All too often D’Annunzio has been labelled a monolingual Italian writer who also wrote in French. Quite a different destiny from, say, Nabokov, or Beckett, or others who are considered as plurilingual writers. Moreover, D’Annunzio's French writings have just as often been labelled second-rate works in comparison to his Italian ones. Giovanni Gullace, for example, describes them as ‘of peripheral importance’ as they ‘reveal no new aspect of his artistic talent’. Their adherence to a francophone literary system has constantly been neglected. At best, these works are considered as documents which show his connections to French literature – sometimes interesting because they are evidence of D’Annunzio's borrowings and plagiarism.
The idea that D’Annunzio's French writings cannot be as valuable as his Italian ones has even been theorised, and some critics have insisted that he is too rooted in the Italian tradition for his French writings to be of value. Gullace, for example, notes ‘his artistic talent was too strongly established in his native tongue to be susceptible of radical metamorphoses, under whatever influence. His linguistic and cultural acquisitions remained, artistically, a foreign world superposed on his native world.’ However, a close reading of D’Annunzio's French writings shows that these judgements oversimplify the question; his relationship to the language of Italy's ‘Latin sister’ cannot be reduced to the bilingual and bicultural competence that, according to George Steiner, characterises the artistic life of canonical bilingual writers.
D’Annunzio himself elaborated upon his relationship to the French language, adopting approaches that range from a pragmatism driven by dissatisfaction with his translators to love for the host language's expressiveness. The purpose of this chapter is to show how, through his writing in French, D’Annunzio was able to work toward his integration into a transnational francophone canon. I shall focus on elements of self-translation that can be spotted in D’Annunzio's writings: in his correspondence with Hérelle, in his Sonnets cisalpins (1896) – which constitute the first work written directly in French by D’Annunzio – and in Le Dit du sourd et muet qui fur miraculé en l’an de grâce 1266 par Brunet Latin.
