Incontri interculturali: Le Bacchae di Euripide e La Morte e il Cavaliere del Re.

Abstract

Friendly conversations between two scholars, literary critics and translators result in a contribution to the reading of The Bacchae of Euripides and Death and The King's Horseman. Both plays highlight an important trend of Soyinkian criticism: the relevance of Hellenism and Ogunism in the output of a writer who made the fight against all forms of oppression his main theme. Maria Rosa Turano has given me both her friendship and her insights, revealing how a truly creative writer chooses when to appropriate ritual for ideological purposes and equally when to epochalize history for its mythopoeic resorcefulness, I am very grateful for these invaluable gifts. I benefited from her wisdom and anthopological competence, her analysis of the radical changes Soyinka has made to The Bacchae of Euripides, has enhanced my understanding and appreciation of Death and The King's Horseman, showing that Soyinka’s works are systems of multiple parts that not always fit together mathematically but reflect his country cultural diversity and the difficulty of achieving “a convergence of wills”, the awareness of the social relevance of African traditions and culture, and that for Soyinka “ritual is the irreducible formal agent for event-disparate and time-separated actions of human beings in human society”.