Ithaca College

Marella Feltrin-Morris, Assistant Professor of Italian, presented a paper at the 29th University of West Georgia Interdisciplinary Conference in the Humanities: Worlds and Words (October 30-November 1, 2014).

Italian mountain climber, wood sculptor and writer Mauro Corona (1950 - ) has dedicated several of his writings to denouncing the ruthless exploitation of the mountains and of the environment as a whole. Having grown up in Erto, a small village in the Vajont valley in northeast Italy, Corona personally experienced the violence of defiled nature in 1963, when the Vajont Dam, built in complete disregard of geological instability, overtopped as a result of a massive landslide, and the ensuing flood killed almost 2,000 people. Erto was one of only two villages that were miraculously spared. In 2008, at the Global Launch Event of the International Year of Planet Earth, UNESCO cited the Vajont Dam tragedy as a "cautionary tale" brought about by "the failure of engineers and geologists."

Feltrin-Morris' paper, "Translating Mauro Corona's Ailing Universe," illustrates some of the leitmotifs and features of Corona’s environmental poetics and provides examples from her own translation of I fantasmi di pietra ("Stone Ghosts").