"Towards the River’s Mouth" (1989) by Gianni Celati: A Critical Edition and Translation of a Philosophical Travelogue

FAIN: FEL-257167-18

Patrick V. Barron
University of Massachusetts, Boston (Boston, MA 02125-3300)

A translation and critical edition of Towards the River’s Mouth (Verso la foce), a late 20th-century philosophical travelogue by Italian author and filmmaker Gianni Celati.

I seek support for a critical edition of Italian writer and filmmaker Gianni Celati’s 1989 philosophical travelogue Towards the River’s Mouth (Verso la foce), consisting of my translation of the text from Italian to English accompanied by a scholarly introduction, a selection of key theoretical essays by Celati translated into English, a selection of reviews and essays by Italian scholars and writers translated into English, and a selection of additional scholarly essays by prominent figures in comparative literature and Italian studies. The book will also feature careful annotations and a bibliography. It will bring to English-language audiences not only a key work of one of Italy’s most influential living writers, but also a valuable body of additional primary and secondary sources. With an advance contract recently offered by Lexington Books, this project will be a major contribution to Italian studies and to the environmental humanities whose results will be widely disseminated.

Associated Products

Towards the River’s Mouth, A Critical Edition. (Book)
Title: Towards the River’s Mouth, A Critical Edition.
Author: Celati, Gianni
Author: Barron, Patrick
Editor: Barron, Patrick
Abstract: Italian writer and filmmaker Gianni Celati’s 1989 philosophical travelogue Towards the River’s Mouth explores perception, memory, place and space as it recounts a series of journeys across the Po River Valley in northern Italy. The book seeks to document the “new Italian landscape” where divisions between the urban and rural were being blurred into what Celati terms “a new variety of countryside where one breathes an air of urban solitude.” Celati traveled by train, by bus, and on foot, at times with photographer Luigi Ghirri, at others exploring on his own without predetermined itineraries, taking notes on the places he encountered, watching and listening to people in stations, fields, bars, houses, squares, and hotels. In this way the book took shape as Celati traveled and wrote, gathering and rewriting his notes into “stories of observation” (9). Celati attempts to find meaning by seeking the uncertain limits of our ability to discern everyday surroundings. “Every observation,” as he puts it, “needs liberate itself from the familiar codes it carries, to go adrift in the middle of all things not understood, in order to arrive at an outlet, where it must feel lost.”
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498566018/Towards-the-River%E2%80%99s-Mouth-(Verso-la-foce)-by-Gianni-Celati-A-Critical-Edition#
Access Model: Print
Publisher: Lexington
Type: Edited Volume
Type: Translation
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9781498566025
Translator: Patrick Barron
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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