With Francesca Muoio and Luca Trezza, a tribute to Dante Alighieri but even before that to Matilde Donnarumma Pierro who translated the songs of the Divine Comedy into Neapolitan.
Saturday, March 18, at 21.00:30 p.m., at the Teatro Bolivar (Via Bartolomeo Caracciolo, XNUMX), directed by Nu'Tracks, comes “Divin 'a 'mmente Dante”, a tribute to Dante by and with Francesca Muoio and Luca Trezza. The show will propose listening to a Divine Comedy different from the one studied at school so that the elderly, adults and young people can perhaps better appreciate its beauty and recognize its familiarity.
There was a Neapolitan woman, Matilde Donnarumma Pierro, great-granddaughter of the namesake Pierro, owner of the famous Neapolitan publishing house with which Benedetto Croce, Salvatore Di Giacomo, Matilde Serao, Gabriele D'Annunzio and Eduardo Scarpetta also printed their works, who thought it would be a good idea to use her dialect to "translate" Dante's work and thus make it more understandable to the people. It was 1963 and the Divine Comedy in Neapolitan was published with the identical structure of the original of 14.233 verses in hendecasyllable tercets with linked rhyme. One hundred cantos that unfortunately, however, Matilde did not have time to publish all of them. We have the cantos of Hell, some of Purgatory, but no trace of Paradise. The writer herself, however, declared that it was not a real translation because "the poet is inimitable, untranslatable, but one can get very close without betraying his thought and language."
“Dante was the first to play with the musicality of languages and dialects and to realize their great artistic power – say Trezza and Muoio, while explaining where the idea for “Divin 'a 'mmente” came from -. The poet knew that every language produces a literature and every literature can multiply into other and other languages, until it spreads like an infinite stain throughout the world. And this is exactly what happened to the Divine Comedy, which has now been translated into two hundred and more different languages and dialects, to reach two hundred thousand and more peoples and make it today truly a universal work. We therefore want to expose in a light and simple way the structure of the work alternating it with the reading of some fragments of these "new" cantos of the Inferno – the authors and actors continue – Dante teaches us that remembering is fundamental and that is why “Tien 'a mmente!”,
"Tien 'a mmente!”, the famous Neapolitan saying, perfectly explains the meaning of what we want to say with this project. Tien 'a mmente the Divine Comedy, tien 'a mmente that it is divine and because it is, tien 'a mmente Dante, his genius and his poetry and, above all, tien 'a mment that the dialect of each individual people is an inestimable heritage that, like a tenderly implacable mirror, reveals to us every time what we were and what we are today. In homage to Dante Alighieri, to Matilde Donnarumma Pierro, to Naples and to all the other polyglot Dantes scattered throughout the world”.
Article published on March 15, 2023 - 10pm
