Italo Svevo

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Italo Svevo
Bronze statue in Trieste (detail)
Base plate and toe of his bronze statue in Trieste

Italo Svevo (actually Aron Hector Schmitz , called Ettore Schmitz ; born December 19, 1861 in Trieste , Austria-Hungary , † September 13, 1928 in Motta di Livenza near Treviso ) was an Italian writer . Svevo is considered the leading Italian novelist of the 20th century.

Life

As the fifth of eight children, Aron Hector Schmitz ( Ettore Schmitz in Italian ) was born in 1861 in Trieste, which at that time belonged to Austria-Hungary . His father Franz Schmitz came from a wealthy family of Jewish descent from Austria , his mother Mirjam Felice (Allegra) Moravia from an equally wealthy Jewish family from Trieste. Svevo's father worked as a self-employed businessman in Trieste.

At the age of twelve Ettore was sent to a boarding school in Segnitz (near Würzburg) with his brothers Adolfo and Elio . The father planned a commercial career for his sons, for which a good knowledge of German was required. Ettore learned perfect German in a short time and was fascinated by German thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer . In 1878 he returned to Trieste, where he studied at the Istituto Superiore di Commercio , a business school. Since Svevo wanted to become a writer, he took a trip to Florence to learn Italian in its pure (Florentine) form - besides German, he only spoke the Trieste dialect , a variant of the Venetian .

From 1880 Ettore wrote under the pseudonym E. Samigli for the Trieste newspaper L'Indipendente articles and theater reviews . In the following years he also wrote four plays, but they were unsuccessful. After his father's company went bankrupt, Ettore took a job at Banca Union , the Trieste branch of the Vienna Unionbank . In addition to earning a living, he read a lot and wrote several novels and stories. In 1890 L'Indipendente published the longer story L'assassinio di via Belpoggio , which shows the influence of Schopenhauer's philosophy. In 1892 he had his first novel Una Vita printed at his own expense . The novel appeared under the pseudonym Italo Svevo (which could be translated as "the Italian Swabian"). The German writer Paul Heyse , later winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature , wrote him an enthusiastic letter - apart from a brief review in the Corriere della Sera , the novel remained unsuccessful.

Svevo married Livia Veneziani in 1896. The following year the daughter Letizia was born. In 1898, Svevo's second novel Senilità appeared , which the author financed out of his own pocket. This book was also ignored and this time Paul Heyse expressed his disappointment. At the urging of his in-laws, Svevo vowed to give up writing and concentrate fully on family and work.

After he took over the management of his father-in-law's company in Murano in 1898 , he was able to quit his job. In the very profitable Moravia-Veneziani factories , a paint was produced that effectively slowed the decay of ship hulls . Svevo used the leisure that came with prosperity for violin lessons. During these years, he traveled partly privately and partly professionally to France and England (where Moravia-Veneziani had had a branch since 1903 ). He took English language lessons in Trieste and met James Joyce at the Berlitz School in Trieste in 1905 , who worked there as a language teacher. The two authors (largely unknown at the time) became friends. Joyce read Svevo's novels, was enthusiastic about them and encouraged him to continue working.

After the First World War - Trieste was now part of Italy - Svevo translated Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams into Italian during a long hospital stay and also dealt with psychoanalysis . As Ettore Schmitz he was politically active and wrote for the new newspaper La Nazione . At the same time he began to write again as Italo Svevo: "La coscienza di Zeno" (In German, ambiguous: Zeno's conscience or Zeno's consciousness ) was published in 1923, again without literary Italy having noticed it. James Joyce, whose figure of Leopold Bloom had greatly influenced that of Zeno, meanwhile lived in Paris. He won over the translator and critic Valery Larbaud for the book, which resulted in an offer for a French edition. Until then, excerpts from Svevo's works appeared in a special issue of the magazine Le Navire d'Argent . On the detour via France, Svevo made the breakthrough after all. The late success strengthened him and he now devoted himself intensively to literature. In 1927 La coscienza di Zeno appeared in the French translation by Paul-Henri Michel, and in the same year his one-act Terzetto Spezzato was premiered in Rome. Svevo was enthusiastic about the works of Franz Kafka and under this influence began his fourth novel Il vecchione , which however remained unfinished. On September 13, 1928, Italo Svevo died near Treviso as a result of a car accident.

influence

In Italy Svevo is now celebrated as one of the greatest writers that Italy's classical modernism produced. His heroes fail in real life, but in an oppressive ( Senilità ) or comical ( Zeno's conscience ) way that makes Svevo's reading interesting. In Germany, translations of Svevo's works by Piero Rismondo were published early on , and Eckhard Henscheid has repeatedly advocated Svevo since the 1970s . Nevertheless, it took a long time for Svevo's works to reach a wider audience. A first post-war translation by Rismondo of Zeno's conscience (under the title Zeno Cosini ) could not reproduce the peculiarities of Svevos Trieste Italian in the German version; It was only the new translation by Barbara Kleiner (2000) that won over a broad audience and also inspired literary criticism.

The Italo Svevo Prize , endowed with EUR 15,000, is awarded annually in Hamburg .

Works

Letters
Single issues
  • L'avvenire dei ricordi . 1877
  • Ariosto Governatore . 1880
  • Il primo amore . 1880
  • Le roi est mort, vive le roi! 1880
  • I due poeti . 1880
  • Difetto moderno . 1881
  • La storia dei miei lavori . 1881
  • La gente superiore . 1881 (former title I tre caratteri )
  • L'assassinio di via Belpoggio . 1890
  • One life. Roman ("Una Vita"). New edition Manesse, Zurich 2007, ISBN 978-3-7175-2124-2
  • Senilità. Roman ("Senilità"). 1898/1927, new edition. Diogenes, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-257-23479-1 (former title A man is getting older )
  • Lo specifico del dottor Menghi (The Serum of Doctor Menghi), 1904
  • Zeno's conscience. Novel. (“La coscienza di Zeno”) New translation by Barbara Kleiner , Zweiausendeins , Frankfurt 2000, ISBN 3-86150-345-X (earlier translation by Rismondo Zeno Cosini ).
  • La madre . La Spiga, Vimerecato 1993, ISBN 88-7100-266-0 (reprint of the Rome 1926 edition)
  • A successful joke. A story (“Una burla riuscita”). Insel, Frankfurt 2002, ISBN 3-458-34508-6 .
  • Vino generoso . Casagrande, Bellinzona 2008, ISBN 978-88-7713-505-6 (reprint of the Rome 1926 edition)
  • The old man and the beautiful girl (“La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla”). 4th edition Wagenbach, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-8031-1175-7
  • Terzetto Spezzato . 1927
  • Il vecchione (unfinished, posthumous)
  • Short sentimental trip. A story (“Corto viaggio sentimentale”). Insel, Frankfurt 2003, ISBN 3-458-34637-6 .
  • A successful prank , stories. Manesse, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-7175-2318-5 .
Work edition
  • Collected works in individual editions . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1984–1996 (7 volumes)

literature

  • P.-H. Kucher:  Schmitz Ettore (Hector Aron). In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 10, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1994, ISBN 3-7001-2186-5 , p. 335 f. (Direct links on p. 335 , p. 336 ).
  • Rudolf Behrens u. a. (Ed.): Italo Svevo. A paradigm of European modernity . Königshausen & Neumann , Würzburg 1990, ISBN 3-88479-405-1 .
  • François Bondy , Ragni Maria Gschwend: Italo Svevo / dargest. by François Bondy and Ragni Maria Gschwend , Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt 1995, ISBN 3-499-50459-6 , series: Rowohlt's monographs; 459
  • Silvano Del Missier: Italo Svevo. Introduzione e guida allo studio dell'opera sveviana; Storia e antologia delle critica . LeMonnier, Florence 1994, ISBN 88-00-64210-1
  • Marie Guthmüller: "Zeno's drive economy. On the budget of desire in Italo Svevo's La coscienza di Zeno ". In: Scientia Poetica. Yearbook for the History of Literature and Science 13 (2009), 135–170.
  • Reto Fasciati: Ital Svevo. Romance moderno . Francke, Bern 1969 (also dissertation, University of Zurich 1969)
  • Nils Kohlmann: Trieste. Herald of modernity. On the existential content of the works of Italo Svevo, Umberto Saba and Scipio Slataper . Dr. Müller, Saarbrücken 2008, ISBN 978-3-639-04619-9
  • Antonio Prieto Martín: Aproximaciones a Foscolo , Leopardi y Svevo . Renacimiento, Sevilla 20910, ISBN 978-84-8472-473-5 (Iluminaciones; 57)
  • Mario Sechi (Ed.): Italo Svevo. Il sogno e la vita vera . Donzelli, Rome 2009, ISBN 978-88-6036-328-2
  • Livia Veneziani Svevo: The life of my husband Italo Svevo. ("Vita di mio marito") Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt 1994, ISBN 3-627-10237-1

Web links

Commons : Italo Svevo  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Italo Svevo  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christiane Pöhlmann: Italo Svevo: Zeno's conscience: And who is making me my milk coffee now? In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . December 16, 2011, ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed March 31, 2017]).
  2. ↑ a b c d newly translated by Barbara Kleiner
  3. ↑ frequent further editions of the Neuübers. ibid., as well as in Diogenes and Manesse, also bilingual editions
  4. ↑ translated by Karl Hellwig
  5. ^ Translated by Piero Rismondo
personal data
SURNAME Svevo, Italo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schmitz, Aron Hector (real name); Schmitz, Ettore
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 19, 1861
PLACE OF BIRTH Trieste , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH September 13, 1928
Place of death Motta di Livenza near Treviso