Eros e Priapo: da furore a cenere is a 1945 satiric pamphlet by Italian author

Carlo Emilio Gadda Carlo Emilio Gadda (; November 14, 1893 – May 21, 1973) was an Italian writer and poet. He belongs to the tradition of the language innovators, writers that played with the somewhat stiff standard pre-war Italian language, and added elements of ...

Uncensored edition

An excerpt comparison. The 1967 censored version is shown on the left, the 1945 original uncensored version on the right.

Style and sources

The work framework is an archaic-style prose drawn from the

Florentine dialect The Florentine dialect or vernacular ( or ) is a variety of Tuscan, a Romance language spoken in the Italian city of Florence and its immediate surroundings. A received pedagogical variant derived from it historically, once called (literally, ...

of Machiavelli, interpolated with the modern vernacular of the

Tuscan language Tuscan ( it, dialetto toscano ; it, vernacolo, label=locally) is a set of Italo-Dalmatian varieties of Romance mainly spoken in Tuscany, Italy. Standard Italian is based on Tuscan, specifically on its Florentine dialect, and it became the lan ...

, and in a few cases, of modern

Lombard language Lombard (native name: ,Classical Milanese orthography, and . , Ticinese orthography. Modern Western orthography. or ,Eastern unified orthography. depending on the orthography; pronunciation: ) is a language, belonging to the Gallo-Italic family ...

and

Romanesco dialect Romanesco () is one of the central Italian dialects spoken in the Metropolitan City of Rome Capital, especially in the core city. It is linguistically close to Tuscan and Standard Italian, with some notable differences from these two. Rich in ...

. Gadda said that this parallels what Machiavelli himself did with

Tacitus Publius Cornelius Tacitus, known simply as Tacitus ( , ; – ), was a Roman historian and politician. Tacitus is widely regarded as one of the greatest Roman historiography, Roman historians by modern scholars. The surviving portions of his t ...

, whose structure he interpolated with jargon from his time. Another source of archaic Florentine expressions is

Benvenuto Cellini Benvenuto Cellini (, ; 3 November 150013 February 1571) was an Italian goldsmith, sculptor, and author. His best-known extant works include the ''Cellini Salt Cellar'', the sculpture of ''Perseus with the Head of Medusa'', and his autobiography ...

. For the satiric attack, the main influences are the

Book of Revelation The Book of Revelation is the final book of the New Testament (and consequently the final book of the Christian Bible). Its title is derived from the first word of the Koine Greek text: , meaning "unveiling" or "revelation". The Book of R ...

, for its caricatures against Cesar and Rome, and D'Annunzio's ''Maia - Laus vitae''.

Related works

Some of Gadda's

fable Fable is a literary genre: a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized, and that illustrates or leads to a particular mo ...

s present related

scatological In medicine and biology, scatology or coprology is the study of feces. Scatological studies allow one to determine a wide range of biological information about a creature, including its diet (and thus where it has been), health and diseases su ...

elements. They are the 111th, 129th, 132nd, 134th, 137th, 138th, 147th and 184th fables of the antifascist cycle.Giorgio Pinott
''Eros e Priapo''
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Notes and references

External links

Chapters 1-3
published in ''The Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies (EJGS)''
Wiki Gadda
*Paola Itali

comparison of the original incipit and the censored one
''Il primo libro delle Favole'' - a selection
{{Authority control Italian-language literature 1967 essays 1945 essays

Uncensored edition

Style and sources

Related works

See also

Notes and references

Further reading

External links