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2. Andrea Maffei and Guglielmo Ratcliff

ndrea Maffei (1798-1885) was a famous poet and translator of his day. He married the Countess Clara Spinelli-Carrara and they are both best remembered as friends of Verdi. Maffei himself was especially devoted to English and German literature, translating among other things not only the complete works of Schiller, but also Paradise Lost of Milton. He prepared the libretto of I Masnadieri for Verdi, which is based on Schiller's Die Räuber (The Robbers). (It is interesting to note that Karl Moor, the hero of The Robbers, is one of the earliest "Outsider" types.)

Andrea Maffei
Maffei's translation of William Ratcliff was published in 1875. It had earlier been performed at the Teatro Manzoni in Milan, where, according to Casimiro Varese, the Italian biographer of Heine, "it was tolerated by the public out of respect for the illustrious and venerated translator, who was present at the performance." A comparison between the opening lines by Heine and the Italian translation of Maffei will show that in spite of the clumsy hendecasyllabic verse used by the translator, the version is an all but literal one:

Heine:
Ihr seid jetzt Mann und Weib. Wie eure Hände
Vereinigt sind, so sollen auch die Herzen,
In Leid und Freud, vereinigt sein auf immer.		 Maffei:
Sposo e sposa voi siete, e come unite
Or stan le vostre mani, i cuori vostri,
Nel dolor, nella gioja, oggi e per sempre
Stiano uniti così.
Maffei introduced his translation with a short preface, dedicating the work to Achille Torelli, who had first produced it at the Teatro Manzoni. This dedication is the usual sort of flattering word spinning (although it does seem to have more honesty about it than the general dedication of the period), but in it Maffei makes the remark that this is "a youthful work of Heine, in which he (Heine) wished to personify the struggle of man with destiny." While it would be easy to write this comment off as the ordinary nineteenth century reduction of the problem of Man to simplistic terms, it does show that Maffei had a glimmering of the underlying problem of Ratcliff. Being familar as he was with Schiller, the "Outsider" concept was not a stranger to him.

Though it was never even remotely to hold the stage in Italy as a play, this translation did fall into the hands of a young music student at the Milan Conservatory. His name was Pietro Mascagni and with Ratcliff he was to create one of his greatest and most powerful works for the lyric stage.

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