Transnational Dante

Heather Sottong is an Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at FLAME University in Pune, India. Her research focuses on the Italian diaspora in Argentina and the literary appropriation of Dante in the Americas.

Introduction 1 1. Bartolome Mitre on Immigration and Argentine Identity 17 2. Bartolome Mitre's Translation of the Divine Comedy: An Anti-Martin Fierro 40 3. Leopoldo Lugones on Immigration and Argentine Identity 58 4. Hypermedievalizing and Demedievalizing Dante: Leopoldo Lugones's and Jorge Luis Borges's Rewritings of Inferno V 76 5. Rewriting Dante to Parody Lugones: Borges's "The Aleph" 94 6. Leopoldo Marechal on Immigration and Argentine Identity 117 7. Dante's Vita nuova and Book 6 of Adan Buenosayres: Solveig as Beatrice, Solveig as Argentina 147 8. The Journey to Cacodelphia: A Parody of Inferno and Modern-Day Argentina 164 Conclusion: Argentina's Failure to Produce a Divine Comedy 200 Notes 205 Bibliography 243 Index 255

In this pioneering book Heather Sottong explores illuminating connections between Argentine literature and Dante, offering many insights and apercus in carefully chosen case studies from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sottong opens revelatory ground, for example, when foregrounding president Bartolome Mitre's engagements with Dante, including his 1889 translation of the Comedy, in the context of his communications with Giuseppe Garibaldi, when the two statesmen were respectively working to create the modern nations of Argentina and Italy.---Efrain Kristal, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles Through a series of studies on singular Argentine authors, Sottong lucidly demonstrates how Dante and his Divine Comedy, seen by Italian thinkers and political figures as the source for an imagined Italian national identity in the nineteenth century, in turn inspired Argentine authors in a similar fashion. This is an important, pioneering book that will open the field of Dante Studies to new transnational studies of the poem's circulation, translation, and global influence.---Kristina M. Olson, Associate Professor of Italian, George Mason University, author of Courtesy Lost: Dante, Boccaccio and the Literature of History