Dall'erudizione al gusto. Cesarotti professore e teorico della traduzione

Résumé

When in 1768 Melchiorre Cesarotti was appointed as Professor of Greek and Hebrew at the University of Padua, he was considered one of the most eminent Italian representatives of the modernist party in the querelle des anciens et des modernes, thanks to the great reception of his translation of the Ossian’s Poems in 1763. Throughout his academic career, his anticlassicism turned into a vigorous polemic against the erudites, as he created a new educational program based on the Enlightenment’s translation theories (such as d’Alembert’s Observations sur l’art de traduire) and specifically addressed to a new type of audience called uomini di gusto. This essay aims to illustrate Cesarotti’s reformism on academic teaching of Ancient Greek language and literature by considering the theoretical statements included in his Demosthenes’s edition (1774-1778), in the Corso ragionato di letteratura greca’s introduction (1781), in the Lettera ai signori Riformatori dello Studio di Padova (1774) and in the Piano ragionato di traduzioni dal greco (date uncertain). The textual analysis may help to depict Cesarotti’s leading role both in the cultural mediation and in the history of classical studies in Italy in the Eighteenth Century.