From gbt@acm.org Tue Mar  7 22:20:37 2000
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From: "Gianfranco Boggio-Togna" <gbt@acm.org>
To: "Classics" <classics@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: Divas
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2000 22:20:04 +0100
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Keely Lake wrote:

> Is anyone able to make more sense of this than I? My Italian is not
> beyond stumbling, so I am wondering if there is indeed something
> more than a confused journalist at heart here:
> Verena Dobnik in the Denver Post, Sunday Feb.  27th, in an article
> about Jessye Norman: "To fans, however, she is a diva in the true
> sense of the word's Italian meaning, which describes an ancient
> goddess praising Achilles in Homer's 'Iliad'."

This sounds like a very hazy recollection of the opening lines
of the classic Italian translation of the Iliad, by Vincenzo Monti
(1758-1828):

          Cantami, o Diva, del Pelide Achille 
          l'ira funesta che infiniti addusse 
          lutti agli Achei, molte anzi tempo all'Orco 
          generose travolse alme d'eroi, 
          e di cani e d'augelli orrido pasto 
          lor salme abbandono` (cosi` di Giove 
          l'alto consiglio s'adempia), da quando 
          primamente disgiunse aspra contesa 
          il re de' prodi Atride e il divo Achille. 

"Divo" and "diva" were common variants (metrically much more
convenient) of "dio" e "dea" and were also used as adjectives ("divo
Achille").  "diva" occurs 84 times in Monti's translation.

I wonder if Verena Dobnik went to school in Italy, where Monti's Iliad
was still mandatory reading forty years ago.  It is a masterpiece
of neo-classical elegance, of course quite remote from Homer's style.
Monti did not know much Greek; a fact that gave his former friend, and
latter bitter enemy, Ugo Foscolo (a much greater poet) the occasion
for a ferocious epigram:

        Questi e` il Monti, poeta e Cavaliero,
        gran traduttor de' traduttor di Omero.

      [ This is Monti, poet and knight,
        great translator of Homer's translators. ]

Incidentally, "diva" no longer has in Italian the connotation it has
preserved in English.  An Italian soprano would be more likely to feel
insulted than flattered by being called a "diva".  The word is now
used for lesser celebrities: "un divo del cinema", "una diva della
televisione".

-- 
   Gianfranco Boggio-Togna
   Milano (Italy)



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