No Deleddian scholar had noted what the Alghero historian Antonio Budruni put down in black and white with his latest book "Grazia Deledda, literary plagiarism" (Nemapress editions). A real scoop revealed by the author who will be a guest at the Ex-Me facility in Nuoro on January 26th at 5pm . The reference is to the text by Joan Palomba, a scholar of the Alghero-Catalan language, active between the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Palomba published a long essay on “Popular Traditions of Alghero” in 1911, making what Budruni defines as a “copy-paste” from “Popular Traditions of Nuoro” that Deledda published between 1893 and 1895.
How did they not understand that the descriptions of habits and customs of Alghero collected by Palomba were not Catalan, but with a very different, very distant origin, the Barbagia one?, the author wonders.
In his book Antonio Budruni directly compared many of Palomba's pages with those of Deledda, from which the repeated plagiarism is immediately evident. The Alghero scholar found the first traces of this alleged plagiarism while conducting research commissioned by the ISRE on the Alghero language in relation to the Sardinian language.
Neria De Giovanni, director of the "Deleddiana" series that hosts the book, will dialogue with the author in an evening that enjoys the patronage of the Municipality of Nuoro, Grazia Deledda's city.