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To: <paul_arpaia@baruch.cuny.edu> Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 20:28:50 -0500 Dear H-Ital, A Hispanist friend of a colleague of mine put out the following interesting query: the Hispanist is working on a 1990 novel by Reinaldo Arenas (the subject of the recent film Before Night Falls). The novel, titled Mona, imagines the Mona Lisa coming to life. It features all sorts of gender transgressions (as it becomes unclear whether Mona is Mona or Leonardo da Vinci). Thoroughly modern ambiguities! The novel begins with an epigraph from Leonardo's Notebooks, with perhaps some Renaissance ambiguities of its own. In Spanish, the Leonardo epigraph reads, "Estoy plenamente consciente de que al no ser un hombre" This the Hispanist has translated as either "I am fully aware that not being a man..." or "I am fully aware that if (I, he, she, it) were not a man..." He is now trying to identify the passage from Leonardo's Notebooks but is having a great deal of trouble locating it. To make sense of the original drift of Leonardo's epigraph, the literary scholar needs the writer's original Italian, and his context. Qualquiera ayudo seria muy apreciado. Tom Cohen (Ren. Italy) History, York University tcohen@yorku.ca
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