In attesa della vera lingua: percorsi stilistici nella prosa di Beppe Fenoglio

My work investigates an unresolved knot in Fenoglio studies: to understand what drove a writer from Piedmont, who had never set foot in England, to first write in English the work that would consecrate him on the literary scene. The critics made it clear that the profound relationship with Anglo-Saxon literature had decisive implications in the construction of the author's cultural identity, but that above all the translation represented a stylistic apprenticeship for Fenoglio, a way of practising and refining his Italian in contact with the structures of the English language. It is that the author concentrates on translating works that tend to be very different from his own production, exploring literary genres such as opera and theatre, even choosing writings that are stylistically very distant, we would almost say opposite, to his own. In our analysis, therefore, we wanted to insist on the choice of self-translation in the Partigiano Johnny as a method to make the author's two different ways of writing interact, to the point of integrating them: in reinventing his stylistic identity, Fenoglio feels he must make use of all the arrows in his bow; through self-translation from English, the author manages to better insert himself into his writing. Our stylistic analysis reconstructs this path of progressive re-appropriation and re-invention of Italian through a series of creative and translative works: it seems to be precisely the interaction of English that brings into the writing a series of iterative phenomena that involve both the syntactic and phonic levels, defining the characters of a recognisable rhythm in this prose. The first chapter of this thesis carries out an in-depth examination of the translation The Wind in the Willows, which represents the most conspicuous translation effort - in terms of sheer size - of which any trace remains in the Fenoglian corpus. The second chapter considers the narrative fragment located in the manuscript Quaderno Bonalumi. Both the setting and the style of this fragment seem to be an immediate repetition of the ‘Grahamian style’ learnt in translation, which is used here to transpose a story of clear autobiographical inspiration. The third chapter analyses Fenoglio's first version of the partisan war, the Appunti partigiani 1944-45. The fourth chapter is devoted instead to a second translation phase of Fenoglio's parable, placed between the publication of I ventitre giorni della città di Alba and La malora, focusing particularly on the ‘discovery’ of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.The fifth and sixth chapters analyse the various drafts of Partisan Johnny: the English language persists in the text until the last draft, as a metaphor for the narrative impossibility of fully recounting the experience of the partisan war.