L'autotraduzione: genesi del monolinguismo aflierano

Despite his being noble and rich, we may consider Vittorio Alfieri to be a “translated man” of his time. Born in – and speaking the language of – the periphery, he considers himself a man with no language at all. He speaks French and Piemontese fluently – he was born in Asti –, but his Italian (or Tuscan) is poor. In this essay, I claim that self-translation together with translation laid the foundations for his future writing into Italian. To this aim, I will first recall his linguistic growth: from the hate and vulgar French to his beloved and sublime Italian. I will then analyze the genesis of Filippo through his first draft into French and its translation into Italian, a foreign language for him, as it were. Finally, I will peruse Luisa Stolberg’s translation in collaboration with the author from the Italian versification into French. This translation was executed while Alfieri was still changing his Italian versification to Filippo’s Sienne edition. These different stages in the genesis of the first acknowledged tragedy by Alfieri, open up new hypotheses about the function of languages in his creative process.