Andrea Maffei, gli stivali di Giuseppe Verdi e le streghe del "Macbeth"

This essay reconstructs the personality of Andrea Maffei as a translator and proposes a new textual analysis of his version of Schiller's "Macbeth", with particular attention to the witches scenes that force him to face formal issues regarding the representation of the fantastic. This new reading demonstrates that the translation of 1863 partially derives from Maffei’s previous work on the libretto for Giuseppe Verdi, from which the translator draws single words or complete verses, metaphors and metric structures while remaining independent from an aesthetic point of view, according to a neoclassic taste inhereted from Vincenzo Monti.