Literature: Italian writers yearned, from the 13th to the 19th century, for the liberation of their "prostituted country", as writer and patriot Ugo Foscolo described it in 1797.
Ignited by the French Revolution of the previous decade, nationalism had spread rapidly throughout Europe. In Italy, it dominated all aspects of life during the Risorgimento.
However, early 19th-century Italian literature was also influenced by a renewed interest in Classicism and a prompt response to the then-dawning Romantic movement.
Foscolo's works are prime examples of this hybrid form.
Foscolo was born at Zante (in the Ionian Isles) in 1778. His father was Venetian; his mother Greek. Following his father's death and their consequent financial difficulties, the Foscolo family left Dalmatia and returned to Venice. Foscolo continued the studies he had begun at the archbishop's seminary in Split at the University of Padua.
His preserved curriculum studiorum confirms the impressive variety of his intellectual interests. He was, at that time, profoundly influenced by Cesarotti, whose versions of the poems of legendary Gaelic poet and warrior Oisin, contributed to their popularity in Italy.
They also provided emerging poets - including Foscolo himself and Leopardi - with a new thematic and stylistic repertoire.
In Venetian intellectual circles and in the youthful group that gathered around Cesarotti, the troubled Foscolo found a fertile environment to feed his "wandering ways". Along with passionate relationships and his first literary efforts, he was embroiled in stormy political discussions. He quickly realised that, for him, literature and politics were inseparable.
Thus, his literary debut was inspired by political disillusionment. Foscolo's desire for a liberated Italy was so intense that he not only wrote an ode for Napoleon - welcomed as "Italy's liberator" - he also fought in his army. However, his infatuation with the French general was short-lived. It came to a bitter end when Napoleon sold the Republic of Venice - Foscolo's "homeland" - to the Austrians (under the Treaty of Campoformio, 1798).
The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis is Foscolo's heartfelt response to these events. The book - the first Italian novel - consists of pretend letters written by the eponymous protagonist to his closest friend, Lorenzo Alderani. It is also a biographical story: Ortis was a real person and, like Foscolo, was a young student in Padua when he committed suicide in circumstances similar to those detailed in the novel.
This epistolary narrative blends fervent patriotism and romantic love: Jacopo's anguished relationship with his country constantly intersects with his grief-stricken love for Teresa (a married woman reminiscent of Don Quixote's Dulcinea). The desperation of the opening line of his first letter to Lorenzo in 1797 - "the sacrifice of our homeland is complete" - and the poignant crescendo in his last letter to Teresa before, two years later, taking his life - "I loved you, I loved you and I still love you" - show the fusion of grand nationalism and personal romance.
While recognising the novelty of this sub-genre, critics have identified Goethe's The Sorrows of the Young Werther as Foscolo's model. However, their works are different. The political element, cardinal to Foscolo's novel, is absent in Goethe's. Also, the theme of the protagonist's suicide, "announced" at the beginning of Werther, emerges gradually but climaxes at the end of Ortis.
In the last years of his life, Foscolo reassessed the pessimism and intense feelings that had compelled him to write The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis. Several young Italians shared Jacopo's sentiments and copied his self-destruction. In particular, the patriotic element - which Foscolo regularly updated in the several editions of the novel (Bologna 1798, Zurich 1816 and London 1817) - subsided into what critics termed "a resigned contemplation of the past glories of his divided country".
In this calmer yet equally bleak mood, Foscolo wrote what is considered his masterpiece: Dei sepolcri (Brescia, 1807). This poem, too, had a political matrix. Napoleon's Edict of Saint Cloud (1804), as well as subsequent Austrian legislation, prescribed that burials be outside inhabited areas and that graves be plain and uniform for all classes of people.
Foscolo's response is a lament to human mortality shrouded in the eternal light of myth. Contemporary allusions and classical references are interwoven in a balanced and controlled style that critics have unfailingly highlighted (and that impressed Thomas Moore when the Italian poet recited the poem to him in London).
In Of Tombs, Foscolo asserts that sepulchres are of no use to the dead but can be inspirational for the living. The following excerpt best explains his view:
The urns of strong men stimulate great minds
To deeds of great distinction; and these urns
Make sacred for the traveller that earth
Which holds them.
Sometimes history gives back what it has taken away. This return is often posthumous, especially for patriots. So it was for Foscolo. The earth that first held his remains was foreign. His anti-Napoleonic and then anti-Austrian attitude forced him to constant travels in Italy and ultimately to exile in Switzerland and England, where he died at Turnham Green (now a station on London's underground line) in 1827.
However, in 1871 - the year in which Italy's liberation was eventually completed - Foscolo's remains were brought back to his native country. From Cheswick cemetery they were transported to their final resting place in the Florentine basilica of Santa Croce. There they lie beside monuments to those "ardent intellects of Italy": Petrarch, Macchiavelli, Michelangelo, Galilei and Alfieri. (Foscolo had coined the famous phrase in Of Tombs).
Among his other works is a translation into Italian of Sterne's Sentimental Journey. He alleged that a copy of Sterne's work was given to him by an Irish soldier, one Nathaniel Cookman. More certainly, out of Ireland came one of the finest studies in English of Foscolo's masterpiece: Of Virgin Muses and of Love: A Critical Study of Foscolo's Dei sepolcri (1981), by the late academic Tom O'Neill.
The first, anonymous translation of Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis appeared in London in 1814; a second, by Douglas Radcliff-Umstead, was published in the US in 1970. This new translation - skilful and engaging - is by the prolific and prize-winning translator J.G. Nichols. He is also the author of the new translation of Dei sepolcri, previously rendered as Of Sepulchres by Thomas Bergin in 1971.
Past and present critics, including Harold Bloom, have routinely called Foscolo "a Romantic poet". However, the clichés of Romanticism have too often clouded a complete understanding of his importance.
In the difficult and complex years of transition from Enlightenment to Romanticism, from 18th-century materialism to Romantic angst, Foscolo gave his uncompromising voice to "a lay earthly faith based on the highest human values of truth, justice, beauty, patriotism and liberty".
These new translations of Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis and Dei sepolcri published by Hesperus Press serve as a timely reminder to scholars and readers of modern literature in general, and of modern Italian literature in particular, that Foscolo is a major writer.
Marco Sonzogni is faculty fellow in Italian at University College, Dublin
Marco Sonzogni