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Article: Translatio galliae: effects of early franco-italian literary exchange.
- Article from:
- The Romanic Review
- Article date:
- May 1, 2006
- Author:
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In the sixteenth century, French writers adopted Italian models, translated and plagiarized Italian works, and even wrote in the Italian language. Italy, it seemed, had introduced France to antiquity, but Italianism was seen as a disease that infected French culture, in particular with its taste for rhetoric, and its privileging of form over content. Jean Balsamo has characterized French translation of Italian works in this period as a kind of conquest, a literary will to power, when French military domination of the peninsula had become impossible. (1) If Italy was an irresistible influence in sixteenth-century France, when, for example, Ariosto's Orlando furioso, based ...