Sappho and Catullus in Twentieth-Century Italian and North American Poetry

Abstract

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Quasimodo, Robert Lowell, Louis Zukofsky, Guido Ceronetti, Rosita Copioli and Anne Carson, and comprise a wide range of unpublished archival material.