Lionello Costantini traduttore delle letterature croata e serba

Lionello Costantini (1934-1994) was Full Professor of Croatian and Serbian literature at Sapienza University of Rome, and an active member of the Editorial Board of the academic journal “Ricerche slavistiche” from 1970 until his untimely death. On the pages of this journal he was the most prolific author of Serbocroatistic contributions after Sante Graciotti. He collaborated with the Institute of the Italian Encyclopaedia, as well, acting as co-director of the Piccola Treccani and as author of many entries related to South Slavic literatures. He had a solid philological education and dealt with different fields of Slavic studies, such as philology, Russian and Polish studies. Nonetheless, in the history of Slavistics he his mainly remembered as a translator of Croatian and Serbian literature. As a matter of fact, he showed his literary and translator skills dealing with a long series of translations and distinguished himself both through his selection of translated writers and through his refined versions. He rendered into Italian only texts of narrative prose, such as novels and collections of stories, publishing fifteen books of eight different authors: Ivo Andrić, Miloš Crnjanski, Danilo Kiš, Ante Kovačić, Ranko Marinković, Slobodan Novak, Meša Selimović, Aleksandar Tišma. His approach to translation was rather free in some aspects and – as Graciotti pointed out – he was like “a creator in competition with the art of originals”, although he never really left his philological accuracy. Sometimes he accompanied his versions with forewords or afterwords where his role of teacher and his role of scholar meet. Lionello Costantini’s literary translations must be considered the core of his activity as slavist, scholar, mediator between cultures; they left a track which is destined to last very long in the history of Serbocroatistics and in cultural relations between Italy and South Slavic lands.