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More Swinburne-D'Annunzio Parallels

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Calvin S. Brown Jr.*
Affiliation:
University of Georgia

Extract

In 1896 Enrico Thovez, in an essay on L'arte del comporre di Gabriele d'Annunzio, made an open accusation of plagiarism, and supported it by pointing out numerous parallels between d'Annunzio's work and passages from Flaubert, Baudelaire, Maeterlinck, Verlaine, Shelley, and Whitman. Croce undertook d'Annunzio's defense, and Thovez, in a reply to Croce, became so satirical as to remark: “Mi vien da pensare al propositio di un amico mio, il quale afferma burlescamente di voler dare un' edizione delle opere del d'Annunzio ‘col testo a fronte’.” In the same essay he adds Tommasseo and Maupassant to the list of creditors.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1940

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References

1 Reprinted in Thovez, L'arco d'Ulisse (Napoli: Ricciardi, 1921), pp. 32–47.

2 La Critica (March, 1898, and Nov., 1903).

3 Thovez, Il pastore, il gregge, e la zampogna (Napoli: Ricciardi, 1926), p. 170.—This book, first published in 1910, contains several essays on d'Annunzio, one of them, “II mio ed il tuo” (pp. 162–172), dealing entirely with the accusation of plagiarism.

4 See Paul Falzon, “Reminiscences of Swinburne in d'Annunzio,” N & Q, 11th Series, v, 210–203. Falzon's passages are included in the large collection of Swinburne-d'Annunzio parallels which appeared in four studies of the “Fonti d'Annunziane” in La Critica, viii; 22–31; x, 257–263; xi, 431–440; xii, 15–25.

5 Huneker, Iconoclasts: A Book of Dramatists (N. Y.: Scribner's, 1914), p. 323.

6 Antero Meozzi, Significato della vita e dell' opera di Gabriele d'Annunzio (Pisa: Vallermi, 1929), i, 264–265.

7 Since d'Annunzio's plays were read in various editions, references are given simply by act and scene for the prose plays, and by line for those in verse. The speaker is always named.

8 All Swinburne references are to Collected Poetical Works by Algernon Charles Swinburne (N. Y.: Harper, n.d.).

9 Critica, 1 424.

10 i, 30. Swinburne's note points out his indebtedness to a fragment of Aeschylus' Niobe for the last six lines. However, the extent of other borrowings from the passage quoted above makes it clear that Swinburne, not Aeschylus, was d'Annunzio's source.

11 A. C. Swinburne, Poèmes el ballades, traduction de Gabriel, Mourey (Paris: Albert Savine, 1891). Chants avant l'aube, traduit par Gabriel Mourey (Paris: Stock, 1909).

12 L'arco d'Ulisse, p. 45.

15 i, 160.

14 Lines 1316–17.

15 Poèmes et ballades, 2nd. ed. (Paris: Stock, 1909), p. 204.

16 He does not seem to have used Nouveaux poèmes et ballades, translated by Albert Savine (Paris: Stock, 1902).

17 Compare lines 425–438 with 1300, ff.; 1314, ff. with 3107, ff.; 1329–38 with 3134, ff.

18 It occurs, as quoted above, in La città morta, i, iii, and is alluded to again in the same scene. A different form of it is found in iii, ii, and is repeated verbatim in v, i. It appears in Fedra, 751, as “Tutto il viso ti pulsa.” The original form, in Swinburne's Phaedra (i, 29), is “My whole face beats.”