(2018) ROSALBA GALVAGNO, The Metamorphosis of Daphne in Carlo Levi, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Twentieth-Century Italian Literature, Alberto Comparini (Ed.), Universitätsverlag Winter Heidelberg, pp. 177-197. ISBN: 978-3-8253-6788-6

Carlo Levi has conveyed some variations to Daphne’s portrait involving either verse, prose or painting, as indeed he had already done with the Narcissus’ portrait, the mythological figure laying at the heart of his poiesis. The Turin artist inherits, in this regard, the great poetic tradition of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, as it is proved, among other evidence, in a letter dated 27 April 1934 addressed to his mother and written from Carceri nuove in Turin: «Di Metamorfosi preferisco quelle di Ovidio a queste che sono una molliccia rifrittura italiana di Döeblin o di Dos Passos, che già non amo neppure negli originali» («About Metamorphosis I prefer Ovid’s ones to these which result in a soggy and Italian rehash of Döeblin or Dos Passos, I yet do not love even in the original»). With Daphne we are in the realm of vegetal Metamorphosis, a realm to which Carlo Levi has dedicated texts and memorable paintings such as, among others, two writings both dating back to the late Sixties: L’Alba sul giardino (1967) and best known Alberi e Narciso (1968) authentic and essential manifesto of Levi’s portrait theory. These fragments clearly show Levi’s (and Ovid’s) complex and structured pattern thought of the Metamorphosis exactly consisting, according to Italo Calvino’s fortunate description referred to Ovid in «indistinti confini» («indistinct boundaries») or, as emphasized by Guido Sacerdoti using a similar utterance, in «labilità di tutti i confini» («blurred boundaries»). Daphne’s first portrait in verses goes back to 24 May 1933. Many others are to follow, always in verses, in the Fourties, Fifties, Sixties and Seventies. To the Seventies also belongs the prose picture to be found in Quaderno a cancelli and, between the Sixties and Seventies, the pictorial series of the carob Trees one of which in particular takes, no coincidence, after Daphne’s name.