Giovanni Salvatore de Coureil
Contributions
- Elena e Vivaldi translation translator
Knows
- Vincenzo Monti civil servant playwright poet professor translator writer
Notes
Coureil was a poet, critic and cultural mediator who actively promoted Italian Anglomania through translation at a time when the dissemination of English literature in Italy was in its early stages. In his early life, he supported himself by travelling to Germany and Russia to give language lessons.
In 1794 he was charged with trying to illegally publish two pamphlets criticizing absolutist regimes and was sentenced to exile, although he was allowed back into Tuscany a few months later. His writings consistently highlighted the relationship between the novel and politics. His articles appeared in several periodicals in Turin and Venice and he wrote the first Italian history of English literature. In 1799, he was tried as a Jacobin and sentenced to a year's imprisonment and exile when he translated over 3000 verses.
Following Napoleon's victory at the Battle of Marengo in 1800 and the re-entry of the French into Tuscany, he was appointed Secretary of State of a short-lived, pro-French republican government, dubbed the Triumvirate. Engaged in a notorious dispute with the politically inconsistent poet Vincenzo Monti between 1804–1807, which ended with Coureil's removal from the editorial staff of the Nuovo giornarle dei letterati.
Coureil also translated Radcliffe's 'The Romance of the Forest' (1791) as 'La foresta o sia L'abbazia di S. Chiara' (1813, Pisa: Antonio Peverata & Ranieri Prosperi) and well as poems by Charlotte Smith.