[In the following essay, Illiano examines Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which was known to Foscolo, for the influence it had on Foscolo's Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis and The Sepulchres. The critic also discusses Ippolito Pindemonte's I Cimiteri and its effect on The Sepulchres.]

Widely acclaimed as a masterwork of poetic expression, Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard had a far-reaching impact on Italian literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Gray was hailed as the new Pindar of England, “poeta caldo, fantastico, armonioso, sublime,”¹ and the Elegy, his major composition, was soon featured among the most challenging projects in literary translation. The first version, a masterful Elegia di Tommaso Gray sopra un cimitero di campagna in unrhymed hendecasyllables, was authored by no less a luminary than Melchiorre Cesarotti. It was published in 1772 by Giuseppe Comino, a well-known printer in Padua, who, that same year, discovered and published two new versions, one in Italian by Giuseppe Gennari and one by Giovanni Costa, who transposed the poem into Latin distichs with the idea of bringing it within the classical tradition.² Meanwhile, a translation in quatrains by Giuseppe Torelli was circulating in manuscript form and was eventually published in 1776 by the heirs of Agostino Carattoni, printers in Verona.³ The output of new translations continued even as the first four were variously collected and reprinted.⁴ But none approached the level of Cesarotti's compelling poetical eloquence.

Cesarotti, the most influential teacher and scholar of late eighteenth-century Italy, had distinguished himself as translator of Voltaire's tragedies,⁵ and, more decisively and distinctively, as author of a poetic version of Ossian, which authenticated Macpherson's “epic” and contributed to the spreading of the mood and mode of Ossianism throughout Europe.⁶ In that allegedly old text, Cesarotti had discovered a sublime example of the poetry of nature and sentiment, which he viewed as outclassing that of reflection. And, in its mythology and psychology, he had perceived the kind of delicate balance between the primitive and the refined, epos and pathos, which appealed to the genteel spirituality and the eudaemonic didacticism of his time.

But such poetry of nature and sentiment was wrought in a style that was fundamentally alien to a literary language long stifled by its submission to the norms of tradition. Accordingly, Cesarotti's primary objective was to promote the development of the Italian language by expanding its range and scope:

Io so bene che alcune di queste locuzioni non sarebbero sofferte in una poesia che fosse originariamente italiana, ma oso altresì lusingarmi che abbia a trovarsene più d'una, che possa forse aggiungere qualche tinta non infelice al colorito della nostra favella poetica, e qualche nuovo atteggiamento al suo stile. Questo è il capo per cui specialmente può rendersi utile una traduzione di questo genere, e questo è l'oggetto ch'io mi sono principalmente proposto,

and by awakening it to the wealth of its expressive potentialities:

Io non avea per istrumento della mia fatica che una lingua felice a dir vero, armoniosa, pieghevole forse più di qualunque altra, ma assai lontana (dica pur altri checché si voglia) dall'aver ricevuto tutta la fecondità e tutte le attitudini di cui è capace, e per colpe de' suoi adoratori eccessivamente pusillanime.⁷

To accomplish this challenging objective, Cesarotti worked out a poetics of translation which, while following D'Alembert's controversial precept of rendering the spirit rather than the letter of the original, allowed for even freer practices of refinement and embellishment inasmuch as Cesarotti understood his task to be not that of a mere translator, but that of a «personaggio di mezzo» between translator and author, a translator-author struggling with the tough and unyielding resistance of the original:

Mi sarebbe stato assai grato di poter presentare ai lettori, a fronte della traduzione poetica, il testo istesso di Ossian tradotto letteralmente in prosa italiana: si conoscerebbe allora chiaramente con qual atleta io fossi alle prese. … Ma se mi si vuol dar carico di aver procurato in vari luoghi di rischiarar il mio originale, di rammorbidirlo e di rettificarlo, e talora anche di abbellirlo e di gareggiar con esso, confesso chi'io sarò più facilmente tentato di pregiarmi di questa colpa che di pentirmene. Ragionando un giorno un mio dotto e colto amico con varie persone di lettere, ed essendosi detto da non so chi che l'Omero inglese di Pope non era Omero:—No invero,—diss'egli—perch'egli è qualche cosa di meglio.—Felice il traduttore che può meritar una tal censura!⁸

This skillfully “athletic” struggle heralded a new sensibility, along with the kind of renovation that Italian literature needed to break the hold of formalistic tradition and to open the way for future generations of poets: «C'est après la parution de la traduction d'Ossian et des études de Cesarotti que s'est formée, à la fin du siècle, une nouvelle Arcadie ‘préromantique,’ et que s'affirma la conception esthétique selon laquelle l'art vrai ne s'attarde à imiter ni les modèles classiques ni la nature, mais exprime les entiments vrais et les passions de l'âme, comme le feront la poésie d'Alfieri et celle d'Ugo Foscolo, premiers fruits de cet art.»⁹

It is no mere coincidence that Foscolo was the first to attempt a historical definition of the main features of Cesarotti's Ossian and of the outstanding contribution his great mentor had made to the development of Italian poetry:

His verses, in truth, are harmonious, are soft, are imbued with a colouring, and breathe an ardent spirit, altogether new; and, with the same materials, he has created a poetry, that appears written in a metre and a language entirely different from all former specimens … The translation of Ossian will, however, be always considered as an incontrovertible proof of the genius of Cesarotti, and of the flexibility of the Italian tongue.¹⁰

Cesarotti was not a radical reformer but an enlightened modernizer who achieved a “mediation” that was as much an accomplishment in cultural diplomacy as it was a masterpiece of refined literary artistry. And it was a mediation that progressed to an even higher form of sophistication with the translation of Gray's Elegy.¹¹ Here Cesarotti's craftsmanship emerged even more assertively as it now faced the task of transposing not a ready-for-poetization narrative but a well-wrought composition that resisted any interference with the inalienable nature of its mold and texture. The mediator's genius, without departing from his basic approach to translation, opted for an inspired heightening of Arcadian sensibility in which a detached perception of time and death leads to a sense of elegiac mediation that foreshadowed the Romantic perception of the lyrical sublime.

Gray's style is sober, selective, restrained, rooted in the concrete usage of the English tongue and enriched by a tactfully literate use of archaic and Latinate elements. Cesarotti “clarifies” and “rectifies” it with an opulence of added connotations that convey the subtler implications of the text:

Gray

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
the lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
the plowman homeward plods his weary way,
and leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
and all the air a solemn stillness holds,
save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
and drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.
Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r
the mopeing owl does to the moon complain
of such, as wand'ring near her secret bow'r,
molest her ancient solitary rein.

Cesarotti

Parte languido il giorno; odine il segno
che il cavo bronzo ammonitor del tempo
al consueto rintoccar diffonde.
Va passo passo il mugolante armento
per la piaggia avviandosi: dal solco
move all'albergo l'arator traendo
l'affaticato fianco, e lascia il mondo
alle tenebre e a me. Già scappa al guardo
gradatamente, e più s'infosca
la faccia della terra, a l'aer tutto
silenzio in cupa maestade ingombra.
Se non che alquanto lo interrompe un basso
ronzar d'insetti e quel che il chiuso gregge
tintinnio soporoso al sonno alletta.
E là pur anco da quell' erma torre,
ch'ellera abbarbicata ammanta e stringe,
duolsi alla luna il pensieroso gufo
di quei che al muto suo segreto asilo,
d'intorno errando, osan turbare i dritti
del suo vetusto solitario regno.

The curfew becomes il cavo bronzo ammonitor del tempo, and the translator contributes quite a few touches of his own (languido, consueto, avviandosi, s'infosca, cupa maestade).¹² In the following lines, the beetle is generalized into insetti and the “distant folds” are reduced to a more specific chiuso gregge, while the translator supplies erma, abbarbicata, stringe, muto, i dritti.

Gray's style, particularly in its rhythmical texture, is slow, threaded with caesura and parallel structure, heavily cadenced in its recurrent sentence patterns, starkly solemn in the alternate use of bare monosyllables and long vowels. Cesarotti is able to soften and “beautify” it according to the requirements of his own taste and the rhetoric of this time:

Gray

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap,
each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn,
the swallow twitt'ring from the straw-build shed
the cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
no more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

Cesarotti

Sotto le fronde di quegli olmi, all'ombra
di quel tasso funebre, ove la zolla
in polverosi tumuli s'innalza,
ciascun riposto in sua ristretta cella,
dormono i padri del villaggio antichi.
Voce d'augello annuziator d'albori,
auretta del mattin che incenso olezza,
queruli lai di rondinella amante
tonar di squilla o rintronar di corno
non gli alzeran dal loro letto umile.

The yew tree becomes a more striking tasso funebre, while the pervasive ruggedness of Gray's landscape is replaced by more genteel connotations. Cesarotti overlooks the rustic straw-built shed and opens the window on a tame scene of Arcadia with such cherished emblems as augello, albori, auretta, olezza, queruli lai, and rondinella amante.

Gray's imagery is reserved, austere: Cesarotti recreates it in a context that often changes the quietly majestic mood of the original into one of insistent melancholy. The presence of death and the inescapable sense of its leveling power take on a new emphasis in the sustained unfolding of Cesarotti's sciolti. Clearly, the translator is “competing” with the original not only through the rehandling of particular images (e.g., “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, / and waste its sweetness on the desert air” rendered with «e molti fior son nati / a vagamente colorarsi invano / non visti, e profumar l'aer solingo / di loro ambrosia genial fragranza»), but also through his consummate mastery of Italian prosody.

Thus Cesarotti achieved an integral transformation of Gray's Elegy by lifting it from its native ground and creating its equivalent within the context of a totally new literary climate; he did not merely translate Gray's poem but thoroughly naturalized it so that it could blend with, and prosper on, its new soil.¹³

Cesarotti was a talented and resourceful versifier who could claim to be a poet in his own right. He had a new sense of the freedom of poetry along with a subtle perception of the dynamism of a literary language whose expressive ranges he was able to enhance by molding a new hendecasyllable that responded to the need for a revitalized prosody and captured the spirit of the sublime as perceived at the dawn of Romanticism. And it was his timely synthesis of tradition and renovation that started the process of sublimation of the sepulchral that would reach its literary and historic culmination in the heightened lyricism of Foscolo's carme.¹⁴

FOSCOLO'S ORTIS

The Italian versions of the Elegy were readily available to the young Foscolo after he moved to Venice in 1792 and became acquainted with such prominent teachers and critics as Cesarotti and Angelo Dalmistro. The impact of the poem on his work can hardly be overlooked. His first novel, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1798), bore, on the very title page, a striking epigraph: Naturae clamat ab ipso / vox tumulo, which Foscolo took from Costa's version of the Elegy. Equally significant is Foscolo's use of Cesarotti's translation and particularly of two passages that he paraphrased in the Letter XXXV of that first edition.

The epigraph sets the mood of regret and disenchantment that permeates the novel; but it is also significant because it involves a concept that was among Foscolo's major concerns and that was to find its full artistic expression in Dei Sepolcri (1807): the concept of man's will to immortality, which may also have critical significance for the interpretation of Gray's poem.

Nature has a variety of connotations in Foscolo's work. It may denote the Ossian-like landscape and its differing manifestations, which may be akin to, or contrast with, the feelings of the protagonist; a lyrical extension of this meaning is the poet's response to such manifestations. In other contexts, Nature refers to the totality of things and, as a materialistic principle, to the power of the ever-changing cosmos. In the context of the epigraph and related passages, however, Nature is more definitely human nature—the nature in which the living principle or life instinct reaches a new level of consciousness; the nature that feels and thinks and therefore refuses to die. Here Foscolo's intuition of man's need to escape oblivion is akin to Gray's. The difference is one of emphasis and occurs when Foscolo transfers the concept of the quest for immortality from the level of attempted or intended universality, which it occupies in Gray's poem, to the individual level of the young poet-martyr who moans and grieves over his own extinction:

Gray

For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey,
this pleasing anxious being e'er resign'd,
left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
nor cast one longing ling-ring look behind?
On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
some pious drops the closing eye requires;
ev'n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,
ev'n in our Ashes live their wonted Fires.

Cesarotti

Poiché chi tutta mai cesse tranquillo
in preda a muta obblivion vorace
questa esitenza travagliosa e cara?
Chi del vivido giorno i rai sereni
abbandonò, senza lasciarsi addietro
un suo languente e sospiroso sguardo?
Ama posar su qualche petto amato
l'alma spirante, e i moribondi lumi
chieggono altrui qualche pietosa stilla.
Fuor della tomba ancor grida la voce
della natura, e sin nel cener freddo
degli usati desir vivon le fiamme.

Foscolo:

E chi mai cede a un'eterna obblivione questa cara e travagliata esistenza? Chi mai vide per l'ultima volta i raggi del sole, chi salutò la natura per sempre, chi abbandonò i suoi diletti, le sue speranze, i suoi inganni, i suoi stessi dolori senza lasciar dietro a se un desiderio, un sospiro, uno sguardo? Le persone a noi care che ci sopravvivono sono parte di noi. I nostri occhi morenti chiedono altrui qualche stilla di pianto, e il nostro cuore ama che il recente cadavere sia sostenuto dalle braccie amorose di chi sta per raccogliere l'ultimo nostro sospiro.—Geme la natura per fin nella tomba, e il suo gemito vince il silenzio e l'oscurità della morte.

Foscolo intensifies Cesarotti's rhetoric (chi mai … chi mai …), dwells more emphatically on the sorrow of departing from life (geme instead of grida), and on the need to feel the closeness of the beloved survivors, a need that foreshadows the «corrispondenza d'amorosi sensi» in Dei Sepolcri. The last line introduces a new idea—the victory of love over death—which is perhaps the first intuition of what will be the central themes of his future poem. The general mood, however, is one of self-indulgent lamentation and continues into the next paragraph where the disenchanted poet, after seeing his final resting place near the church, a white tombstone where his loved ones will go to pay tribute to love and memory, once again utilizes Cesarotti's rendering in a poetic reproduction of the passage that leads to the concluding epitaph.

Here the open mention of the English poet («Ché se il solitario giovane innamorato chiederà la mia storia, forse l'agricoltore più vecchio … risponderà quei versi di Gray») has considerable historical significance as proof of influence. Foscolo, however, reinterprets the spirit of the original by introducing images that mirror the Ossian-like restlessness of the protagonist (onde inquiete, cupo fremere dell'acque), and emphasize the tragic nature of his thoughts and the disquieting sense of isolation and victimization that characterizes his own temperament: «Or lo vedresti presso l'ombre del bosco disdegnoso / sorridendo aggirarsi, or borbottando / quasi per doglia trasognato, o vinto / da cruda sorte, o disperato amante.» Foscolo's verse adaptation ends with the first two lines of the epitaph, «A fama ignota e a fortuna, eterno / sonno sotterra il giovinetto dorme,» which bears an interesting resemblance to Torelli's translation as well.¹⁵

But the most significant change occurs in Foscolo's transformation of Gray's thee into his unequivocal first person («la mia storia»). Gray attempted to objectify his feeling of sorrow (if thee does not refer to an imaginary personage such as a stonecutter), while Foscolo, through his use of the epitaph, expresses his protagonist's self-pity. The lines were deleted from the subsequent editions of the novel, but Foscolo's paraphrase of Cesarotti still holds a considerable literary interest both from the point of view of style and as a telling document of the new spirituality sparked by the encounter of Arcadia with the meditative sentimentality of the Elegy.

LEGOUVé, DELILLE, PINDEMONTE

Citoyen Legouvé read his poem La Sépulture at the October 1797 meeting of the Institut National des Sciences et des Art, in Paris. The work, published four years later in the Memoirs of the Institute, brought a new dimension to the genre of sepulchral poetry by proposing that the tombs provide, in addition to a fundamental lesson in humility and equality, a constant source of civic virtue through emulation of the good citizens of the past. Jacques Delille, a poet nearly forgotten but quite popular in his time for such descriptive and didactic works as Les Jardins (1782) and L'Imagination (1806), followed Legouvé's example and emphasized the social, historical and “political” value of the cult of the dead in terms of the ennobling and beneficial effects it can produce among civilized men. It was definitely a new way of looking at the tombs. Parnell had viewed the cemeteries as proofs of transience and in terms of a deep-rooted religious belief (“Death's but a Path that must to trod, / if Man wou'd ever pass to God …”). Gray had meditated on the tombs as expressions of the pitifully human need to be remembered, a need that is universal and equally legitimate in men of both high and low station. Delille shifted the emphasis from death to life and elaborated on the good effects that life itself can derive from the respect from sepulchral monuments as emblems of a fundamentally existential preoccupation: «J'ai médité long-temps, assis sur les tombeaux, / non pas pour y chercher, dans ma mélancolie, / le secret de la mort, mais celui de la vie» (L'Imagination, VII).

Ippolito Pindemonte, a student of Torelli and a protégé of Dalmistro, was well acquainted with the works of Delille and with the English poets of the “night” school. He drew inspiration from them and imitated them in many passages of his own poetic works.¹⁶ In 1806, Pindemonte published the first canto of a projected poem in octaves entitled I Cimiteri. In it he expressed his indignation at the neglectful state of the tombs in the cemetery of Verona, and condemned the indiscriminate anonymity of burial allowed by the new laws, particularly the Napoleonic edict of St. Cloud, which banned cemeteries from residential areas.

Pindemonte's treatment of the theme is not merely didactic like Delille's, but more poignantly involved with a pressing political reality, and motivated by a zestful sense of moral indignation: «Ignoranza o saper, colpa o vertude / una sola vil tomba inghiotte e chiude.» The poem evolves around an allegorical encounter of the poet with a tearful group of discontented ghosts. Within the framework of this episode, which is partially drawn from Mazza's version of Parnell's Night-Piece on Death, Pindemonte weaves a few clumsy borrowings from Dante together with such familiar trademarks of the sepulchral genre as the moon, the owl, tranquillity, la faccia del mondo (Cesarotti's la faccia della terra from Gray's landscape). The only original touch is the poet's all too polemical outcry: «Ombre, io grido, il destino vostro orrendo / e macchia eterna della mia cittade.»

After completing the first canto of I Cimiteri in the early summer of 1806, Pindemonte sent it to Cesarotti, who promptly replied that the episode of the talking shades lacked verisimilitude, and suggested that the projected four cantos be reduced to two while the ottava could be dropped in favor of a more fitting meter.¹⁷

FOSCOLO'S DEI SEPOLCRI

In July 1806, Foscolo visited with Pindemonte in Verona and learned that his friend was writing a long poem on I Cimiteri. He had the opportunity to read and hear the author recite the recently completed first can to of the work in progress. In the weeks following that meeting, Foscolo, back in Brescia, composed his own treatment, Dei Sepolcri, in the form of an epistle in verse addressed to Pindemonte.

This startling coincidence has sparked a great deal of speculation as to the nature of Foscolo's borrowing from Pindemonte's work.¹⁸ Granting that Foscolo could have been more forthright or tactful with his trusting friend, the charges of plagiarism are decidedly unfounded both in terms of content and expression. In fact, Pindemonte responded by addressing to Foscolo his own Sepolcri, a new poem of 409 hendecasyllables prefaced by a note to the reader that provides a valuable clarification about the genesis and background of his work:

Compiuto quasi io avea il primo canto, quando seppi che uno scrittore d'ingegno non ordinario, Ugo Foscolo, stava per pubblicare alcuni suoi versi a me indirizzati sopra i Sepolcri. L'argomento mio, che nuovo più non pareami, cominciò allora a spiacermi; ed io abbandonai il mio lavoro. Ma leggendo la poesia a me indirizzata, sentii ridestarsi in me l'antico affetto per quell'argomento; e sembrandomi che spigolare si potesse ancora in tal campo, vi rientrai, e stesi alcuni versi in forma di risposta all'autor de' Sepolcri benché pochissimo abbia io potuto giovarmi di quanto avea prima concepito e messo in carta su i Cimiteri.¹⁹

The kinship between I Cimiteri and Dei Sepolcri can hardly be said to extend beyond Foscolo's receptive group of the political implications and motivations of his friend's indignant reaction to the edict of St. Cloud. Nonetheless, Pindemonte deserves special recognition for what was, albeit unwittingly, his fruitful role in the conception and gestation of Dei Sepolcri: listening to his friend's plea, Foscolo was inspired to issue his own answer to a problem that had plagued two generations of poets and that he had been brooding about for some time.

The widespread concern with the issue of burial in the late eighteenth century was partly reflected in a sort of common iconography and stereotyped imagery characterized by such mannered traits as the urn, the cypress and the stone, and always leading up to doubt and questioning of their value:

Dunque a che pro l'inanimata salma
vestir di bruno ammanto, e al non suo tetto
ombrar le porte di feral cipresso?
.....Forse la spoglia del suo meglio vota
sente l'onor de' mesti uffici? Forse
a lo spirto è mistier pompa di duolo?(20)

Foscolo knew the trend from the time of his early apprenticeship in Venice.²¹ He understood its literary significance and the reasons for its wide appeal. He was also keenly aware of the various implications it could have for the Italian libertarians and committed intellectuals in an age of political unrest and insurgent nationalism.²² Consequently, when he finally decided to express his own lyrical view through Dei Sepolcri, he had simply to begin in medias res and did so with a sense of urgency that leaves no doubt as to the seriousness and emotional poignancy of his inspiration. The heightened diction and the startling abruptness of the beginning immediately place the issue in a novel context as Foscolo's initial questioning presses for the negative in order to convey his vibrant avowal of a deterministic materialism that denies all metaphysical solutions.

Faced with such a hopelessly definitive statement of agnosticism, the more attentive reader may justifiably hold some doubts as to the need for dwelling on the subject. Meanwhile, however, Foscolo has successfully articulated the issue in such an emphatic fashion that the reader's expectation can only be fulfilled by a fundamentally new lyrical statement. What follows is precisely such a statement, in four parts, in which the poet transcends the rhetoric of the churchyard school and establishes poetry as the ultimate means of preservation and consecration of the continuing work of history.

Whereas the themes and the concepts of Dei Sepolcri are not new, their treatment is original in that Foscolo's poetic imagination “combines” them in a complex frame of reference that blends a varied pattern of classical and modern sources. More importantly, because his impassioned plea is addressed to the emotions and not to the intellect of his readers, Foscolo is able to break away from the traditional modes of composition and to use the intuitional technique of transvolare, a decidedly novel form that allows his fantasy to progress rapidly from one segment of the poem to the next, and, within each segment, from one image to the next. The intuitional texture and the emotional élan are the unifying elements that move the composition forward, from the opening statement to the recollection of the myth of Electra, Cassandra's prophecy, and Homer's pilgrimage to the tombs of Ilion. Through these conclusive figurations, Foscolo's poetic phantasy transcends time and space in order to relive, in a romantic flight inspired by a new sense of the sublime, the dawn of classical civilization.

Admittedly, Foscolo was asking Italians to acquire a higher cognizance of history's great wisdom and exemplary accomplishments. This is essentially what he meant when he differentiated his “political” approach to the tombs from Hervey's and Young's “Christian” intention and from Gray's “philosophical” meditation: «L'autore considera i sepolcri politicamente; ed ha per iscopo di animare l'emulazione politica degli Italiani con gli esempi delle nazioni che onorarono la memoria e i sepolcri degli uomini grandi; però doveva viaggiare più di Young, di Hervey e di Gray, e predicare non la resurrezione dei corpi, ma delle virtù.»²³

This kind of “political” commitment draws its inspiration from a redeeming faith in human dignity which, shunning all forms and traditions of transcendental consolation, can reassert its undaunted reliance on the immanent values of art and history.

Notes

1. F. Algarotti, «Saggio sopra Orazio» in his Saggi, ed. G. Da Pozzo (Bari: Laterza, 1963) 459. Also, Foscolo held Gray in high esteem and, in pointing out his imitation of Petrarch, noted that the English poet «accoppia in sommo grado severità di gusto con ardire di espressione» (Saggio sopra la poesia del Petrarca). See also O. Micale's Thomas Gray e la sua influenza sulla letteratura italiana (Catania, 1934), reviewed by J. G. Fucilla in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 34 (1935): 277-79. For a review of the background of the Elegy, see Paul Harvey's Oxford Companion to English Literature; W. Powell Jones, Thomas Gray, Scholar (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1955); and Amy Louise Reed, The Background of Gray's Elegy (New York: Columbia UP, 1924).

2. Giuseppe Gennari (1721-1800), a historian and humanist from Padua, was much admired for his elegant style and for his Dissertazione sopra il rinnovamento e i progressi delle umane lettere in Italia (Padua, 1823). Giovanni Costa (1736-1816), a learned philologist and poet, translated Pindar into Latin and published Poema Alexandri Pope de homine, Jacobi Thomson et Thomae Gray selecta carmina ex britanna in latinam linguam translata (Padua, 1775).

3. Giuseppe Torelli (1721-1781), a man of letters and a well-known mathematician from Verona, was the influential teacher and tutor of Ippolito Pindemonte, who wrote a eulogy upon his death. Torelli opposed Bettinelli's and Voltaire's polemic against Dante in his Lettere sopra Dante e contro il signor di Voltaire (1781).

4. Costa's and Gennari's versions were included in the second edition of Gray's poems (Dublin, 1775). Costa's piece was reprinted, together with Cesarotti's, in Poesie inglesi di Alessandro Pope, di Jacopo Thomson, di Tommaso Gray, con la traduzione in varie lingue (Venice, 1791). Costa's, Cesarotti's and Torelli's versions were published in 1793 by Bodoni of Parma, while Torelli's was also featured in Versioni dall'inglese (Venice, 1794), collected by Angelo Dalmistro (1754-1839), a Venetian poet who was a close friend of Ippolito Pindemonte and one of Foscolo's teachers at the Collegio di San Cipriano. All the early translations were later collected in Elegia di Tommaso Gray sopra un cimitero di campagna tradotta dall'inglese in varie lingue con l'aggiunta di varie cose finora inedite, by Alessandro Torri (Livorno: Tip. Migliaresi, 1817, 1843), which included the Italian translations by Torelli, Cesarotti, Gennari, Lastri, Buttura, and others; the Latin translations of Costa, Anstey, Barbieri, Bene, and Venturi. It also included the literal translation by Domenico Trant, an Irish gentleman who resided in Padua and prompted his friends Costa and Gennari to translate Gray's Elegy, and several foreign translations as well. For a complete listing of the translations of the Elegy, consult Clark S. Northup, A Bibliography of Thomas Gray (New Haven: Yale UP, 1917) and Herbert W. Starr, A Bibliography of Thomas Gray, 1917-1951, with material supplementary to C. S. Northup's Bibliography of Thomas Gray (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1953).

5. Voltaire's unconditional admiration for his Italian translator touched notes of hyperbolic humility: “J'ai trouvé dans votre style tant de force et tant de naturel, que je m'ai cru votre faible traducteur et que je vous ai cru l'auteur de l'original” (Dell' epistolario di M. Cesarotti [Florence, 1811] I: 434. For Cesarotti's high opinion of the French philosopher, see the comparison Voltaire-Lucian in his Epistolario scelto (Venice, 1826) 92-93.

6. P. Sárközy, in Le Tournant du siècle des lumières 1760-1820: Les genres envers des lumières au romantisme (Budapest, 1982), states that Cesarotti's translation “représente la première étape de la fièvre ossianique européenne et en détermine en partie aussi l'évolution ultérieure” (385). Cf. P. Van Tieghem, “Ossian et L'Ossianisme au XVIII^e siècle,” in Le Préromantisme (Paris, 1948) I: 226-27, and G. Marzot, “Ossian,” in Il gran Cesarotti (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1949). See also C. Cooke, “La traduzione cesarottiana delle poesie di Ossian,” Aevum 3-4 (1971): 340-57, and G. Savoca, “La crisi del classicismo dall'Arcadia lugubre e sentimentale alla retorica ossianesca e sepolcrale” in La letteratura italiana, Storia e Testi 6.2 (Bari: Laterza, 1974) 266-72.

7. From the preface to the second edition (Padua, 1772) of Poesie di Ossian antico poeta celtico, now in Dal Muratori al Cesarotti, IV: Critici e storici della poesia e delle arti nel secondo Settecento, ed. E. Bigi (Naples: Ricciardi, 1960) 87-98.

8. Ibid. In the third part of his Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue, Cesarotti will further elaborate on the art of translation as linguistic enrichment and will parallel the image of the author-athlete with that of the translator-athlete: “Un traduttore di genio prefiggendosi per una parte di gareggiar col suo originale, e sdegnando di restar soccombente: temendo per l'altra di riuscire oscuro e barbaro ai suoi nazionali, è costretto in certo modo a dar la tortura alla sua lingua per far conoscere a lei stessa tutta l'estensione delle sue forze, a sedurla accortamente per vincer le sue ritrosie irragionevoli e ravvicinarla alle straniere, a inventar vari modi di conciliazione e d'accordo, a renderla infine più ricca di flessioni e d'atteggiamenti senza sfigurarla o sconciarla. La lingua d'uno scrittore mostra l'andatura d'un uomo che cammina equabilmente con una disinvolturea o compostezza uniforme; quella d'un traduttore rappresenta un atleta addestrato a tutto gli esercizi della ginnastica.” On Cesarotti as translator of Homer, see G. Marzot, Il gran Cesarotti, 147-55, and M. Mari, “Le tre Iliadi di M. Cesarotti,” Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana 167 (1990): 321-95.

9. Sárközy 386.

10. “Essay on the Present Literature of Italy” in Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Ugo Foscolo, XI, II: Saggi di letteratura italiana (Florence, 1958), 404-05. Foscolo had already intuited the value of a “mediation” which Paul Hazard, “L'Invasion des littératures du nord dans l'Italie du XVIII^e siècle,” Revue de Littérature Comparée, I (1921), 30-67, attempted to define by saying that “il s'agit de créer á nouveau en transformant” (49), and W. Binni further elaborated in Preromanticismo italiano (Naples: E.S.I., 1948), 185-252, and in his chapter on Cesarotti in Storia della letteratura italiana, VI (Milan: Garzanti, 1968). For further bibliographical references on Cesarotti's translation of Ossian, see G. Frazzetto, “Ipotesi su Cesarotti: le ‘Osservazioni’ alle tradizioni ossianiche, Le forme e la storia, 4 (1983): 545-76; and G. Baldassarri, “Sull' Ossian di Cesarotti,” Rassegna della letteratura italiana, 93 (1989): 25-58. See also G. Marzot's chapter on Cesarotti in Letteratura italiana, I minori, (Milan: Marzorati, 1961) and G. Ortolani's introduction to his edition of Cesarotti's Opere scelte (Florence, 1945).

11. For a proof of the positive reception of Cesarotti's translation, see, in his Epistolario, Angelo Mazza's letter of 12 May 1772, which is also a proof of great admiration for all of Cesarotti's literary work: “Mi sareste stato assai più cortese, se in cambio delle lodi, di cui m'avete sovrabbondantemente onorato, e che venendo da un vostro pari non lasciano di lusingarmi moltissimo, m'aveste mandato una copia della versione del Church Yard, Elegia da voi divinamente tradotta, siccome mi scrivono da Torino e da Milano. Io, che fo tesoro delle cose vostre, e le considero, quali sono, originali di vera e maschia Poesia, non so vedermene da voi frodato senza vivissimo rincrescimento” (Dell'epistolario, I, 172).

12. What a distance separates these words from the inimitable lines that inspired Gray's opening of the Elegy: “Lo giorno se n'andava, e l'aer bruno” (Inf. II), and “che paia il giorno pianger che si more!” (Purg. VIII). For bibliographical information on Gray and Dante, and Gray and Italy, see Alan T. McKenzie, Thomas Gray: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1982). By contrast, Giuseppe Torelli's determination to adhere to the original is underscored by the adoption of the quatrain with alternate rhyme as the closest reproduction of the metric scheme of the original. But compare the beginning stanzas of his translation (“Segna la squilla il dì, che già vien manco; / mugghia l'armento, e via lento erra, e sgombra; / torna a casa il bifolco inchino, e stanco, / et a me lascia il mondo e a la fosc'ombra. / Già fugge il piano al guardo, e gli s'invola, / e de l'aere un silenzio alto's s'indonna, / fuor 've lo scarabon ronzando vola, / e un cupo tintinnir gli ovili assonna.”) with the more successful rhythms of A. Buttura's terza rima: Già la squilla serale il giorno piagne, / e a mano a mano il languido fulgore / va il sol levando ai campi; alle montagne. / Già nello scuro ogni color si muore; / e lascia il mondo all'ombra e al pensier mio / traendosi al tugurio il zappatore. / Regna quiete; il sol cupo ronzio / degl'insetti, per l'aer che tace, / s'ode e la soporosa onda del rio.”

13. For an understanding of Cesarotti's concept of equivalency in translating poetry, see the short chapter “I traduttori” in his Prose edite e inedite, ed. G. Mazzoni (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1882), 243-45.

14. On concept and use of the sublime, see G. Costa, “M. Cesarotti, Vico, and the Sublime,” Italica, 58 (1981): 3-15, and “Foscolo e la poetica del sublime,” Forum Italicum, 12 (1978): 472-97.

15. As further demonstration of Foscolo's familiarity with Torelli's translation of the Elegy, see the quote in a letter to Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi: “Tu allora ti lagnavi del suo poco spirito; ed io risposi quel verso di Gray Tarpò al bell'estro povertà le piume (Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Ugo Foscolo XV, Epistolario 1804-08, II [Florence: Le Monnier, 1952], 382), which reproduces verbatim Torelli's text. The first evidence that Foscolo was acquainted with Torelli's translation occurs in a letter of 1807 to Giustina Renier Michiel, where he says: “… poi dì e notte sto qui come un gufo: E il gufo ognor pensoso / Si duole al raggio della luna amico / Di chi, guardando il suo ricetto ombroso, / Gli turba il regno solitario antico” (Ibid. 240), which is a quote of the third stanza of the Elegy as translated by G. Torelli; the only change, guardando instead of girando, may suggest that the poet was quoting from memory.

16. N. F. Cimmino, I. Pindemonte e il suo tempo (Roma: Abete, 1968). See also F. Torraca's “I Sepolcri d'Ippolito Pindemonte” in his Discussioni e ricerche letterarie (Livorno, 1888), and the annotations to Pindemonte's work in Lirici del Settecento, ed. B. Maier (Naples: Ricciardi, 1959).

17. Cimmino, I, 73. The text of I Cimiteri was published in G. Biadego's Da libri e manoscritti (Verona, 1883).

18. For a list of works dealing with this question, see Lirici del Settecento, 1023-24, and Ugo Foscolo, Opere, I. ed. F. Gavazzeni (Naples: Ricciardi, 1974). For a detailed discussion, see C. Antona-Traversi's Della prima e vera origine dei “Sepolcri” di U. Foscolo (Napoli: Morano, 1882).

19. Dei Sepolcri, poesie di U. Foscolo, I. Pindemonte e G. Torti (Brescia: Bettoni, 1808), 27-28. Of particular interest is also a notation on the use of italics in Pindemonte's text: “Questi versi io t'offerisco, lettor cortese, facendoli precedere dal componimento, cui son di risposta, e che tu potresti non aver letto. Appartengono ad esso alcune parole in carattere diverso, che trovansi nel componimento mio, il che io noto per questo, che al mio potrìa taluno andar tosto con gli occhi. Quante spezie non v'ha, come d'autori, così ancor di lettori?”

20. From Mazza's translation of Parnell's Night-Piece on Death, included in A. Dalmistro's collection of Versioni dall'inglese. For an introduction to Mazza's contribution to late eighteenth-century poetry, see the important outline of his work in Foscolo's “Essay on the Present Literature of Italy”: “Angelo Mazza, the school-fellow and the friend of Cesarotti, may be fairly subjoined to a mention of that poet. … His first essay was made in the year 1764, when he translated the Pleasures of the Imagination, and convinced the Italian that the compressed style of Dante was capable of being applied to their blank verse, which as yet was little more than a string of sonorous syllables. The poetry published by him in a maturer age consists in great part of lyrical pieces on Harmony. … The imitations, and even the translation of Mazza, have a certain air of originality impressed not only on their style, which is extremely energetic. … His odes are composed of stanzas, the melody of which is often sacrificed to what the musicians call contrapunto, which is calculated to surprise more than please, and he has even adopted those difficult rhymes which the Italians call sdrucciole, or slippery, and which not only lengthen the eleven syllabled verse into twelve syllables, but change the position of the accent. … The only work of Mazza which has been often printed, and has hit the taste of the Italians, is a poem in thirty pages, addressed to Cesarotti [Stanze sdrucciole a M. Cesarotti, Elogio di questo tratto dalla necrologia litteraria di Luigi Bramieri, Piacenza, 1809], in which he gives a masterly sketch of the great poets of every nation, and has placed the English on a distinguished eminence amongst the immortal brotherhood. …”

21. M. Allegri, “‘Di Grecia in Italia’: il Foscolo veneziano,” Letteratura italiana, storia e geografia, I, L'età moderna (Turin: Einaudi, 1982): 1008-12.

22. I. B. Zumbini, “La poesia sepolcrale straiera e italiana e il carme del Foscolo,” Nuova Antologia, 19 (1889), 21-46, 449-65; V. Cian, “Per la storia del sentimento e della poesia sepolcrale in Italia ed in francia prima dei Sepolcri del Foscolo.” Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, 20 (1892), 205-35; L. Sozzi, “I Sepolcri e le discussioni francesi sulle tombe negli anni del Direttorio e del Consolato,” Giornale Storico della Letteratura italiana, 144, (1967), 567-88; P. Hazard, La Révolution française et les lettres italiennes (Paris: Hachette, 1910). For the development of the genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see I. P. Van Tieghem's discussion of “La poésie de la nuit et des tombeaux en Europe en XVIII^e siècle,” in his Le préromantisme; R. Michea, “Le ‘plaisir des tombeaux’ en XVIII^e siècle,” Revue de Littérature Comparée, 18 (1938), 287-311, and J. W. Draper, The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of Romanticism (New York: New York UP, 1929).

23. From the letter to Monsieur Guillon “Su la incompetenza a giudicare i poeti italiani,” in Foscolo's Opere (Milan: Bettoni, 1832), II, and in Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Ugo Foscolo, I. See also Foscolo's restatement of the objective of I Sepolcri in his “Essay on the Present Literature of Italy”: “The aim of Foscolo in this poem appears to be the proof of the influence produced by the memory of the dead on the manners and on the independence of nations.” Cf. G. Getto, La composizione dei “Sepolcri” di Ugo Foscolo (Firenze: Olschki, 1977), and S. Gamberini, Analisi dei “Sepolcri” foscoliani (Messina-Firenze: D'Anna, 1982). For an introduction to further study and research, see also the important contributions by E. R. Vincent, Ugo Foscolo: An Italian in Regency England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1953) and G. Cambon, Ugo Foscolo: Poet of Exile (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980).