«La natura dell’anima»: l’Omero di Salvatore Quasimodo

The purpose of this paper is to look at Homer’s poetry through the lens of Quasimodo’s translations, from both Iliad and Odyssey. These pages aim at detecting a ‘standard procedure’ linking Quasimodo’s poetical work to the translations from the epic poetry. The analysis focuses especially on the rendering of the Greek epithets. Quasimodo’s translations are put into the wider frame of the Homeric versions dated to the last Century, which are metrically and formally divergent. The final result of Quasimodo’s work offers to the reader a Homer ‘lyricized’, sounding less grandiloquent when compared to other versions of the same period (as, for instance, those of Rosa Calzecchi Onesti).