«La speranza di tempi migliori, cioè di uomini migliori»

Fabrizio Cambi e "La storia di Agatone" di C. M. Wieland. Un ricordo

Abstract

For many years, Fabrizio Cambi (1952-2021), a major figure in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Trento, worked on the translation of the History of Agathon by Christoph Martin Wieland (1766/67), a key text of the German Enlightenment and a forerunner of the Bildungsroman. In his last months he came to complete it, but his early death prevented him from carrying out the last revision. This paper tries to recount him at work, by recalling conversations, emails, as well as the introduction and commentary to the novel written in preparation for its publication and still unpublished. The Agathon workshop thus yields the portrait of a man and an intellectual, who on the threshold of the new millennium looks to the past of German literature to imagine the future of the new generations, aware of the ethical and political implications of his work, in a never-ending yearning for utopia.