Adone

by Giambattista Marino, Emilio Russo (Editor)

"È del poeta il fin la meraviglia”, affermava Giovan Battista Marino, e veramente è fonte di meraviglia l’Adone, il maggior manifesto poetico del barocco italiano ed europeo. Nella favola di Adone, antieroe passivo e femmineo, negazione dell’eroe forte e coraggioso, in un divertito e continuo rovesciamento si mescolano e insieme si negano tutti i generi tradizionali, dalla favola mitologica al poema cavalleresco, al romanzo d’avventura. E nell’esile storia del giovinetto amato da Venere e ucciso da un cinghiale si innestano come in un caleidoscopio innumerevoli digressioni e straordinarie prove di virtuosismo poetico, in cui Marino trasfuse tesori di poesia attinti da un’infinita selva di autori antichi e moderni, ripresi, contaminati, variati.
L’Adone è un poema che creò da sé le sue regole dettando un nuovo modello alla poesia della sua epoca perché, come affermava l’autore, “la vera regola è saper rompere le regole a tempo e luogo, accomodandosi al costume corrente e al gusto del secolo”.

a cura di Emilio Russo

in collaborazione con l’associazione degli italianisti

Genres: Poetry, Italian Literature

2343 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1623

About the author

È considerato il massimo rappresentante della poesia barocca in Italia, identificata, dal suo nome, anche come marinismo. La sua influenza su letterati italiani e stranieri del Seicento fu immensa. Egli era infatti il rappresentante di un movimento che si stava affermando in tutta Europa, come il preziosismo in Francia, l'eufuismo in Inghilterra (dal romanzo di John Lyly Euphues), il culteranismo in Spagna.

Reviews

[Giulia Iaccarino]

Non sono riuscita ad apprezzarlo davvero ma dato che è uno dei pilastri della letteratura italiana non emetterò giudizio per non essere picchiata

[Kristján Hannesson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Giambattista Marino was an adventurer, constantly on the move, escaping censorship of the paranoid Inquisition (with occasional stints in jail) and sparring with other poets, a kind of precursor of Casanova a century later. He was incredibly talented, already famous at the age of 16, writing marvelous poems that aim to dazzle the reader at every page, and the verses just kept pouring out of him like music out of Mozart. I sometimes have the feeling that he wrote his poems faster than we read them.
The Adonis is one of the longest poems in the Italian language, and there is no need to read it through linearly because it was both conceived and structured in a highly episodic way. Older abandoned works are grafted into the main narrative as digressions and the narrative often stops to explore totally different spheres of reality. The frame story is the love affair between Venus and the lovely shepherd boy Adonis, who one day gets gored to death by a boar, lending his name to a flower that springs up in his memory, and becoming a resurrection figure (that Frazer later sees as a precursor of the crucified Man-God of Judeo-Christianity). To readers of Roman or Greek literature, this myth seems tailor-made for a touching pastoral poem, but it is one of Marino's great generic innovations to stretch the narrative into the longest Italian epic to date. Hence, any good edition of the poem also prints as an introduction the letter of Chapelain, Marino's friend, who endeavors to explain the idea behind the poem. It is not an epic in the classical sense, nor is it a chivalric romance in the style of Ariosto or Tasso, because Marino refuses to treat wars or other world-historical events, and even though the desire of Venus for Adonis is at the heart of the plot, it is not really a love story either. It is, as Chapelain maintains, the world's first "epic of peace".
What this means in effect is an encyclopedic exploration of all the great things that this world has to offer. Marino is particularly taken by new discoveries in technology, in stagecraft, painting and sculpture. If you read nothing else from it, look at cantos 5 and 6, on Tragedy and The Garden of Pleasure, and you will get a sense of why poetry in baroque Italy is characterized as "Marinism", and why writers of prose could hope for no higher praise that to be called the 'Marino of prose'.

[Jakob · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the most influential books in the 17. Century. Definitely not an easy read!