C'è arte! Esterházy Péter Olaszországban

In una dettagliata ricognizione della ricezione dell'opera di Péter Esterházy in Italia, si offrono al pubblico ungherese anche le diverse questioni relative all'esame critico della stessa, indicando la notevole attenzione delle officine di ricerca scientifica degli atenei italiani (e di alcune riviste scientifiche in lingua italiana pubblicate in Ungheria) verso questo autore fondamentale per la letteratura ungherese tra XX e XXI secolo. *** Péter Esterházy is, without a doubt, one of the most famous writers of Hungarian contemporary literature, even outside Hungary’s borders. His Italian reception started towards the end of the 1980s, prompted by a few Italian publishers’ (e/o, Garzanti) notable interest in Hungarian literature in general and in this writer in particular. Thus, between 1988 and 1995 the following works by Esterházy came out in Italian translation: Helping Verbs of the Heart, The Book of Hrabal, A kitömött hattyú [The Stuffed Swan], A hely, ahol most vagyunk [The Place Where We Are Now], Elenyészően csekély rosszhiszeműség [An Infinitesimal Amount of Malice], and The Glance of Countess Hahn- Hahn. The appointment of Giorgio Pressburger as the head of the Italian Cultural Institute in Budapest proved the starting point of a significant cultural and publishing project that lead to a new phase in the Italian reception of Esterházy. This is the same era when, following Imre Kertész’s Nobel Prize win and the huge popularity of Sándor Márai’s work in Italy, Italian publishing houses paid increasingly great attention to Hungarian contemporary literature. In those years, the Milano publisher Feltrinelli started to systematically build its own Esterházy series, publishing Celestial Harmonies and its Javított kiadás [Revised Edition], She Loves Me, Not Art, and Esti between 2003 and 2017. Thanks to numerous book reviews in prestigious national newspapers as well as to Esterházy’s growing international popularity, Italian literary criticics also took note of the writer, as demonstrated by the multiple Italian literary prizes awarded to Esterházy (Grinzane, Città di Bari, Masi, Mondello). Following the processes of publishing, the continuity of Esterházy’s reception is clearly visible, from the last era of 20th century Italian-Hungarian cultural relations (coinciding with the years of the regime change) to the first two decades of the new millennium. The thoughts of the writer’s Italian translator also help us in reviewing the mechanisms which lead to the permanent presence of Esterházy’s works within the panorama of Hungarian works translated into Italian, and which will hopefully also establish the future interest of readers and litterateurs in Esterházy.