Ettore Romagnoli traduttore delle Baccanti

Abstract

At the beginning of the Twentieth Century the Italian philologist Ettore Romagnoli popularised ancient classical culture through his work as translator and director of performances of Greek and Roman dramas. In his plays he attempted to reproduce the unity of the arts that belonged to the mousikē technē and to achieve a modern recreation of ancient sounds and rhythms. The paper aims to analyse the translation of Euripides’ Bacchae by Romagnoli (1912), comparing it with his studies on Greek music and tragedy and with operas. On the one hand, Romagnoli’s translation in Italian verses is based on the musicological theories about the close relationship between music and metrics in ancient Greek poetry; on the other, the adoption of operatic language to translate specific lines of Euripides’ drama is probably oriented to the Italian audience, which would have recognised conventional expressions from the libretti or from famous arias.