Word: manzoni
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Legend has it that Sir Walter Scott once met Alessandro Manzoni and fervently congratulated him on his historical novel, I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed). Manzoni replied modestly that the book owed everything to Scott. "In that case," said Sir Walter, "this is my finest work...
...stuffed with figures of villainy that most Americans have forgotten ever existed, and 3) it has been more traduced than translated into English. The newest English version, the work of a British writer named Archibald Colquhoun, is a happy improvement on the earlier ones, and should establish Manzoni's virtues with curious U.S. readers as well as any translation is ever likely...
Vengeance, Fate, Evil. The betrothed of Manzoni's title are two young Italian peasants, Renzo and Lucia, who lived near Milan in the time of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). In the very choice of such a hero & heroine, Manzoni kicked over the elegant traces that had bound Italian writers to the creaky old chariot of classicism. Free of that dead weight, his story tears off on a wild, romantic ride...
...goes, hound after hare, with the jaws of fate snapping just too late at least every other chapter, until the plague of 1630 almost takes them all. Beneath all this activity, the conventional apparatus of the romantic novel, lies the real action of Manzoni's story: the inner feeling of his people. And in this Manzoni shows himself a psychologist to stand firmly with the finest novelists of his century...
...wait till after supper, parish-wise and heaven-foolish all day long. The wicked nun is not simply wicked, but a believable wretch who got that way partly through her own vanity, partly because she was hideously tricked by her father into a life she had no call for. Manzoni's novel has sizable literary faults, e.g., the narrative is clogged, especially toward the end, with long passages of unabsorbed history. But his humanity has touched generations of Europeans. Said Goethe after reading The Betrothed: "Everything which is of the poet's heart is perfect...