Elio Vittorini - Translation American Literature Under Fascism

Translation of American literature in Italy under Fascist regime

-VIttorini’s antifascist literary project-

Summary:

1. Elio Vittorini
2. Cultural climate in Italy beginning early 1920’s
3. The 1930’s: proliferation of translations. The new literary industry.
4. Vittorini: translation as subversion
5. Americana

1. Elio Vittorini

Elio Vittorini was an Italian writer and novelist. Born in Sicily in 1908 as the son of a railway worker, he became a construction worker and started to write stories. Starting as contributor to the small Florentine literary journal La Ronda, he soon moved to Florence, where he worked as a proofreader (type corrector?) fore the newspaper La Nazione. During this time he learned English translating Robins Crusoe, he’s favourite book since he was a child, word by word. This exercise had a profound effect on his own writing.

Afterward he moved to Milan (1939), where he worked as a translator, for Arnoldo Mondadori and Valentino Bompiani, of such writers as Poe, D.H. Lawrence, Hemingway, Caldwell, Steinbeck, Saroyan and Faulkner. Modelling his own writing on their prose style, especially focusing on dialogs, Vittorini polemically searched for innovation in Italian literature and became an influential voice in the modernist school of novel writing.

His best-known work is the anti-fascist novel Conversazione in Sicilia, for which he was jailed when it was published in 1941.

1. Cultural climate in Italy beginning early 1920’s

The cultural climate in Italy beginning early 1920’s favoured the translation of North American works, especially popular fiction, the reading matter of the masses.

Pro-American attitudes found public expression: Mussolini adopted a friendly stance toward America in his first decade of rule, writing many articles for the American press that highlighted the similarities between the two countries. Both were young, both were forging new ground, both were anti-communist.

America, known above all for its cinema and music, soon became a symbol of glamour and freedom, occupying a special place in the Italian imagination.

1. The 1930’s:

The 1930’s may have been the decade of translations. Italy published more translations than any other country in the world, creating a new literary industry. Based on popular fiction, which did not imply any political contents, this new industry was the literary response to fascism: a response of indifference, if not actual dissent.

There were good reasons why this should be so. In fact, by the 1930’s, imprisonments, censorship and politically motivated firings had silenced many of the most significant writers living in Italy.

There are 3 important reasons for translating which can be highlighted:

1. translation became an economic necessity

For a number of important and influential writers it represented a way to maintain themselves: many had lost their jobs because they were ideologically suspect.

1. translation became a creative opportunity

For writers who had difficulty publishing their own work.

1. translation was a form of political activity

It had the effect of giving expression to the cult of America, which represented, at this chronological time, nearly the opposite of the regime’s cultural ideology.  

Fascist jail and censorship contributed this way to the creation of the translation industry.

1. Vittorini: translation as subversion

Elio Vittorini translated extensively in the 1930-40 also because he was not allowed to publish his original work (his novel Il Garofano Rosso had been seized, causing the closure of the literary magazine Solaria on which it appeared serialized). Thus, promoting American authors became for Vittorini a form of literary antifascism, an opposition, a covert action taken subtly to subvert the regime.

From 1938 Vittorini worked for the Milanese publisher Valentino Bompiani as a translator and an editor, helping to organize the Italian translation industry and promoting North American prose.