LITERARY CONQUESTS

Benvenuto Terracini defined volgarizzamento as a kind of translation effected between peoples, rather than individuals. Translations from French, because of their narrative or informational content, like prose vernacular translations of Latin works, he called volgarizzamenti. Whereas Italian renditions of Occitan poetry he did not.

Italians translated both from Latin and from French and, at first, much Latin through French. Italian lyric poetry begins with translations of Occitan verse. Indeed the story of Italian literature in general is often narrated as a liberation from cultural domination from over the Alps.

Translation can be seen as a poorer culture's enrichment by another more developed one; or, on the contrary, as the target language's imposition of its own forms on an adopted source. In another context, Terracini noted that whereas Karl Vossler read the German translations of Dante's Commedia as a ‘conquest by German culture’, Italians like Terracini (an exiled Italian Jew writing in Spanish from South America) might well see such translations as an expansion of their own cultural influence.