D'Annunzio, Etra and a Threnody

Abstract

Through the preparatory papers of Fedra, preserved in the Archivio Privato del Vittoriale which I studied for the critical edition of the tragedy, the article analyzes the character of Etra and the threnody of the third act, and demonstrates that d’Annunzio recovers and indifferently mixes lexical and syntactic tiles from a fourteenth-century author (Arrigo Simintendi, vulgarizer of Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and a contemporary one (Giovanni Pascoli, the poet of Poemi conviviali).