How the Sicilian cheetah became a leopard, but nothing has changed

23 January 2022, 15:14 | Art
photo Зеркало недели
Text Size:

The horoscope-astrological mania that covered our compatriots twenty years ago has almost receded, but still we still do not forget to mark the year of which animal, “according to the Chinese calendar”, is coming. Some even know that it's not January 1. Still, it doesn’t hurt to start the book year with something literary-brindle. Or belonging to the cat family, necessarily predatory. For example, from a cheetah that turned into a leopard, but this did not change anything, as bequeathed by the author by the name, which is now strongly associated with an island in the Mediterranean Sea, regularly replenished by regular waves of refugees - Lampedusa.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957), 11th in the list of princes de Lampedusa (who from the 16th century until the middle of the 19th century really owned this small island between Tunisia and Sicily, and closer to the African coast), entered world literature with his only. A novel called Il Gattopardo became known in translation as The Leopard, especially after the film adaptation in 1963 by Luchino Visconti himself (starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale). An epic film for two and a half hours, with a key scene of an aristocratic ball 51 minutes long, although it bears the title of “one of the pinnacles of world cinema”, not every movie fan can afford. At the same time, the novel itself is a small book of less than 200 pages.. And, what pleases, it was published at least three times in Ukrainian - in 1985, 2009 and 2010, under the name "

As for the name, the translators did not come to a consensus. On one of the Italian resources, you can find such an explanation for these zoological translation difficulties: “gattopardo is not at all a cheetah, for which the Italian language has its own word - ghepardo. Gattopardo is a serval, or ocelot, a very little known animal to the public.. By design, the name of the novel " Moreover, the adopted son of the writer, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, noted that gattopardo in the Sicilian dialect is exactly a leopard.. The point in fixing the name of the spotted predator in translation was put by the name of the above film adaptation.

I think it will be interesting for a not very wide range of Ukrainian readers to plunge into the world of hot Sicily of the 1860s (“mayzhe two days of straight sun over our heads; summer long and gloomy, like a Russian winter, but more important for whether it’s winter...”), at the next stage of the process under the melodic name “risorgimento”, that is, the revival. The landing of the famous thousand Garibaldi fighters on Sicily was to become the basis of the novel - through the optics of the telescope of the protagonist, Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, a representative of the dying aristocracy.

Realizing that the young and impudent bourgeoisie will inevitably move the old aristocracy, its bright representative, the head of the clan, who has on the heraldic shield the image of a Leopard (or Cheetah? - let's leave it at the reader's discretion), finds peace for the soul in astronomy, and not only in it (complaining about the blinkeredness of his own wife - "

The story of the " But was its cornerstone maxim justified, declared at the very beginning by the words of, of course, still strong Leopard, when radical historical changes in sleepy, sun-scorched Sicily were just beginning:.

Read all articles by Oleg Suprunenko here.




Add a comment
:D :lol: :-) ;-) 8) :-| :-* :oops: :sad: :cry: :o :-? :-x :eek: :zzz :P :roll: :sigh:
 Enter the correct answer