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Going beyond exclusively national perspectives, this volume considers for the first time the reception of the ancient Greek poet Sappho and her first Latin translator, Catullus, as a literary pair who transmit poetic culture across the world from the early 20th century to the present. The 20th and 21st centuries have seen Sappho and Catullus gaining prime positions in literary culture, with a vigorous industry of translations and rewritings of their poetry and biographies driving their intertwined fortune. A slow yet powerful fire, Sappho’s and Catullus’ reception has shaped a transnational network of poets and intellectuals, helping to define ideas of origins, gender, sexuality and national identities. This book shows that across time and cultures translations and rewritings of Sappho and Catullus articulate modernist poetics of myth and fragmentation, forms of confessionalism and post-modern pastiche. A sustained transnational poetic discourse employs the ancient pair to expand notions of literary origins and redefine poetry’s relationship to human existence. The inquiry focuses on Italian and North American poetry as two central yet understudied hubs of Sappho’s and Catullus’ modern reception, also linked by a rich mutual intellectual exchange. Grounded in textual criticism, the analysis combines translation, reception, gender and thing theories to tackle the multifaceted question of the reception of Sappho and Catullus, while positioning the two ancient poets within World Literature. Key case-studies include Giovanni Pascoli, Ezra Pound, H.D., Salvatore Quasimodo, Robert Lowell, Louis Zukofsky, Guido Ceronetti, Rosita Copioli and Anne Carson, and comprise a wide range of unpublished archival material.

This paper explores how a transnational approach to university language classes may help develop students’ intercultural competence. Researchers have shown that the integration of literature in the language class has the potential to raise intercultural competence (Deardorff, 2006), especially when migrant and travel literatures are used (Matos, 2012, Paran, 2008). I present an empirical case study of the use of migrant literature in Italian in a Learning Unit (LU) for final-year undergraduate students of Italian language – Common European Framework of Reference for languages (CEFR) C1/C2 (Council of Europe, 2001). After describing the context of the LU, I explain the rationale behind its design, outline its contents, and observe that the LU helps students to improve all canonical linguistic skills as well as intercultural abilities.

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Mediterranean migration is often spectacularized by contemporary global media, creating a hyper-determined discourse that any art form engaging with the migrant experience must consider. On the premise that the aesthetic qualities of visual arts and literature have the potential to destabilize sensationalist rhetoric and produce a more complex understanding of Mediterranean migration, I focus on representations of migration by sea from Northern Africa toward Europe in works from the exhibition The Restless Earth/La terra inquieta (Milan, 2017) and the Italian short story La via del pepe: finta fiaba africana per europei benpensanti (2014), by Massimo Carlotto. I show how strategies such as the integrated use of documentary and imaginative elements, the multimodal metaphoric dimension developed through word and image, and the use of irony may compel the viewer/reader to take an active role in the creation of meaning, contributing to more inclusive and relational approaches to the experience of migrants.