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ABSTRACT
This essay addresses how the manifold Italianness of Mary Shelley’s Valperga informs our translation of the novel into Italian. Valperga narrates – and in part fictionalizes, especially through its female figures – Italian Medieval history, based on the author’s wide-ranging and scrupulous research into multiple historiographical sources from Machiavelli to Muratori to Villani. It also engages with the Italian cultural and political scene of Shelley’s own time. The novel was composed between the revolutionary moti of 1820–21 and the later Risorgimento, and powerfully reflects the troubled political climate of the age. Valperga draws on Shelley’s experience of living in early nineteenth-century Italy, as well as on her reading knowledge of Italian, a language that she was successfully endeavouring to learn to speak at the time. There is therefore a special appropriateness, and also a special responsibility, in translating the novel into the language and culture that played such an important role in its formation. This essay provides significant examples of the challenges involved in the translation process.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 A small part of this essay is a revised and extended version of an earlier paper by Lilla Maria Crisafulli, entitled ‘Mary Shelley’s Valperga and Women’s Historical Revisionism’, in Italomania(s): Italy and the English Speaking World from Chaucer to Seamus Heaney: Proceedings of the Georgetown and Kent State University Conference Held in Florence in June 20–21, 2005, and published in 2007 in Florence, by Mauro Pagliai Editore and edited by Giuseppe Galigani.
2 The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennett & Charles E. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 342.
3 Valperga: Or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, ed. Nora Crook, Vol. III, in Nora Crook (with Pamela Clemit), General Editor; Betty T. Bennett, Consulting Editor, The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, 8 vols (London: William Pickering, 1996).
4 The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), I, 203.
5 Ibid., I, 322.
6 The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F. L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), II, 372.
7 The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, I, 362–5, see, in particular, p. 364.
8 P. B. Shelley, Letters, II, 324.
9 The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, I, 323, n. 10.
10 Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘Preface’ to Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, ed Gary Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 73.
11 The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, cit., 85.
12 Ibid.
13 Percy Shelley, Letters, II, 352–4.
14 Mary Shelley, 1996, XI-XII.
15 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, XII (March 1823): 283–93.
16 Ugo Foscolo, Epistolario, XXII (letter 2688, to John Murray, August 11, 1822), 82–3. Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo, 22 vols (Florence: Le Monnier, 1933): XXII, Epistolario: 1822–24, ed. Mario Scotti (1994), 83.
17 Ugo Foscolo, Epistolario, 81.
18 See Sandra Parmegiani’s volume, Ugo Foscolo and English Culture (London: Routledge, 2010), and, in particular, the chapter ‘British Culture in the Epistolario,’ 121–3.
19 Ugo Foscolo, Epistolario: XXII, 82.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 See Walter Scott’s diary, in the entry for 24 November 1825 quoted in Sandra Parmigiani 2010: 120.
23 Ugo Foscolo, Epistolario: XXII, 81–2.
24 Ibid., 82.
25 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
26 Betty T. Bennett, ‘Machiavelli’s and Mary Shelley’s Castruccio: Biography as Metaphor,’ Romanticism 3, no. 2 (1997), 139–51 (p. 144).
27 MSL, 1:307.
28 Mary Shelley, Valperga, translated and edited by Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Keir Elam, 2nd ed. (Milan: Mondadori, 2021).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lilla Maria Crisafulli
Lilla Maria Crisafulli is Alma Mater Professor of English Literature at the University of Bologna. She founded the Interuniversity Centre for the Study of Romanticism (CISR). She is general editor of the journal La Questione Romantica. She has been president of AIA, the Italian Association for English Studies. Her research interests include British Romanticism, Mary and P.B. Shelley, Byron, Romantic women playwrights and poets and Anglo-Italian cultural relations. Her volumes include: Percy Bysshe Shelley - La Realtà del Desiderio, (1999); Romantic Women Poets: Genre and Gender, edited with C. Pietropoli (2007); Women’s Romantic Theatre and Drama: History, Agency, Performance, edited with Elam K. (2010); British Risorgimento. Vol. I. L’unità d’Italia e la Gran Bretagna (2013); Women’s Voices and Genealogies, edited with G. Golinelli (2019).
Keir Elam
Keir Elam is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Bologna. His research interests include early modern literature and drama, the theory of theatre and performance, and intermedial relations. His books include The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (2nd ed. 2002) and the Arden 3 edition of Twelfth Night (2008). His most recent volume is Shakespeare’s Pictures (Bloomsbury, 2017).