Beatrice nelle parole di Muḥammad Mandūr

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche Università degli Studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, Caserta, Italy

Abstract

The unique relationship between the famous Italian poet Dante and his loved Beatrice was analyzed by the Egyptian critic Muḥammad Mandūr in a text in two parts appeared in Namāḏiǧ bašariyyah, a collection of articles, the majority of which had been published in the Egyptian press in the 1940s. Of the two parts comprised in the said text, the former deals with Beatrice in La Vita Nuova. In this paper, focus will be put on this section itself, in the attempt to highlight the way how Muḥammad Mandūr introduced the figures of this real and imagined woman, and of Dante, to the Arab and Egyptian audience. Mandūr wished to show to what extent and why the Italian poet’s art could be labelled as eternal, according to the critical method he was following those years, for which he owed much to ¦āhā Ḥusayn, Gustave Lanson, and Plato. This period in his literary activity is remembered as being al-marḥalah – or al-naz‘ah – al-ǧamāliyyah al-insāniyyah.

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