MILAN. Mourning in the world of culture. The writer and translator Gianni Celati died at the age of 84 in England. “Farewell to Gianni Celati – writes Feltrinelli Editore on his official accounts – writer, translator and literary critic, an inimitable model for his unique and original ability to rework the main themes of the great authors of English and international literature”.
Born in Sondrio in 1937, he would have turned 85 on 10 January. He spent his childhood and adolescence in the province of Ferrara. Graduated in English literature from the University of Bologna with a thesis on James Joyce, he soon began writing articles for various journals, as well as publishing the first translations, including William Gerhardie’s “Futility” and Louis’s “Colloquia with Professor Y” -Ferdinand Céline. In 1971 he published his first novel, “Comiche”, for Einaudi, while continuing to collaborate with several other magazines and devoting himself to the translation of English classics, such as “Bartleby the scribe” by Herman Melville. Also from Einaudi came the following “The adventures of Guizzardi” (1972), “The band of sighs” (1976) and “Lunario del paradiso” (1978). The three novels will be collected by Feltrinelli in 1989 in “Parliaments buffi”. During a teaching period at Cornell University in Ithaca (New York), essays and short stories still come out.
After moving back to Italy he assumed the chair of Anglo-American literature of the Dams of Bologna (among his students Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Claudio Piersanti, Enrico Palandri, Giacomo Campiotti, Gian Ruggero Manzoni, Andrea Pazienza and others), and also resumed critical and scholar of European literature, translating James Joyce, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and other great authors. The writer returned to fiction in 1985 with the thirty short stories by «Narratori delle pianure» which also marked the passage to the Feltrinelli publishing house, and which show a strong change of style. Then came the “Four short stories on appearances” (1987) and “Verso la foce” (1989), an itinerary towards the mouth of the Po (the writer’s childhood and adolescence territory).
Among his countless cultural activities, he also taught at the Université de Caen and Brown University in Providence and for the rest of his life he resided in Brighton, England, where he passed away in the night.
Among the latest works are the prose transcription of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s poem, “Orlando in love told in prose” (Einaudi, 1994), the autobiographical transfiguration “Acting of the actor Attilio Vecchiatto in the theater of Rio Saliceto” (1996 , which was followed by the “Sonnets of Badalucco in Italy today”, 2010), the travel report “Adventures in Africa” (1998), and nine new stories collected in “Cinema naturale” (2001), where the meditations memories alternate on the present. In permanent collaboration with the Bolognese film production house Pierrot e la Rosa he also made, as director, the documentaries «Strada Provinciale delle anime» (1991), «Il mondo di Luigi Ghirri» (1999), «Case sparse. Visions of collapsing houses “(2003), and” Diol Kadd. Life, diaries and filming of a trip to Senegal “(2010). In March 2013 Einaudi published James Joyce’s “Ulysses” in a new version translated by Celati, the result of over seven years of work.
The Minister of Culture, Dario Franceschini, writes in a note: «With pain I learn of the death of Gianni Celati, a great intellectual of the twentieth century, a never banal author, an extraordinary translator who studied the Italian language and its sounds with mastery. It is a sad day for literature and for our country, which also loses an attentive observer who has been able to describe the lesser-known Italy with simplicity, Italy elsewhere. I cling to the family and friends of Gianni Celati on this sad day ».