ITL 508

Assignment # 9

Riscrivere il seguente brano in italiano, mantenere lo stile dell’originale.

... Paradise Lost is by far the most important survivor of the many heroic poems which were being written all over Europe in the seventeenth century, so that it is often regarded as a solitary and peculiar Puritan work. But Milton’s choice of a Biblical subject was in full accord with the European movement, since the effect of both the Reformation and the Counter Reformation has been to turn epic ambitions away from secular to Christian material. Milton himself had early contemplated a British subject, which would of course have been Christian, but he settled on one of much broader and deeper significance, one which has already attracted other European poets.

When we compare Milton’s poem with the ancient epics, we see that his subject involved special difficulties, difficulties of a kind apparent to some degree in Virgil. These are mostly comprised in one large fact, the widening gulf between material and theme. In Homer material and theme were indivisible; all the spiritual values of life were concentrated in the active courage of the warrior and the traveler in a dark world of flux and futility. The Aeneid, however, moves on more than one level, and we feel a partial disharmony between the prescribed pattern of war and voyaging, the traditional stuff of the epic, and the abstract theme. And Virgil’s abstract theme is not single. It obviously presents the glory of the Italian poets and the Italian destiny. But in a larger way it presents what C. S. Lewis has called "a transition in the world-order, the shift of civilization from the East to the West, the transformation of the little remnant, the reliquia, of the old, into the germ of the new." ...

From: Milton (Englewood Cliff: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p.109.

e-mail the first draft of your assignment to: pina@italianstudies.org - write on the subject line of your e-mail: 508-#9 draft  e-mail by Monday March 26

e-mail the revised assignment to: itl508@italianstudies.org - write on the subject line of your e-mail: 508-#9 revised