Why Read Italian Literature?

That's the question posed recently by the Oxford University Press blog.

From the piece...

But why isn’t Italian literature read more widely? Is there a continuing English mistrust of ‘abroad’? Or should we be citing linguistic incompetence? Neither is to be underestimated. Or, are we to go on the attack and say that Italy’s not produced much that’s exciting or innovative in intellectual or literary terms for a few hundred years? This is about as convincing, when you look into it, as saying that Italians aren’t good soldiers.

One starting point is the fact that classic Italian literature (Dante included) isn’t much read by Italians either, unless they have to, though they are often grandly patriotic about their great authors in a way English literature enthusiasts rarely are. The reason for both the grandeur and the non-reading is that Italian literature is written in a language that most Italians have never spoken (literary Tuscan) and prefers to operate at higher points on the rhetorical scale than is normal in ordinary language. So abstraction and generalisation win out over concreteness and particularity, the present is defined by reference to what predecessors have done, and again and again the Latin classics are perceptible just below the surface.