Versi francesi nel “Krull” di Thomas Mann: da Béranger a Hugo

As in many other texts, from earlier short stories to last novels, Thomas Mann put (or maybe hid) some verses in the prose of one of his masterworks: Felix Krull. It is a very significant book, because it was forty years in the writing, and the author published it unfinished in 1954, one year before his death. Not by chance many critics noted a strange contamination between prose and poetry, a sort of metric latency – all effects that the Italian translation of 1954 ignores. Magrelli’s essay analyses Mann’s verses present in Felix Krull, interpreting them in the light of a deep stilistic orientation, and presenting at the same time an Italian metric translation. It is a particularly interesting translation because of the multilinguistic nature of these verses. In fact we have to remember the the novel’s hero, Krull, is a young boy who knows German, French, English and Italian.