Jacopo Sannadzaro

He was born in 1458 in Naples. His father died around 1462, the adolescence of Jacopo Sannadzaro, spent in Nocera Inferior and in San Cipriano Picentino . The rural atmosphere of these places adorned the poetry of Sannadzaro. He was close to the humanist Giovanni Pontano , was a member of the Pontana Academy, within the walls of which Sannadzaro took the literary pseudonym Actius Syncerus.

For many years he devotedly served the sovereigns of the House of Aragon . In 1483-85, he and Alphonse II twice participated in the invasions of the Papal States . He quickly achieved fame as a poet and became a court poet. After the death of his main patron, Alfonso II (1495), in 1499 he received the villa of Mergellin near Naples from Federigo . After Federigo lost his crown, Sannadzaro followed him into exile in France in 1501, from where he returned after the death of Federigo to Plessis-les-Tours (1504). The last years the poet spent in Naples, where he died in 1530.

As a court poet, he wrote farces, comic monologues that entertained the court society, love lyrics in the style of Petrarch .

The novel "Arcadia", written by a prosimeter , the author began in the 1480s. and completed around 1489. Arcadia was published in Venice in 1504 and (in a highly edited form) in the same place in 1524. Sannadzaro drew inspiration from the works of ancient authors who wrote in the pastoral genre - Latin ( Virgil , Kalpurniy ) and Greek ( The Idylls of Theocritus ). At the center of the story is a poet suffering from love (“Sincero”), who leaves the city (in this case Naples) in order to live in the serenity and simplicity of Arcadia . In rural Arcadia, he embarks on wanderings, listening to the love or sad songs of the shepherds.

In 1526, Sannadzaro published an epic Latin poem, The Birth of the Virgin (De partu Virginis), which reveals (in style and language) the influence of Virgil. Despite the small size of the poem (about 1,500 verses), Sannadzaro worked on it for more than 20 years. Nowadays, “The Birth of the Virgin” is evaluated as an example of the spiritual and religious lyrics of the Renaissance and an outstanding artifact of Latin poetry as a whole.

Arcadia is the first major pastoral in Renaissance Europe to gain international success. The novel had a decisive influence on the development of the pastoral genre in European literature of the 16th – 17th centuries (“The Seven Books of Diana” by Montemayor , 1559; “Pastoral Poem” by Bello , 1565; “Galatea” by Cervantes , 1585; “Arcadia” by Lope de Vega , 1598; “ Arcadia " Sidney , 1580;" Astrea " Yurfe , 1610-1619).

The puppeteer wrote the dramatic fantasy “Jacobo Sannazar” (1833), which is read by the characters of Dostoevsky ’s Netochka Nezvanova.

• The best edition of the Italian works of Sannadzaro: Le opere volgari, a cura di GBCrispo, Padova, 1723.
• A full edition of his Latin works was published in Amsterdam (Actii Synceri Sannazarii opera latine scripta), 1728.
• Selected Latin verses are in the collection Poeti umanisti maggiori, a cura di L. Grilli, Citta di Castello, 1914.
• The best commented editions of Arcadia are M.Scherillo, Torino, 1888, Torino, 1926.

• Renaissance. M .: Publishing House Enlightenment of the USSR, 1966 ( Foreign Literature )
• Sannadzaro Jacopo. Arcadia. / Per. with Italian., article, comment. A. Triandafilidi - M .: Aquarius, 2017 (Series "Translation Space") - 272 p. ISBN 978-5-91763-359-6
• Sannadzaro Jacopo. Arcadia / Per. with ital. Peter Epifanova. - St. Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh Publishing House, 2017 .-- 292 p. ISBN 978-5-89059-283-5

• Sannazzaro, Jacopo // Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron : in 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - SPb. , 1890-1907.
• Collection of Latin poetry (lat. Original and translations in English)
• Library of Italian literature. Jacopo Sannadzaro
• Jacopo Sannadzaro