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Renato Poggioli (April 16, 1907 in Florence – May 3, 1963 in Crescent City), was an Italian academic specializing in comparative literature. After 1938, he lived in the United States. At the time of his death, he was the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Unsigned article, "Renato Poggioli Dies at 56, Noted Scholar and Author", Harvard Crimson, May 6, 1963. A prolific writer and translator, who was fluent in five languages, he is considered one of the founders of the academic discipline of comparative literature in the United States.
In the fall of 1938 Poggioli was hired as a visiting lecturer in Romance language and literatures at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, where he gave a course in Dante Alighieri. The following year he became Assistant Professor of Italian Literature teaching graduate students at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, with an interruption from 1943–45 when he served in the United States Army as a translator. The academic year 1946–47 saw his first stint, at the behest of Harry Levin, as visiting professor at Harvard. He also taught during the summer of 1947 at the University of Chicago.
Poggioli's most ambitious project during this period was his founding editorship, with Italian writer Luigi BertiSee the entry on Luigi Berti in the Italian Wikipdedia, who was based in Florence, of the Italian-language literary periodical Inventario (1946–1963) to which Poggioli contributed numerous articles and translations. The publication was intended to expose Italian readers, whose horizons had for years been narrowed by Mussolini's censorship, to a broad range of new developments in contemporary literature of all countries.Ludovico, "Renato Poggioli. Between History and Literature": 304 and passim. It published literary and critical works by and about such important writers as Giuseppe Ungaretti, Pablo Neruda, T. S. Eliot, Salvatore Quasimodo, Vladimir Nabokov, and Boris Pasternak. Poggioli's own magnum opus, his Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia, which traced the connection between the twentieth-century avant garde and the legacy of nineteenth-century Romanticism, first appeared in Inventario in four installments between 1949 and 51.
In the fall of 1947, Harvard University, as part of its ongoing expansion of its department of Slavic studies, hired Poggioli and two year later, Roman Jakobson – in 1952 the two would collaborate on an edition of the Medieval Russian epic, Tale of Igor's Campaign. Poggioli was named full professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard in 1950. Unsigned article, "Poggioli Is Appointed to Full Professorship", Harvard Crimson, April 21, 1950. In 1951 he became head of the Department of Slavic Studies, switching over in 1952 to head the Department of Comparative Literature, a position he held until his death. While teaching at Harvard, Poggioli also received Fulbright grants to teach at La Sapienza in Rome (1953–54), at the Sorbonne in Paris (1961) and at the University of Puerto Rico (1962).
Poggioli's best known book is his Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia (1962), which was not issued as a single volume until 1962.Ludovico, "Renato Poggioli. Between History and Literature": 308. It was translated posthumously into English as The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Gerald Fitzgerald, translator, Harvard University Press, 1968). Poggioli was also the author of The Poets of Russia 1890–1930 (Harvard University Press, 1960), a study of the poets of the so-called "Silver Age" of Russian poetry (1890–1910), which was awarded the 1960 Harvard Faculty Prize; and The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Harvard University Press, 1975).
Poggioli is briefly mentioned in Saul Bellow's 1964 novel Herzog. Saul Bellow, Herzog (New York: Viking Press, 1976), p. 71. His daughter, Sylvia Poggioli, who was born when her father was teaching at Brown University, is the senior European correspondent for NPR.
It is stated that the English translation of the book Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia, Theory of the Avant-Garde, appeared posthumously in 1971. I have a copy of the translation, first print: it is translated and published by the Belknap Press Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Ma./London GB, in 1968. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge Mass/London GB, 1968).
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