Antonino De Francesco

The Excellency of a Free State by Marchamont Nedham was remarkably successful in revolutionary Europe. The French edition produced in Paris in 1790 by Theophile Mandar was later used for an Italian translation, published in early 1798 in Milan, at the time of the Cisalpine Republic, by Pietro Custodi. The biographies of the two translators – both engaged in the radical politics of their time – suggest some considerations on how first one and then the other thought they could make use of Needham’s text. Mandar translated Nedham to suggest the fragility of English political culture in the face of the long road travelled instead by French political philosophy. Custodi’s translation was the opposite of Mandar’s, as it showed instead all the uncertainties that in Milan could lead to the loss of liberty. In both cases, in one translation as in the other, very little remained of Nedham, because his words were used to develop a different discourse, where the translations in another language – and in a quite different context – played the role of an instrument to validate theses constructed elsewhere and established in another political framework.

Il saggio torna sull’annosa questione della datazione del Marzo 1821, per dimostrare che, contrariamente a quanto sin qui accettato, la dedica dell’opera al poeta tedesco Theodor Körner conferma come, anche in questo caso, Manzoni ripetutamente tornasse sulla propria scrittura e costantemente la rivedesse. L’errore circa il luogo in cui cadde Körner – benché noto, ma mai approfondito – chiarisce come Manzoni venisse a conoscenza di quelle vicende solo negli anni immediatamente precedenti il 1848 e quanto fossero le concomitanti vicende rivoluzionarie, d’Italia come di Germania, a suggerirgli di dedicare l’ode al poeta tedesco. L’analisi del testo consente inoltre, nella seconda parte del saggio, di rileggere la posizione del Manzoni rispetto al tema dell’unità italiana: distinguendosi da Gioberti e Rosmini, egli avrebbe tenuto fermo sul portato della stagione napoleonica nella costruzione dell’identità nazionale.