Italo Pizzi’s Shahnameh: Oriental Studies, Comparison, and Translation at the Origins of the Italian Nation

Published between 1886 and 1888, Italo Pizzi’s Il Libro dei Re was the first complete verse translation of the national epic poem of Iran, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (c. 1010 CE). This article draws on early theorisations of the role of translation and comparison in world literature (William Jones and Goethe) to analyse the wider cultural ramifications of Pizzi’s endeavour to introduce Ferdowsi to an Italian readership. After a broader contextualisation of the development of Oriental Studies in post-unification Italy, Pizzi’s translation, its paratext, and his other publications on Ferdowsi are analysed together in order to reconstruct his approach to literary translation and the dissemination of knowledge, in which literary comparison (in particular that between Ferdowsi and Dante) played a central role. Whereas the nineteenth-century reception of Persian classics such as the Shahnameh has received scholarly attention in the English, French, and German language contexts, little has been said of their Italian reception. This article brings to light the equally pioneering work of translation and dissemination that was undertaken in Italy, despite the young nation being late to professionalise Oriental Studies – Pizzi became Italy’s first Professor of Persian in 1887. In doing so, the article expands our understanding of the development of Oriental Studies in nineteenth-century Europe and reveals Italy’s distinctive place in the global circulation of Persian literature in translation.