Stefano D'Arrigo

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Stefano D'Arrigo ( Fortunato Stefano D'Arrigo ; born October 15, 1919 in Alì Marina (since 1954: Alì Terme ), Province of Messina ; died May 2, 1992 in Rome ) was an Italian poet, novelist and journalist.

D'Arrigo's literary work is narrow in terms of the number of titles - a volume of poetry, two novels - but his major monumental work, Horcynus Orca , which he spent decades perfecting, was perceived as a masterpiece of Italian literature when the first edition appeared in 1975. The first translation of this novel into another language 40 years later, the translation into German by Moshe Kahn in 2015, was consistently celebrated by literary critics as the discovery of a hitherto internationally unknown piece of world literature .

Life

Stefano D'Arrigo was born on October 15, 1919 in the small Sicilian coastal town of Alì Terme. Shortly after his birth, his father Giuseppe emigrated to the USA . D'Arrigo attended elementary school in Alì Terme, then from 1929 in Milazzo the middle school and the classical grammar school. After leaving school, he studied literature in Messina from 1938 ; D'Arrigo completed his studies in 1942 with a thesis on Friedrich Hölderlin .

During the Second World War , D'Arrigo served as a lieutenant in Palermo until the Allies landed in Sicily in 1943 . In 1946 he moved to Rome , where he worked as a journalist and art critic for the daily newspapers Il Tempo and Il Giornale d'Italia as well as for the weekly newspaper Vie Nuove . In 1948 D'Arrigo married Jutta Bruto, who became a companion of his life and such an important interlocutor that he dedicated the Horcynus Orca : "For Jutta, who deserves to be on the front page, with her Stefano" .

In 1950 D'Arrigo went on a trip to the Strait of Messina with friends , and from there he announced in a letter to his wife Jutta that he wanted to study a literary work of great epic breath, the first clue to the ideas about the Horcynus Orca . From around the mid-1950s, D'Arrigo devoted himself exclusively to his literary work.

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D'Arrigo's first independent publication was a volume of poems, Codice siciliano (Sicilian Code), published by Scheiwiller in Milan in 1957; the work was awarded the Premio Crotone in the following year , reissued and supplemented by further poems by the Mondadori publishing house in 1978.

In addition to the poems, a 600-page novel with the working title La testa del delfino (The Dolphin's Head) was created in one throw between 1956 and 1957 , the first version of the work that would be published almost 20 years later as Horcynus Orca . In the course of 1958 D'Arrigo subjected this text to a first revision and sent two episodes from it to the jury of the Premio Cino del Duca literary prize . He was awarded the prize for 1959, and the award changed D'Arrigo's life, because among the jurors was Elio Vittorini , who was enthusiastic about the emerging work and asked D'Arrigo to publish the two episodes totaling about 100 pages in the literary magazine Menabò to publish, which he edited together with Italo Calvino . A little later, the publisher Arnoldo Mondadori offered D'Arrigo a contract for the publication of the novel. D'Arrigo accepted both offers and began to revise what had been written so far. In 1960 the two chapters appeared in the third issue of Menabò magazine under the title I giorni della fera (Days of Fere).

In September 1961 the apparently final manuscript went to the publisher, now under the title I fatti della fera (The stories of the Fere). The final editing up to the first edition of the novel should, however, take 14 years; It was not until 1975 that the work appeared under the title Horcynus Orca , now heavily edited and doubled in size. Until his death in 1992, the author fine-tuned his novel, the story of a war returnees who, in the last eight days of his life, was confronted with both the mythology and the reality of post-war society in southern Italy, both in terms of language and content. These continuous revisions and changes by the author were incorporated into the authoritative text-critical edition of the work, the new edition in 2003 by the Rizzoli publishing house.

In Germany, Moshe Kahn campaigned for Horcynus Orca, which had long been considered untranslatable, and began work on a German translation with the support of publisher Egon Ammann . When Ammann Verlag was dissolved in 2010, S. Fischer Verlag took over the project and published the work in 2015. In the same year, Kahn's congenial translation was awarded the German-Italian Translator Prize and the Jane Scatcherd Prize .

In 1985 D'Arrigo, again at Mondadori Verlag, published his second and last novel, Cima delle nobildonne (The Summit of Noble Women), a work completely different from its predecessor, in a more accessible language and much less extensive with almost 200 pages. His starting point is the iconographic connection of the pharaoh Hatshepsut (whose name means: the summit of noble women) with the placenta : while setting up a museum for the placenta, a group of medical professionals made the discovery that the genetic structure of humans contains murderous elements, as proof that death is closely connected with life right down to its last (and earliest) ramifications. The novel was awarded the Premio Brancati of the city of Zafferana Etnea in 1986 .

Trivia

  • In Messina there is the literary park Parco Horcynus Orca in honor of D'Arrigo .
  • In 1961 D'Arrigo starred in Pasolini's film Accattone .

Awards

literature

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  • Codice siciliano , Mondadori, Milan 1978. (First edition Mondadori, Milan 1957)
  • I fatti della fera , Rizzoli, Milan 2000, ISBN 978-88-17-66981-8 . (i.e. first edition of the manuscript from 1961, which is critical of the text)
  • Horcynus Orca , Rizzoli, Milan 2003, ISBN 978-88-17-87228-7 . (First edition Mondadori, Milan 1975)
    • Horcynus Orca . From the Italian and with an afterword by Moshe Kahn. Published by Egon Ammann, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2015, ISBN 978-3-10-015337-1 .
  • Cima delle nobildonne , Rizzoli, Milan 2006, ISBN 978-88-17-00985-0 . (First edition Mondadori, Milan 1985)
Secondary literature (selection)

Note: further bibliographic information can be found in the annotation apparatus for the critical edition of the work at the Rizzoli publishing house.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ The presentation of the biography follows Marco Trainito: Stefano D'Arrigo (1919-1992) , ItaliaLibri.net, Milan, February 10, 2004, accessed October 23, 2018.
  2. ↑ cit. after Horcynus Orca . From the Italian and with an afterword by Moshe Kahn. Edited by Egon Ammann, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2015, ISBN 978-3-10-015337-1 , p. 9.
  3. ↑ Marco Trainito: Stefano D'Arrigo (1919-1992) , ItaliaLibri.net, Milan, February 10, 2004, accessed October 23, 2018.
  4. ↑ Marco Trainito: Stefano D'Arrigo (1919-1992) , ItaliaLibri.net, Milan, February 10, 2004, accessed October 23, 2018.
  5. ^ I giorni della fera . Il Menabò No. 3, Verlag Einaudi, Turin 1960. Cf. Marco Trainito: Stefano D'Arrigo (1919-1992) , ItaliaLibri.net, accessed October 23, 2018. "Fere" is an artificial word from D'Arrigos for "dolphin" , s. Moshe Kahn: Translator's Notes , Horcynus Orca , Frankfurt / Main 2015, p. 1458.
  6. ↑ This original version of Horcynus Orca was published in 2000 by the Rizzoli publishing house as a text-critical edition: I fatti della fera . Edited by Andrea Cedola and Siriana Sgavicchia, Rizzoli Publishing House, Milan 2000, ISBN 978-88-17-66981-8 . For the edition history of this Ur-Horcynus cf. the short review by Pasquale Vitagliano: I fatti della fera (1975) , ItaliaLibri.net, Milan, September 24, 2003, accessed October 23, 2018.
  7. ↑ Marco Trainito: Stefano D'Arrigo (1919-1992) , ItaliaLibri.net, Milan, February 10, 2004, accessed October 23, 2018.
    On the significance of the 2003 edition in the context of a text-critical complete edition of D'Arrigo's works, cf. also the remarks by Moshe Kahn in his translation of Horcynus Orca , Frankfurt / Main 2015, p. 1457.
    For the interpretation of the work cf. Marco Trainito: Horcynus Orca (1975-2003) , ItaliaLibri.net, Milan, January 28, 2004 (short review), as well as Marco Trainito: L'Orca. Genesi, vicenda editoriale, genealogia culturale e simbolismo nel romanzo di Stefano D'Arrigo. ItaliaLibri.net, Milan, January 28, 2004; Web links accessed October 23, 2018.
  8. ^ German-Italian Translator Prize 2015 , list of winners of the Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation ; accessed November 4, 2019.
  9. ^ Marco Trainito: Stefano D'Arrigo (1919-1992) , ItaliaLibri.net, Milan, February 10, 2004; Marco Trainito: Cima delle nobildonne (1985) , ItaliaLibri.net, Milan, November 7, 2006; both web links accessed October 23, 2018.
  10. ↑ Comune di Zafferana Etnea: Albo d'oro Premio Brancati , accessed October 23, 2018.
  11. ^ Il Premio Letterario Internazionale Mondello: Albo d'Oro dei vincitori del Premio Internazionale Letterario Mondello , accessed October 23, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME D'Arrigo, Stefano
ALTERNATIVE NAMES D'Arrigo, Fortunato Stefano
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 15, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Alì Marina, today Alì Terme , Province of Messina , Sicily
DATE OF DEATH May 2, 1992
Place of death Rome