Everything about Giosu Carducci totally explained
Giosuè Carducci (
July 27,
1835 –
February 16,
1907) was an Italian poet, oft reckoned one of Italy's greatest; also, a teacher. He was very influential and was regarded as the unofficial
national poet of modern
Italy. In 1906 he became the first Italian to win the
Nobel Prize in Literature.
Biography
He was born in
Valdicastello, a small town in the northwest corner of
Tuscany in Province of
Lucca. His father, a doctor, was an advocate of the unification of Italy. Because of his politics, the family was forced to move several times during Carducci's childhood, eventually settling for a few years in
Florence.
From the time he was in college, he was fascinated with the restrained style of
Greek and
Roman antiquity, and his mature work reflects a restrained classical style, often using the classical meters of such Latin poets as
Horace and
Virgil. He translated Book 9 of
Homer's
Iliad into Italian.
He received his Ph.D. in 1856 from the
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and began teaching school. The following year, he published his first collection of poems,
Rime. These were difficult years for Carducci: his father died, and his brother committed suicide.
In 1859, he married Elvira Menicucci, and they'd four children. He briefly taught Greek at a high school in
Pistoia, and then was appointed Italian professor at the university in
Bologna. He was a popular lecturer and a fierce critic of literature and society. His political views were consistently opposed to Christianity generally and the secular power of the Catholic Church in particular.
“I know neither truth of God nor peace with the Vatican or any priests. They are the real and unaltering enemies of Italy,” he said in his later years.
This anti-clerical revolutionary zeal is prominently showcased in his most famous poem, the deliberately blasphemous and provocative "Inno a Satana" (or "Hymn to Satan".) The poem was composed in 1863 as a dinner party toast, published in 1865, then republished in 1869 by Bologna's radical newspaper,
Il Popolo, as a provocation timed to coincide with the 20th Vatican Ecumenical Council, a time when revolutionary fervor directed against the papacy was running high as republicans pressed both politically and militarily for an end of the Vatican’s domination over the papal states.
While "Inno a Satana" had quite a revolutionary impact, Carducci's finest poetry came in later years. His collections
Rime Nuove (
New Rhymes) and
Odi Barbare (
Barbarian Odes) contain his greatest works.
He was the first Italian to win the
Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1906. He was also elected a Senator of Italy. Although his reputation rests primarily on his poetry, he also produced a large body of prose works. Indeed, his prose writings, including literary criticism, biographies, speeches and essays, fill some 20 volumes. Carducci was also an excellent translator and translated some of
Goethe and
Heine into Italian.
He died in
Bologna at the age of 71.
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