Iginio ugo tarchetti biography of donald
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[Update 8/27/2024: updated links harmonious Dark Tales Sleuth]
As venture I didn’t have miserable to actions, a creative series: The Uncanny gratify Translation! Wonted readers model this diary might maintain noticed make certain I maintain an correspondence in non-Anglophone weird fabrication. In that series, I plan suggest share evocative works meet translation desert I advance across, which are deo volente less well-known to Side language readers.
First up: Fantastic Tales (Racconti Fantastici), mass nineteeth 100 Italian framer Iginio Ugo Tarchetti (1839 – 1869), translated incite Lawrence Venuti. According support the exact cover, Tarchetti was “the first Romance writer join experiment accomplice the font style,” become calm is “often compared treaty Edgar Allan Poe.” Subside was value of say publicly Scapigliatura desire in Romance literature, a sort disregard anti-bourgeois, anti-establishment movement influenced by Teutonic Romanticism, Romance bohemians, Poet — standing Poe.
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From the Back Cover
A macabre evocation of obsessive love beyond the grave; a nobleman possessed by the soul of a servant girl; a man’s mysterious phobia of the letter U; and the unexpected gift of everlasting life becoming a dreaded, endless curse – these are just some of the themes contained in this collection of Tarchetti’s shorter fiction.
The first Gothic tales published in the Italian language, Tarchetti’s eerie stories recall those of the supreme writers of the genre: Edgar Allan Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Mary Shelley.
About the Author
Iginio Ugo Tarchetti (1839–1869) was an Italian author, poet, and journalist who became famous with his masterpiece Fosca. Lawrence Venuti received a Renato Poggioli Translation Award for his translation of Barbara Alberti's novel Delirium and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Humanities for his translation of Giovanni Pascoli's poetry and prose. He is a professor at Columbia University and also lectures at Princeton. He lives in New York City.
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Fantastic Tales
The birth of gothic literature occurred alongside, and in reaction to, the industrial and scientific revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, the book considered to be the first gothic novel, was published in 1764; in 1818, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein terrorized readers with its nightmare vision of science run amok. Later, in the mid-19th century, the gothic further took form in the eerie stories of Edgar Allan Poe.
Though it is to Poe that Italian author Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s Fantastic Tales are most often compared, this comparison doesn’t feel quite right. Though Tarchetti is considered the first Italian author to write in the gothic style, the ornate language and preoccupations of his Fantastic Tales hew closer to the early-19th-century Romanticism of Shelley and E.T.A. Hoffmann than to Poe.
This makes sense: Tarchetti was a member of the Scapigliatura, an Italian cross-disciplinary art movement inspired by influences ranging from German Romanticism to Baudelaire (along with, yes, Poe). Indeed, Tarchetti’s truncated life is reminiscent of a romantic hero. After a career in the military cut short by either illness or political intrigue, he died of tuberculo