Luca Beltrami explores the Fondo Carlo Levi (Carlo Levi collection), available at the “Renzo Deaglio” Library in Alassio. He focusses on two drafts of Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, one connected to the English translation by Frances Frenaye (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1947) and the other to a school edition of the book, edited by Virginia Galante Garrone (Milano: Mursia, 1966). Moreover, he compares the representation of Lucania as a sort of terrible stepmother in Cristo to the paradisiac image of Liguria emerging from some of Levi’s articles in «La Stampa» in the Fifties.
Patrizia Guida’s contribution analyzes the letters between Levi and the US publishers of the English translation of the book (cited above), Christ stopped at Eboli. Furthermore, she focusses on Frenaye’s translation strategies, mainly the attempt to produce a text that “does not seem a translation” (116) by eliminating some paratextual elements, such as the Preface and the notes of the translator.
Guido Sacerdoti deals with Levi’s painting before and after the exile experience in Lucania: on the one hand, he underlines the relevant bonds between Cristo and the paintings of the exile; on the other, he illustrates the use of some pictorial themes (like Southern peasants) in Levi’s paintings after the war.
Giuseppe Lupo faces the question of Levi’s legacy and the so-called levismo, whose fascination derived from Ernesto De Martino’s great consideration of Levi’s work as an inspiring model to understand the Italian South. In addition to mentioning many publications inspired by Cristo (like Giovanni Russo’s Baroni e contadini [1955]), Lupo calls the attention to the coeval attempts to offer an alternative representation of the South (such as Elio Vittorini’s and Raffaele Crovi’s), tracking the dichotomy between levismo and antilevismo also in the Italian literature of the last decades.
Anna Ferrari problematizes Lucania’s otherness as depicted by Levi in Cristo, focussing on the “mutual approaching” (172) between Levi’s and Aliano’s apparently incompatible worlds. Through the analysis of some stylistic signs (such as the revealing use of the dialect version of “Aliano”, namely Gagliano), Ferrari highlights Levi’s will to enter that world and its problem and to give its inhabitants the «chance/necessity of a redemption» (177).
Calvino’s interpretation of Cristo (particularly in the article “La compresenza dei tempi” [1967]) returns in the last paper of the volume, in which Giuseppe Bonifacino examines the utopic aesthetics of Cristo. He reads Levi’s work in the light of the “coexistence” of a historic, modern time and a remote “temporal and spatial otherness” (185), connected with the typically modernist search for the “utopia of the authentic” (194).
To sum up, thanks to its multifaceted gaze on Levi’s work, the volume as a whole is a precious tool for a better understanding of the cultural, literary and historical complexity of Cristo si è fermato a Eboli. While establishing a rewarding dialogue with the already rich bibliography on Cristo, Giannone’s volume offers new and convincing interpretations of its most intriguing themes.
[In “Quaderni di Italianistica”, Canadian Society for Italian studies, vol. 37, n. 2, 2016, pp. 259-260]
