While a reader of an English translation of The Betrothed cannot directly pick up on any of this, the novel’s curious linguistic history does reflect how it became so central to Italian literature, and what it can offer to a contemporary reader. But it has a much greater claim on being a national novel than the other works I mentioned above: after publishing its first edition, Manzoni went back and re-wrote it - or rather, he translated it, from his Lombardian dialect of northern Italy to central Italy’s Tuscan dialect, which Manzoni, as others in his day, wanted to promote as the standard for all of Italy.ġ While today an author who rewrote their novel to remove its language of regional peculiarities would probably be accused of erasing their cultural heritage in order to sell more books, in Manzoni’s case, adopting the Tuscan dialect allowed him to cast off the stuffy, polished style of Lombardian pose and spend days on the streets of Florence absorbing Italian as it was spoken. īut can The Betrothed even be called a novel of Italy? It was, after all, first published more than 30 years before Italy became a nation state, and it is set in a time before there was even much of a concept of nation states. The most famous of this category of novel is Italy’s The Betrothed. It pains me to assign novels by nationality and not by author, but this is essentially how they are remembered.
It's not that other European countries don't have a rich corpus of novels from the 19th century, only that they are typically represented in English-language publishing with just one novel each: Spain’s La Regenta, Portugal’s The Maias, Poland's The Doll, Denmark’s Niels Lyhne … probably there are others. These are the countries with multiple major authors and with a globally acknowledged tradition that stretches across the century.
In the canon of the 19th century European novel, three countries produce the bulk of what we in the 21st century read: Britain, France, and Russia. Moore and with a reface by Jhumpa Lahiri. By Alessandro Manzoni, translated by Michael F.
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