Journal | Archivio d’Annunzio
Journal issue | 7 | 2020
Research Article | Il Vate e il suo doppio ironico
Il Vate e il suo doppio ironico
Altre note su Thomas Mann lettore di d’Annunzio
Abstract
In Germany, beginning from the last decade of XIX century, the fame of Gabriele d’Annunzio grew increasingly thanks to a continue flow of translations, which made him one of the most celebrated writers of the Jahrhundertwende in the country of Goethe. Among the German admirers of the ‘Vate’ there were poets and novelists such as Stefan George, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Heinrich Mann. On the contrary, Thomas Mann’s appreciation of d’Annunzio was problematic: he disliked his aestheticism, his superficial Nietzschean Übermensch cult and moreover his far too refined, turgidly baroque prose. Nevertheless, he read attentively his colleague’s narratives – albeit using German translations, unlikely George and his senior brother Heinrich –, and undoubtedly made allusions – often in a deeply ironical sense – to d’Annunzio’s Triumph of Death in his novel Tristan. This essay reconstructs the cultural context of the relation between Mann and d’Annunzio, and offers a detailed comparison of selected passages and/or fragments from both works aimed at analysing the nature of Mann’s borrowings from the Italian writer, in order to show the ‘dialectical’ character of such a procedure.
Submitted: April 25, 2020 | Accepted: June 1, 2020 | Published Oct. 22, 2020 | Language: it
Keywords Decadentism • Comparative Literature • Irony • Aestheticism • Allusion
Copyright © 2020 Maurizio Giani. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/AdA/2421-292X/2020/01/004
