Trovatori a Modena nel XIX secolo: il Novellino provenzale di Giovanni Galvani
Troubadours in 19th Century Modena: Giovanni Galvani’s Novellino provenzale

Summary/Abstract: Giovanni Galvani (Modena 1806-1873) cannot be considered one of the first Italian Romance philologists, but his research on the poetry of the Provençal troubadours contributed nevertheless to the development of Romance Philology in Italy. Among his Occitan works, the Novellino provenzale, a collection of translations of troubadour vidas and razos, deserves a special mention. This book, in its early editorial stages, is the oldest Romance translation of troubadour vidas and razos, but it is not a real collection of translations: Galvani suppresses some parts of the Provençal text, inserts additions and extensively re-elaborates the plot of the ancient biographer. The reasons for these interventions, which do not derive from imperfect knowledge of the ancient Provençal language, are manifold: moral censorship, literary exegetical interventions, narrative explanations interpolated to the text where the translator did not consider troubadour prose sufficiently clear, etc. The first part of this contribution reconstructs the editorial history of the Novellino provenzale; the second part analyses Galvani’s interventions on the Provençal text and tries to explain the meaning of his personal reworking of the text of the ancient vidas.

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