital. Il Gattopardo ) is the only novel by the Italian writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957). It was published posthumously in 1958 by Feltrinelli in Milan.

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In eight chapters (or "parts") episodes from the life of the Sicilian princely house Salina between May 1860 and May 1910 are told. Against the background of the political upheavals in Italy through Garibaldi's triumphant march in 1860 and the social changes through the rise of the bourgeoisie, the first chapters depict everyday life in the princely household between 1860 and 1862 in individual scenes: a trip to Palermo at night, a day on the Hunting in the mountains, delivery of the lease in the manor house, a festive dinner, a visit to the princely monastery, the visit of an envoy from the new rulers who in vain offer the prince a senatorial office, a lavish ball in Palermo, and much more. The princely household changes from his city palace to his rural summer palace Donnafugata in the south of the island. There the prince's nephew, Tancredi, who had taken part in Garibaldi's campaign, falls in love with the beautiful Angelica, the daughter of Calogero Sedàra, the shrewd and ruthless as well as the nouveau riche, but plebeian and uncultivated provincial mayor.

The love story between Tancredi and Angelica is at the center of the novel. On the one hand it is hymnal and indulges in sensual representations of the couple at the festive meal in large groups and during the "love storm" of their endless forays through the huge palace with its secrets. On the other hand, this infatuation is undermined from the start by Angelica's pursuit of social advancement and Tancredi's interest in her wealth. So at the end it says: "These were the best days in Tancredi's and Angelica's life ... the prelude to their later marriage, which they never really succeeded in, even erotically."

Chapter 7, dated July 1883, deals with the death of Don Fabrizio, told from the inside of the dying man. The guiding figure is the metaphor of the leakage, the permanent loss of parts of the personality, first in the image of an hourglass, then in that of an ever-growing waterfall, which creates an ever louder inner roar - until the roaring sea finally "completely calms down" comes.

In the last chapter, which takes place in May 1910, Angelica is already a widow and thus ends the time of their marriage, which began so romantically. The three unmarried sisters of the House of Salina, who have become pious in old age, have to experience how, after a rigorous examination by the Roman Curia, the pride of their piety is taken away by the Cardinal Archbishop of Palermo having their private house chapel cleaned of a pile of false relics. One of the three sisters, Concetta, who all her life mourned Tancredi, who was lost to Angelica 50 years ago, learned at the age of 70 from a friend of Tancredi's that she might have won her lover but lost it through her own fault. Bitter, she clears the last memory of better days from her room.

Structure, style and interpretation

The main theme of the novel is therefore the futility of the search for duration and happiness, the predominance of time over all efforts of individuals to give their lives a lasting meaning. On his deathbed, Don Fabrizio sums up that of his 73 years he only “really lived” for two, at most three years.

The love between Tancredi and Angelica is told along the lines of a grand beginning with a banal end, the basic pattern of all the stories in the novel: that of the Salina family, whose passivity is ruined and of which Don Fabrizio is the last real offspring, of the rise of the bourgeoisie He gambled away his reputation and that of the nobility by marriage through his avarice and soon the plebeians had to fight back, those of the disenchanted piety of the old maid Salina, and finally that of Concetta, who might have been successful in their vain courtship.

All of these stories are those of a necessary, painful failure of human hope that is inscribed in their beginnings. Thus the political development, the social upheaval, the departure into a great love and finally even the severity and severity of a pious lifestyle lead to the failure of human life in its various facets connected by the thread of action.

Tancredi's motto is quoted several times in the novel itself and now also often by his Italian readers: “If we want everything to stay as it is, everything has to change.” Tancredi thus justifies his affiliation with Garibaldi's movement, which in reached the unification of Italy under civil auspices in the years after 1860 . The deeper meaning of this motto (known in today's Italy as gattopardismo ) could thus be to suggest change, development and progress as the true driving forces of history.

Nevertheless, the composition and texture of the motifs in the novel is actually written against Tancredi's motto. Even the changes he has brought about cannot prevent the end of the supremacy of his class and that of his love, Tancredi is also a failure in the end. On closer inspection, the core of the novel is revealed not in the triumph of change, but in that of futility.

In connection with the leveling role of time in the novel, there are also the mentions of events outside the storyline of the novel, which the author is sometimes accused of as stylistic errors. (Compare Vargas Llosa , The Truth of Lies.)

Examples:

  • “He [Prince Fabrizio in 1860] was in the mental state of a person who, believing that he had boarded one of the fat propeller planes that provided the postal service between Palermo and Naples, suddenly noticed that he was sitting in a supersonic aircraft ... "
  • "... a very successful gag , as a director's idea almost comparable to Eisenstein's pram on the stairs in Odessa [in his film" Battleship Potemkin "]."
  • “Father Pirrone came from the country. He was born in San Cono, a tiny village that today, thanks to the bus connection, is almost one of the more distant satellites from Palermo ... "

In this otherwise consistently linearly written novel, these unusual breaks in time are anticipations that emphasize the changeability of living conditions and accentuate the theme of transience. So you are not a "stylistic error" of the author, but underline his actual topic.

On the original title Il Gattopardo

Family coat of arms of the Tomasi

In the 1990s, triggered by a thesis by the Lampedusa biographer Andrea Vitello, there was a debate about the eponymous Gattopardo , which the author chose as the heraldic animal of the Salina family, while the coat of arms of the Lampedusa family was a high-upright leopard with a lion-like mane and crown shows. Since “leopard” in Italian means leopardo , it was argued that gattopardo (literally “katzopard”) was a smaller big cat, a serval or ocelot, also called pardle cat, and with this choice of name the author ironically pointed to the fall of power want to allude to the prince. Burkhart Kroeber , who published a new translation of the novel at Piper Verlag in 2019 , reproduces gattopardo as “Leopard” in both the title and the text. In the afterword to his translation, he justified this decision by stating that the text of the novel did not show any ironic diminution of the predator, the gattopardo appeared “on the contrary, more like a lion”. In fact, the prince is referred to as "lion-like" or "like a lion" in several places in the text. According to Kroeber, the gattopardo is “quite obviously a creation of the author”, especially since the word before this novel can hardly be found in Italian literature; an animal named gattopardo i. S. v. Serval did not exist in Sicily or anywhere else in the world; “In Sicily”, says Kroeber, “there is no serval, and wherever it is, it is not called gattopardo ”. Today, experts believe that gattopardo is an Italianized form of the Sicilian dialect word gattupardu (also attupardu without g ) for leopardo , the word used by the servants of the House of Lampedusa to refer to their masters' heraldic animal; the author used it as a representative example of how he replaced the eponymous island of Lampedusa with the island of Salina off the north coast of Sicily. This is why the novel is generally cited in German-language specialist literature today under the title The Leopard .

expenditure

  • Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa: Il Gattopardo (= Biblioteca di lettura, diretta da Giorgio Bassani , I Contemporanei. 4). Feltrinelli, Milano 1958

See also

literature

  • Birgit Tappert (Ed.): From bestseller to modern classic. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel “Il gattopardo” (= Romanica et comparatistica. Vol. 34). Stauffenburg-Verlag, Tübingen 2001, ISBN 3-86057-084-6 .
  • Margareta Dumitrescu: Sulla parte VI del Gattopardo. La fortuna di Lampedusa in Romania. Giuseppe Maimone Editore u. a., Catania et al. a. 2001, ISBN 88-7751-214-8 .
  • Giovanni di Stefano, Italian Novels of the 20th Century in Individual Interpretations , ed. v. Manfred Lentzen , Erich Schmidt Verlag , Berlin 2005, pp. 208-227.
  • Jochen Trebesch : Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Life and work of the last Gattopardo. Nora, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-86557-289-9 .
  • Maike Albath , grief and light. Lampedusa, Sciascia, Camilleri and the literature of Sicily , Berenberg , Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-946334-50-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Der Leopard (2019), pp. 196–205.
  2. ↑ Der Leopard (2019), pp. 205 f.
  3. ↑ Der Leopard (2019), p. 324.
  4. ↑ Der Leopard (2019), p. 323.
  5. ↑ Der Leopard (2019), p. 36.
  6. ↑ Der Leopard (2019), p. 124.
  7. ↑ Der Leopard (2019), p. 176.
  8. ↑ Der Leopard (2019), p. 239.
  9. ↑ In his book Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa , Sellerio, Palermo 1987.
  10. ↑ The new translation by Giò Waeckerlin Induni, published in 2004, adopted this conception, justified it in a short foreword and reproduced gattopardo throughout the text with “pardel” or “pardelcat”, the adjective gattopardesco also with “pardelkatersch”; only in the title is the novel called Der Gattopardo .
  11. ↑ p. 366 f. of the Piper 2019 edition
  12. ↑ Examples: p. 76: "He looked like a satisfied and soothed lion"; P. 125: "who opposed his allegedly lion-like nature"; P. 154: "besides, he was a skeptic under his lion-like appearance"; P. 294: (after the dance with Angelica) “there was only no applause because Don Fabrizio looked too lion-like to risk such impropriety” (translation by Burkhart Kroeber 2019).
  13. ↑ This view is also held by the author's adoptive son and estate administrator, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, most recently in the documentary The Birth of the Leopard by Luigi Falorni, Kick Film, Munich 2019.
  14. ↑ The Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, south of Sicily, was nominally owned by the family from 1667 to 1849.
  15. ↑ On this and in general on this subject Wilhelm Bringmann: On the trail of the »Gattopardo«. Historical facts and background to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel "The Leopard" . WiKu-Verlag, Duisburg & Köln 2008, p. 15, as well as the afterword by Burkhart Kroeber to his new translation of the novel Der Leopard , Piper, Munich 2019, p. 366 f.
  16. ↑ So also recently in Maike Albath : Mourning and Light. Lampedusa, Sciascia, Camilleri and the literature of Sicily . Berenberg, Berlin 2019, passim.