Il "Battesimo presso la Savica" di France Prešeren: un'"Eneide harvardiana" avanti lettera

Abstract

Baptism at the Savica is a short epic poem by the romantic Slovenian poet France Prešeren, published in 1836: in it the influence of the Virgilian Aeneid can be traced, and yet it has not been sufficiently investigated, especially for ideological reasons, by scholars of Slovenian literature. Through the comparison of certain passages of the poem with the Aeneid, this paper demonstrates the possibility of reading Prešeren’s poem as a 'proto-harvardian' rewrite of the Aeneid based on the notorious opposition between two competing 'voices', the 'public' and 'private', whose point of departure is in the narrative form of the Virgilian Troiae halosis, that is, the autobiographical story of Aeneas, i.e. the experience of the protagonist reliving his own story in his words.