A Kim e a tutti gli altri… (Italo Calvino, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno)
National Cultures and Foreign Narratives. Italy 1903–1943 was originally published in Italian as Culture nazionali e narrazioni straniere: Italia 1903–1934 in 2007. These books discuss the role translations played in shaping the Italian national textuality from the beginning of the century to the fall of the Fascist regime: 1903–1943. To this end, they reconstruct the channels, the discourses, the patterns of reception and appropriation of translations by publishers, writers, readers, intellectuals and the Fascist regime, during a period in which the aspiration to become modern was a driving force in politics and society. In the literary world, this was translated into a desire to update Italy’s literary models—both highbrow and popular—and engage in an international dialogue.1 This new version of the book upholds the same core arguments. Yet, in the decade since its publication, the very same issues and themes discussed in the 2007 version of the book have been developed in a range of scholarly approaches which question, expand and complement some of the initial assumptions and findings.
In seven chapters, I argue that although the Fascist regime saw the practice of translation as an expression of unhealthy interest in foreign literatures, they did not prohibit translations, because they were an integral part of the national literary system: facilitating its renewal and the modernization of the publishing industry. Within the boundaries of the Italian national tradition, translations had a paradoxical nature: they expressed a potentially dissenting voice because they proposed alternative cultural, social and literary models, which were nonetheless essential to both the publishers’ and the regime’s financial survival since they could meet the demands of a growing number of readers. To make this case, the book expands the traditional chronological time frame considered to include the pre-war period, in order to account for the importance of translations prior to the Fascist period. Translations were the key literary, aesthetic and cultural phenomenon of first half of the twentieth century, for they responded to the need for identifying and theorizing structural points of contact between publishers, writers, readers and state-run institutions.
This study focuses mainly on Anglo-American literature because, contrary to French, German and Russian, it was perceived as more captivating and ‘popolare’, thereby able to reach larger groups of readers. The corpus examined comprises large- and small-scale publishing houses—for instance Mondadori, Bompiani, Einaudi, Barion, Modernissima—whose distinctive models for the dissemination and reception of translations were aligned with the imperative of modernizing the field.
From the beginning of the twentieth century and through two World Wars, translations and foreign literature were one of the most hotly debated issues in literary circles.2 Some saw this as a positive development, some as a negative influence on the national tradition—and some as both. The great Italian tradition of the past had lost its ascendency nationally and internationally, and reclaiming this prestige meant importing and absorbing foreign voices, rather than competing with them. Furthermore, in the 1920s and 1930s, the systematic arrival of prose in translation was a moment of transnational dialogue which impacted the organization of the publishing industry. Primarily from this transnational point of observation new literary affiliations were formed and the very idea of popular aesthetics reshaped. All this happened within the Fascist project of creating a mass culture and mass consensus.3
Whilst liberal Italy had openly promoted a competitive exchange with foreign voices, the regime strategically ignored real translations and the fascination with all things foreign, and surreptitiously took advantage of their popularity through the astute and rhetorically attuned press campaigns launched by a range of journals, such as Il lavoro fascista, Gerarchia, Augustea, the publishing industry’s Giornale della libreria, the union of authors and writers’ Autori e scrittori, diverse elite literary journals with no particular political alignment and those which reflected youth culture within the regime’s cultural apparatus (L’Italia letteraria, Orpheus, Corrente di vita giovanile), as well as those ostensibly supporting the regime as in the case of Primato edited by Giuseppe Bottai.
Naturally such campaigns were never neutral and adopted communication strategies which can aptly be described by the attitude Torquato Accetto termed ‘dissimulazione onesta’ (‘honest dissimulation’).4 In other words, the regime, in its modernizing and xenophobic and racist expressions, allowed the importation of translations when these were of convenience to certain key agents within the literary field. It instead blocked them by means of state censorship when they became too visible an obstacle, especially after 1936 with the beginning of the decline in mass consensus and the promulgation of the racial laws in 1938.
If we accept the idea of the Fascist regime as an imperfect totalitarian experiment, we can see how other cultures, and in this case the cultures expressed through translations, survived within the rigid and prescriptive doctrine of the regime.5 On the one hand, the Fascist regime officially and publicly affirmed the solidity of the national literary tradition, and on the other it turned a blind eye to the cultural institutions and publishing industry which promoted foreign voices.6 What were the consequences of all this? Translations published on a large scale challenged the uniformity of the national tradition and made it, in contrast to its traditional elitism, accessible to new groups of readers, writers and intellectuals
This is not a book about the history of the regime and the history of translation within it.7 I am equally indebted to the history of publishing and the history of the regime and of its cultures, and the book is located at the juncture of these scholarly fields.8 The history of publishing has acknowledged the importance of translation for the development of the publishing industry, whilst historians have emphasized the need to pay attention to the politics of culture shaped during the dictatorship. The book has pushed the argument further by fusing these two fields. By attributing the centrality of translations to both liberal and Fascist Italy as literary, social, political and aesthetic forces, I have observed how they came to influence the cultural sphere as a whole and their impact on the understanding of literary and aesthetic matters in diverse communities.
To make sense of these processes, I have identified and historicized the narratives surrounding translation practices and observed how they vary or remain stable over some fifty years. These four main narratives are: that of visibility vs invisibility of culture, that of national vs international tradition, that of the ‘Ancients vs Moderns’ and that of popular vs elite literature.9
First of all, visibility and invisibility were cardinal concepts in the politics of translation. When translation was carried out in a manner which guaranteed the publishers sales without being too visible, it was tolerated. Or rather, it was criticized but not ostracized. When instead the visibility of translation was potentially dangerous it was forcibly erased.
The perception of being modern if engaging with foreign writing was a commonly accepted topos, as was the perception that Italian letters had to break with the national tradition to modernize. In practice, both young publishers, ...