Irish Literature in Italy and in German speaking countries

The aim of the essay is to provide a concise comparative view of the reception of Irish culture in German speaking countries and in Italy. Where possible, similarities and differences in the reception of Irish culture in the two different contexts are highlighted The essay will first take a cursory glance at Italy’s and Germany’s perception of Ireland from the 18th to the 19th century and it will then concentrate on some major issues relating to Irish-Italian and Irish-German cultural inter-relations in the 20th century. Irish literature in German-speaking countries is dealt with by Anna Fattori. Fiorenzo Fantaccini examines the Italian context. Abstract of the part about Irish-German relations: In 18th century Germany the need of a national consciousness and a culture/literature with peculiar national features was very strong. In this process of “teutonisation of German literature” (F. Strich) English culture and, in particular, Irish literature played a significant role. In a way, from the very beginning modern German literature was under the shadow of Irish literature. In fact the German word empfindsam, which is used to define the ‘new’ literature (empfindsame Literatur, Empfindsamkeit) which was moving away from French Classicism and was looking with interest at Britain, was suggested by Lessing in 1768 to Sterne’s translator, Bode, as the translation for the English word ‘sentimental’ in the German version of the Sentimental Journey. It would be inconceivable to imagine Goethe’s representation of nature in die Leiden des jungen Werther without Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, a novel Goethe had read and appreciated. Furthermore, the young Goethe had translated The Deserted Village and had been affected by its melancholy tone arising from the consciousness that civilisation would destroy the rural way of life, a topic we find in Goethe’s Werther. Attention will be given to Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) too, who wrote his humorous digressive novels under the spell of Sterne and his satiric texts – Essigfabrik, as he calls them – under the influence of Swift. In the 19th century we do have some texts showing interest in Ireland, i. e. Die Pfälzer in Irlandby the (today forgotten) Nobel Prize writer, Paul Heyse, but it is not until the beginning of the 20th century that Irish literature can be said to have a serious impact on German artists. Starting from this period, Ireland is not perceived merely as ‘the island behind the island’, but thanks to the German translations of texts by Yeats, Wilde and Joyce it is considered as a country with its own culture, literature and Weltanschauung. In particular, the article will focus on Joyce’s influence – the first German translation of Ulysses appeared in 1927 – and impact on novel writing in German literature, both in terms of form and content. Attention will be given to Alfred Döblin, Hermann Broch and Arno Schmidt. The article will concentrate on Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) as a case study and on Broch’s essay, Joyce und die Gegenwart(1936)(“I see in Ulysses a perfect realization of everything which it is possible to express in a novel”). It is not easy to think of a novelist in post-war Germany who is not indebted to Joyce for the use of inner monologue and style. As for representations of Ireland and of Irishness, in addition to the well known Irisches Tagebuch by Heinrich Böll, attention will be given to the perception of the Emerald Isle in a selection of novels by contemporary Swiss-German writers (G. Alioth, M. Baur, H. Schertenleib, R. Lappert). From the point of view of imagology, they often reproduce established clichés about Ireland, contrasting its variety of landscape with the dullness and narrowness of Swiss everyday life. In Germany Irish writers have been published by notable publishing houses and have often been translated by writers: Hildesheimer has translated passages from Finnegan’s Wake, Heinrich Böll has translated G. B. Shaw, J. M. Synge, Flann O’Brien, Brendan Behan. In some cases German translations have established themselves as bestsellers.