Edipo in Transilvania: tracce del folklore romeno nel Novecento italiano

Oedipus in Transylvania: Traces of Romanian Folklore in Twentieth-Century Italian Culture This paper aims to reconstruct the traces that romanian folklore left within the works of three prominent italian writers and intellectuals of the second-half of the twentieth-century: Franco Fortini, Ernesto de Martino and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In his first book of poetry, Foglio di via (1946), Fortini translated, from a french version made by Ilarie Voronca, some romanian funeral songs, trying to conceal the folkloric sources, in order to misappropriate them. The same archaic ceremonial songs are used, as historical and ethnographic evidences, by Ernesto de Martino in his great anthropological survey on european funeral laments, Morte e pianto rituale (1958), and then by Pier Paolo Pasolini as a soundtrack for his movie Oedipus Rex (1967). In all of this cases, the fascination for the romanian popular poetry is tangled with reticences and ambiguities, that reveal the complex relationships existing between intellectuals and popular traditions in twentieth-century culture.