Volume 46, Number 3, 2025 Access to current issues of this journal requires a subscription. Stefano D’Arrigo, Poet and Novelist: New Readings for the Twenty-First Century Guest-edited by Daria Biagi and Chiara Caradonna

EN:

This essay examines The Buyer of Dead Souls (2024) by Stefano D’Arrigo, a “free adaptation” of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842). Through a comparative analysis of the two novels, this essay explores how D’Arrigo reconfigures the concept of dead souls, reinterpreting themes, characters, and settings over a century after the publication of Gogol’s novel. Rather than merely transposing Gogol’s social critique to the Southern Italian context, D’Arrigo, in light of the Italian Resurgence, introduces a vision of hope and renewal—an element subtly implied in Gogol’s work.

EN:

Codice siciliano, Stefano D’Arrigo’s debut work, was first published in 1957 by Scheiwiller and later republished in 1978 by Mondadori. Despite its initial success, the book has not yet received sufficient critical attention. This essay aims to contribute to the study of D’Arrigo’s poetic oeuvre by highlighting the significance of its sacred and religious references. These references serve a specific purpose, which D’Arrigo himself outlines in a typewritten document in which he describes the “antagonistic function” of certain quotations in relation to his poems. This essay contextualizes D’Arrigo’s literary endeavour and, through key examples, demonstrates how this “antagonistic function” operates in Codice siciliano and the meanings it conveys.

EN:

This essay employs Ernesto de Martino’s concept of the “relic” to analyze Stefano D’Arrigo’s novel Horcynus Orca (1975), arguing that by revitalizing archaic narrative forms the novel challenges modern cultural structures and creates new meaning in the face of a perceived “end of the world.” After examining the intellectual context in which D’Arrigo’s novel takes shape—particularly the circle around the magazine Vie Nuove—the analysis focuses on a tragicomic funeral chant performed in the novel by the Femminotas. It shows how this archaic chorus, ineffective in postwar Italy, is “translated” into the modern novel by a narrator who is both participant and outsider. Thus, Horcynus Orca explores how art can actively replace defunct magical-ritual systems with new symbolic formations that respond to the altered needs of the present.

EN:

This essay explores Stefano D’Arrigo’s negotiation with visual representations of artisanal fishing communities while initially conceptualizing what would later become Horcynus Orca. It delves into the debates and aesthetic choices of a group of mainly Sicilian painters leaning towards Gramscian Marxism with whom D’Arrigo collaborated during the 1950s. This allows an exploration of D’Arrigo’s activity as an art critic, amateur photographer, and writer. I argue that this complex engagement with visuality, anthropology, and the question of realism in the arts is of crucial importance to assess both D’Arrigo’s development as a writer and the specificity of his novel, as it radically departs—aesthetically and ideologically—from the conventional tenets of realism. D’Arrigo finally reaches a highly original position that aligns with political ecology and recent debates in anthropology.

IT:

Il saggio studia le direttrici geografiche del romanzo di Stefano D’Arrigo mostrandone la pertinenza dal punto di vista diegetico. L’orchestrazione cronotopica di Horcynus Orca rigidamente orchestrata dentro le coordinate dello Stretto di Messina risulta così al servizio di una storia che mira a narrare gli esiti storici, psicologici e culturali della devastazione bellica, che rende impossibile il ritorno del reduce alla consueta abitazione dello spazio nativo, a quella “assiduità” che trama ogni forma del vivere comunitario.

EN:

This essay investigates Primo Levi’s complex engagement with the passage from Stefano D’Arrigo’s Horcynus Orca (1975), which Levi selected for inclusion in his 1981 anthology La ricerca delle radici (The Search for Roots). Through a close reading of D’Arrigo’s depiction of a German soldier’s execution by Neapolitan children, the analysis explores the episode’s symbolic, ethical, and narrative force—and its resonance with Levi’s own reflections on violence and justice. Drawing on new archival material, the essay also examines Levi’s correspondence with his friend and translator Heinz Riedt, who as early as the 1960s expressed interest in translating Horcynus Orca and first introduced Levi to the novel. Finally, the discussion turns to Levi’s short story “Ospiti” (“Guests,” 1978), in which two German soldiers are spared by partisans, offering a quiet, yet realistic counterpoint to D’Arrigo’s mythic scene. The comparison sheds light on Levi’s evolving stance towards vengeance, moral complexity, and the ethical representation of the enemy.

FR:

La traduction intégrale en français du roman de Stefano D’Arrigo, Horcynus Orca (1975), parue fin 2023, donne accès à l’originalité de ce roman pour le public francophone. Les difficultés qu’impliquent un tel travail viennent pour l’essentiel de la complexité du langage adopté par D’Arrigo, dont l’italien, tissé de dialectes et de néologismes, est particulièrement inventif. Cette traduction, dans le sillage de celle de Moshe Kahn en allemand (2015), permet de découvrir un ouvrage désigné par George Steiner comme « un chef-d’œuvre que presque personne ne connaît » et pour lequel il n’est pas facile de convaincre de partager le plaisir qu’il procure. Les confidences des deux traducteurs et celles de leurs collègues au cours de différentes tables rondes permettent de comprendre les enjeux que D’Arrigo s’était donnés et les difficultés qu’il avait dû affronter au long de la vingtaine d’années de gestation du roman.

EN:

This essay focuses on the overcoming of gender binarism as a posthuman element in Stefano D’Arrigo’s Cima delle nobildonne (1985), a novel that marks a rupture with respect to his first published novel, Horcynus Orca (1975). Through an analysis of gender fluidity, corporeal transformation, and the placenta as a liminal emblem between life and death, this study situates D’Arrigo’s work within contemporary debates on posthumanism and gender theory. The surgical sequence involving Amina—a pseudo-hermaphrodite who undergoes a surgery that will define them as a woman—serves as a narrative and symbolic prologue, anticipating the gender oscillations of Mattia Meli, one of the protagonists. By engaging mainly with Judith Butler’s and Roberto Marchesini’s theories, this essay re-evaluates the novel’s philosophical implications and its relevance within the evolving literary and theoretical landscape in the last quarter of the twentieth century.