Ossian sixty years after Cesarotti. A translation of "Oinamora" by Giovanni Torti (1825)

Abstract

Cesarotti’s translation of The Poems of Ossian famously introduced to Italy certain stylistic features, images and linguistic movements that would later be the seed of the new Romantic sensibility. In 1825, Giovanni Torti, a poet of Parini formation who later converted to Romanticism, published a translation of one of Ossian’s lesser-known epic poems: Oinamora. The basic text of the translation, however, was not Macpherson’s English text, as was the case for Cesarotti, but rather a later Latin translation from the English area (1807), published together with the text of what is supposed to be the Celtic original. The article intends to compare the two translations (Cesarotti 1772 - Torti 1825) to highlight the different metrical, stylistic and linguistic choices, and to reason about the different epic models of reference; in an attempt to provide a picture of the development of the new Italian poetic taste, observed sixty years after the unique literary phenomenon that was the publication of The Poems of Ossian translated by Melchiorre Cesarotti.