Talk:Italo Svevo
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Second change. I deleted mention of Svevo's religiosity, which is irrelevant for his literary production (and inappropriate for the shortness of this voice). Sara again. Ciao.
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Attention! Svevo did write in an excellent Italian! Any Italian still considers it such, today that Italians do have Italian as their mother-tongue. Anyhow, Italy was largely progressing towards the unification of its language by Svevo's time, so you cannot talk of Svevo's Triestino as you had to talk of any other writer, up to Manzoni, needing to borrow another language, i.e. Tuscanian (Manzoni said he had to "sciacquare in Arno" his literary language, i.e., wash one's originary Italian dialect in the river crossing Florence). On the topic, which is indeed very interesting, you can read more if you search for "questione della lingua", which has been lasting since Dante's first use of "volgare", till Italian re-unification in 1861 and further. Sara
—Preceding unsigned comment added by Sarettolina (talk • contribs) 17:47, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
I think that mentioning he wrote Italian badly is without merit. It is not bad Italian, it is the Tuscan language in a Triestino mouth. And it is arguable if many of the critics of his Italian ever read a page of his works.
I believe the only two English translations are titled "Confessions of Zeno" and "Zeno's Conscience." I have a copy of both, and the preface to the latter says that the former was the only prior English translation. I thus changed the literal rendering "Conscience of Zeno" to "Zeno's Conscience." Changing the syntax into a possessive when translating from a Romance Language into English is pretty common anyway, and it's also the phrasing that English readers will be familiar with.
24.238.167.44 04:02, 29 June 2006 (UTC)MOB
