Iron

D‘Annunzio, Gabriele, 1863-1938Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.7

Word count: 175K words
Chapters: 18

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Il ferro by Gabriele D'AnnunzioAuthor: D'Annunzio, Gabriele, 1863-1938,Language: Italian, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Oct 25, 2011

Editor's review

Il ferro is a work by the Italian poet and novelist Gabriele D'Annunzio, included in Project Gutenberg's Italian public-domain collection. D'Annunzio is known for his aestheticist, sensual and rhetorical style, and this work continues his intense rhetorical manner; it serves as a sample for understanding the Italian literary language of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The electronic edition is in the original Italian, with no Chinese translation or notes, so reading it requires some grounding in the language. Its value lies not in a light plot but in the rhythm, imagery and period feel of the text itself; for those studying D'Annunzio's style, Italian literature or translation practice, it can serve as close-reading material. General readers simply looking for strongly plotted books may find the language dense. It is best treated as an object for observing language and style rather than as commute reading.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Literary readers with Italian reading ability who want to encounter D'Annunzio's original text
Students and researchers studying Italian literature or aestheticist style
Translators doing literary translation practice who need public-domain foreign-language texts
Advanced readers interested in early twentieth-century Italian language style

Not a good fit for

General readers with no Italian who need a Chinese translation to assist them
Casual readers who prefer light plots and fast-paced narrative
Beginners who need detailed notes or a guide to enter the text

Reading tips

Read one or two pages first to feel the density of syntax and rhetoric, then decide whether to read the whole thing.
Prepare an Italian-Chinese dictionary or a parallel translation; for long sentences, break them down to the main structure first and then read back.
Excerpt typical passages for stylistic analysis; there is no need to finish it in one go.
If using it for translation practice, choose short passages for close translation and compare different ways of handling them.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Is this book a Chinese edition?

No. What Project Gutenberg has collected is the electronic edition in the original Italian, with no Chinese translation; readers need some Italian before reading it.

Can I read it without any Italian?

You can force your way through with a dictionary and machine translation, but the experience will be much diminished. D'Annunzio's sentences are long and his rhetoric dense; without language grounding it is easy to stay at the literal level and hard to feel the stylistic features.

Is it suitable as Italian learning material?

It suits intermediate and advanced learners for extended reading, but not absolute beginners. Its literary language is distant from everyday Italian; try it after mastering basic grammar, and use a dictionary alongside.

Comments

Find this book

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

D‘Annunzio, Gabriele, 1863-1938 Author

Gabriele D‘Annunzio (1863–1938) was an Italian writer. Thirteen of his works are held in this collection, including The Child of Pleasure, Le Novelle della Pescara, L‘Innocente, La Gioconda, Cabiria: Visione storica del terzo secolo A. C., Le vergini delle rocce, San Pantaleone and Forse che sì forse che no. Public information is limited, but these works show that his writing spans novels, short stories and drama, often dealing with desire, guilt, aristocratic life and historical imagination. His style is known for sensuous description and elaborate rhetoric, with aesthetic and decadent overtones. His works had a certain influence on early twentieth-century Italian literature and popular culture.