F. B. Cicala traduttore di Orazio (1814) tra Napoleonidi e Restaurazione

For F. B. Cicala (1765-1815) Orazio’s translation from Latin into ‘Tuscan’ was a literary challenge and a historically realizable dream. He wanted to fight hand to hand with the Latin poet. Suggestive images, the symbols of youth and death, mythological references, the variety of metrics according to form and content illuminate his soul and the reader’s one. In this way Orazio’s translation becomes a lesson of melancholic and virile waiting, but with this trial Cicala is conscious of the final loss in the transformation of art. Sense of crisis and powers of poetic truth are all interlinked between history, invention and literary tradition.