Edited by Anna Maria Babbi and Vicent Josep Escartí
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 10] 2015
► pp. 119–138
The fortune of Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanch in Italy is characterized by the early interest for this novel expressed since the beginning of the sixteenth century. The documentation on this subject, consisting mainly of letters, shows in particular the early attention of Isabella d’Este for the novel, as witnessed by the letters of the Marquise mentioning the Catalan Tirant, and by the presence of two copies of this text in the inventory drawn up after her death. Furthermore, the first Italian translation of Tirant, written by Lelio Manfredi between 1515 and 1519 (and printed posthumously in Venice in 1538), was made for Federico II Gonzaga. Once provided a summary on the genesis of this translation (as it can be reconstructed on the basis of the information provided by Manfredi’s correspondence with the court of Mantua), the paper focuses on some specific aspects of the text, studied in relation to its Catalan source. The analysis confirms once again what has been observed by previous scholarship, i.e. the extreme stylistic care paid by the author in transferring Martorell’s text into Italian.
Article language: Italian