This device gives the story another layer, a story within a story. Manzoni makes his narrator the reteller of a tale found in an old book written by an anonymous chronicler. Manzoni took a familiar and attractive literary genre, as did Dostoevsky, and used it as the vehicle for something more complex than it seems on the surface. But to say that The Betrothed is such a romance would be like saying that Crime and Punishment is a detective story. That sounds like a typical nineteenth-century romance, the type which makes for good opera. A cruel nobleman, however, has evil designs on poor Lucia, and sets out to prevent their marriage and to force himself on Lucia. The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi), which appeared in its final form in 1840, is the story of two Italian peasants, Renzo and Lucia, who are deeply in love and engaged to be married. I number it among those novels of Providence, as I like to call them, which have become favorites of mine, such as Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey, or Willa Cather’s Death Comes to the Archbishop. I was quickly captivated by the story, the style and the characters, and, having finished it, I can say that it does indeed merit the high praise it has been accorded. So, when I left for my vacation in October, I took with me The Betrothed. Tuscan peasants quote pages of it by heart.” Curious as to whether it deserved the high praise given it by such illustrious writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Walter Scott and Goethe, and why it became a national classic in Italy, I decided to read it sooner rather than later. … Children in Italian Government schools now begin studying it at the age of nine.
… It has gone into over 500 editions, and been translated into every major language, including Chinese. It is not only the first modern Italian novel for Italy it is all Scott, Dickens and Thackery rolled into one volume. Finally, I received a copy as a gift from my brother, who had found it in a second-hand book store it had been discarded by the New York Public Library.Īrchbald Colquhoun, translator of this 1951 American edition, writes in a biographical note about Manzoni: “Few novelists have tried to concentrate as much into one book as Manzoni has in I Promessi Sposi. Although my old Catholic Encyclopedia referred to it as a great work by the greatest Italian novelist, I had a difficult time tracking down a copy. On the recommendation of an acquaintance, I had some time ago put on my mental list of books to read, The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni.
0 kommentar(er)
