Irish Literature in Italy in the Era of the World Wars (New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature) 3030835855, 9783030835859

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN IRISH AND IRISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

Irish Literature in Italy in the Era of the World Wars Antonio Bibbò

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature Series Editor Kelly Matthews Department of English Framingham State University Framingham, MA, USA

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature promotes fresh scholarship that explores models of Irish and Irish American identity and examines issues that address and shape the contours of Irishness. The series aims to analyze literary works and investigate the fluid, shifting, and sometimes multivalent discipline of Irish Studies. Politics, the academy, gender, and Irish and Irish American culture have inspired and impacted recent scholarship centered on Irish and Irish American literature, which contributes to our twenty-first century understanding of Ireland, America, Irish Americans, and the creative, intellectual, and theoretical spaces between. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14747

Antonio Bibbò

Irish Literature in Italy in the Era of the World Wars

Antonio Bibbò University of Trento Trento, Italy

ISSN 2731-3182     ISSN 2731-3190 (electronic) New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature ISBN 978-3-030-83585-9    ISBN 978-3-030-83586-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83586-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

While the literary mediators at the center of my work only rarely managed to create tight networks and work together to promote Irish literature, I have been blessed with a strong and supportive network of friends and colleagues. They are the fiber of this book, and there is hardly a sentence I can read without thinking of fruitful exchanges I have had with them. This research started as part of a Marie Curie project at the University of Manchester. I wish to thank Francesca Billiani, the supervisor of that project, and the great colleagues and friends I met at Manchester: Mona Baker,  Christian Goeschel, Rachel Clements, Caterina Sinibaldi, and Walter Baroni. I am grateful to Catherine Dunne for showing her support at a very early stage of this research, and to Dan Carey for giving me the opportunity to be a visiting scholar at the Moore Institute (NUI Galway), an environment that proved extremely conducive to the development of new ideas and inspiring discussions. Colleagues have been very generous with both their time and attention. This book was completed while starting a new position at the University of Trento, and I wish to thank my colleagues there, Andrea Binelli, Sabrina Francesconi and Dominic Stewart for the support they gave this immigrant traveling back to his home country and trying to juggle new teaching and old research. Declan Kiberd, John McCourt,  Christopher Rundle, Michele Sisto, Mariavita Cambria, Irene Fantappiè, Anna Baldini, Daria Biagi, Stefania De Lucia, Sara Sullam, Enrico Terrinoni, Anna Modena,  Daniela La Penna, Elisa Bolchi, Alan Cunningham, Derek Hand, Riccardo Michelucci, Ursula Fanning, Jerôme

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

aan de Wiel, Franca Ruggieri, Debora Biancheri, Anne O’Connor, Ciaran McDonough, Barry Houlihan, Chiara Chini, Serenella Zanotti, Ruth Scales, Gabriella Petti, Francesco de Cristofaro, Carmen Gallo, and Riccardo Capoferro have discussed political, literary, and more general Irish-Italian issues with me and in some cases read early drafts of these chapters providing invaluable advice. Jessica D’Eath has polished this text with unparalleled attention and care. Alessandra Diazzi has been a very present, though virtual, writing buddy. My parents gave me all the love and help I needed. Lucy Carroll has been incredibly patient and supportive in ways that sometimes defied my comprehension, but are hopefully met by my gratitude. Zeus provided the much needed walks to break the long hours in front of the screen. This book would not have been possible without the help of the often unsung heroes of research, the archivists and librarians who very patiently have assisted me in what felt at times like an endless and frustrating task. I want to especially thank Anna Lisa Cavazzuti, Tiziano Chiesa, and Luisa Finocchi at the Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori (Milan); Gian Domenico Ricaldone at the Archivio Museo Biblioteca dell’Attore (Genoa); Pietro Crivellaro and Anna Peyron at the Archivio del Dramma; Centro Studi del Teatro Stabile (Torino), Marina Gentilini at Biblioteca Statale di Cremona; Nicoletta Trotta at the Centro Manoscritti (Pavia); Diana Rüesch at the Archivio Prezzolini; Biblioteca cantonale (Lugano) and their colleagues at the Biblioteca comunale di Como, APICE (Archivi della Parola, dell’Immagine e della Comunicazione Editoriale, Milan), Fondazione Giorgio Cini (Venice); and Gabinetto Vieusseux. I would also like to thank all copyright holders and estates for permission to quote from unpublished material in this book. Every effort was made to seek permission where copyright could be identified. Archives were also very generous with their materials during the organization of the “Irish in Italy” exhibition at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (Rome), organized thanks to the support of the Embassy of Ireland in Rome. My gratitude especially goes to the former Ambassador Bobby McDonagh. The exhibition then moved to the Rome Global Gateway (University of Notre Dame), thanks to Barry McCrea, and to the University College Cork, thanks to Daragh O’Connell and Crónán Ó Doibhlin. I wish to thank them for the opportunity and especially for the lively conversations on things Irish-Italian. “Irish in Italy” is now online (minerva.manchester.ac.uk/irish-in-italy/), thanks to

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the great support of Guyda Armstrong and Federica Coluzzi. I also wish to thank Anna Antonello for the huge help she gave me populating the online database (ltit.it). This book is largely based on research funded by Marie Skłodowska-­ Curie action under Grant (627852). Project Acronym: ItalianIrish. Chapter 5 is an updated version of an essay originally appeared as “Irish Theatre in Italy During the Second World War: Translation and Politics”. Modern Italy, vol. 24, no.1, Feb. 2019: 45–61, © 2018 Association for the Study of Modern Italy. Published by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with permission.

Praise for Irish Literature in Italy in the Era of the World Wars “The translator is often a character in search of an author—Antonio Bibbò, with his gift for imaginative connection, shows how often the Italians, in translating Irish masters, uncovered their own deeper selves. In doing as much, they added new layers of depth to the understanding of Irish classics. Bibbò has a gift of explanation without simplification—and an audacity of interpretation tempered by sound scholarly scruple. This is a work deeply researched and deeply felt—a combination of passion and truth.” —Declan Kiberd, University of Notre Dame, USA “This book is a painstakingly researched and very original historically-grounded work that throws much new light onto the complex process of understanding and interpreting Irish literature, culture, politics, and indeed Ireland itself in various Italian contexts from the early decades of the twentieth century up to the period of the Second World War. Building on existing recent scholarship and on many underused archival sources, it offers a number of revealing case studies while also conveying a broad sense of the changing perceptions about Ireland over half a century and offering important insights into the players—major and minor—involved in this process. It also focuses on the principal translations of Irish literary works, examining the often political motivations that lay behind the texts chosen for translation and the manner in which they were translated.” —John McCourt, Università di Macerata, Italy “A fascinating study that adopts an innovative method involving reception studies, comparative literature studies, imagology, and translation studies. Antonio Bibbò uses these approaches to show how the image and perception of Irish literature evolved in Italy during the first thirty to forty years of the twentieth century, basing his research on a wealth of archival and paratextual material. Bibbò convincingly shows us how our understanding of a national literary field like the Italian one should include the history of its cross-cultural and transnational literary relations and influences; and also how our understanding of a literary tradition, such as the Irish one, can be greatly enhanced by the history of its translation, mediation, and reception in other languages and cultures.” —Christopher Rundle, Università di Bologna, Italy, and University of Manchester, UK

Contents

1 Introduction: Imagining Ireland in Italy  1 References 21 2 Early Irlandesisti 27 2.1 Making Sense of Ireland in Early Twentieth-Century Italy 27 2.1.1 Writing the Home Rule 29 2.1.2 Writing the Irish Struggle for Independence 48 2.2 “A Geographical Mystery”: James Joyce, an Italian-Irish Intellectual? 62 2.2.1 Translating Irish Playwrights in Trieste 73 References 77 3 False Start: Carlo Linati and the Irish 83 3.1 Linati’s “discoverta degli irlandesi” 83 3.1.1 A Budding Writer, an Amateur Translator 90 3.1.2 “The general admiration of the Irish for criminals”: Linati and Irish Politics100 3.2 The (Few) Fortunes and (Many) Misfortunes of Irish Drama in Italy106 3.2.1 Emma Gramatica112 3.2.2 Eleonora Duse116 3.3 The Irish Season of Ferrieri’s Il Convegno123

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3.3.1 Impressionist Landscape Painting on the Aran Islands130 3.3.2 The Spaesato Joyce in the Pages of Il Convegno 139 3.4 Who’s He When He’s Abroad? The Revival in Italy151 References168 4 Ireland in Fascist Italy179 4.1 Political Discourses, Travelogues, and Historical Narratives179 4.1.1 Pilgrimages in the West. Rossi and the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy184 4.1.2 Mario Borsa and the Myth of Roger Casement190 4.1.3 A Fascist Ireland?194 4.2 Enlarging the Repertoire200 4.2.1 Pirandello and Lord Dunsany at the Teatro d’Arte in Rome202 4.2.2 Irish Theater Before the Second World War: Depoliticizing O’Casey, Assimilating O’Neill207 4.3 The Largest Province of Irish Literature: Irish Prose in Fascist Italy218 4.3.1 Gian Dàuli and the New Canon of Irish Literature219 4.3.2 Mondadori and Contemporary Irish Writers235 References245 5 We Are All Irish in the Eyes of Mussolini: Irish Theater in the War Years253 5.1 Anton Giulio Bragaglia and the Italian Theater Scene253 5.1.1 The Rediscovery of Irish Theater in Wartime Italy257 5.1.2 The Oriundi and O’Bragaglia’s New Irish Repertoire264 5.2 Paolo Grassi and Rosa e Ballo: Publishing Anti-Fascist Ireland273 References280

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6 Conclusion283 References288 Index of Names289 Index of Works and Periodicals301

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 John M. Synge, Le isole Aran, trans. C. Linati, Milan: Rosa e Ballo, 1944 Fig. 5.1 Seán O’Casey, Il falso repubblicano, trans. C. Linati, Milan: Rosa e Ballo, 1944

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Imagining Ireland in Italy

It is only by contact with the art of foreign nations that the art of a country gains that individual and separate life that we call nationality —O. Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” It is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language. —B. Friel, Translations

When I started my investigation into the perception and reception of Irish literature in Italy, I thought I would be spending a lot more time with James Joyce than with any of his fellow Irish writers. After all, Joyce began studying Italian at the age of nine, spent some of the most important years of his life as a struggling writer in Trieste, and wrote some of his early published criticism in Italian, showing a stunning mastery of the language

The issues here discussed on the relationship between comparative literature and translation history have been developed more at length in Bibbò (2021). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Bibbò, Irish Literature in Italy in the Era of the World Wars, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83586-6_1

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of Dante, despite claims by Alessandro Francini Bruni that his Italian was “crippled” and “full of ulcers” (Potts 1979: 12). Moreover, he tried to establish himself as a presence in the Italian cultural and literary system, albeit with little or no success. Toward the end of his career, the Italian translation of two short sections of Finnegans Wake, more of a re-creation by Joyce himself, was “the last page of great prose that Joyce left us shortly before dying” (Bosinelli and Maria 1998: 197). In the words of John McCourt, Joyce had become “someone […] steeped in Italian culture, literature and language – an Italianized Irishman” (McCourt 2000: 9), a “chameleon artist” (Ruggieri 1992: xxxviii) with a strong Triestine accent (Frank 1967: 37). Little did I know that, though I would spend some quality time with him, Joyce would be somewhat unexpectedly sidelined by other Irish writers. The centrality of William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, and Lady Gregory certainly came as no surprise, but even the now almost unknown Brian Oswald Donn Byrne was to take up a substantial part of my time spent scouring archives and libraries. This is, of course, in part due to the nature of my study, focusing as it does on the Italian perception of writers as Irish, and therefore leaving little room for the likes of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, who were almost unfailingly identified (and marketed) in Italy as English. This is partly true of Joyce also, whose presence on the Italian literary scene was also often associated with a virtual erasure of his Irish roots. The author of Ulysses was most often regarded within a European, rather than an Irish, frame of reference, generally linked to the cosmopolitan French literary system and rarely discussed in the few surveys of Irish literature produced in the Bel paese. The presence of Joyce in this book is thus more in the guise of a cumbersome absence, or rather an overwhelming but liminal presence occupying an in-­ between space connecting Irish and European literature. The case of Joyce serves to illustrate one of the primary concerns of this book: the reception of literature—be it single authors or national traditions—should always take into account roads not taken and failures, productive misunderstandings, and cultural bias that keep allegedly key players out of the game. In recent decades, a side effect of the debates on world literature (Moretti 2000, 2003; Prendergast 2004) has been that scholars have grown especially concerned with the afterlife of texts and with a transnational approach as a necessary corrective to the traditional study of national literatures, seen as elements of the literary polysystem (Even-Zohar 1990) in constant interaction. In keeping with this approach, my case study can

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shed light both on the history of Italian and Irish literatures, their relationships, and the way they refract each other within the Italian literary system. Studying the translation history of literary texts offers a means of investigating the status of literature itself in a specified place and time, exploring the ways in which literary texts are chosen, translated, manipulated, and received by interpretive communities. The study of reception and translation is no longer limited to an examination of direct and binary influences between two clear-cut opposed (and primarily national) systems, but instead involves a complex analysis of the transnational circulation of literature, understood to encompass not only the works forming the canon, but also writers, mediators, genres, forms, and discursive formations. In this sense, if “Comparative literature should be actively engaged in the comparative study of canon formation and in reconceiving the canon” (Bernheimer 1995: 44), it is necessary to focus both on what becomes part of the said canon—or rather, canons—including translations, and what is excluded, erased from it. This is where the history of translation can shed light on the metonymic character of cultural exchange (Tymoczko 1999: 41–61, 278–300), but also, in conjunction with comparative literature and area studies, on the reasons behind certain translation choices, both at a text level and in terms of more general publishing strategies, such as the selection of texts to translate. While this is now generally accepted, though still not a stable feature of our literary histories (Venuti 2007: 308; Kershaw 2010: 4), such an approach can productively complicate our notions of national literature: a study of the process of canon formation that effectively and systematically incorporates literary exchanges makes the idea of national literature more “dynamic and changing” (Gentzler 1999: 259), less monolithic and monolingual. In the words of David Damrosch, “national literatures should not be construed simply on the basis of a fatherland’s Muttersprache, or on authors’ passports, but on their works’ effective presence within a nation’s literary culture, whatever their land and language of origin” (Damrosch 2014: 351). The aim of such a study is thus to present the dynamics of translation as fully integrated with the dialectics of the national field. A recent example of such an approach, concerning early-twentieth-century Italy, is a research project, carried out by Baldini, Biagi, De Lucia, Fantappiè, and Sisto, aimed at exploring the dissemination of German literature in Italy. The project, characterized by a pronounced sociological approach, focused on a deceptively simple premise, shared by other classic Bourdieusan works on translation and

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reception such as Gouanvic (1999):1 “once we acknowledge that the socalled foreign literature circulating in Italy is produced by the same actors who produce Italian literature, we can overcome the separation between national literatures” (Baldini et al. 2018: 17).2 Translation history can illuminate the reception and manipulation of foreign literatures if it succeeds in renegotiating the idea of nation and making national canons more complex, by focusing on the elements of the literary system that are both part of more than one national literature and belong to different subsystems in different ways.3 In this sense, it seems useful to consider translation as an activity which changes the receiving as well as the source context, by refracting what we have come to consider the original into a complex array of texts that are worthy of investigation. In a recent and inspiring position paper included in the latest ACLA report, Rebecca Walkowitz argues that in the future, we will have to approach literary works as if they exist in several languages, media, and formats and as if they are written, from the get-go, for many audiences. […] Future reading is foreign reading because it implies something about the people who encounter texts: they are not a predictable group, and they are not contained by one territory or ethnos. (Walkowitz 2017: 108, my emphasis) 1  “l’œuvre traduite diffusée dans le champ littéraire est soumise à la même logique objective que l’œuvre indigène non traduite” (Gouanvic 1999: 19). 2  My translation. Unless otherwise stated, all translations in this book are mine and revised by Dr Jessica D’Eath or vice versa. 3  A transnational turn since the start of the century has recently been acknowledged in many quarters of Italian studies as well. Charles Burdett, Loredana Polezzi, and Nick Havely summed it up quite fittingly in a recent special issue of Italian Studies: “Approaching Italian studies as a transnational and translational space makes it possible to broaden the boundaries of the discipline, acknowledging the need for greater inclusivity, both in terms of objects of study and methodological approaches. Placing mobility at the center of the research map (rather than treating it as a secondary, marginal or accidental feature of an essentially national narrative) brings into focus how labels such as ‘Italy’ and ‘Italian’ are at once essential and essentializing, indispensable and insufficient. Just as ‘Italian culture’ is not a homogeneous entity, so it is not co-extensive with the space of the nation, nor with the Italian language (which, of course, is itself far from a single, standardized and stable object). Cultural and linguistic practices or products escape and exceed the limits imposed by any definition of the term ‘Italian’, exposing its shifting nature. Yet that term also maintains the power to define and absorb, or to exclude and marginalize. In its porosity, it continues to signify something specific and identifiable, functioning as a notion which carries historical specificity and cultural capital just as it (thankfully) fails to crystallize into any permanent and prescriptive meaning” (Burdett et al. 2020: 231).

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Following on from this last point, a historical approach to translation is not just about the reproduction of texts or the fame of individual writers, but about their complex and transnational identities, their living several and diverse lives at the same time, and their participating in different literary traditions in different guises. The emphasis on the fluid meaning of literary texts, posited by reception studies since the traditional works of Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, has given way to a markedly relativist approach to the study of literature and its circulation. Even more, it has instilled new life into traditional studies of literary dissemination. Taking Jauss’s paradigm shift as an ideal point of departure, the study of translation history can constitute a similar provocation within comparative literature and contribute to “de-sacralizing” the original (see Baer 2017). While this condition is certainly destined to become more prominent in the future, as stated by Walkowitz, it can also inform our understanding of the literary past and contribute to questioning the notion of national belonging for literary works. We will see these dynamics at play, particularly when exploring the case of James Joyce as an intellectual beyond the confines of national identity. Indeed, I argue that Joyce’s role on the literary scene can be interpreted in radically different ways depending on whether one examines his dealings with the Irish or Italian system, his rebellious attitude toward the aesthetics of the Celtic Revival, and the support he gave that very aesthetics when trying to carve out a space for Irish literature in Italy, as an Italian writer and translator. Thus, we can further complicate the portraits of established actors within the literary field. The worldliness of writers and literary works is of course even more obvious when authors participate directly in a foreign literary system as in the case of Joyce, but it is still worth observing when drawing maps of the transnational waves of literary circulation, and when dealing with literary texts in translation as acquiring a different array of meanings from those they had in the source system. Reception studies can further our understanding of what Joe Cleary dubbed “the co-existence of relatively discrete or parallel literary systems with their very different aesthetic canons and diverse hierarchies of ‘world’ authors” (Cleary 2006: 210). This view of translation, of its role in literary history as an instrument of change and a means of probing the gaps between systems instead of bridging them, calls to mind the deconstructionist idea of translations creating their originals and contesting the authority of the source text, or rather start text, as suggested by Anthony Pym (2014: 2). Seen in this light, translations do not say almost the same thing as their originals; they are ulterior

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creations that make use of the essential lack of homogeneity between systems of meaning. They are what Benjamin called “fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together [and] must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another” (Benjamin 2007: 78). It is precisely because translations fail that they testify to the afterlife of a text and add meaning to it, creating new experiences of reading for new readerships.4 The emphasis is essentially reversed if compared to more traditional reception studies: the source text is decentered, and its variety is emphasized over its supposedly innate and stable qualities, while the texts are presented as malleable items employed as symbolic currency by the actors of the literary fields. It is in this spirit that, whenever possible, reception has been articulated here not as a passive process, but as the result of interactions between Irish and Italian writers and mediators which seek to inhabit a liminal space where translation interacts with canon formation in a systematic and stimulating fashion. I have therefore primarily focused on the work of mediators found in paratexts, understood to include prefaces, reviews, articles, and unpublished material. “Mediator” is used here as an umbrella term to encompass all agents involved in the translation exchange, be they translators, publishers, editors, theater managers or directors, critics or political observers. In order to be useful to the writing of literary histories and to illuminate how interactions between literary systems work, however, this idea or reception needs to move beyond “canonical authors who have also written translations” (Venuti 2007: 308) and must also inform our general view of translation when less-known mediators, or anonymous translators, are involved. This is a recurring feature of my study, as the main mediators who took a shine to Ireland and raised an awareness of it in Italian political and literary circles were rarely at the center of the literary system. The material at the core of this work is thus not merely what was effectively published or produced on stage but also, to a large extent, the traces that can be found in archives, providing depth and complexity to the interactions of key figures: as Lawrence Venuti put it, “[o]nly archival research can yield the data to make clear the ideological determinations and social effects of translation” (Venuti 2007: 308). This 4  “In the context of the study of literature in segregated national containers, with their emphasis on national cultural roots, translation necessarily appears as loss; but in the context of world literature translation appears as gain in the sense that it is the means by which texts transcend their culture of origin, acquiring new depths of meaning and horizons of interpretation as they enter new contexts” (Maher and Nelson 2013: 6).

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is in keeping with a relatively recent trend in translation studies. Particularly since the start of the century, translation studies scholars have woven a tight relationship with historical disciplines, and this has also resulted in the exploration of literary archives of translators, publishers, and, more generally, cultural mediators. Jeremy Munday, in particular, has reflected on the role of translators’ documents testifying to the various stages of the translation process and showing the work of the translator firsthand (Munday 2013). Scholars have pointed out how “analyzing other types of document, such as translators’ correspondence, notes, and marginalia” (Zanotti and Bosinelli 2016: 128) can also be fruitful for such a study. The genetic study of translations can thus be intertwined with the more traditional study of the history of translations, and both disciplines currently see a tendency to explore archives and make the final product of translation interact with the peritexts in new, productive ways, often providing invaluable information on dead-ends and alternative histories. While, for reasons of space and focus, this study is less concerned with close analyses of the various stages of the translation process of actual texts than with the role of translations in the literary system, it takes a leaf from such studies in that much attention has been paid to the avant-texte of literary translations and editorial activity, in order to figure out the dialectics of the entrance of Irish literature into Italy. The gatekeeping role of mediators, and translators in particular, is investigated here with regard to the metonymic dimension of the translation process as put forward by Maria Tymoczko. Translators negotiate the “contradictory demands” (Tymoczko 2007: 211) of the translated text and tend to provide a version of it that responds to some of those demands while ignoring, or simply underplaying, others. According to Tymoczko, this is due to the metonymic dimension of the translation process and is not just unavoidable but “desirable” (2007: 215; 308) as it is a way for translators—and I would argue mediators in general—to empower themselves and focus on the aspects of the text which they deem to be more important (or more acceptable) for their intended audience. While this can either disrupt the order of the receiving literary system, so to speak, or confirm it, it is nevertheless a relatively direct way of observing the mediator’s bias or agenda.5 Mistranslations, mitigations, or intensifications of 5  Michael Cronin emphasizes how there is another side to the translator’s empowerment: “If the translator is to assume authorial power, then abdication of responsibility for the final result (‘I was only doing my job’), is no longer possible” (Cronin 1996: 123).

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specific elements can also be considered part of a similar phenomenon, as they often stem from received notions about the culture of the source text and can be converted into stereotypes in the receiving culture. Italian mediators of Irish literature, for instance, tended to attach Catholic values to Irish texts even when they were not manifest in the source text, something that arguably stemmed from a received idea of Ireland as well as from the common idea of similarities between the Emerald Isle and Italy. An element arising from the history of translation can thus shed light on the mutual perception between cultures. With this in mind, the more general aim of this book is twofold. On the one hand, it aims to make a case for including foreign texts in the study of domestic literatures. On the other, it intends to stress the need to look at literary traditions beyond national borders, considering their transnational ramifications. The interconnections between literary traditions are at the center of my research, more so than a purely quantitative study of Irish writers who were translated into Italian, though this latter element constituted the foundation of my work, which started as a meticulous perusal of library and publishers’ catalogs, periodicals, and archives. The quantitative aspect of the analysis, the results of which have populated an online database (www.ltit.it),6 was the necessary point of departure for making sense of how the Italian literary field acquired an awareness of the specificity of Irish literature during the first half of the twentieth century, when, in the words of Valery Larbaud, “Ireland [was] making a sensational re-entrance into high European literature” (quoted in Deming 1970: 253). In order to do so, I explore Italian responses to this newcomer to the European literary scene, studying mediators and investigating which writers they imported, their connections, what images of Ireland they either promoted or were affected by, and their own creative output. What happens to Irish literature in Italy is not a straight path, but a windy road or, rather, a labyrinth full of cul de sacs. However, as alluded to earlier, I believe that the history of literature should pay more attention to failure and to the roads not taken, to what does not quite work out, in order to make sense of the needs of, and gaps in, the system. In this regard, I have focused on identifying networks of shared interests connecting the Italian mediators involved in Irish affairs, but a rather fraught picture has emerged. Most 6  The database devotes much attention to the mediating agents and the structures that made the mediation process possible. At the time of writing, it includes data on German, Irish, Scandinavian literatures, and it is being populated with data on American literature.

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intellectuals connected with Ireland and committed to disseminating Irish literature were engaged in solitary endeavors and only rarely came into contact with one another, with collaborations being even less common. Even the frequency of mediators quoting one another or relying on the work of their predecessors is relatively low. Nonetheless, while these literati did not see themselves as part of an integrated group or movement, certain shared ideas of Ireland still made their way into the Italian cultural and political scene. Thus, my main concern is not with the mere recording of all translations of Irish writing in Italy—though this information is available for the first time in the aforementioned database—but with the way notions of Ireland influenced the reception and circulation of Irish literature. In order to do so, I have investigated the nature and dissemination of what imagologists (or image studies scholars) call images of Ireland in Italy. Images of Ireland have always been central to the self-definition of the national character in the country, and this concern became even stronger with the Celtic Revival. In 1897, the “Manifesto for the Irish Literary Theatre” was clear in stating that the new literature of Ireland was to entail a thorough rethinking of the image of the country as it was perceived abroad: “We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and easy sentiment […] but of ancient idealism” (quoted in Gregory 1972: 20). The new literature of the nation had to get rid of old and colonial ideas of Ireland in order to establish the country as autonomous and independent. The process of image-building was instrumental to the development of a new Irish identity as a counterpoint to the colonial version that had been assigned to the country over centuries of British rule. Irish studies have always dealt with various and often contrasting versions of Ireland: Catholic, Protestant, pagan, rebellious, and Celtic Ireland, as well as the politically ingenious mix of all these aspects presented by the movement for the Celtic Revival, with the diverse images of a still politically unresolved Ireland being one of the main issues faced by the country at the turn of the century. While national characters are always the result of a process of narrative construction, it is no wonder that the process of image-building that Irish revivalists set out to enact was perceived as a revelation of the truth concerning their country. Lady Gregory makes it particularly clear in her 1898 article, “Ireland Real, and Ideal”: They see in us one part boastful quarrelsome adventurer, one part vulgar rollicking buffoon […] But we begin to think after all that truth is best, that

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we have worn the mask thrust upon us too long, and that we are more likely to win at least respect when we appear in our own form. (Quoted in Kiberd and Mathews 2015: 51)

As a discipline, imagology is rooted in comparative literature and is concerned with the stereotyped images of ethnicities or nationalities, or “imagotypes”.7 “Literary […] imagology studies the origin and function of characteristics of other countries and peoples, as expressed textually, particularly in the way in which they are presented in works of literature, plays, travel books and essays” (Beller 2007: 7). This is often the result of a conflict, or a set of dynamics, between self-representation (auto-images) and the representation of the Other (hetero-image). “The auto-image is primarily the implied negative counterpart of a given hetero-image […]. The auto-image is thus the embodiment of the ethnocentricity against which the foreign becomes recognizably foreign” (Leerssen 1997: 11). We can find examples of this process of image formation in classical as well as in modern literature, ranging from Tacitus to Mme de Staël, but the definition of national characters became predictably central during the Romantic period and the acceleration of the process of state formation across Europe as a strategy to define one’s national characteristics as opposed to those of the neighboring people(s). After the Second World War, imagology had to suffer a virtual ban by the major exponents of New Criticism, particularly René Wellek, as a study of literature that allegedly focused on extrinsic, rather than intrinsic, literary aspects. Despite this, it continued to be practiced, primarily in France (under the influence of Daniel-Henri Pageaux) and the Netherlands, where the school of Hugo Dyserinck “demonstrated both the intrinsic literary function and the general ideological importance of national images” (Beller 2007: 9) In keeping with Dyserinck’s approach, what makes national images a useful tool when practicing literary and translation criticism is that they appear to influence the way foreign cultures and literatures are perceived, and the way pre-conceived notions of national characteristics provide a complex array of textually codified images: “Our images of foreign countries, peoples and cultures, mainly derive from selective value judgements (which are in turn derived from selective observation) as expressed in travel 7  According to Leerssen, “[t]he term ‘imagotype’, coined in analogy to ‘stereotype’, is preferable to this latter term since it does not labour under the connotations of changelessness and stability implied in “stereotype”” (Leerssen 1997: 457).

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writing and in literary representations” (Beller 2007: 5) The birth and evolution of these images, and the interactions between auto- and heteroimages, are some of the elements that can deepen our understanding of international literary exchanges. One aspect to bear in mind is that imagology is eminently descriptive and aims to map the dissemination of national stereotypes and the way they affect the perception of the Other, not to explain them or define how true they are.8 Central as images are to the perception of foreign cultures, it comes as no surprise that scholars have sought to reflect on the possibility of establishing a methodological framework at the crossroads of translation studies and imagology, especially in recent years (Sengupta 1995; Kuran-Burçoğlu 2000; van Doorslaer et al. 2015). According to the editors of one of these volumes, the “crossfertilization” between the two disciplines is justified because “[b]oth disciplines have a research history stemming from descriptive and diachronic viewpoints that prevent them from using static approaches or positing stable or essentialist views of cultures and their practices. Change and hybridity are two important features of the objects both disciplines study: translation and images” (van Doorslaer et al. 2015: 2). Images of national literatures influence translation processes and are simultaneously influenced by them: the variability of images related to a specific literary tradition is often linked with the variability of that tradition’s repertoire in a foreign country. In the case study at hand, this is further complicated by the fact that, in the decades here investigated, Ireland was undergoing profound changes as it transitioned from being part of the Empire to an almost independent country, with Italy likewise rapidly shifting from a liberal country to a dictatorship. An effect of this can be seen, for instance, in Ireland being compared more often to regions of Italy in the years before its independence and to the entire Bel paese in the years following the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921. Focusing on the variability of the images of Ireland together with the variable contexts that produced them helps avoid the trap, to which reception studies can fall victim, of turning one of the two terms into an unchangeable Other. The perception and reception of Irish literature in Italy provides an interesting case study in terms of the dynamics between stability and 8  “it is the aim of imagology to describe the origin, process and function of national prejudices and stereotypes, to bring them to the surface, analyze them and make people rationally aware of them” (Beller 2007: 11–12).

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variability of stereotypes. A relatively narrow and monolithic notion of Irishness in the 1910s was characterized by an image that primarily focused on a depiction of the Irish as melancholy and contemplative Celts, but was also ingrained in the traditional idea of Ireland as a fellow Catholic country. This resulted in a repertoire of Irish writing that privileged the dramatic production connected with the Abbey Theatre’s most lyrical, mystical, and least political works. Moreover, it emphasized some commonplace ideas about the Irish, including their religious allegiance, which resulted, as we will see, in a virtual erasure of the Protestant element and a tacit agreement that Irish writers were, in one way or another, Catholic. It is only around the 1920s that different images of Ireland and Irish literature began making inroads in Italy, first in the political discourse, influenced by the turmoil of the early 1920s, then in literary criticism. These new images rearticulated some of the elements that were already part of Matthew Arnold’s discourse, such as the rebelliousness of the Celts and their inconsistent behavior, to add more elements to the Italian hetero-­ image of the Irish: inconsistency and rebelliousness were instrumental, for different reasons that will be explored, to making room in the Italian repertoire of Irish writers for the likes of George Moore, James Stephens, and Liam O’Flaherty, around the year 1930. In those same years, this also brought about a decisive shift from the notion of Irishness as non-­ Englishness to a more bellicose anti-Englishness. While present from the beginning of the century, the latter notion was especially foregrounded by fascist propagandists focusing on denouncing English colonial atrocities and using Ireland as a pawn in their cultural diplomacy war, especially after the Ethiopian crisis of 1935. As is hopefully clear from these necessarily brief introductory remarks, the hetero-images of Ireland that were disseminated in Italy at the start of the century were closely dependent on the British-Irish dynamics that produced them in the first place. In the works of the cultural mediators here at play, the colonial discourse and the “reciprocity between colonizer and colonized” whereby “the colonized” is “the repressed and rejected other against which the colonizer defines an ordered self” (Cairns and Richards 1988: 8), is still at the foundation of the most common images of Ireland. These images tend to maintain their original function but are in most cases also redeployed within Italian political and cultural discourses imbued with new meanings. To give but one example, the notion of virile and fighting Gaels became more frequent in fascist discourses that framed Ireland as a thorn in Britain’s side and a possible fascist ally. This, in turn, brought about the rediscovery of Irish

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literature during the Second World War, and especially its politicization. By the time the war was being fought, the commonplace image of Ireland had decidedly shifted to anti-England, to the point that even writers, who until that moment had been perceived as uninterested in politics, such as James Joyce, were deemed anti-English. An analysis of texts, their contexts, and their intertextual relationships for the purposes of following “the textual dissemination history of a given trope or commonplace concerning a given nation’s ‘character’” (van Doorslaer et al. 2015: 3) is instrumental to an exploration of the variability and hybridization of national images, as they interact with each other and are continuously altered by their context of reception. It is for this reason, in particular, that this book devotes significant attention to the dissemination of journalistic, political, and diplomatic discourses about Ireland. It is outside of the purview of this work to discuss the story of Irish politics in Italy, or to provide a full survey of the intense debates on Irish politics that interested Italian-based mediators at various stages during the early decades of the century and that provided a reflection on the political turmoil in Ireland. Instead, the book will focus on some outstanding contributions and analyze them from the point of view of the stereotypes of Ireland that they conveyed. The principle of selection is that the texts analyzed here—that are not immediately concerned with literary matters—should address cultural issues and attempt to affect a wider debate on Irishness beyond the political commentary. The sections that are more concerned with political writings and issues, then, display a focus on intellectuals who also often disseminated information on Irish culture and whose views directly or indirectly influenced the status of Irish literature in Italy. These mediators are well represented by the rectors of the Irish College Michael O’Riordan and John Hagan, the historian Ernesto Buonaiuti, and the philosopher Mario Manlio Rossi, as well as by most of the fascist authors of propaganda texts (e.g. Nicola Pascazio, Luigi Villari, Pier Fausto Palumbo). As alluded to earlier, politics and literature were tightly bound together in Italian accounts of Irish affairs, to the point that a strong affiliation with Ireland and its politics was often a necessary element for a writer to be considered Irish. The main source of confusion was, to be sure, the language. English, North American, and Irish writers shared a language that, however different, could easily be perceived as one and the same by a foreign observer. Due to this confusion, Italian literati had two main ways of figuring out whether a writer was Irish or not: their biographical circumstances or their interest in, and work on, things Irish.

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Preference for one or the other criterion could vary from book to book, or even within the same book. A case in point is Mario Borsa’s biography of Roger Casement (1932), an extremely interesting text that served not only as an engaging narrative about the great martyr of the Easter Rising, but also as a well-documented history of Ireland’s struggle for independence and, in places, an idiosyncratic guide to contemporary Irish literature. Here Borsa, who had a profound knowledge of both Irish and English literatures and politics, tended to recognize as Irish those authors with an interest in Irish matters or in some ways linked to the Irish Revival. The two mentions made of Arthur Conan Doyle in the book on Casement confirm this attitude in quite striking, albeit puzzling, terms. The first time he mentions the creator of Sherlock Holmes, he compares his perspective that the end of the British Empire would be a catastrophe for Ireland with Casement’s opposing view. The second reference in the text to Conan Doyle concerns the petition he started to convince the king to have mercy on Casement. Only in the latter case is Conan Doyle, whose parents were indeed of Irish descent, presented as an Irish writer. While the primary focus of the book is on the dissemination of literature, the analysis of other discourses was thus necessary for a more comprehensive understanding of the notions of Irishness in Italy. Since the reception of foreign literature is about the co-production of new meanings rather than the transferring of pre-packed meaning, the diverse and, at times, contradictory elements of which a culture consists are selected by mediators in order to present a necessarily limited version of that culture to domestic readers. It is, according to Venuti, a process whereby foreign texts are inscribed “with linguistic and cultural values that are intelligible to specific domestic constituencies,” a process that “is initiated by the very choice of a foreign text to translate” (Venuti 1998: 67). Systematic changes in the perception of an entire literature, of individual writers or movements, are regularly brought about by, and through, translation. Due to their metonymic character, translations tend to simplify, or rather specialize, the foreign text and the images of its culture embedded in it, and focus on a more reduced gamut of characteristics than the original text: thus translators orient reception by emphasizing certain elements over others. It is for this reason that this book addresses the emergence and dissemination of stereotypes and images connected with the circulation of Irish literature in Italy. In order to do so, it does not limit itself to the narratives that gained more traction, but instead attempts to provide a survey of lesser-known mediators, the minority voices seeking to disseminate

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alternative ideas of Irishness that did not become common currency in the Italy of the time. In the reconstruction of motivations and aims of mediators, minor or otherwise, I attempt to ascertain the trajectories of certain ideas of Ireland and how they were intertwined with the reception of Irish literature. This book therefore comprises a survey of images of Irishness in Italy and a history of the reception and dissemination of Irish literature in the country. Due to its nature, the book does not aspire to provide a comprehensive picture of either topic, but rather to inspire research in both directions as well as to suggest the inevitable interconnections between them. One of the main aims of the book, then, is to explore how cultural mediators developed a notion of Irish culture and how this affected the system’s attitude toward the country’s literature. Translation “does not simply offer a window onto some unified, exotic Other; it participates in its very construction” (Gentzler 2002: 217) and in so doing contributes to the construction of that particular culture in the domestic system. It is again with reference to Maria Tymoczko’s 2007 book, Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators, that we can aptly sum up the ideal point of departure of this book, with regard to the ideological elements pertaining to all translation activity: Ideological representation per se is sometimes the primary goal of translations, and it can be an overt aspect of a translator’s decision-making process as well; in such translations the image cast of the source material can be demonstrated to be the controlling determinant of particular translation decisions and strategies, as well as the shape of the entire translated text. […] But representation can also be an implicit and subliminal element in the translation process. Receptor discourses can be the vehicles for such covert representations, coded subliminally and obliquely in subtle choices of language, or they can be established in paratextual materials. (Tymoczko 2007: 115)

With this in mind, I have deemed it necessary to focus on the images of Ireland and of Irish literature that circulated in Italy in order to make sense of how these affected the emergence of a repertoire of Irish literature in Italy. Images are important not just because they influence the responses of the public, but because they influence the choices of mediators themselves. In the recent past, numerous projects have focused on the reception of a specific national literature abroad, particularly when such reception had political overtones (to limit ourselves to Italy: Baldini et al.

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2018; Dunnett 2002, 2015; Rubino 2010). Especially challenging are case studies presenting a new literature that shares its main language of expression with a more established one. This is the case with two interesting projects on Australian (Wilson 2013)9 and Norwegian literature in Italy (Nergaard 2004), both showing a keen interest in the images of their respective literary traditions in the receiving context.10 It is not surprising that such projects tend to involve literatures produced in languages shared by more than one national system (at various stages of their history) and in which the issue of identification and of specificity of a cultural system is central.11 This study claims that emerging literatures, such as Norwegian, Australian, or Irish, struggle for recognition and are more easily associated with a limited set of characteristics that often harden into stereotypes. While this process also happens with more established literatures (Lefevere 1992: 5),12 the sheer number of translated texts and discourses in these latter cases makes it easier for a variety of more nuanced, and even conflicting, viewpoints to emerge (see Turi 2011). With minor literatures that employ the language of a major tradition, as is the case with Irish writers using English, on the other hand, the process of stereotypization appears even more pervasive. Often, in these cases, a narrow set of images is associated with a foreign literature and functions as the benchmark for gatekeepers to recognize authors as belonging, or not, to that specific literature. 9  “Australian literature when translated continues to belong to the national culture, indeed often aggressively markets the specificity of that national culture, yet paradoxically extends well beyond the borders of the nation and makes up an integral part of the cultural archive of the nations whose literatures it enters via translation” (Wilson 2013: 189). 10  This is also the case explored by Meg Brown in her study on The Reception of Spanish American Fiction in West Germany (Brown 1994), which acknowledged the need to investigate both a range of themes and elements connected to the new literary tradition that is been disseminated and the role of critical writing to provide the right framework for audiences to familiarize with it. For an analysis of the international circulation of Dutch literature, as a minor literature whose language is transnational but is not shared by any other major literary tradition, see Brems, Réthelyi and van Kalmthout (2017). 11  Pascale Casanova’s emphasis on the struggle of minor literatures to be internationally recognized strikes a similar chord (Casanova 1999). 12  “In the past, as in the present, rewriters created images of a writer, a work, a period, a genre, sometimes even a whole literature. These images existed side by side with the realities they competed with, but the images always tended to reach more people than the corresponding realities did, and they most certainly do so now. Yet the creation of these images and the impact they made has not often been studied in the past, and is still not the object of detailed study. This is all the more strange since the power wielded by these images, and therefore by their makers, is enormous” (Lefevere 1992: 5).

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This is what happens in Italy, for instance, with James Joyce and George Moore, and is particularly pronounced with those works of theirs that may be more difficult to associate with typical images of Ireland of the time, for instance Ulysses or Moore’s naturalist novels. Similarly, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw often fail to be perceived as Irish writers by a literary system that pays lip service to the circumstance of their being born in Ireland but struggles to associate their works with the productions of the Abbey Theatre, the only center of Irish drama known in Italy until the end of the Second World War. The two most conspicuous absences (of sorts) in this survey are indeed Wilde and Shaw. Irish studies scholars have, in recent decades, attempted to assess their idiosyncratic Irishness and repatriate them, so to speak (Coakley 1994), while the assimilation of their works to the field of Irish studies is ever so lively (Clare 2016; McNamara and Ritschel 2020; Ó Donghaile 2020). As we will see, this was for the most part not the case in Italy in the first half of the century. As for Wilde, in particular, “[t]he mixture of French-inflected cosmopolitanism, Englishness and Irishness […] made him then and still makes him now difficult to assimilate into a single national tradition” (Evangelista 2010: 1). They were generally not included in discourses concerning Irishness as they did not conform to the images of Irishness that were more common in Italy at the time, indulging little in rural plots, mysticism, Celtic themes, or urban realism. It is, however, quite puzzling that one of the few omissions in Shaw’s oeuvre was, in fact, his work most concerned with Irish politics, John Bull’s Other Island,13 which presented the issue of Irish nationalism in Shaw’s usual paradoxical fashion, suggesting a radical subversion of stereotypes and a move beyond conflicts based on nationality (Morash 2002: 157–8). The almost complete exclusion of Wilde and Shaw from the Irish canon would only be partially corrected when, during the Second World War, the ban on English writers provoked a race to find Irish ancestry—even a grand-uncle would do14—for writers that, until then, had been considered simply English, British, or American. For this reason, this book will primarily 13  However, Shaw’s other Irish play, O’Flaherty V.C., a controversial work “subversive of ideals of family and home” (Morash 2002: 158), was not staged by the Abbey due to pressure from Dublin Castle, but was included in a collection of one-act plays published in 1929 by Mondadori (Shaw 1929). 14  Ferdinando Ballo of the Milanese publishing house Rosa e Ballo asked Alessandra Scalero if she could find an Irish ancestor for the American playwright Robert E.  Sherwood (see Chap. 5).

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touch upon Wilde and Shaw when their Irish origins are an element in the reception of their works, an aspect only dealt with in passing in otherwise stimulating and extremely detailed works such as Bizzotto (2010) and Severi (2010). Literary classics were approached in a similar way to the works of Wilde and Shaw. As we will see, defining an ancestry of Irish literature in authors once thought to be English was a typical move by Hibernophiles in Italy, as well as in other countries (see Bourgeois 1913). The status of classics is generally fundamental to define Irishness, but while the Irish origin of Sterne, Swift, Goldsmith, and others was often mentioned in Italian criticism, it did not become a widely acknowledged aspect of the reception of these writers and was usually decoupled from the more contemporary emergences of Irish literature such as those of the Revival. The first modern translations of some Irish classics, such as Mario Manlio Rossi’s anthology of Swift (1942), were rare exceptions, which did, however, establish a strong, if still somewhat latent, presence of pre-­ twentieth-­century works in the Italian repertoire15 of Irish classics, as we will see in Chap. 4. This study also contributes to the recent trend of exploring the ramifications of Irish literature beyond the nation and, in particular, beyond the English-speaking world. As evidenced by the groundbreaking studies of Michael Cronin (1996) and Maria Tymoczko (1999), among others, Irish literature has never been a monolingual affair. Irish, Irish English, Italian (Joyce), and French (Beckett and Moore) are just some of the languages used by Irish writers. Moreover, in recent years, Irish studies scholars have begun focusing on the global and transnational dimension of Irish culture, literature, and politics (Delaney 2011; Whelehan 2014; Holfter and Migge 2019). Literary studies have provided a wealth of scholarship on reception over the last two decades. A commendable effort to illustrate the afterlives of Irish writers abroad is the Bloomsbury book series edited by Elinor Shaffer focusing on the “The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe” (since 2002), which has often served as a point of departure for my own explorations. The series editor aptly maintained that “responses 15  In the following pages I will employ the terms “canon” and “repertoire,” with slightly different meanings. By “canon” I mean the authors and works that are considered the expression of a specific literary tradition at any given time in literary history, thus including authors that are discussed in critical works, surveys, reviews, and more generally paratexts. On the other hand, I employ “repertoire,” with a slightly more restricted meaning, as the works that are available in translation to the readership the mediators are addressing. It goes without saying that the two labels overlap at times (see Sisto 2019: 11–33).

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[from abroad] provide quite unexpected and enriching insights into our own history, politics and culture”, without which our knowledge of these writers “is simply incomplete and inadequate” (Shaffer 2002: ix). Within Irish studies, drama scholars, in particular, have acknowledged that the circulation abroad of Irish theater should be taken into account as part of the effort to make sense of the potential ramifications of Irish literary works on a global stage, either taking their cue from the study of the Irish diaspora (Harrington 2009, 2016; Lonergan 2008) or focusing on non-­ English-­speaking countries (Kurdi 2007, 2009; Pilný and Power 2014; Pilný 2015; Keane 2016; Ruane 2020). This field of studies is traditionally rich in Italy, where a number of scholars have investigated the relationship between the Italian and Irish literary scenes. Studi Irlandesi – A Journal of Irish Studies has been particularly attentive in that regard, since its very first issue in 2011 (Abbate Badin and Fantaccini), which comprised a substantial number of contributions on “Italy-Ireland: Cultural Inter-­ relations,” including a valuable survey by Carlo Maria Pellizzi (2011) on the “images” of Ireland, to which this volume is greatly indebted. The work of these scholars has been a great help in bringing the issue of the Italian perception of Ireland to the fore and has made it possible for me to embark on such a panoramic survey that, unlike past works, attempts to rearticulate their valuable contributions beyond the realm of the reception of an individual author or genre. Although the history of Irish culture cannot dispose of its special relationship with England, it is nevertheless necessary to free it from this constant parallel. It is therefore important to consider Irish literature in relation to other developing literary systems, such as the Italian system, as doing so can provide new insights into its role abroad and might also help challenge the historical mindset according to which Irishness is simply the opposite of Englishness. Nonetheless, as we will see in this book, Italian mediators in the first half of the century tended to see Ireland and England as two mutually defining entities, with the status of one being constantly dependent on the other. The long and difficult process whereby Ireland gained tentative recognition of its specificity and cultural independence was almost unfailingly bound with its former colonizer. It is my contention that an investigation of the worldliness of Irish writing would contribute to an assessment of long-standing issues within Irish studies, when they concern not only writers like Yeats, who used to winter in Italy in his

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sixties,16 or exiles like Joyce or Beckett, whose transnational lives shaped their creative output and outlook, but also writers who never left the country, except through translation. The variety of takes within the Italian literary system on the Irishness of writers, one of the running themes of this book, could help foreground similar concerns that have shaped the nature of Irish studies itself, regarding, for instance, how a writer qualifies as Irish.17 In a 1992 essay titled “On Minor Literature: Nineteenth Irish Literature,” Chris Morash asked a series of pointed questions about the way the nineteenth-century literary tradition is structured and studied as “foreshadow[ing] the messianic arrival” of the great names of the twentieth century—for example, do we study Samuel Ferguson instead of Aubrey De Vere merely because “Yeats elected Ferguson to his pantheon of literary ancestors”? (Morash 1992: 210)—and, in so doing, provided a stimulating argument for a study of literature that employed historical methods and investigated the context of production and dissemination of the canon (Morash 1992). Such a study that aims to question the idea of a monolithic national tradition can be further complicated when we acknowledge the role played by the diasporic incarnation of this tradition in translation, thus “complicat[ing] the ideas of canonicity or ‘Irishness’ established in the Anglophone world” (Pilný 2020: 219),18 re-discussing the right of citizenship within Irish literature and acknowledging that Irish “plays mean different things, to different audiences, in different parts of the world,” as Patrick Lonergan put it (2008: 223). In keeping with this, my book is also an exercise in comparison, underpinned by a specific question: what does it mean to transfer an idea (of Ireland in this case) to a different political and literary system? In order to answer this question, we need to forgo the idea of a correct version of Ireland (of its republicanism, of its 16  Recently, Lauren Arrington (2021) has presented a convincing argument regarding the profound impact on Yeats of the community of Anglophone poets in Rapallo as part of the development of a late modernist style. 17  Writers at the margins of the Irish canon have long posed this “fundamental and oft repeated question, of course, of how we identify an Irish writer. Is a writer Irish by birth? By geography? By passport? By consent? By language? By the fact of living in the country for a certain amount of time?” (Frawley 2009: 52). 18  “An examination of how Irish literature and culture have been received in European countries will unravel the variegated strategies of domestication employed in the transfer, necessitated by the need for translation into a foreign language, and combined with the relative absence of an Irish diaspora. The resulting perceptions of Ireland in mainland Europe may ultimately complicate the ideas of canonicity or ‘Irishness’ established in the Anglophone world, and thus contribute to a reinvigoration of the critical discussion” (Pilný 2020: 219).

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independence, of its literary canon, etc.) and open up the field to coeval and conflicting interpretations. Rather than speaking of correct – or incorrect – versions of Ireland, this book is an attempt at illuminating equally valid alternatives.

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Gouanvic, Jean-Marc. 1999. Sociologie de la traduction: La science-fiction américaine dans l’espace culturel français des années 1950. Arras: Artois Presses Université. Gregory, Augusta. 1972. Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe. Harrington, John. 2009. Irish Theater in America: Essays on Irish Theatrical Diaspora. Syracuse, N.Y: Syracuse University Press. Harrington, John P. 2016. Irish Theatre and the United States. In The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre, ed. Nicholas Grene and Chris Morash, 593–606. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holfter, Gisela, and Bettina Migge, eds. 2019. Ireland in the European Eye. Dublin, Ireland: Royal Irish Academy. Keane, Barry. 2016. Irish Drama in Poland: Staging and Reception, 1900–2000. Bristol; Chicago: Intellect. Kershaw, Angela. 2010. Sociology of Literature, Sociology of Translation: The Reception of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française in France and Britain. Translation Studies 3: 1–16. Kiberd, Declan, and P.J. Mathews, eds. 2015. Handbook of the Irish Revival: An Anthology of Irish Cultural and Political Writings 1891–1922. Dublin: Abbey Theatre Press. Kuran-Burçoğlu, Nedret. 2000. At the Crossroads of Translation Studies and Imagology. In Translation in Context: Selected Contributions from the EST Congress, Granada, 1998, ed. Andrew Chesterman, Natividad Gallardo San Salvador, and Yves Gambier: 143–150. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kurdi, Mária. 2007. Transplanting the Work of “that rooted man”: The Reception of John Millington Synge’s Drama in Hungary. Comparative Drama 41: 219–241. Kurdi, Maria, ed. 2009. Literary and Cultural Relations Between Ireland and Hungary and Central and Eastern Europe. Carysfort Press. Leerssen, Joep. 1997. Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century. 2nd ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Lefevere, André. 1992. Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London: Routledge. Lonergan, Patrick. 2008. Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic tiger era. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Maher, Brigid, and Brian Nelson. 2013. Introduction. In Perspectives on Literature and Translation: Creation, Circulation, Reception, ed. Brigid Maher and Brian Nelson, 1–10. London; New York: Routledge. McCourt, John. 2000. The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904–1920. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press.

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McNamara, Audrey, and Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, eds. 2020. Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Morash, Chris. 1992. On Minor Literature: Nineteenth Century Ireland. In The Internationalism of Irish Literature and Drama, Irish Literary Studies 41, ed. Joseph McMinn, 209–216. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe. Morash, Christopher. 2002. A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moretti, Franco. 2000. Conjectures on World Literature. New Left Review 1 (January–February): 54–68. ———. 2003. More Conjectures. New Left Review 20 (March-April): 73–81. Munday, Jeremy. 2013. The Role of Archival and Manuscript Research in the Investigation of Translator Decision-making. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 25. John Benjamins: 125–139. Nergaard, Siri. 2004. La costruzione di una cultura: la letteratura norvegese in traduzione italiana. Rimini: Guaraldi. Pellizzi, Carlo Maria. 2011. «Ibernia fabulosa»: per una storia delle immagini dell’Irlanda in Italia. Studi irlandesi. A Journal of Irish Studies 1: 29–119. Pilný, Ondřej, ed. 2015. Irish Theatre & Central Europe. Vol. 25. Literaria Pragensia 50. Univerzita Karlova v Praze, Filozofická fakulta. ———. 2020. Irish Studies in Continental Europe. Irish University Review 50: 215–220. Pilný, Ondřej, and Gerald Power, eds. 2014. Ireland and the Czech Lands Contacts and Comparisons in History and Culture. New York: Peter Lang. Potts, Willard, ed. 1979. Portraits of the Artist in Exile: Recollections of James Joyce by Europeans. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Prendergast, Christopher, ed. 2004. Debating World Literature. London; New York: Verso. Pym, Anthony. 2014. Exploring Translation Theories. 2nd ed. London; New York: Routledge. Ruane, Aileen R. 2020. Language, translation, and the Irish Theatre Diaspora in Quebec. Ilha do Desterro A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies 73: 63–83. Rubino, Mario. 2010. Literary Exchange Between Italy and Germany: German Literature in Italian Translation. In Translation Under Fascism, ed. Christopher Rundle and Kate Sturge, 147–177. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ruggieri, Franca. 1992. Introduzione. In Poesie e prose, James Joyce, ed. Franca Ruggieri, xi–xlii. I Meridiani. Milan: Mondadori. Sengupta, Mahasweta. 1995. Translation as Manipulation: The Power of Images and Images of Power. In Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts, ed. Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier, 159–174. University of Pittsburgh Press.

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Severi, Rita. 2010. “Astonishing in my Italian”: Oscar Wilde’s First Italian Editions, 1890–1952. In The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, ed. Stefano Evangelista, 108–123. London: Continuum. Shaffer, Elinor. 2002. Series Editor’s Preface. In The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe, ed. Mary Ann Caws and Nicola Luckhurst, ix–xi. London: Continuum. Shaw, George Bernard. 1929. Atti unici. Trans. Antonio Agresti. Teatro completo di G.B. Shaw 21. Milan: Mondadori. Sisto, Michele. 2019. Traiettorie. Studi sulla letteratura tradotta in Italia. Quodlibet: Macerata. Swift, Jonathan. 1942. Swift. Edited and translated by Mario Manlio Rossi. Milano: Garzanti. Turi, Nicola. 2011. Declinazioni del canone americano in Italia tra gli anni Quaranta e Sessanta. Rome: Bulzoni. Tymoczko, Maria. 1999. Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. ———. 2007. Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. van Doorslaer, Luc, Peter Flynn, and Joep Leerssen. 2015. On Translated Images, Stereotypes and Disciplines. In Interconnecting Translation Studies and Imagology, ed. Luc van Doorslaer, Peter Flynn, and Joep Leerssen, 1–18. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Venuti, Lawrence. 1998. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London; New York: Routledge. ———. 2007. Translation Studies. In Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. David G. Nicholls, 3rd ed., 294–311. New York: Modern Language Association. Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2017. Future Readings. In Futures of Comparative Literature: ACLA State of the Discipline Report, ed. Ursula K.  Heise, 108–111. Routledge: New York. Whelehan, Niall, ed. 2014. Transnational Perspectives on Modern Irish History, Routledge Studies in Modern History. New York: Routledge. Wilson, Rita. 2013. Terra Australis Incognita Even Now? The Reception of Contemporary Australian Literature in Italian Translation. In Perspectives on Literature and Translation: Creation, Circulation, Reception, ed. Brian Nelson and Brigid Maher, 178–194. London; New York: Routledge. Zanotti, Serenella, and Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli. 2016. Exploring the Backstage of Translations: A Study of Translation-Related Manuscripts in the Anthony Burgess Archives. Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies 14: 127–148.

CHAPTER 2

Early Irlandesisti

2.1   Making Sense of Ireland in Early Twentieth-Century Italy Exchanges between Italy and Ireland were quite frequent in the mid-­ nineteenth century during the Italian Risorgimento (O’Connor 2017; Carter 2015; Dal Lago 2014), and a significant translation flux ensued in both countries. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century, however, that the cultural and literary identity of the Irish nation was more widely recognized in Italy, and such recognition was consistently coupled with an awareness of the country’s political and ideological struggle. While this book is primarily concerned with the dissemination of literature, its focus on how mediators perceived Irish literature as connected with, and influenced by, received ideas of Ireland, calls for an analysis of the formation of such ideas and images. Such images travel through imported literature and the associated peritexts, but they are also formed elsewhere; in the case of a nation struggling to achieve an independent status, this elsewhere is often the political discourses concerning the struggle itself. This constant entanglement of culture, literature, and politics is one of the main features of the reception of ideas of Ireland in Italy at the start of the twentieth century. It is therefore worth exploring the ways in which Irish politics and culture at large were perceived within certain Italian circles; in fact, even when the interest was eminently literary, Irish © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Bibbò, Irish Literature in Italy in the Era of the World Wars, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83586-6_2

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politics occupied a key role in the accounts of Italian mediators, and political accounts of Irish history were rarely devoid of comments on the island’s cultural identity. As mentioned in the introduction, when a peripheral literature shares its main language with a central literary system, which is more established and widely recognized, politics is one of the main distinguishing elements through which the former carves out its own separate identity. When it comes to Ireland, during the first decades of the twentieth century, political observers were, of course, primarily interested in the debates about Home Rule (the self-government of Ireland) and the events leading up to and following the Easter Rising, the 1916 insurrection that set in motion the process of Irish Independence. The first part of this chapter will therefore focus on the reactions to the Home Rule debates within Catholic communities in Italy, with particular attention given to the pro-Irish propaganda frequently associated with, and emerging from, those communities. The political value of such texts is only partially of interest here; instead, our primary concern is with the ways they comment on, and negotiate, a set of stereotypes, either by reproducing or subverting them. They produced images of Ireland outside Ireland, but also participated in the transnational construction of images of Ireland that contributed to influencing the self-images of the nation. In some of the most intricate cases, they not only formed part of a transnational network of Irish stereotypes and images through circulation abroad, but also directly affected the idea of Ireland in the English-speaking world and became part of the nationalist project in Ireland through translation and adaptation. This was the case with the writings produced at the Pontifical Irish College in Rome and by Ernesto Buonaiuti, in the 1910s, as well as by Mario Manlio Rossi in the 1930s, to mention the most conspicuous instances. In this chapter, in particular, we will explore the case of a key article penned by Buonaiuti in 1911 that was promptly translated and published in English in 1913 by M.H. Gill & Son in Dublin (Buonaiuti 1911, 1913), thus becoming an integral part of the publisher’s collection of nationalist texts. These case studies highlight one of the main aspects in the transnational formation of images, that is, the circularity involved in the constant process of production and dissemination of stereotypes.1 1  In a similar vein, Loredana Polezzi speaks of the “creation of an Italy outside Italy” (Polezzi 2009: 276) discussing the translation and transnational circulation of Italian stereotypes.

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The second and final part of the chapter will examine the depiction of the Easter Rising and the tidal changes that were taking place in Italy after the Peace Conference following the Great War. Though the Easter Rising was regarded in Italy, almost unanimously, as nothing short of an act of treason by Ireland, seriously undermining British war efforts, in the years following the disappointment of the Peace Conference, most observers, politicians and intellectuals, across the political spectrum developed a more friendly attitude toward Ireland, which translated into the production of more sympathetic literature on Irish affairs. The likes of Paolo Valera and Dino Fienga, in particular, started a discussion on Irish politics that also involved narrating Ireland and Britain’s relationship in a way that paid significant attention to economic factors, while Annie Vivanti provided a romanticized idea of Ireland and its revolutionary heroes that was unheard of in Italy. These writers thus contributed to the production of images related to Ireland that focused both on the heroic character of Irish nationalism and on non-essentialistic views, with Fienga, in particular, emphasizing the psychological effect that centuries of subjugation had had on the Irish. 2.1.1  Writing the Home Rule One of the primary examples of such circulation of highly politicized images is the intense propaganda linked to the Italian Modernist historians and clergymen Ernesto Buonaiuti and Nicola Turchi, as well as to the Pontifical Irish College in Rome. Buonaiuti’s and Turchi’s involvement with Ireland seems closely linked to their antagonistic position with respect to the Vatican, as the two Modernist theologians tended to extoll Ireland and its so-called primitive Catholicism as a counterpoint to the decadence of Papal Rome. On the other hand, Michael O’Riordan and John Hagan, the rectors of the Pontifical Irish College (1905–1919 and 1919–1930, respectively), were staunch supporters of Home Rule, but became very critical of the Irish Parliamentary Party’s politics under John Redmond, especially when the latter accepted the postponement of Home Rule and encouraged Irish to enlist in the British Army during the Great War. Hagan’s sympathies, in particular, progressively shifted toward Sinn Féin, and more resolutely antiBritish positions. Both rectors, however, acted as the unofficial legation of the as-yet unborn Irish State. Their declared ambition was to counteract the

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news spread by biased English press agencies with pro-Irish information within Vatican circles. At the start of the century, the Irish question was not of central interest in circles close to the Pope. In a 1907 article, alluding to the prominence of British sources in the Vatican, James Joyce lamented that Irish news arrived in Rome “to the real sovereign of Ireland, the Pope, […] like so many dogs in church; the cries weakened by so long a journey, have almost died out in the time they reach the bronze door” (Joyce 2000: 146).2 As Dermot Keogh has stated, despite the centuries-long schism between Great Britain and the Catholic majority in Ireland, the Vatican was not particularly supportive of either the Irish struggle for independence or the Home Rule movement (Keogh 1995). The reasons for this are complex and mostly extraneous to our study, but can be summed up in the Vatican’s ongoing project to re-evangelize Britain and the economic problems faced by the state after the unification of Italy, which compelled them to look abroad for powerful and rich allies. The following pages will therefore analyze the images of Ireland that circulated in the Vatican sphere at the start of the century, with a special focus on the second decade, given the key changes and contributions that took place in the years leading up to and following the Great War. While not all of the texts examined here enjoyed wide circulation, they represent a range of images and stereotypes that would underpin future interpretations of Ireland in Fascist Italy. In the 1900s, some intellectuals at the fringes of the Catholic community were instrumental in disseminating information about Ireland in a way that was uncommon in Italy at the time. As anticipated, this network involved both Italian and Irish clerics, all linked in various ways to the Pontifical Irish College. They had different agendas and espoused different ideas of Ireland, but for a relatively brief period, they joined forces in the name of pro-Irish propaganda. Their production and distribution of controversial and surprising images contributed to the formation of a new and innovative idea of Ireland in Italy. The political discourse voiced by these intellectuals was intertwined with a discourse on the images 2  “al vero sovrano dell’Irlanda, il papa, […] come tanti cani in chiesa; le grida, infiacchite dal viaggio lungo, sono già quasi spente quando arrivano alla porta di bronzo” (Joyce 2016: 731).

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commonly associated with Ireland, in which the drive to subvert stereotypes was at times manifest (e.g. in Hagan), and at times subtler (e.g. Buonaiuti), but pervasive. The texts produced by these mediators were characterized by an outpouring of images that contributed to what we might call an image war waged against official British sources: the agency of these cultural mediators manifested itself in their relentless discussion of such stereotypes and attempts to subvert them as part of their political endeavors. In a similar spirit to that of Lady Gregory writing to Hugh Lane in 1921, they were “image-makers” (Gregory 1921: 127) and never underestimated the potential of direct cultural propaganda in spreading their perspective on the Irish question. At times, the approach did achieve concrete political results: O’Riordan, in particular, managed to awaken the Vatican, and primarily the Pope, to the situation in Ireland in the aftermath of the Easter Rising (aan de Wiel 1999). In the following text we will see how the images proposed by more subversive voices such as the rectors of the Irish College and Joyce eventually came to be less influential in the discourse on Irish affairs in Italy than Buonaiuti’s and Turchi’s more conservative position. Influenced by Ernest Renan, the latter were comparatively more traditional, and their perspective found its way more easily into the works of later mediators such as Carlo Linati, Gian Dàuli, and Serafino Riva. Indeed, it is Ernesto Buonaiuti and Nicola Turchi who had a much broader and more enduring influence within the budding community of Italian irlandesisti. Buonaiuti, in particular, was a prominent figure in the Italian intellectual field of the early 1910s. Born in 1881, he was a theologian and historian who adhered to Modernism3 and was therefore excommunicated in 1925. He was also, in 1931, one of the few Italian academics who refused to swear his loyalty to Fascism. Buonaiuti had a brief but quite intense interest in Ireland, which seemed to date back to the years following Pius X’s condemnation of Modernism as heretical in his Pascendi Dominici gregis encyclical letter in 1907. It is not entirely clear how Buonaiuti’s interest in Ireland started, but he was in contact with the Irish Modernist George Tyrrell, whom he regarded as the leading figure of the Modernist group, from 1907 until his death in 1909. Moreover, and 3  “The modernist group […] rejected any kind of positive religion as well as any dogmatic apparatus” (Centro studi 1972: 12). Their movement, started in the late nineteenth century, was at times vigorously anti-clerical and went as far as to look for an alliance with socialist forces in order to undermine the papacy.

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perhaps more importantly, he met John Hagan in the context of Roman Modernist circles. Buonaiuti was also a ripetitore [instructor] at the Irish College, where one of his disciples was the future rector Michael J. Curran (Fantappiè 1997: 88), and he worked there when ostracized by the Italian University. Buonaiuti’s active interest in Ireland seems nonetheless to be limited to the 1911–1914 period, as proven by his publications, mainly consisting of articles for the influential quarterly Nuova Antologia (1911, 1912) and an introduction to Irish history, politics, and culture he co-­ wrote with Nicola Turchi in 1914, entitled L’isola di smeraldo [The Emerald Isle]. These were crucial years in Buonaiuti’s life, as the inquiry by the Curia Romana after the summer of 1908 caused the Roman radical Modernist group to fall apart, with its members being scattered in various directions to explore different ways of negotiating their reformist drive. Buonaiuti and Turchi, thus, traveled to Ireland, and during a brief stay in Dublin they were “certainly” hosted by John Hagan’s family (Centro studi 1972: 93); their exploration of the Emerald Isle would prove instrumental to inspiring their post-Modernist phase. Both Buonaiuti and Turchi were unflinchingly pro-Irish and supporters of Home Rule, and their writings show that their take on the Irish question, and Irish national character, was particularly influenced by Ernest Renan and Alice Stopford Green. The history of Buonaiuti’s publications, in particular, can shed some light on the images of Ireland in Italy before the Great War, featuring, as they do, some of the motifs that characterize the works of early irlandesisti and that would endure for decades to come. In particular, Buonaiuti provides lengthy explanations of the political and cultural situation in Ireland since the beginning of English domination, in order to better throw light on the contemporary situation. Less surprisingly, he also confirms the inextricability of politics and culture in Ireland, an element that featured in most of the Italian writings on Ireland, as far back at least as Mario Borsa’s account of Irish drama in 1906. Nuova Antologia, one of Italy’s most prestigious quarterlies, had a history of devoting attention to Irish matters. Nonetheless, until then, it had primarily concerned itself with either archaeological issues or strictly contemporary political affairs. In 1905, two articles by Giacomo Boni (Boni 1905a; b) show a slight change of attitude, in that they depart from a long and learned history of Irish archaeology (including interesting similarities between ancient Irish and Roman art) and also provide one of the first surveys of the Gaelic Revival ever read in Italy. Boni, who acknowledged the help of none other than Horace Plunkett in his research, devoted

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several pages to Douglas Hyde and the Gaelic League, as well as to the establishment of a National University, which could, in his view, have a fundamental effect on the intellectual life of the Irish people; it would allow them to employ their “uncommon imaginative faculty” to produce “concrete inventions,” and thus the “latent intellectual energy which can be perceived in their vigorous heads and in their blue-purple eyes searching for infinity” would be devoted to “higher goals than struggle for the sake of struggle itself.”4 Buonaiuti’s Nuova Antologia’s articles confirm this tendency, as well as the traditional reliance on stereotypes dating back to Renan and Arnold concerning the Celtic “races.” His first article (1911) provides a varied portrait of different facets of Irish culture and politics, ranging from the Gaelic Revival to the invention of Purgatory and Home Rule, while the focus of the second article (1912) was limited to political matters. Even in the brief time that elapsed between the first two articles and the 1914 volume co-written with Turchi, Buonaiuti’s ideas on Ireland seem to have evolved and changed. A staunch supporter of Home Rule, Buonaiuti was at first also approving of Sinn Féin and, in general, a more radical solution to the Irish question than that provided by parliamentary politics. However, at the time of the publication of L’isola di smeraldo, his support for Home Rule as the best solution for Ireland became unwavering, as did his criticism of Sinn Féin. Their writings, and Buonaiuti’s in particular, circulated beyond Italy, partly thanks to the international network of the aforementioned Modernist theologians. In 1913, the Dublin-based publisher M.H. Gill & Son issued a booklet entitled Impressions of Ireland, consisting of an unabridged translation, by Fr Bernard Maguire, of Buonaiuti’s first Nuova Antologia article. As recently noted by Gillian McIntosh, M.H.  Gill’s “publications reveal that the firm’s political evolution was following the trend of Irish nationalism in the period.” In 1912, they published Alice Stopford Green’s The Old Irish World and, in 1913, “an edition of Mitchel’s Jail Journal […] with a preface by Arthur Griffith.” They were also known for publishing short pamphlets such as “John Sweetman’s Nationality, a paper read to the National Council in 1907” (McIntosh 4  “Allor che un’Università nazionale avrà dato agl’Irlandesi modo di svolgere le singolari attitudini nell’apprendere e d’applicare, ad invenzioni concrete, la non comune facoltà immaginativa. Allora che, infine, il tesoro d’energia intellettuale latente nel vigoroso capo, intuito negli occhi azzurro-violetti dallo sguardo che ricerca l’infinito, avrà meta più eccelsa che non la lotta per sé stessa e la egoistica rinunzia ad ogni tentativo” (Boni 1905b: 58).

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2011: 518). In the year Buonaiuti’s booklet was published, Richard Gill was at the helm of his late father’s company and “[h]is interests lay principally in the literary movement,” but more importantly,“[t]heir steady range of Catholic devotional literature continued” (518). Buonaiuti’s pamphlet could be regarded as belonging to both strands of the publisher’s range of publications, but what makes it particularly interesting are some subtle editing decisions that reveal a more obviously militant attitude on the part of the publisher, and arguably the translator, than Buonaiuti had displayed up to that point. In one of the introductory paragraphs, for instance, Buonaiuti describes the program of the Gaelic League as follows: Free from political and religious prejudice alike, [the Gaelic League’s] aim is to fuse the rabid Orangemen of Ulster, and the devout Catholics of Connacht, in a united struggle for the intellectual and economic regeneration of their common country, which has been so long and so bitterly tried.” (Buonaiuti 1913: 7, my emphasis)

While consonant with Buonaiuti’s take on Irish affairs, the connotation of Ulstermen as “rabid” was nowhere to be found in the original 1911 text. The nationalist slant of the article-turned-pamphlet was therefore heightened in the Irish version, in keeping with M.H. Gill’s Catholic and nationalist propaganda. There is no substantial evidence of how the translation came about, but one could arguably assume that John Hagan played a mediating role, thanks to his association with M.H. Gill, both as a friend of Patrick T. Keohane5 and as a frequent contributor—with his notes from Rome—to the Catholic Bulletin, a publication M.H. Gill started in 1911, characterized by “rancorous Catholic nationalism” (Farmar 2017: 108). The publication of Buonaiuti’s article shows that his ideas could be used to confirm a notion of Catholic Ireland that was prominent in certain spheres and that became even more so after the polarization arising from the arming of the Ulster Volunteers in 1912. To make matters more complex, a comparison of the 1911 and 1912 Nuova Antologia articles with

5  The future senator was founder of the Catholic Bulletin (1911–1939) and “had been company secretary since 1903” (Farmar 2017: 134), before taking the helm of the publishing house as managing director following the death of Richard, in 1923, whose widow he married. (McCarthy 2011: 257).

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the fifth chapter6 of L’isola di smeraldo reveals that a key connecting paragraph was the only substantial addition Buonaiuti made on that occasion. It is rather surprising that this very paragraph mentioned the protest against Home Rule by “i feroci orangisti dell’Ulster” (Buonaiuti and Turchi 1914: 184. Hereafter IS), where “feroci” sounds almost like a direct reference to the “rabid” that had cropped up in the Irish version. Whether this suggests that the initial addition was in fact also Buonaiuti’s doing, or indicates that Buonaiuti himself had somewhat changed his mind after the key events of 1912, is hard to say; the coincidence is nonetheless telling, and at the very least shows a commonality of intent between Buonaiuti and his Irish publisher and, perhaps more importantly, the potential for processes of cultural transfer to engender unexpected changes. Cultural and political images travel incessantly, and circular movements such as that under examination here afford us the opportunity to appreciate the reciprocal influence between start and target texts firsthand.7 Moving on to an analysis of L’Isola di smeraldo, we can discern that the image of Ireland promoted by Buonaiuti and Turchi is that of a Catholic and Celtic country. The pair of Modernist historians does not regard the coexistence of the two elements as contradictory, with both contributing to establishing an identity that is shared by Irish people throughout the ages. The adjectives are used indiscriminately to characterize the “true” inhabitants of the Emerald Isle and present them in contrast to the various invaders, from the Danish to the British: “As usual in the history of Ireland, the overpowering appeal of land and race triumphed over the savage invaders,”8 revealing that the two historians were already tempted to invert traditional stereotypes. The division of the chapters between the 6  The first part of the chapter (up to page 184) was the third section of the 1911 article, while the second part corresponded to the 1912 article in its entirety. 7  When analyzing the circulation of Italian stereotypes through and in translation, Loredana Polezzi seems to address a very similar issue: “In the “unfaithful” truths of translation, cultures find a unique chance to maintain their dynamism, to combine change and permanence, to balance the universal and the particular. Once the intrinsically dynamic processes of translatio and translation are set in motion, we should not, however, expect them to come quickly to a definitive stop, nor to be easily controlled. In other words, we should not be tempted to describe these processes as one-directional, but should rather pay attention to their potential multi-directionality, their ability to escape the temporary position and functions they have been assigned in a particular target culture, to travel repeatedly between target and source system, and perhaps to proliferate elsewhere” (Polezzi 2009: 275). 8  “Come sempre nella storia d’Irlanda, la suggestione irresistibile della terra e della razza trionfava dei selvaggi invasori” (IS: 112).

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two scholars reflects their consonant but slightly different attitudes, which tend to emphasize distinct aspects of Irish identity. While Buonaiuti’s discourse is more focused on political and contemporary elements, Turchi is more interested in the history of Irish folklore and in associating an idea of uniqueness to Ireland. In both cases, Irish identity is better defined in opposition to English identity, and both scholars are unflinchingly pro-­ Irish in their exposition, to the point of sounding apologetic for the slight bias of their reconstruction of Irish history and culture: “Because of these unique factors characterizing the soul and the history of its people, the Emerald Isle […] greatly fascinates whoever happens to know, visit or study her, whether they choose it or not.”9 This is a key element that would be repeated by many in the future: the unabashed confession of a bias toward Ireland, an attitude that writers cannot avoid despite their best intentions. The conviction that Ireland is unique is palpable throughout the book, but is especially obvious in Turchi’s chapters. The overwhelming majority of elements in Turchi’s survey contribute to an idea of Ireland as exceptional, from geography to language. Ireland’s geography is “diametrically opposite to that of normal insular areas” as “in Ireland […] the mountains that are placed on its perimeter around a depression occupying the whole of the island’s center make it look like a huge elliptical basin, floating in the blue waters of the Atlantic.”10 Ireland’s uniqueness is defined in opposition to England, in ways that are at times extreme. Even the green that characterizes Ireland’s parks and plains “is not as homogeneous throughout the country, it is not as dull for the spirit as that of the endless and meaningless parks of London.”11 Positive Irish qualities are a counterpoint to English flaws. The language serves as another case in point for Turchi, who compares its richness to English, “so poor of all the features Irish is rich in.”12 Such a politically charged and negative 9  “Per questi coefficienti singolari che contrassegnano l’anima e la storia del suo popolo, l’isola di smeraldo […] esercita un potente fascino su chiunque sia tratto, volontariamente o no, a conoscerla, visitarla, studiarla” (IS: vii). 10  “L’Irlanda presenta al visitatore, una conformazione del tutto opposta a quella normale dei territori insulari. […] in Irlanda […] si ha una serie di monti posti in giro attorno ad una depressione che occupa tutto il centro dell’isola e la fa rassomigliare a un’enorme bacinella ellittica galleggiante su le acque azzurre dell’Atlantico” (IS: 2). 11  “non è così uniforme per tutta la regione, che alla fine attedii lo spirito come quello degli sterminati ed insignificanti parchi londinesi” (IS: 10). 12  “così povero di tutte quelle cose delle quali l’irlandese è ricco” (IS: 49).

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depiction would unsurprisingly become commonplace among Italian scholars, even comparatively balanced writers such as Dino Fienga. It is an attitude that can also be identified in Turchi’s survey of Irish literature. The latter’s canon of Irish literature was, as usual among Italy’s early irlandesisti, quite inclusive and vast. His main interest lay in literature in Irish, but he also dedicated a few pages to the literature produced by Anglo-Irish writers. Directly influenced by Hyppolite Taine’s Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1864), his repertoire includes the usual suspects— Sterne, Swift, Sheridan, Thomas Moore, Goldsmith13—as well as more uncommon figures such as Edgeworth and Lady Morgan. Quite significantly, Turchi classified these authors’ texts simply as “Irish literature in English” [“letteratura irlandese di lingua inglese” (IS: 67)] and “AngloIrish” [“anglo-irlandesi” (IS: 71)], without ever commenting on the writers’ religion or their nationalities. These Irish authors have all the characteristics of the “Celtic soul” (IS: 68), and therefore they belong to Ireland. The convenient erasure of religious differences, all the more unexpected in the writings of a theologian, would become a common feature of the works of other mediators, such as Carlo Linati, as we will see in the next chapter. Turchi also stressed that writers like Swift show “the resentment of an Irishman at watching his Island being drained and oppressed […], the humorous irony, though bitter like absinthe […], that ‘rebellion against the despotism of fact’, that is a typical characteristic of the Celtic soul,”14 directly harking back to both Matthew Arnold’s famous phrasing and Taine’s definition of the “Irish  or Celtic tone”  as “an excess of chivalry, sensuality, expansion; in short, a mind less equally balanced, more sympathetic and less practical” (Taine 1965: 310).15 This is linked, according to Turchi, to the pervasive presence of folklore and superstition as emphasized by Alfred Nutt and the general pantheistic element in the “spirit” of the Irish people (IS: 73–4; 81).16  “Sterne, Goldsmith, Burke, Sheridan, Moore ont une nuance propre, qui vient de leur sang, ou de leur parenté proche ou lointaine, la nuance irlandaise.” (Taine 1905: 138). 14  “lo sdegno di un Irlandese che vede la sua isola succhiata ed oppressa […], l’ironia spiritosa, ma amara come l’assenzio […]. Quella “ribellione al dispotismo del fatto” che è una caratteristica dell’anima celtica” (IS: 68). 15  “la nuance irlandaise ou celte [...] un excès de chevalerie, de sensualité, d’expansion, bref un esprit moins bien équilibré, plus sympathique et moins pratique” (Taine 1905: 138). 16  The works of Alfred Nutt were not widely known in Italy at the time, where Matthew Arnold’s take on Irish folklore and national character was more influential. A telling exception was Paolo Emilio Pavolini, who quoted him in his article on the rewriting of Deirdre’s myth by Moore, Yeats, and Synge (Pavolini 1919). 13

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The traditional theme of the rebellious race is further developed in the four subsequent chapters signed by Buonaiuti, along with a detailed analysis of the three Home Rule bills, reprinted from his early articles. As anticipated, Buonaiuti provides quite a monolithic portrait of Irish society as Catholic and Celtic. While paying little more than lip service to an acknowledgment of the stratifications of Irish society, he is more interested in describing a country that is entirely and genuinely opposed to England. To this end, he also pays little attention to economic factors, or presents them as subordinate to cultural elements. The centrality of literature and culture is one of the recurring motifs of the book. In the final sections of the text, Buonaiuti referred to the increased stability of the Irish economy as heralding the beginning of a phase of great literary production (IS: 174). The Irish/English dichotomy permeates the entire book. It is so strong in the co-signed preface that Buonaiuti and Turchi go as far as to say that one of the main characteristics of the Irish is their hatred of the English. This is an element that they perceive as so ingrained in Irish nature that, referring to the diasporic Irish as a close-knit community, they state: “The Irish are always this way: Celtic by temperament, of Catholic faith, haters of usurping England by tradition, nostalgic dreamers of their free and independent homeland”17: the longing for independence and Catholic faith are inextricable. This was already a constitutive element of Buonaiuti’s first article on Ireland in 1911, where significant passages were devoted to the “spiritual abyss separating England […] and Ireland” [“l’abisso che separa spiritualmente l’Inghilterra […] e l’Irlanda” (Buonaiuti 1911: 459)]. Buonaiuti’s (and to a relatively lesser degree, Turchi’s) insistence on Irish Catholicism probably begs some clarifications. The 1911 article was even more direct than L’isola di smeraldo in describing Irish Catholicism as representing the ideal of a poor and modest Church. According to Buonaiuti, “We Latin would tend to believe that such a profound veneration of the Gospel should be matched by the most fanatical dogmatism. Not at all: apart from some very rare exceptions, the Irish are not dogmatic. […] An old proverb states that if a girl is too devout, she will soon become an old devil” and that “Irish priests do not

17  “L’irlandese è sempre e dovunque tale: celtico di temperamento, cattolico di fede, odiatore per tradizione dell’Inghilterra usurpatrice, sognatore nostalgico della terra madre, libera e indipendente” (IS: vi).

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take advantage of being an object of veneration.”18 These arguments (which were partly qualified by Turchi in L’isola di smeraldo) were probably influenced by Buonaiuti’s Modernist beliefs. As mentioned, Modernism was a spiritual movement at the turn of the century, strongly critical of any positive and revealed religions, and of the Catholic hierarchy, to the point of being anti-papist in its most extreme instances. The ideal of a primitive Church like Ireland’s, so prominent in L’isola di smeraldo, could thus be perceived as a not-too-subtle means of criticizing the Roman Curia, which had just tried Buonaiuti for his ideas and that would eventually excommunicate him in 1925. Indeed, in L’isola di smeraldo, Buonaiuti and Turchi’s support for Irish nationalism seems largely based on a religious idea of Ireland as the “only truly Catholic nation in the world” [“unica vera nazione cattolica del mondo” (Buonaiuti 1911: 459)]. The inextricable connection between Catholic faith and the Irish national character is always foregrounded in their writings.19 Toward the end of the booklet, they once again stress the link between faith and nation, while emphasizing the little recognition given by Rome: The Catholic Church could more lovingly appreciate the invaluable work carried out by the tenacious Irish loyalty for its holy cause, as well as the inexhaustible missionary zeal of the moral sons of Saint Patrick. Rome could better appreciate the heroic history of this people that, for eight centuries or so, has been fighting for its faith, which is inextricably tied with its national conscience.20

18  “Noi latini saremmo subito indotti a credere che simile profonda venerazione del Vangelo debba essere accompagnata dal più fanatico bigottismo. Niente affatto: l’irlandese non è bigotto che per rarissima eccezione. […] Un suo vecchio proverbio prevede che una fanciulla troppo pia diventerà presto un vecchio diavolo” (Buonaiuti 1911: 459); “Il prete irlandese non approfitta della venerazione di cui è oggetto” (Buonaiuti 1911: 460). 19  “The persecutions of Catholics was not always bloody, but it was always in full motion and implacable. While [the Irish] had always given evidence of tolerance – welcoming even with benevolent hospitality the English Protestants when they were persecuted by Queen Mary – now the English Parliament launched a series of cruel Penal Laws against them.” [“La persecuzione contro i cattolici, se non fu sempre cruenta, fu sempre viva e implacabile. Mentre essi avevano dato costante prova di tolleranza, accogliendo persino con benevola ospitalità i protestanti inglesi, quando questi erano stati perseguitati dalla regina Maria, ora il Parlamento inglese inaugurava una serie di crudeli leggi penali contro di loro” (IS: 120)]. 20  “La chiesa cattolica da parte sua potrebbe più amorosamente considerare i servigi inestimabili resi alla sua santa causa dalla tenace fedeltà irlandese, dall’inesauribile zelo di proselitismo dei figli morali di san Patrizio. Potrebbe più adeguatamente apprezzare l’eroica storia

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Unsurprisingly, L’isola di smeraldo was deemed iconoclastic, and Benedict XV virtually censored it by purchasing the whole edition of the book (Parente 1971: 41–42). This idea of the “simplicity of Celtic Christian institutions” is, according to Donald E. Meek, quite consonant with the general perception of ‘the Celts’ as essentially simple, spiritual, other-worldly people, given to dreams and visions, uniquely their own and in sharp contrast to the jaded materialism of modern society. This ‘ethnic preconception’ is not new; it was elaborated in the nineteenth century, in the writings of Arnold and Renan. (Meek 1996: 147)

Meek himself notes how the “rejection of central authority and authority figures, and […] the displacement of structured forms of worship in favor of the unstructured, the spontaneous and the individualistic” was “consistent with the ethos of post-Impressionist, culturally modernist Britain (and probably Ireland)” (Meek 1996: 151) and quite crucially concludes that “The Celts, remarkably, have become role models or at least validators for this new anti-hierarchical movement” (Meek 1996: 152). It is testament to Buonaiuti’s courage that his tone was still rather explicit in the 1914 booklet. Toward the end of the year, while busy writing the preface for L’isola di smeraldo, Buonaiuti was also applying for a chair of History of Christianity at the University of Rome, which he would eventually obtain in 1915 (Fantappiè 1997: 13–14). Nonetheless, L’isola di smeraldo still presents some more or less direct attacks on the Roman Curia, particularly concerning their timid support for the Irish cause in the past: “one is surprised to notice that Catholic Rome itself does not seem to have always understood the goals and the attitudes of the Irish race, nor its historical merits and future destinies, despite the incalculable contribution of the Irish to the Catholic cause in the world.”21 On the other hand, it may be argued that Buonaiuti primarily wanted to emphasize the importance of Ireland’s missionary work for the dissemination of the Catholic

di questo popolo che da otto secoli, si può dire, lotta per la sua fede, indissolubilmente intrecciata alla sua coscienza nazionale” (IS: 214). 21  “Per questo si osserva con stupore […] che Roma stessa cattolica, alla cui causa nel mondo la razza irlandese ha dato un contributo incalcolabile, non sembra averne sempre ben capito i propositi e gli atteggiamenti, non sembra averne tenuto nella dovuta considerazione i meriti storici e i destini futuri” (IS: viii).

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faith.22 His and Turchi’s primary aim was to promote the status of Irish Catholicism within the Catholic community, focusing on both the reversal of traditional stereotypes and the importance of Irish Catholics for proselytism. Thus, the images disseminated by this fascinating booklet are rarely innovative and mostly take their cue from conventional ideas related to Celticism, in the tradition of Renan and Arnold. They are, however, always presented in a positive light. Just as the dream-like Celtic element is a welcome corrective to English practical sense, so too is the Irish people’s taste for alcoholic beverages a sign of their fervor. Accordingly, the book closes by quoting Renan and celebrating “the perennial youthfulness of the Celtic race” [“la gioventù perenne della razza celtica” (IS: 174)] even in the “old Green Island” [“vecchia isola verde” (IS: 175)], and especially embracing the idea of a “pure and tame, Irish race, spirited and given to daydreaming” [“razza irlandese mite e pura, ardente e sognatrice” (IS: 217)]. As we will see later, Hagan and O’Riordan’s approach was quite different from Buonaiuti and Turchi’s and, while the former’s influence on the Italian perception of Ireland is arguably rather limited to the religious sphere, their endeavor is indicative of a possibility rather underexplored in Italian-Irish studies in the early twentieth century, that of a more radical subversion of stereotypes. As will become clear, Hagan, in particular, pursued a different strategy and, along with O’Riordan’s indefatigable diplomatic activity, succeeded in changing the Church’s attitude toward the Irish question. As mentioned earlier, the links between the Modernist group and the Irish College were quite strong. Buonaiuti and Turchi both moved in the same circles as John Hagan and had at least read O’Riordan’s Catholicity and Progress in Ireland, a 1906 book meant as a response to Plunkett’s Ireland in the New Century (1904), which argued that Catholicism was not opposed to industrial progress. In their rather comprehensive bibliography—quite uncommon in Italian-Irish-themed works at the time—they also include Hagan’s recent book on Home Rule (Hagan 1913). The two Italian historians had, in fact, been in contact with the Irish college, and particularly with Hagan, since at least 1908, when the three scholars were 22  “It is especially thanks to them that the Roman Church affirms itself and is strong everywhere in the world, since they happen to speak the language of the people reigning over the vastest colonial empire.” [“Specialmente per merito loro, che hanno la ventura di parlare la lingua del popolo a cui obbedisce il più vasto impero coloniale, la chiesa di Roma si afferma e vigoreggia in tutte le parti del mondo” (IS: 147)].

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part of the budding Radical Modernist group in Rome. Hagan had arrived in Rome in 1903 and studied at the Seminario Pio. Nonetheless, his manipulation of Irish images did not fully align with Buonaiuti and Turchi’s. A few words on the Irish College are probably necessary before shifting our focus to Hagan and O’Riordan. The Pontifical Irish College was established in 1625, but it was not until the nineteenth century, and particularly under the rectorship of Paul Cullen (1832–1849), that it became a link between Irish Catholics and the Roman Curia, as well as the various Roman congregations. The centrality of the Irish college to the Vatican’s foreign policy toward Ireland became quite apparent in the years leading up to the Great War, at a time when its general stance was rapidly shifting from pro-British to pro-German, and increasingly more favorable to “the rights of small nations to self-determination.”23 This change in position can be attributed to the fact that the Vatican was being saved from bankruptcy by Germany, coupled with an awareness within the Curia that a treaty had secretly been signed between England and Italy that would exclude the Vatican from the Peace Conference.24 Hagan and O’Riordan were both interested in making the Curia more aware of Ireland’s struggle for independence, and such political circumstances helped them achieve some success. According to Brian Heffernan (2014: 32–33), the Irish College in Rome was apparently somewhat of an exception in its support for the nationalist cause, and later for Sinn Féin, particularly if compared with the rather more conservative Irish College in Paris. O’Riordan was rector until his death in 1919, and was succeeded by Hagan, who had served as his vice-rector and who held the position until 1930.25 Dermot Keogh (1995, 2008) and Jerôme aan de Wiel have dedicated some 23  “If Gasquet and Merry Del Val hoped to influence in one way or another the highest authorities in the Vatican, their chances of success had considerably diminished when Pius X died. Pietro Gasparri, his successor, was one of his greatest rivals and the new Cardinal Secretary of State’s Under Secretary was Bonaventura Cerretti who firmly believed in the rights of small nations to self-determination. Cerretti and Hagan met regularly and exchanged ideas about Ireland” (aan de Wiel 2003: 270). 24  “But Howard’s mission was completely discredited when Italy and Britain eventually signed their secret treaty including the famous clause XV, which excluded the Pope from any future peace negotiations. The Holy See found out in December 1915, if not before. This could not have failed to affect Benedict XV and Gasparri and lead them to adopt a favourable attitude to the Central Powers and nationalist Ireland” (aan de Wiel 2003: 267). 25  Hagan was only nominated rector a few months after O’Riordan’s death, probably due to his links with Buonaiuti and Modernism, as well as alleged interference by the British legation (see papers of John Hagan, Irish College Rome (1904–1930), July 4-November 22/28,

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seminal works to the role of the Pontifical Irish College in Irish history. In particular, aan de Wiel has demonstrated that O’Riordan’s activity within Vatican circles was extremely effective in positively influencing the relationship between them and nationalist Ireland. O’Riordan was not a scholar like Hagan and was primarily focused on diplomatic and political action. He translated Bishop of Limerick Edward O’Dwyer’s nationalist anti-Redmondite pamphlets and articles, and distributed them to the Pope and Italian ecclesiastics. O’Dwyer was a key figure at the time, known for his anti-militarism and his direct opposition to John Redmond. He “had ultramontane tendencies and contrary to the vast majority of the Irish clergy, he did hear Benedict XV’s peace appeal in his first encyclical called Ad Beatissimi” (aan de Wiel 1999: 138). In the years leading up to the Great War, “the Vatican became a propaganda battleground for the belligerent countries” (aan de Wiel 2003: 256). In particular, [O’Riordan] knew that the Vatican did not regard Ireland as being important from an ecclesiastical point of view, and that certain Italian newspapers, such as the Corriere d’ltalia, influenced by English Conservative politicians, misrepresented Irish politics and history. (aan de Wiel 1999: 139)

He therefore took advantage of his position as rector of the Irish College to inform the Pope of “the political situation in Ireland and give his own version of events” (aan de Wiel 1999: 142). Helped by the political climate and by the Vatican’s recent Germanophilia, O’Riordan managed to convince key figures within the Curia that the Irish Catholic Church was more powerful than its British counterpart, and of the legitimacy of Irish nationalist claims. Quite adroitly, both O’Dwyer and O’Riordan realized that “the best way to counter British influence or policy in the Holy See was to follow the Pope’s peace initiatives which would bring about the rapprochement between their country and the Vatican” (aan de Wiel 1999: 143). It was also thanks to O’Riordan’s diplomacy that the Vatican began to support Irish independence: “Never again would the Holy See interfere in Irish politics on behalf of Britain. The Pope and the Roman Curia were now fully convinced of the legitimacy of Irish independence and the importance of her Church” (aan de Wiel 1999:148). Monsignor O’Riordan had a perfect ally in John Hagan. As mentioned, Hagan’s 1921, file: HAG1/611, in particular “Private and Confidential Memorandum 4 July 1921, HAG/611, items 6 and 7).

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weapons were different to O’Riordan’s. The former was a scholar in his own right and was especially versed in the production of propaganda books and articles rather than in diplomatic activity like his predecessor. While the Irish College’s role in shifting the balance of the Vatican’s Irish policies has been the object of solid and detailed scholarship, less work has been done on the complex array of images employed by the rectors in their attempt to renew the perception of Ireland in Italy and the Vatican. The two rectors adopted distinct yet complementary strategies, with Hagan’s work more concerned with discussing the set of images concerning Ireland. This section will therefore primarily focus on him. Thus, though similar in terms of intent, what John Hagan and Michael O’Riordan tried to do, from the diplomatic trenches of the Irish College in Rome, was divergent in nature, and Hagan’s 1913 L’Home Rule. L’autonomia irlandese is quite emblematic in this regard. Initially published as a militant article in the Rivista internazionale di scienze sociali,26 it was subsequently extended into a 91-page-long booklet and published in small print run in Rome. In L’Home rule, Hagan sought not only to win over the opinion of the public at whom the pamphlet was targeted, consisting primarily of Roman ecclesiastics, but also made quite a resolute attempt to subvert established stereotypes of Ireland and England, with a view to acquiring more political support for his country among Vatican circles. Hagan’s take on Ireland represents one of the various roads generally not taken by Italian irlandesisti who, for the most part, subscribed to Buonaiuti’s and Turchi’s concept of a primitive and Arnoldian Ireland, even while regarding it positively. Thus, though Hagan’s depiction of Ireland shares more than one border with Buonaiuti’s, it would seem that their intentions did not converge. Hagan’s text opens with two motifs that recurred in early works on Ireland for an Italian readership. He first condemns the widespread ignorance surrounding Ireland in Italy, before denouncing the prejudice toward Irish affairs in Italy, due to the filter of English press agencies and diplomatic circles. Similar claims, as we know, can be found in a number of works, including L’isola di smeraldo, in which 26  Edited by Giuseppe Toniolo, the Rivista was the organ of the Catholic Partito Popolare Italiano (Italian Popular Party). Since the 1890s it had hosted a series of Irish-themed contributions signed by the likes of Filippo Meda, Romolo Murri, Buonaiuti, and Toniolo himself, as well as more militant contributions by O’Riordan (1909) and Hagan (1909 and 1913). Hagan was also instrumental in changing the PPI’s policy on Ireland, having introduced Seán T. O’Kelly to Luigi Sturzo, the founder of the party (see Chini 2016: 47–48). For Sturzo’s interest in Irish culture, see Reggiani (2010: 167–173).

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very similar phrasing seems to suggest direct influence.27 Hagan’s pamphlet was consistent with the kind of offensive engaged in by Buonaiuti and Turchi. The booklet thus clarifies its militant purpose from the start, exposing the misrepresentations offered by British press agencies and criticizing the way Home Rule had been covered by some Italian periodicals, particularly Corriere d’Italia and Popolo Romano (Hagan 1913: 4). Information about past and current Home Rule bills is very detailed, and the booklet also provides an in-depth analysis of their political and economic benefits. In 1913, Hagan was still a staunch supporter of Home Rule, but he would change his mind during the Great War, progressively leaning toward Sinn Féin’s position.28 Although the booklet is interesting, in itself, as a political statement by the vice-rector of the Irish College in Rome, and as evidence of Hagan’s contributions to O’Riordan’s political endeavors, its role in the dissemination of an innovative idea of Ireland is of greatest interest here. The early pages of the booklet contribute to setting the tone quite clearly. Writing about Britain and Ireland in the Middle Ages, for instance, Hagan glosses: “England was well-known for being ignorant and uncouth, while Ireland was praised for its culture and civilisation,”29 while a few pages later he provides a striking portrait of the English people as “degenerates” [“degenerati” (Hagan 1913: 22)]. This goes even further in the second part of the booklet, in which Hagan devotes quite a substantial number of pages, and detailed examples, to arguing that, contrary to traditional stereotypes, the Irish are less turbulent than the English (Hagan 1913: 42–43) and Ireland is “a country that is remarkably immune to crime, and naturally less inclined to criminality

27  The preface to Buonaiuti and Turchi’s work declared that even well-read Italians tended to regard Ireland as a “simple county of Great Britain” (“semplice contea della Gran Bretagna” (IS: vii), blaming this in particular on the fact that “since the Act of Union, that is since 1800, everything we have learnt about Ireland is just what England wanted us to learn, and how it wanted us to learn it” (“dal tempo dell’Unione, vale a dire dal 1800, noi non abbiamo saputo dell’Irlanda, può darsi, se non quello che è piaciuto all’Inghilterra di farci sapere, e nel modo in cui le piaceva di farcelo sapere” IS: viii). 28  Hagan’s position was all the more interesting since the relationship between the Catholic Church and Sinn Féin was often tense for several reasons, including Griffith’s project of rural economic development threatening pastoral economy and its cultural foundation of familism, and Sinn Féin’s wavering stance against landlordism and their abstentionism (see Cairns and Richards 1988: 94). 29  “L’Inghilterra era tuttora nota per la sua ignoranza e rozzezza, mentre l’Irlanda era esaltata per la sua cultura e la sua civiltà” (Hagan 1913: 9).

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than any part of Great Britain.”30 A similar point was made by Joyce at the end of “Ireland at the Bar” (Joyce 2000: 147 and 219). The booklet ends on a note that shows how the subversion of gender stereotypes was one of Hagan’s main goals: Ireland “is going towards its future fearless and with a virile soul” [“va incontro all’avvenire senza paura e con animo virile” (Hagan 1913: 91)]. Such subversion harks back to the traditional discourse of Counter-Reformation Catholic intellectuals who founded Irish identity “upon the denial of English assertions” (Cairns and Richards 1988: 20), but of course also echoes more recent nationalist discourses related to the Celtic Revival. In particular, the two rectors’ subtle insistence on the virility of the Irish appears to be a reaction to Matthew Arnold’s attribution of feminine traits to the Irish race. Like O’Riordain and Hagan, writers as diverse as D.P. Moran and Arthur Griffith, as well as Pádraic Pearse, reacted by exalting the Gael over the melancholy Celt and “by emphasizing the manly and masculine aspects of the Irish character” (Cairns and Richards 1988: 49).31 The propaganda aspect of Hagan’s booklet is clear in its alternating fact-based claims and images taken from allegedly unbiased sources. Scholars have often asserted how stereotypes originate from the political opposition between enemy countries and provide each country with a negative image of the enemy that corresponds to the positive qualities they see in themselves. To be sure, national images are a discursive formation that is not based on actual facts but instead brought about by political expediency. Quite adroitly then, Hagan employed clichés originating from French literature to back up his claims. This triangularization is quite typical of the production of national images: a third, allegedly unbiased party, is called upon to support a groundless claim: [t]he conventional descriptions of Irish turbulence produced by the English are surpassed by the descriptions of English barbarity and licentiousness produced in seventeenth century France. A 1654 French guidebook declared that England was inhabited by demons and parricides; and a few

30  “un paese ora singolarmente immune da delitti, e sempre naturalmente meno inclinato alla delinquenza che qualsiasi parte della Gran Bretagna” (Hagan 1913: 79). 31  The main difference between Griffith and Moran was that “Griffith’s Gael, following closely the position of the Gaelic League, was primarily a linguistic and historic construct, only incidentally Catholic, Moran’s Gael was pre-eminently Catholic” (Cairns and Richards 1988: 91).

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years later, another Frenchman maintained that the English were a rabid and cruel race of foxes.32

To make his claim even stronger, he specifies that the author of these words is a “professor of modern history at the University of London, prof. Pollard, who is neither Catholic nor Irish.”33 Hagan’s quite vast production of pro-Irish literature primarily focused on similar points, but cannot be examined here in detail. Moreover, its relatively limited dissemination means it serves more as an interesting counterpoint to the most common versions of Irishness circulating in Italy than as an influential factor in the formation of an Italian understanding of Irish affairs in the years of the Great War. To summarize, whereas Buonaiuti and Turchi largely accepted established images of Ireland and the Irish but sought to change their significance and turn them into positive images, Hagan seemed interested in waging a different battle, involving turning preconceptions on their head and proposing a relatively unheard of (in Italy) image of Ireland as civil, cultivated, and virile. Hagan’s approach would not see many converts among Italy’s irlandesisti. Those primarily concerned with literature, such as Linati, would essentially follow the route traced by both Buonaiuti and Turchi, while an idea of Ireland closer to Hagan’s interpretation would only partially take root from the mid-1930s onward and particularly during the Second World War when war propaganda would once again help bring about a radical change in stereotypes. This belated recognition would not be directly linked with the Irish College, however, whose political role rapidly waned in the following decades. In one respect, though, the two radically different positions explored earlier shared a key aspect: the common element in these representations of Ireland was their essentialist character and their tendency to set Ireland against Britain as two fundamentally different, and incompatible, countries and cultures. As we will see, Joyce’s take on Irish culture and politics was strikingly different and more nuanced. Before approaching that, though, we need to consider 32  “Le convenzionali descrizioni inglesi della irrequietezza irlandese sono sorpassate dalle descrizioni fatte in Francia nel XVII secolo, della barbarie e licenza inglese. Una guida francese del 1654 dichiarava l’Inghilterra abitata da demoni e parricidi; e pochi anni dopo un altro francese proclamava che gl’inglesi erano una feroce e crudele razza di volpi” (Hagan 1913: 42). 33  “professore di storia moderna all’Università di Londra, il Pollard, il quale non è nè cattolico nè irlandese” (Hagan 1913: 42).

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another development: the changes brought about by the political and diplomatic turmoil following the Easter Rising and the Paris Peace Conference. 2.1.2  Writing the Irish Struggle for Independence Italy is a marginal presence in accounts of the Easter Rising. The country is rarely mentioned, except as one of the neutral territories Joseph Plunkett traveled through in April 1915 on his way to Germany (Townshend 2005: 103). Nonetheless, the contribution made to the Irish cause by the likes of John Hagan and Michael O’Riordan, and the reverberations of the insurrection felt on the Peninsula, deserve further investigation. The Easter Rising was a momentous event in Irish history; its consequences and Britain’s reckless retaliation inaugurated a new dramatic phase in the history of the Anglo-Irish conflict. On Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, a group of Irish nationalists, including Padraig Pearse, James Connolly, Thomas Clarke, Thomas MacDonagh, Seán MacDermott, Joseph Plunkett and Éamonn Ceannt, launched a revolt, their goal an Ireland independent of the British Empire. Pearse, a revolutionary poet, declared the birth of the Irish Republic outside Dublin’s General Post Office, and read out what would become one of the founding documents of the Irish Republic, its declaration of independence. The rising lasted just one week, but it made headlines all over the world. Italy was no exception,34 with newspapers busily discussing what was almost unanimously judged an untimely revolt against one of Italy’s allies. Most newspapers also sheepishly reported that the Rising was the result of a German plot to attack England on the home front. The majority of the country’s main newspapers, then, favored the British side, since reports were filtered through British news agencies. As we have noted, this was already a problem before the war, when the Home Rule bill was discussed in Parliament, but had become an even more pressing issue during the Easter Rising. As we will see in more detail in the next chapter, the Rising arguably had a discernible effect on the works of Italy’s first irlandesista, Carlo Linati, who was quite aware of the close entanglement between Irish 34  News about the Easter Rising were so numerous, and continued to be so after the Rising was over, that Emilio Cecchi wrote to Carlo Linati on 4 May 1916 that his article on the poet Dino Campana was “delayed in Rome by all these Irish revolts, attacks and counterattacks” [“ritardato a Roma da tutte queste sommosse irlandesi, offensive e controffensive” (Cecchi and Linati 2012: 90–91)].

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culture and politics, but was also extremely cautious in associating the Irish playwrights he translated with nationalist rebellions. During the war in particular, Italy’s involvement alongside Britain turned the Irish question into a rather sensitive issue for him. While Linati was certainly aware of the political elements conveyed by Irish drama, he did not dwell on them when importing Irish plays into Italy. When prefacing Synge’s plays, he strongly distanced himself from the Easter Rising, even going as far as to say that the Rising had shown the Irish people’s tendency to embrace violence and side with outlaws. Not surprisingly, Linati’s attitude matched that of the conservative Italian newspapers to which he would become a contributor in the postwar period (e.g. Corriere della sera). Raison d’état made these newspapers pro-British almost without fail; they circulated questionable stereotypes on both the Home Rule movement and Sinn Féin, which was often disparagingly branded as a communist movement. As we know from Chiara Chini’s valuable study on the diplomatic relations between Italy and Ireland between the wars (2016), one of the main reasons for this was that the Entente powers did not approve of the Irish attempt to involve Germany in the Rising or their resistance to military conscription. Newspapers such as La tribuna and La domenica del corriere would even go as far as to claim that German intelligence had conspired to provoke the Rising and that German and Austrian officials had been found dead in Dublin on Easter week.35 The coverage in Italy began immediately, and the insurgents were branded “a despicable small group of fanatics” [“una infima minoranza di fanatici,” Corriere della sera, 27 April 1916] by newspapers that tended to either belittle or, more often, decidedly condemn the insurrection in Dublin as an “ill-timed” “small episode in a great war.”36 Quite interestingly, many newspapers (La tribuna and La Stampa in particular) compared the Rising to a “messinscena,” a “staging” or a “farce,” thus voicing widespread stereotypes about the Irish, and somehow anticipating what is now a widely held view of the Rising as a “theatrical” performance (see 35  See for instance, L’infelice tentativo tedesco di sommuovere l’Irlanda, La tribuna, 27 April 1916: 1. 36  “This seems a small episode in a great war, and it will remain such. Even if Ireland had a real and justified irredentist movement, this was not the time to attempt to break Great Britain’s unity” [“l’episodio appare e rimarrà un piccolo episodio di una grande guerra. Vi fosse anche in Irlanda un vero e proprio e giustificato irredentismo, non era certo questo il momento di tentare di rompere l’unità della Gran Bretagna” (Ibidem)].

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Moran 2005). Moreover, many articles showed a relative ignorance of Irish affairs and lumped together Sinn Féiners and Fenians, regarding them as the leading groups among the insurgents and almost foreshadowing the propaganda campaign of the former movement that would follow the Rising itself. The idea that the Rising was to ascribe exclusively to Sinn Féin is a typical trait of both Irish and Italian journalistic accounts, and even the well-informed journalist and scholar Mario Borsa discussed it as the Sinn Féin rebellion as late as 1932. Comparatively less attention was paid to the executions of the leaders: they often made the front page, but only in the form of short informative news agency reports. A remarkable exception to this was a long comment by Gastone Chiesi (La tribuna, 6 May 1916) in which the journalist warned British authorities against making martyrs out of the Rising leaders; given the date, however, it was already too late to voice such recommendations. There were dissenting voices without doubt, but these were barely audible over the noise of pro-British intellectuals and journalists supporting the official state line. Unsurprisingly, given the diplomatic situation in Italy, most of the pro-Irish documents were anonymous. Two pamphlets that enjoyed significant dissemination were Come combatte l’Inghilterra (1915) [How England fights] and La recente insurrezione in Irlanda (September 1916). The former was an anonymous attack on the English, which primarily focused on the Irish question and the attempt by the English ambassador to Norway to frame Roger Casement. This text is of interest primarily for two reasons, which are intertwined. First, it was one of the documents that started the Italian love affair with Casement, a figure who would become a symbol of the Irish struggle for independence and the only martyr of the Easter Rising with whom the Italian public was generally familiar. Second, the section about Ireland and the brutality of the British Empire, constituting the most substantial part of the booklet, relied heavily on the works of John Hagan, which either testifies to their dissemination in Italy or suggests that its author was somehow connected with the Irish College. There is, however, no evidence that Hagan or O’Riordan might themselves have been the authors of the booklet. Nonetheless, the main writing technique employed in the text is a form of montage similar to that used by the Sinn Féin magazine Scissors and Paste, and by Michael O’Riordan himself in most of his propaganda. This included La recente insurrezione in Irlanda. Esposizione delle sue cause e delle sue conseguenze attinta da fonti ufficiali e da rapporti di pubblicisti inglesi [The recent insurrection in Ireland. A description of its causes and

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consequences based on official sources and on accounts by English publicists]. La recente insurrezione, published anonymously, had quite a strong impact at least within Vatican circles; copies also reached Ireland and were welcomed by the local clergy, making it one of the most significant attempts by the Irish College in Rome to bring Italian public opinion round to the cause of Irish independence. Despite its anonymous publication, the text was penned by O’Riordan, probably with the help of his then vice-rector Hagan. O’Riordan himself informed Cardinal Gasparri (who would go on to sign the Lateran Pacts in 1929) that he intended to educate the Curia on the Rising to counteract information coming from the British government (aan de Wiel 1999: 144). The booklet, which was also known as the Red Book, was privately printed but widely distributed, to the extent that it was banned by the Interior Ministry, with copies being seized, perhaps at the behest of the British authorities in Italy. Eventually neither O’Riordan nor the printer were sanctioned, and the Red Book had a strong influence on the largely pro-Redmondite Irish community in Italy; it demystified some of the preconceptions that circulated about the Rising and brought the Irish community closer to the insurgents. Like others before him, O’Riordan also began his pamphlet with references to the literature of the Revival and emphasized how the cultural renaissance paved the way for the Rising. Some other elements strongly tie the Red Book with the leitmotifs of the other publications issued by the Irish College, such as a strong reliance on the words of Bishop O’Dwyer and the frequent attacks on Italian newspapers’ ignorance about Irish affairs.37 The Red Book was cleverly engineered by O’Riordan, who presented it as a montage of primarily English and North American newspapers, in order to avoid being seen as biased. He employed a ruse partially reminiscent of Scissors and Paste (see Kenny 2018), as it was explicitly based on mainly English sources, which were aptly edited, montaged, and commented on, in order to disprove them and present another side of the story. British faults stand out quite starkly in the booklet, but they are primarily presented in the words of the independent sources rather than of the anonymous writer. The booklet also 37  “[T]hose who wrote about the topic in some Italian Catholic periodicals put pen to paper without even trying to understand what it was about. One thought that the Sinn Féin movement was Fenian, others defined it a sect.” [“coloro che scrissero sull’argomento in alcuni periodici cattolici italiani avevano preso la penna in mano senza preoccuparsi gran che di capire di che si trattava. Uno ha confuso il movimento Sinn Fein [sic] col Fenianismo, gli altri lo definiscono una setta” (O’Riordan 1916: 6)].

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achieved another non-negligible diplomatic goal: “every nationalist, from John Redmond to Arthur Griffith, would have approved of the ‘Red Book’. It certainly was not a statement in favor of one particular brand of Irish nationalism” (aan de Wiel 1999:145). O’Riordan also insisted on one of the key elements of Irish diplomacy in the aftermath of the war, specifically the insistence on the rights of small nations. The closing paragraphs of the booklet are quite telling in this regard, with O’Riordan comparing what Germany had done to Belgium to what England had done to Ireland. Since the Curia was already leaning toward Irish nationalists, due to O’Riordan’s indefatigable propaganda and the secret pact between Italy and Britain, “O’Riordan’s initiative had been successful. The British in Rome were unable to use the Easter Rising to orchestrate a rapprochement with the Vatican and use the latter against the cause of Irish nationalism” (aan de Wiel 1999: 146). While the Red Book represents a slight change of direction in terms of the College’s political position, showing their more radical tendency, it was consistent with the Irish College’s previous publications on Irish politics, as it insisted on the preeminence of Catholics within the nationalist movement (O’Riordan 1916: 20). The aim of providing alternative views on the Rising to an Italian readership was not limited to the Irish College and its associates. Italian socialists, in particular, were eager to offer a version of events more sympathetic to the Irish rebels. These voices of opposition were fragmented, however, and never joined to form a unified chorus in support of Ireland that would be consistently heard within the Italian political landscape. However, the situation was to change during the War of Independence (January 1919– December 1921). News of the violence and persecution perpetrated by British troops against the civilian population spread around the world and shook international public opinion. In Italy, a broad movement emerged in support of Irish independence from across the political spectrum (including Catholics, socialists, nationalists, and even the nascent Fascist movement) and from the intellectual sphere, with the likes of Paolo Valera, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and, in particular, the poet Annie Vivanti, taking up their pens in support of the cause. Some socialists attempted to change the narrative about Ireland in Italy with unflinching determination. Bernardino “Dino” Fienga, in particular, was quite eager in his attempt to present the Irish question from a relatively innovative viewpoint. Fienga was a socialist and, after the 1921 Livorno conference, became one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, and one of the most prominent members of its Neapolitan branch.

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He would soon be banned by the Fascist regime and forced to withdraw from the medical profession and move to France. In 1936, he went to Spain to assist republican soldiers in the Spanish Civil War (Tuccillo 2008). His developing increasingly revolutionary ideas is reflected in the differences between his two contributions on the Irish question: L’insurrezione irlandese (Fienga 1916) [The Irish Insurrection] and L’Inghilterra contro l’Irlanda (Fienga 1921) [England Against Ireland]. Despite their points of divergence, both pamphlets confirm two of the most innovative elements of Fienga’s take on Irish affairs: his focus on economic over religious matters and his insistence on the importance of what he calls the “psychological moment” [“momento psicologico” (Fienga 1916: 12)] of the revolution, the causes favored by propaganda and shared narratives that pushed the Irish beyond the brink of resistance. The latter element is central in Fienga’s argument, as he is quite aware of the fact that “political inferiority” [“inferiorità politica” (Fienga 1916: 11)] was only the most immediate and strongly felt reason for the Irish rebellion, one of the causes that the “community of people affected by it blames for its issues” [“comunità degl’interessati assegna ai propri mali.” (Fienga 1916: 9)]. Fienga was therefore convinced not only that economic factors were at the heart of the Irish crisis as it unfolded in the war years, but also that centuries of subjugation imposed on the Irish people by a foreign occupier had kept them in a minority position. He was not alone in thinking this: in a long and dense preface to the Italian translation of Plunkett’s Ireland in the New Century, Gino Borgatta made similar points concerning the limited effect that the Land Act would have had on centuries of subjugation (Borgatta 1914: 13–4). Fienga maintained that the inferiority of which the Irish had been convinced needed to be challenged. As such, he traced the origins of the unrest in Ireland to the economic factors that were tightly knit with the political, and even racial, inferiority, which other observers tended to foreground in their analyses. Thus, the causes of the Irish question were lack of industrialization, depopulation, and land-­ owning policies (Fienga 1916: 6–7), which made the Irish case very similar to that of Southern Italy (Fienga 1916: 7–8). Not only was Fienga’s analysis of the causes unique in Italy, only partially echoing Borgatta’s, his proposed solution was too. Fienga’s idea to solve the Irish question was that the Empire should be transformed into a federation of states. He did not believe, in 1916, that Ireland could be autonomous, and he criticized Casement for buying into that idea. All other solutions were, according to Fienga, just ways of postponing the issue: the only solution was a reform

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of the dominions (Fienga 1916: 15). This is consistent with Fienga’s view of Ireland as a region, a part of the Empire, something that is clear from his decision to compare it to a part of Italy (the South) that had, in his and Gramsci’s view, been made poorer by the unification of the country. In his later, extended edition of the pamphlet, published under the more virulent title of L’Inghilterra contro l’Irlanda, Fienga’s analysis of the causes did not change substantially, but the evolution of his ideas toward communism is clear. The booklet was written in February 1919, according to its last page, but prefaced in November 1920, at the height of the War of Independence, in time to dedicate it to the memory of the mayor of Cork and fallen hunger striker, Terence MacSwiney. Fienga’s postscriptum is quite remarkable in this regard, as it testifies to his change of mind regarding the solution to the Anglo-Irish conflict and England’s attitude: The iron fist England is using (it feels like living at the time of the special laws of the 1500s) has not enfeebled the proud resistance [of the Irish] and, in all likelihood, Albion will not come out a winner: Albion is losing all its humanity to defend the empire. I will add, in order to avoid any misunderstanding, that the solution I have suggested (that is a federation) is final only as far as England is concerned, but is temporary for Ireland. The end of the national struggle will channel the popular movements into the class struggle: the national question will be replaced by the social question.38

What looks like an afterthought written to clarify his point of view in a rather uncharacteristically apodeictic fashion is probably best explained in light of the writer’s recent conversion to revolutionary socialism and the keen awareness within Italy of England’s atrocities during the War of Independence. This also translated into a rather kinder treatment of Roger Casement. While Casement was simply a martyr with unsound political ideas in the first booklet, all criticism against him disappeared in the second edition, paving the way for his consecration in Italy as the true hero of the Easter Rising, which would culminate in the publication of Mario 38  “Il pugno di ferro che sta sperimentando l’Inghilterra (sembra di rivivere il tempo delle leggi eccezionali del ‘500) non fiacca la fiera resistenza e tutto lascia sperare che questa volta Albione non la spunterà: Albione che per difendere un impero cessa di essere umana. Ad evitare equivoci poi, dico, che la soluzione proposta (cioè la federazione) è definitiva solo nei riguardi dell’Inghilterra, ma transitoria per l’Irlanda. La fine della lotta nazionale incanalerà i movimenti popolari verso la lotta di classe; alla questione nazionale subentrerà la questione sociale” (Fienga 1921: 31).

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Borsa’s biography in 1932. This interpretation of events was also conducive to a different understanding of Ireland as a significant player in European affairs and a country that was likely to join the Communist International. It is also indicative of a change in attitude among political observers in Italy that went well beyond the socialist ranks. Ireland was increasingly perceived as equally worthy of governing itself as England, an uncommon idea in Liberal Italy. In fact, in the postwar years, the diplomatic tide was rapidly changing. As soon as it was clear that the Peace Conference would not result in Italy having its requests granted—primarily involving domination over a strip of land including Istria and part of Dalmatia—many Italian observers turned against Britain and, consequently, began to support Ireland’s claim to independence. The myth of the so-called mutilated victory prompted Italian newspapers to pay more attention to the revolts within the British Empire. During the War of Independence, the Irish question was thus generally treated quite differently: it had now become one of the issues that allowed Italian nationalists to brand the British as unfaithful and regard them as managing their foreign affairs at the expense of weaker nations: after all, the rights of small nations that were now wielded by the US President Woodrow Wilson as grounds to deny Italy’s requests, had not been imposed on the United Kingdom concerning the Irish question (Chini 2016a: 21). As mentioned earlier, this change in attitude involved politicians and intellectuals from across the spectrum of political parties, though in most cases it only lasted as long as the War of Independence; attention waned during the Civil War (June 1922–May 1923), suggesting that support for Ireland was primarily sustained by a strong anti-­British stance. The War of Independence, however, coincided with a general shift in the interpretation of the Anglo-Irish conflict. While Hagan and Curran (the future rector of the Irish College) were both busy seeking military support from Italians for the republican side in Ireland, others were engaged in familiarizing the Italian public with new takes on Irish affairs, which were less reliant on traditional sectarian frameworks. Economic causes were at the heart of the rather virulent and sensational pamphlet published by Paolo Valera. Valera was a socialist novelist and chronicler of Milan’s underworld at the turn of the century.39 Ireland would feature 39  Among his numerous works, the collection of Milanese articles and essays Milano sconosciuta (1879), the collective novel La folla (1901), and his controversial biography of Mussolini (1926), which his subject did not appreciate, have a prominent place.

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quite extensively in Valera’s production, both as a journalist and as the author of novels and memoirs.40 In 1896, just back from a ten-year-long exile abroad, he submitted two articles on the Irish Parliamentary Party leader Charles Stewart Parnell to the Italian press, in which he decidedly sided with the Irish nationalist. In the aftermath of the Great War, he was one of the most vocal critics of the Peace Conference and an early admirer of Mussolini. Thus, in 1921, he tackled the Irish question with an interesting booklet tellingly entitled L’Inghilterra che ammazza un popolo [England Killing a Nation]. Valera’s text is strikingly different to Fienga’s in that, rather than an examination of causes, it reads more like an invective, a propaganda book aimed at criticizing England more than supporting Ireland’s claims. In some ways it can be seen as the precursor to a long line of books promoted by the Fascist Party from the mid-1930s to spread anti-English ideals in Italy. As we will see more in detail in Chap. 4, these books had England as their main target and attacked it by supporting the causes of rebellious dominions and colonies. Valera’s pamphlet employed most of the elements already mentioned in our discussion of the anonymous 1915 propaganda booklet Come combatte l’Inghilterra. It is primarily a list of, not always accurate, narratives of colonial atrocities, the sole aim of which is to depict Britain as a despotic country and its rulers as bloodthirsty: “Lloyd George went for the blood. Irish blood went to his nose and inebriated him.”41 Valera fires a broadside at England using a staccato syntax and tabloid-like sensational lingo, with the remarkable employment of onomatopoeia and multilingual prose, as exemplified by the following passages that, for this reason, will be provided in Italian first: Pam! Pam! cadevano. Vi furono atti eroici. Non pochi sono stati inviati alla servitù penale, comprese le donne. L’Inghilterra delle trades-unions si è messa le mani alla faccia dalla vergogna. Nulla. Alcuni sono stati appesi. Più tardi venne l’amnistia, la solita baldracca che salva i ministri dalle collere proletarie. (Valera 1921: 29) […] L’Irlanda divenne furiosa. Non ha veduto salvezza che in sè stessa. Si costituì in repubblica, pur avendo il bloody

40  See in particular, La donna più tragica della vita mondana (1923) and I miei dieci anni all’estero (1925). In 1909, Valera had also published a despicable homophobic pamphlet that centered on Oscar Wilde, but the booklet made only passing reference to Ireland. 41  “Lloyd George fu per il sangue. Il sangue irlandese gli andava per le nari, come un ebbrezza” (Valera 1921: 6).

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Castello che moltiplicava le forze militari in tutte le quattro provincie per aggredire i sinn-feiners. (Valera 1921: 32) Bang! Bang! They fell. There were heroic actions. More than a few of them were sent to serve time in prison, including some women. The England of trades unions covered its face in shame. Nothing. Some were hanged. Then the amnesty was declared, the well-known whore saving ministers from the proletarian rage. […] Ireland became furious. She could only see herself as her own saviour. She declared herself a republic, even though the bloody Castle multiplied the military forces in all four provinces to attack Sinn-Féiners.

While such rhetorical devices would be frequently used by Fascist propagandists in the future when the regime was at odds with Britain, it is perhaps also important to note how the socialist Valera positioned the Irish case in the context of the wider issue of the proletarian international from the very start of the booklet (Valera 1921: 5). His description of the condition of the lower strata of Irish society, for example, is built upon a parallel with the Jewish in Russia who became victims of the Cossack pogroms, to the extent that they were murdered in their hundreds, imprisoned and deported to Siberia, the “[s]ame as in Ireland” [“Come in Irlanda” (Valera 1921: 10)], Valera claims. He went even further than Fienga, in declaring that Ireland was a “social republic dating back to May 1921” [“repubblica sociale, che data dal maggio 1921” (Valera 1921: 10)], a claim that would become even more common in Italy during the Irish Civil War, when many thought Ireland was on its way to Bolshevism (Chini 2016: 72). Far from surrendering to the cliché of the somehow misleading affinity between Irish Republicanism and Italian Risorgimento, Valera and Fienga’s readings advocated for another type of affinity, specifically between the age-old economic distress of Ireland and that of rural Italy. The religious conflict was dismissed by both observers as either superficial or instrumental to the divide et impera strategy of the British in Ireland, and economic factors were given ample coverage for the first time. This unsurprisingly changed the shared narrative surrounding the Irish question in Italy, at least for the brief season of the War of Independence (Chini 2016: 25–64).42 42  I wish to thank Enrico Terrinoni for sharing his unpublished paper on Fienga and Valera, presented at the Irish and Italian Summer Seminars, Rome Global Gateway, University of Notre Dame, in June 2017.

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A major event can be identified in the hunger strike and consequent death of the mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, soon hailed as a hero of Irish nationalists. The episode was widely covered by Italian newspapers from across the political spectrum, from the much-quoted article by Benito Mussolini in Il Popolo d’Italia43 to the piece by literary critic Emilio Cecchi in La Tribuna. As noted by Chini, despite Cecchi’s complaint that Italian media tended to favor the spectacular elements of the story, it can be argued that the MacSwiney affair offered an opportunity for Italian political observers to investigate the causes of the War of Independence more thoroughly and raise awareness among their readers. It was thus a way for the Italian public to understand the economic causes of the Anglo-­ Irish conflict, which so far had been limited to a small number of publications that were not widely circulated. As such, the episode played a significant role in the construction of an Italian awareness of matters Irish, and it combined the two main characteristics of this process: an ability to move beyond the traditional idea of a merely religious conflict, and a romanticization of the struggle itself. Not only did Italian politicians and journalists begin to interpret the conflict in economic terms, but general support for the Irish would also result in a depiction of the oppressed people as a fighting and rebellious “race.” The virilization of the Irish, of which we have hinted at with reference to Hagan’s books, was rather enhanced by the heroic accounts of the post-Great War years. The stereotype of the fighting Irish then, which would also become prominent in future Fascist pro-Irish works, resurfaced here with Valera, chiefly thanks to his striking comparison of Irish acts of heroism with English crimes and accusations of attempted genocide (Valera 1921: 49). In the aftermath of the Great War, and during the War of Independence, this stereotype was often combined with a romantic take on the protagonists of the Rising and the subsequent insurrections. As noted by Chini in relation to Annie Vivanti’s contributions (Chini 2016: 29), the figures of Irish rebels tended to be romanticized by the Italian press, and the English occupier received similar treatment, being depicted as an insatiable monster: 43  Benito Mussolini was also among those celebrating the fledgling republic. In his article on MacSwiney’s hunger strike, Mussolini quoted the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, but, in particular, his declaration concerning the Irish Republic strikingly jars with the principles of Fascism as would be delineated over the following years, as it promoted the principles of civil and religious liberties, as well as equal rights for all of Ireland’s citizens (Mussolini 1920).

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Cousin to the German “tawny beast”, the Anglo-Saxon “blond ogre”, with his monstrous appetite, looks around for something to devour. Today it looks like the entire world should fall into those gaping jaws opening from one side to the other of the Atlantic.44

While the purple prose employed here by Vivanti can be considered an extreme example of the flourish that tended to accompany such reports, it is by no means an exception. Vivanti’s depiction of de Valera is that of an “almost legendary” [“quasi leggendario”] romantic adventurer whose escape from prison is made of the stuff of Celtic legends and appearance is that of a “new Lionheart” [“nuovo Coeur-de-lion”]. De Valera has “two wonderful blue eyes and a refined and spiritual face” [“due meravigliosi occhi celesti e un volto fine e spirituale”], and the narrative of his actions had almost biblical tones: “on the seventh day, to spare his comrades, de Valera surrendered” [“Il settimo giorno, per non sacrificare i suoi compagni, De Valera si arrese” (Vivanti 1919b)]. Vivanti was a very popular writer of romance, and she also wrote a pro-Irish article for the women’s magazine Donna, in which she employed some of those rhetorical devices to glamorize the Irish struggle (see Chini 2016). Vivanti’s articles in Il Popolo d’Italia are also interesting because they downplayed the socialist element on the republican side, as would most contributions linked with Mussolini and his paper. When she wrote about James Connolly, for instance, no mention was made of his political convictions, while the parallel she drew with Cesare Battisti, a Triestine irredentist and one of the founders of Il Popolo who was put to death by hanging in 1916, can arguably be seen as one of the first steps in the Fascist attempt to appropriate Battisti’s legacy.45 The number of contributions that appeared during the Anglo-Irish war thus confirmed a common trait of Italy’s relationship with Ireland: interest in Irish affairs arose particularly when political circumstances were favorable, and was never separated from the dynamics of Italy’s relationship 44   “Cugino della ‘fulva Fiera’ tedesca, il ‘biondo orco’ anglosassone, con appetito mostruoso volge intorno lo sguardo in cerca di ciò che potrà divorare. Oggi sembra che il mondo intero debba cadere in quelle fauci spalancate di cui una mascella s’apre di qua e l’altra di là dell’Atlantico” (Vivanti 1919a: 462). 45  These include, among other things, a monument to Battisti in Bolzano, celebrating him as a hero of irredentism. The figure of Battisti is curiously intertwined with Irish politics: in the early 1930s, Mario Borsa would compare him to another prominent figure of the Easter Rising, Roger Casement.

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with England. Nevertheless, Ireland certainly benefited from that in terms of propaganda in Italy. As shown in the examples taken from Valera and Fienga, in particular, the constant parallel with Britain was also functional to a reworking of national stereotypes. As stated by Chini, the main Italian parties supported the Irish cause: recognizing in it profoundly different meanings and values: nationalist parties saw it as a revolt against the overwhelming power of old empires; Catholics saw it as a struggle for religious and political freedom, republicans saw it as an anti-monarchic war to uphold the values of republicanism, socialists saw it as a proletarian revolution against the oppressive power of a capitalist nation. For all groups, however, it represented a symbol, a way to question the international political order and the status quo. (Chini 2016: 38)

The portrait of Ireland and of the “indomitable Sinn Féin” [“indomito Sinn Féin”]46 did not vary much if we consider the articles published by the fledgling Fascist movement in Il Popolo d’Italia, penned by Franco Fabbris and Mussolini himself, or if we look at D’Annunzio’s support from Fiume (Phelan 2013: 98–114). There seemed to be general agreement, across the political spectrum, not only regarding the Irish claim for independence but also about the stereotypical character of the Irish people as a fighting people. After the signing of the Treaty in December 1921, welcomed with enthusiasm by the Italian Parliament,47 interest in Ireland progressively abandoned center stage. It is possible that a number of different, concurrent factors contributed to this: the rapprochement between Italy and Britain, the lack of support for Irish missions in Italy and the progressive loss of centrality of the Irish College in Irish diplomacy in Italy (Chini 2016: 54–55), and, last but not least, the general idea that Ireland was becoming a communist country. Most protagonists of this postwar surge in interest in Irish affairs continued to study Ireland, but their interest was either overshadowed by other concerns or had to focus on cultural matters due to the difficulty of discussing political affairs in the context of a Fascist 46  D’Annunzio pronounced these words in one of the most memorable speeches he made during the Fiume campaign, Italia e Vita. The speech can now be read in D’Annunzio (1974: 155). 47  The writer and Sardinian politician Emilio Lussu mentioned the Italian deputies’ “general approval” [“plauso […] generale”] in his December 8 speech at the Chamber of Deputies (Lussu 2008: 26).

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Italy that was becoming, albeit temporarily, closer to Britain. Buonaiuti remained in contact with Hagan and would try to promote Irish nationalist politics in Amendola’s newspaper Il Mondo48; Fienga’s library, held at the National Library in Naples, testifies to his continuing concern with Irish politics, but his writing activity was much less intense in the 1920s and 1930s, and Valera died in 1926. Vivanti, meanwhile, shifted her political interest to other oppressed small nations such as Egypt, but she visited Ireland in 1927, and there is evidence that she remained in touch with Hagan in those years.49 Nonetheless, Italian media only rarely presented the results of such ongoing interest in the early years of Fascist Italy. As a result of this progressive distantiation, the stereotypes that arose during the War of Independence and in the immediate years that followed were generally accepted in Fascist Italy and would go on to form the basis on which Fascist diplomats and literati would construct their images of Ireland from the mid-1920s onward, while intellectuals less connected with Fascism would still rely on a less rebellious image closer to that disseminated by Buonaiuti and Turchi. Unsurprisingly, the perception of the specificity of Irish literature gained momentum during times in which Italy was either at war or simply at odds with Britain. While the translation of Irish writers did not always follow trajectories that are linked to the political history of either Italy or Ireland, meanwhile, the general acceptance of their being Irish in public discourse often seemed to be directly affected by such seismic movements.

48  In a letter dated 29 August 1922, with the Il Mondo letterhead in the top-left corner, addressed to Gavan Duffy, Buonaiuti announced that he had published an article on the death of Michael Collins and would continue to discuss Irish affairs in the future. The following issues of the paper, however, do not include significant references to Irish politics, which is unsurprising as anti-British articles were generally ostracized in the periodical since Italy’s diplomacy had changed direction (Chini 2016: 76). For Amendola’s connections with Ireland and especially the thought of Berkeley, see Mc Cormack 2010: 78–86. 49  We can find traces of Vivanti’s trip to Ireland in a letter to Hagan, kept in the archive of the Irish College (Papers of John Hagan, Irish College Rome (1904–1930), letter from Seán T O’Kelly to Hagan, 26 August 1927, file: HAG 1/1927/440). I wish to thank Chiara Chini for pointing me toward it.

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2.2   “A Geographical Mystery”: James Joyce, an Italian-Irish Intellectual? As mentioned in the introduction, James Joyce’s relatively liminal role in my research was rather surprising considering his numerous and strong connections with the Italian literary scene. Joyce’s presence in Italy as an Irish writer is partially negligible—though for this very reason significant—for most of the period under consideration here, but his work both as a translator and a would-be mediator of Irish literature and commentator on politics deserves some attention. If Joyce-the-Writer would come to be perceived as a protagonist of European literature in the years between the wars, Joyce-the-Journalist and Joyce-the-Translator had initially tried to earn some deserved recognition in Italy in the years leading up to the Great War. Aside from striving to have Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man published, Joyce’s most significant activity in the public sphere in the years between 1907 and 1914 concerned making his Triestine audience more aware of Irish politics, as well as seeking to familiarize them with Irish literature. Joyce’s work in this field shows that, despite his ambivalent take on Irish nationalism, he considered literature and politics to be deeply connected and mutually informative when it came to things Irish. More importantly, it shows how Joyce was trying to come to terms with his transnational position as an intellectual straddling cultural systems, getting the most out of his stay in Italy, but never giving up on becoming a noteworthy figure in the Irish literary world. This section is therefore mainly concerned with Joyce as an advocate for Ireland in Italy, as an intellectual who tried, and mostly failed, to render the conversation about Ireland in Italy more nuanced and less reliant on British sources and Arnoldian age-old stereotypes. Joyce’s attempt to go beyond the representations of Ireland put forth by early mediators of Irish matters in Italy was only partly successful and only among the small audience of his Triestine readership. Joyce’s nationality (or lack thereof) was a key element in the reception of his works in Italy from early on.50 Quite aptly, an early Italian commentator of Ulysses, Antonello Gerbi, defined Joyce as a “geographical mystery.” According to a petulant Gerbi, the 1926 Italian translation of excerpts of Ulysses had made the novel “too familiar” to the Italian public: 50  In the next chapter, I will sketch the process of denationalization (and re-nationalization) that Joyce experienced in entre-deux-guerres Italy.

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Joyce. James Joyce. Ulysses. Dedalus. He was a name, he was a myth. He shouldn’t have been translated. Now everybody knows him personally, everybody can claim to know him […] He was a myth, and they made of him a man of letters as many others. A literary myth and a geographical mystery has suddenly become a mere contributor to Italian journals, the most prosaic reality one can imagine. (Gerbi 1927: 270–1, translated in Zanotti 2013: 183)

As is known, this prosaic reality—of being a contributor to Italian journals and newspapers—had, in the previous decade, provided a great opportunity for Joyce to earn both symbolic capital and some much needed cold hard cash (Ellmann 1982: 255). It was also, in part, an attempt at positioning himself in the Italian cultural field as a reliable source of information on Irish affairs, though this aspect of the strategy proved unsuccessful. From 1907 to 1912, in particular, Joyce conceived most of his published writing in Italian, and Giorgio Melchiori famously claimed that during those years he could arguably be considered an Italian writer (Melchiori 1994). These texts were mostly related to his long but rather intermittent collaboration with Il Piccolo della sera, an irredentist newspaper published in Trieste and whose editor was his then friend Roberto Prezioso. Since Il Piccolo was an Italian nationalist and anti-Austrian newspaper, Joyce’s pro-­ Irish contributions were highly appreciated, both for their nationalism— which could easily mirror local attitudes—and for their anti-imperialist traits: “it occurred to [Prezioso] now to commission Joyce to do a series of articles on the evils of empire as found in Ireland. The Piccolo’s readers could be depended upon to see the parallel with the evils of empire as found in Trieste” (Ellmann 1982: 255).51 These articles52 represent a unique perspective on Joyce’s political thought, but here they will mainly 51  In the words of Italo Svevo: “Trieste was then to him like a small Ireland, which he was able to consider with a more equanimous mind” [“Trieste allora rappresentava una piccola Irlanda ch’egli poteva considerare più serenamente della propria” (Svevo 1995: 78)]. For an informed account of Triestine anti-imperialist attitudes and publications, see McCourt 2000: 79–136. 52  Here follows the list of articles in order of publication: Il Fenianismo: L’ultimo feniano. Il Piccolo della sera. 22 March 1907; Home Rule maggiorenne. Il Piccolo della sera. 19 May 1907; L’Irlanda alla sbarra. Il Piccolo della sera. 16 September 1907; Oscar Wilde: Il poeta di “Salomè”. Il Piccolo della sera. 24 March 1909; La battaglia fra Bernard Shaw e la censura: “Blanco Posnet smascherato”. Il Piccolo della sera. 5 September 1909; La cometa dell’“Home Rule”. Il Piccolo della sera. 22 December 1910; L’ombra di Parnell. Il Piccolo della sera. 16 May 1912; La città delle Tribù: Ricordi italiani in un porto irlandese. Il Piccolo della sera. 11

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be considered as a testament to the idea of Ireland (and its literature) that Joyce was trying to disseminate in Italy. The articles were quite distinct from Joyce’s narrative works, and while scholars no longer refer to them dismissively as “Joyce’s shrill note” (Mason 1956), John McCourt recently warned “against attributing excessive importance to [Joyce’s] Italian journalism” (McCourt 2018: 127). Nonetheless, scholars have primarily read Joyce’s journalistic writings in interaction with his main works,53 as preparatory material for the great books to come. Joyce himself, while pitching them for publication in his letter to the Genoese publisher Angelo Formiggini, declared that the articles in question had “absolutely no literary value” (Joyce 1992: 517; Schenoni and Del Greco Lobner 1983: 84). For the purposes of this chapter, though, I am not concerned with the “literary value” of the texts, nor with the future redeployment of themes and motifs in Joyce’s later works; of interest, instead, is their use, and perhaps misuse, by Joyce as a way of breaking into the Italian cultural and literary scene. As we know, Joyce did not limit himself to writing the abovementioned Italian articles, but also gave talks and produced Italian translations of the works of Irish writers during his stay in Trieste. Joyce’s Italian production has been investigated from a variety of points of view, but relatively little has been said about the Irish writer’s relationship with the Italian publishing system and how, especially during his Triestine years, his interactions with the book market were characterized by what we might call a certain inability to figure out its ins and outs. As Stanislaus Joyce maintained, Joyce employed his Italian works as a way to counteract “the ignorance that existed about Ireland on the continent” (quoted in McCourt 2000: 92) and acquire a respectable status among Italian literati. Then a struggling and as-yet almost-unpublished writer, he viewed this diverse medium as a way of establishing himself as an intellectual associated with Irish literature and politics, which must have seemed, for a relatively brief season, a good idea in irredentist Trieste. Compared with the scant and rather simplified versions of Irishness circulating in Italy at the time, both Joyce’s criticism and his translations conveyed an idea of Ireland and Irish literature that was at once more inclusive and more complex, August 1912; Il miraggio del pescatore di Aran: La valvola dell’Inghilterra in caso di guerra.Il Piccolo della sera. 5 September 1912. 53  According to John McCourt “In this Italian journalism, Joyce is rehearsing some of the themes he will later recast in his fiction, mostly in a more humorous and sometimes in a more caustic key: namely, his interest (and the Irish Revival’s interest) in the West of Ireland, in the Irish islands in general […], and the Aran Islands in particular” (McCourt 2018: 127).

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being ambivalent about political issues and claiming, perhaps for the first time in Italy, Shaw and Wilde for Irish literature; he would learn, at his own expense, how precarious and difficult an enterprise it is to make a culture heard abroad. In light of this, his focus on Ireland might be said to have affected his ultimately unsuccessful career as an Italian-Irish intellectual. I will therefore consider Joyce’s position in the Italian literary scene and argue that both the scarce general interest in Ireland and his own insecure standing ought to have encouraged him to pursue a different strategy to succeed in the cultural and political climate of Liberal Italy. It has been suggested that these works are also key to evaluating Joyce’s multilingualism. Before Finnegans Wake and the Swiss and Parisian years, Joyce’s famed multilingualism (O’Neill 2005) could more aptly be defined as bilingualism: the Italian of his translations and journalism went hand-­ in-­hand with his constant writing and revising of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. As Serenella Zanotti has argued, “Joyce’s dissatisfaction with monolingualism is an important aspect of his intellectual history” and his “Italianism had both a biographical and psychological motivation” (Zanotti 2013: 9, 69), to the point that he even “threatened to unlearn English and to write in French or Italian” (Ellmann 1982: 397) in an avant la lettre Beckettian fashion. According to Italo Svevo: we Triestines have a right to regard him with deep affection as if he belonged in a certain sense to us. He was to a certain extent Italian. In Joyce’s culture there is a marked Italian bias, accentuated by the desire, which was very lively at some periods of his life, to feel less English. (Svevo 1995: 77, translated in Zanotti 2013: 69)54

This process of “transculturation” that Joyce was undergoing meant he was “steeped in Italian culture, literature, and language – an Italianized Irishman” (McCourt 2008: 133)55 who, “while giving conditional 54  “S’intende come a noi triestini sia concesso di amarlo come un poco nostro. E anche come un poco italiano. Nella cultura di Joyce c’è qualche inclinazione decisamente italiana, forse più accentuata per il desiderio, vivo in certi periodi della sua vita, di sentirsi meno inglese” (Svevo 1995: 77). 55  McCourt convincingly links this with the writing of Giacomo Joyce: “The hybrid ItalianIrish title, Giacomo Joyce, evokes a different vision of the writer from the one to which we are accustomed, suggesting a man who has undergone a process of transculturation and is now very much at home in his adopted city, who is comfortably acclimatized to life in Trieste and steeped in Italian culture, literature, and language – an Italianized Irishman pleased to stray into the shadows of many an illustrious Italian Giacomo before him, such as Leopardi,

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support to the Irish nationalist cause, […] was far keener to assert his independence from nationalists of all shades, from Pearse to Yeats, even if that meant exposing the limits of a broad movement that, in theory, he wanted to engage with and at least partially endorse” (McCourt 2000: 99). His Triestine articles in part confirm this hypothesis: when Joyce started the second wave of his career as a cultural and political critic, following similar attempts in Dublin, he did so with a view to counteracting the misinformation spread by British news agencies in Italy (McCourt 2000: 113). In the years leading up to the final Home Rule bill, as we know, Italian newspapers and magazines almost exclusively received information about Ireland with a distinctive British bias. Up to that moment, commentators on Irish affairs who were more sympathetic to the nationalist cause were few and rarely connected with one another. These voices engaged in an attempt to start a public conversation about Ireland in Italy and, in order to do so, tended to provide images of Ireland that were rather monological and unambiguous, mainly based on traditional Arnoldian readings and primarily concerned with the Catholic element in Irish culture. Joyce’s journalistic work provided a more nuanced image of Ireland, for instance rearticulating the presence of the Catholic element in Irish culture, and ultimately failed to interest mainstream periodicals and publishers as much as other more partisan, Manichaean writers. One relevant example of such circulation of highly politicized images is the intense propaganda associated with the Italian Modernist historians and clergymen Ernesto Buonaiuti and Nicola Turchi, and with the Pontifical Irish College in Rome, commented upon in the previous section. As discussed, the political discourses voiced by these intellectuals were intertwined with a conversation on the images commonly associated with Ireland. The Irish/English opposition, for instance, was so strong in Buonaiuti and Turchi’s L’isola di smeraldo (1914) as was their insistence on the alleged hatred of the Irish for the English. The difference between them and Joyce seems quite clear: any senseless hatred of the British was never part of Joyce’s tentative endorsement of nationalist ideas. On the contrary, Joyce was always aware—especially after his sojourn in Rome, during which he had the opportunity to further explore socialism (Ruggieri 2016)—that Puccini, and Casanova (as well as the nineteenth-century Irish poet Joyce translated as Giacomo Clarenzio Mangan in his lecture prepared for, but never delivered at, the Università Popolare in Trieste)” (McCourt 2008: 133). In keeping with McCourt’s point, it could be argued that Giacomo Joyce as a pseudonym had a similar function as Italo Svevo for Ettore Schmitz.

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the main issue with nationalists like Griffith was that they “educat[e] the old people of Ireland on the old pap or racial hatred whereas anyone can see that if the Irish question exists, it exists for the Irish proletariat chiefly” (Joyce 1966: 167; see also Cairns and Richards 1988: 84). This, he felt, was one of the shortcomings of Griffith’s propaganda: “for Joyce the aspiration of Irish nationalism did not have to involve pointless anti-­ Englishness” (McCourt 2000: 99). On the other hand, Hagan, in particular, made quite strong attempts to subvert established stereotypes about Ireland and England. Thus, while Buonaiuti and Turchi mainly sought to transform established portrayals of Ireland and the Irish into positive images, Hagan attempted to promote an image of Ireland as civil, cultivated, and virile. As discussed, though, these two radically different positions agreed in seeing Ireland and England in essentialist terms, as fundamentally different and incompatible. In such a landscape, Joyce’s take on both the Revival and the Irish struggle for independence was quite anomalous and provided Triestine audiences with a more complex and nuanced idea of Ireland, which was less schematic and less dependent on essentialist views. According to Rebecca Walkowitz, “many of Joyce’s contemporaries, such as artists of the Irish Revival and the Harlem Renaissance, sought to promote political recognition for specific social groups by affirming the distinctiveness of their cultures” (2006: 60). Joyce, on the other hand: had a different image of culture in mind […]. For Joyce, it is not because Ireland has a distinct culture that it deserves self-determination; rather, Joyce wants Ireland to have self-determination so that its culture may change and diversify, so that it may become less distinct. (Walkowitz 2006: 60)

It is a delicate point, and one that has also been discussed by Kevin Barry, among others, in his excellent introduction to Joyce’s Occasional, Critical, and Political Writings. Barry is keen to emphasize that many Irish intellectuals “sought to resist the tendencies of Irish nationalist culture to become as exclusive as D.P. Moran intended it to be” (Barry 2000: xxx). On the other hand, in Joyce and Nationalism (Nolan 2002), Emer Nolan has argued that Joyce’s political thought is not “fair-minded” but instead rather confused and ambiguous: Indeed I would argue that it represents just the kind of symptomatic ambiguity in his political thought which has been so misleadingly simplified to an

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idea of impeccable fair-mindedness. Such ambiguities abound in essays like ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages’.[…] [W]hat his critics see as detached ambivalence was experienced as painful deadlock by Joyce. (2002: 129)

Whether we choose to consider Joyce’s stance as complex and articulate, or ambiguous and unsettled, it is arguable that the lack of a clear-cut image of Ireland in his writings made communication between him and his readers difficult. The Ireland that Joyce sought to articulate to his Triestine readership was not easily recognizable: Joyce’s awareness of the historical elements of Irish culture and politics, as opposed to the a-historical view of the Emerald Isle presented in Italy—and often back home—provided his readers with an image of Ireland that was only partly familiar (e.g. its conflict with Britain, colonization, political turmoil), but mostly unknown. Thus Joyce resisted essentialist claims, be they of a religious or a nativist nature, and did not refrain from introducing in his articles “criticism of the Irish themselves, by one who claimed it as the criticism of a patriot and nationalist (of sorts)” (Fraser 2018: 163). This is perhaps because, as argued by McCourt, “despite publication in Il Piccolo della sera, Joyce always had one eye to Ireland—and his Italian writings consciously address a possible future Irish or international readership. These multiple audiences need to be kept in mind in our attempts to understand these writings” (McCourt 2018: 129).56 The genuine nationalist sentiment pervading his articles could easily be appreciated by Triestine irredentists (McCourt 2000, 2004; Bulson 2001), and James Alexander Fraser goes as far as to maintain that their circulation in Trieste was facilitated by the very image of Ireland that they conveyed, that of a country “plagued by unfortunate setbacks, most of them involving treachery of some kind.”57 However, these ideas fell on deaf ears when Joyce tried to address a wider  The Irish literary scene was always on Joyce’s mind, including when he was living in Italy or Switzerland. On 1 August 1918, he wrote to Forrest Reid: “I had hoped that the Abbey Theatre or the Stage Society (London) would do it [Exiles] but, though it is on the program of the latter, nothing definite has been arranged. As you will see by the enclosed we have given here and in Geneva and Lausanne plays (in English) by Synge, Wilde, Mr. Shaw and Sir J. Barrie. I wonder whether the fact would interest any newspaper in Belfast. If you could perhaps pass on the enclosed. It is, I believe, the first Synge performance of any of his plays in English) on the continent” (Joyce 1957: 117). 57  “Joyce had been expressly warned that his audience’s interest in Ireland was driven by a desire to see Irish victimhood – its prolonged fight for independence – as a proxy for Triestine annexation. As such, they were well accustomed to and well prepared for the image of Ireland already well rehearsed by sections of Irish nationalism: that it was plagued by unfortunate setbacks, most of them involving treachery of some kind”(Fraser 2018: 162). 56

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Italian audience. There were various reasons for this, including Joyce’s questionable dissemination strategy, but Italy’s mounting pro-British sentiment in the years leading up to the Great War arguably also played a part, as did Joyce’s socialist-leaning interpretation of political events. While his socialism did not appeal to nationalist papers, his nationalism must have appeared suspect to less conservative editors. As discussed, it is only after the Easter Rising of 1916, and especially after Italy’s so-called mutilated victory in the Great War, that a socialist and left-wing interpretation of the Irish question in line with Joyce’s became, if not prominent, at least significant in Italian political discourse. To be sure, when Joyce attempted to have his articles published in other newspapers, as well as by the Genoa-based publisher Formiggini in 1914, things did not go according to plan. While it is tempting to believe that the publication of L’Irlanda alla sbarra (“Ireland at the bar,” the title Joyce suggested for the Formiggini collection) could have helped Ireland’s case in Italy by presenting Joyce’s ideas to a much wider audience, the remoteness of such a possibility needs to be assessed in light of Joyce’s actual relationship with the Italian cultural field. Joyce’s booklet, after all, was never published as an independent volume during his lifetime, and we do not know if Formiggini even dignified this almost-unpublished and barely known Irish writer with an answer. Scholars have paid great attention to these writings and to the links with Triestine intellectuals that favored their publication. What has not yet been adequately emphasized, to the best of my knowledge, however, is that this was yet another of Joyce’s strategic miscalculations in the years in which he was still struggling to reach a wider audience both in Italy and abroad. Up to 1914, the watershed year that saw the publication of Dubliners (15 June) and the first installments of A Portrait in The Egoist (from 2 February), Joyce had not shown great talent in making a name for himself in Italy. He tended to show interest in, and rub shoulders with, relatively minor figures, mostly linked to Trieste’s irredentist circles (e.g. Attilio Tamaro, Silvio Benco, Antonio Francini Bruni, and the young and yet-unknown Italo Svevo). He began, or merely planned, several translation projects, all concerning Irish writers. While he completed some without acquiring the relevant production rights (Yeats’s and Synge’s plays), others were abandoned at the planning stage or were barely started (i.e. Moore’s Celibates,58 Wilde’s 58  He started the translation with his friend Francini Bruni while in Pola, as a languagelearning exercise, which is mentioned in a letter to Stanislaus dated 15 December 1904 (Joyce 1966: 74; see Zanotti 2013: 24–26).

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The Soul of Man under Socialism59 and The Picture of Dorian Gray).60 Moreover, as shown by Caterina Del Vivo (1991) and Corinna Del Greco Lobner (1998), his attempt to contribute an article on Defoe to Il Marzocco unsurprisingly failed, as Joyce was under the false impression that the Italian aesthetes’ review, which “attuned itself to a D’Annunzian formula of aesthetic perfection,” might be interested in a writer that Joyce himself portrayed as a champion of realism à la Zola (Del Greco Lobner 1998: 399). On 25 March 1914, almost two years after the publication of the final article, Joyce sent a book proposal to Formiggini. It would seem this was another instance of the writer misreading the dynamics of the Italian book market. Considering that the last article had been published in September 1912, the delay in sending the proposal, in itself, indicates that Joyce was waiting for the right moment, and somewhat extends his term as an Italian critic. Twenty-one days earlier, though, on March 4, he had sent Grant Richards his signed contract for the publication of Dubliners from Trieste and had known for a couple of months that the publisher had eventually decided to publish the short stories. While it is understandable that Joyce might still be wary of possible predicaments, this overlap seems to suggest that, up to this date, he did not see his two careers as mutually exclusive. As recently recalled by Fraser, Joyce claimed that without his artistic talent, he could not have written for the papers: “The distinction that Joyce had drawn up until that point  – and continued to draw in his fiction – between art and journalism is seen to soften” (Fraser 2018: 158). So, while it is true that, once Dubliners and A Portrait were published, Joyce almost immediately stopped trying to become an Italian journalist, it is also true that he did not give up on the idea of publishing his Irish-themed articles in book form, and even seem to have toyed with the idea of publishing an English translation of them (Melchiori 1995: 114; McCourt 2000: 280). The proposal itself is quite interesting for a number of 59  “Joyce had been interested in Wilde for a long time, and even wrote to Robert Ross asking permission to translate The Soul of Man under Socialism” (Ellmann 1982: 274). 60  Joyce proposed the translation to Treves, but the publisher’s answer from 21 April 1909, was in the negative: “they received many proposals to publish translations of ‘O.W.’ but [...] they had never accepted any of them because of the ‘difficulties in introducing this name and of recommending his works in catalogues and newspapers which had family readerships.’ It would be even more inopportune to publish the very work in which Wilde laid out ‘his real aesthetic theories’” (McCourt 2000: 133). See also Binelli (2019).

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reasons, first of which is that Joyce seemed to justify only in very general terms the potential “interest” among Italians in a book on Ireland, with a mix of awkwardness and misplaced confidence: This year the Irish problem has reached an acute phase, and indeed, according to the latest news, England, owing to the Home Rule question, is on the brink of civil war. The publication of a volume of Irish essays would be of interest to the Italian public. […] I am an Irishman (from Dublin): and though these articles have absolutely no literary value, I believe they set out the problem sincerely and objectively. (Joyce to Formiggini, 25 March 1914, in Joyce 1992: 517)

Despite the somewhat dismissive attitude he manifested in this letter, the importance Joyce attached to these writings was nonetheless rather significant; he was proud of his activity as a journalist, and famously told Stannie that “I may not be the Jesus Christ I once fondly imagined myself, but I think I must have a talent for journalism” (Ellmann 1982: 255). He presented the publisher with a choice of Irish-themed articles to which he did not assign any “literary value,” but that “set out the problem sincerely and objectively.” Quite surprisingly, Joyce did not make any reference to his studies or collaboration with Irish periodicals, nor to his activity as a public speaker in Trieste. While the timeliness of his book was mentioned, the argument he made was rather generic and unconvincing. Moreover, the choice of Formiggini as the publisher was quite an odd one. No reference is made in Joyce’s letter, or indeed elsewhere, to the rationale behind the decision. Born in 1878, Angelo Formiggini was, in March 1914, a relatively young and successful publisher, who was then primarily known for his book series focusing on philosophy and pedagogics, as well as the works of contemporary poets and what he dubbed “Classici del ridere” [humorous classics]. While Melchiori has emphasized that he was a socialist (Melchiori 1995: 107), it should be noted that Formiggini had never showed any interest in Irish affairs or in publishing political books. Also, rather surprisingly, Joyce does not seem to have tried other options, not even the very few mainstream publishers that had a certain interest in Irish culture, such as Treves (maybe he still remembered his failure with the translation of Dorian Gray) or Bocca, which published L’isola di smeraldo by Buonaiuti and Turchi in 1914. For all his literary genius, Joyce did not seem to be fully attuned to the readership he was trying to reach, despite Melchiori’s comment on “the care with which he had chosen the one

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Italian publisher who might have been interested in the issue” (Melchiori 1995: 108). Of particular note here is also that Joyce did not manifest any awareness of the fact that discourse on Ireland was either limited to small independent publications with limited circulation (e.g. Hagan and O’Riordan’s booklets), or required a patient process of readership-­building at national level, as was the case with Buonaiuti, who was a successful historian in his own right and long-standing contributor to Nuova Antologia, one of Italy’s most reputed political and cultural quarterlies at the time. As hinted at, closely linked to the promotion of his Irish essays, was the self-promotion in Italy of both his own creative writing and that of fellow Irishmen Yeats and Synge. This followed similar lines, but showed a slightly better understanding of the Italian cultural system. For instance, Joyce attempted to have his short story “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” published in Nuova Antologia, an idea that also dates back to the start of 1914, after Joyce had been contacted by Grant Richards with a serious publishing proposal and could be relatively confident that Dubliners would be published. He therefore tried, and failed, to publish the most overtly political of his short stories in the literary and political periodical that had already hosted a number of articles sympathetic to the Irish cause, including the two by Buonaiuti mentioned earlier. While this choice may have had less to do with careful planning on Joyce’s part and more to do with his student and co-translator Nicolò Vidacovich (see below) being a recurrent contributor is up for speculation, the fact remains that this move would have been much more consistent with the dynamics of the cultural field. In the years immediately preceding the Great War, Joyce seemed to envisage for himself a role as a public intellectual in Italy, and never gave up on the idea of becoming a published author in his adopted country, either with his critical and political writings or with his literary works, including his translations. Joyce’s agenda was one of self-promotion (Bulson 2001), and in those crucial months at the start of 1914, he was still uncertain as to whether he would be known as a journalist and critic or as an author of fiction. This is all the more obvious if we consider that he did not abandon the ambition of publishing his Triestine articles in book form the minute he realized Dubliners would be published. He entertained the idea for a few more months before eventually letting go of it, perhaps also disappointed by the lack of interest shown by Formiggini.61 61  Nonetheless, it is worth noting that only two and a half years later, in his letter dated 8 November 1916, to Harriet Shaw Weaver (Joyce 1975: 222–224), he provided a summary

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2.2.1  Translating Irish Playwrights in Trieste Joyce’s translations have often been analyzed from the point of view of his use of (the Italian) language and as a testimony to his complex relationship with the literature of his home country. Rarely have they been considered in light of a position-taking strategy engaged in by their author. An in-­ depth analysis of these translations is beyond the scope of this study, but a few words on Joyce’s use of translations (both of his own works and of works by other Irish writers) can shed light on his attempts to find his place within the literary system in Italy. Jolanta Wawrzycka defines Joyce’s translations of Hauptmann, Yeats, and Synge as “ambassadorial”62: this is certainly true with regard to the latter two, whom he intended to herald to Italian audiences (Wawrzycka 2009: 126). From the early years of the Irish Literary Theatre, Joyce had appreciated Yeats’s and Synge’s works in particular, albeit from a distance. The relationship was an ambivalent one. Joyce overtly criticized what he saw as the provincial attitude of the Abbey, and particularly its commitment to peasant drama. Nevertheless, his translations, his Piccolo articles, and his attempts to work as a theater manager, both in Italy and in Switzerland, proved his interest in contributing to having Irish drama produced on the foreign stage. As is known, Joyce translated Riders to the Sea (completed by 1909) and Countess Cathleen

of his works that completely omitted his journalistic output, but did include his translations. In those eighteen months, Joyce effectively gave up on the idea of becoming a public intellectual, or even a literary critic, to the point that he invariably refused any such work when Ezra Pound proposed it. Furthermore, when her father declined a request to write a preface to Beryl De Zoete’s translation of Senilità, Lucia Joyce wrote to Livia Veneziani that “A long time ago [Joyce] made it a rule that he would not write a preface to his own or another’s book or notes of explanation or give an interview or deliver a lecture” (Joyce 1975: 356), clearly forgetting the talks delivered at the Scuola Revoltella in Trieste in 1907, the year Lucia herself was born. It must be a rule Joyce had made after he decided to give up on his career as a journalist and critic, a sign of a change of heart and career. 62  Joyce’s “ambassadorial” attitude was also noticed by Nino Frank, his future co-translator of Finnegans Wake: “I noticed, however, that despite his insular loyalty and disdain for political affairs, he showed little interest in truly English writers, proposing instead that I publish an Irishman like Lord Dunsany, Australians and South Africans, as though basing his preference on what best lent itself to irredentism.” [“Je remarquais pourtant qu’en dépit de son loyalisme insulaire et de son dédain à l’égard des questions politiques, il attachait peu d’intérét aux écrivains proprement anglais et me faisait plutôt publier un Irlandais tel que Lord Dunsany, des Australiens et des Africains du Sud, comme si sa préférence allait à ce qui était susceptible d’irrédentisme” (Frank 1967: 43].

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while in Trieste, with the help of Vidacovich.63 It is possible to assume that Vidacovich played a more central role in the latter translation, as Joyce referred to this as “my friend Vidacovich’s version” (Joyce 1975: 221) in a 1916 letter to Yeats. Vidacovich, Joyce wrote, intended to “present [Yeats] to the Italian public in the first instance through the pages of some review of the same standing as, say, the Fortnightly” since the “Countess Cathleen would hardly appeal to an Italian audience in either its first or its new form” (Joyce 1957: 71). It is unclear what prompted Vidacovich to make such a claim, but Joyce did not seem to share his opinion entirely. He added that, if a company manifested a wish to produce the play after its publication in Italian, Yeats could provide them with the most recent version. Yeats himself would often say that his plays were “intended for hearers and for readers” (Yeats 1934: v): the Italian reception of Yeats’s drama would confirm that the latter would often be the privileged audience of his plays when these were taken out of the Abbey. On the other hand, Joyce was quite keen to have Riders to the Sea produced by an Italian company, and he approached important capocomici with that in mind. The thriving Triestine theater scene was conducive to such an endeavor. A frequent theatergoer, Joyce could enjoy good productions of Ibsen’s plays in Trieste, attend one of the last performances of Eleonora Duse before her temporary retirement from the stage, and especially see Strauss’s Salomè, which prompted his article on Oscar Wilde for Il Piccolo della sera. A night at the theater could also turn into a business opportunity for Joyce, as was the case when he approached Alfredo Sainati, the director of the Grand Guignol, after a show in Trieste in 1909, to convince him to work on an Italian production of Riders to the Sea. As remarked by McCourt, the choice of Sainati was an odd one: Synge’s “dwarf drama” was certainly not in tune with the Grand Guignol’s habitual gory and shocking scripts. However, the Italian company often had to intersperse their signature style of production with less daring scripts aimed at the general public, in order to make ends meet. Furthermore, Sainati seemed impressed with Joyce’s pitch, if we are to believe the latter’s own testimony, “I read it one night to Mrs. Sainati, a very original actress, and her husband took away the copione to read it again.”64 Gaining the interest of one of Italy’s most audacious and successful theater companies could have had a positive 63  As Vidacovich wrote to Nino Frank in 1929, it had been Joyce who introduced him to the Irish Revival (McCourt 2000: 109). Despite his well-known issues with the Abbey playwrights, Joyce was an avid reader of both Synge and Yeats. 64  Joyce to Yeats, 14 September 1916 (Joyce 1975: 221).

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effect on Synge’s status in the country, and Joyce went as far as to try to acquire the rights from the Synge estate, but the plan came to nothing65 (McCourt 2000: 135). Another frustrated attempt concerned Yeats’s Countess Cathleen, which would be  translated into Italian also  by Carlo Linati, the Italian writer, translator, and critic befriended by Pound and Joyce, who was the first prominent translator of Irish literature in Italy. Despite the perfunctory compliments he would pay Linati in 1919, Joyce had shown no enthusiasm three years earlier when writing to Yeats about Linati’s Italian translation.66 While this can be regarded as one of his selfpromotional attempts to both secure his standing within the Irish literary world and become an ambassador of Irish culture in Italy, it is nonetheless true that Linati’s translations were generally characterized by overly literary language and revealed a deafness to some Irish references that clearly did not present an obstacle to Vidacovich and his co-translator (Fitzgerald 1991). The letter, written around four years after Joyce’s translation of Countess Cathleen, at a time when he had lost touch with Vidacovich (Joyce 1966: 398) due to the Great War, is also testament to the importance of this translation for Joyce. Nevertheless, the “Triestine” Countess Cathleen would never be produced by Italian companies, in this case not only because of Joyce’s inability to find a company but primarily because Yeats, in his constant rewriting of the play (Ure 1962; Chapman 1995), was not willing to have the old version (used by Joyce and Vidacovich) performed in Italy. Yeats had indeed failed to send the updated “acting version” he had promised, and Joyce wrote to him on 16 December 1912 to ask if he would suggest a different play to translate: “[Vidacovich] still holds his opinion about the earlier version of Countess Cathleen but says if you have any other play of yours which you think more fitted for the stage he will leave his translation of Countess Cathleen unfinished and translate it instead” (Joyce 1966: 321–2). The plan, again, fell through. One can only imagine the outcome in terms of appreciation of Irish theater in Italy had these translations ever been performed. To be sure the Triestine 65  In the summer of 1909, Joyce wrote to both Elkin Mathews (Joyce 1957: 66–7) and Synge’s brother (Joyce 1975: 162) to inquire about the dramatic rights of Riders to the Sea. While this text was never produced by the Grand Guignol company, Sainati’s wife Bella would eventually stage Synge’s Well of Saints in Milan on 22 February 1929, at the Teatro Arcimboldi. It is arguable that it was her early encounter with Joyce that pointed her curiosity in that direction. 66  “I saw some time before I left Trieste the Italian version of Countess Cathleen in a bookshop and I must say that the few passages which I read I did not like. It is, I think, a great pity that my friend Vidacovich’s version was not published. His rendering of many parts (especially of the song Impetuous heart) was excellent” (Joyce 1975: 221).

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translations would have presented the Italian public with a more complex image of Ireland than the melancholy and Catholic one largely conveyed by Linati’s versions. As far as Joyce’s Italian translations are concerned, it may be instructive to briefly consider the translation of Synge’s Riders to the Sea67 he penned with Vidacovich. According to McCourt, “[t]his is a remarkably controlled achievement, which manages often to reproduce the flow of Synge’s lines and, by careful use of rhythm, mirrors and sometimes even intensifies the original tragedy” (McCourt 2008: 131). Due to their ­metonymic character, translations tend to simplify the images of the culture embedded in the foreign text and focus on a reduced range of characteristics compared to the original; thus, translators may steer literary reception by emphasizing certain elements over others. As “tacit censors” (Gibbels 2009), translators can also sometimes be influenced by images of a foreign culture in rendering and mediating texts. As we will see in the next chapter, at the start of the twentieth century, Riders to the Sea was also translated by Carlo Linati (Synge 1917). A comparison of the two translations reveals different ways of reframing Irish literature in Italy. In his translation of Riders to the Sea, for instance, while also more respectful of Irish pagan cultural legacy than Joyce and Vidacovich, Linati often lays more emphasis on Catholic elements than Synge himself. The stronger presence of Catholic references seems to counter the Italian writer’s own frequent declarations of a common pagan and Celtic heritage shared by Lombard and Irish cultures (Linati 1940) and arguably shows the influence of both an assimilative translation strategy and a general perception of Ireland as a fellow Catholic country, commonly held in Italy at the time, thanks also to Buonaiuti and Turchi’s work (Bibbò 2015). Had Joyce and Vidacovich’s translation been published before Linati’s, or met with greater success, it could have had an impact on Joyce’s career and on the Italian perception of Irish literature. In particular, a Joycean Synge in Italy could have steered the reception of Irish literature toward less Celtic and Catholic waters and with an even stronger emphasis on realist elements. As Laura Pelaschiar has claimed in her discussion of Stanislaus Joyce’s diary, “Among the other Irish artists, Joyce finds John Millington Synge most

67  Joyce had an ambivalent relationship with the works of Synge. During their Paris encounters of 1903, he criticized his “dwarf drama” (Ellmann 1982: 124) Riders to the Sea. However, he chose that very play both for one of his rare Italian translations and for the debut night of his English players in Zurich during the Great War.

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akin to himself because like Joyce Synge had no interest at all in the prevailing interest in Irish myth and legend” (Pelaschiar 1999: 64). In retrospect, these failed attempts not only ended Joyce’s career as an Italian writer, at least until his translations from Finnegans Wake were published in Curzio Malaparte’s Prospettive (Joyce 1940a, b), but also virtually put an end to his association with Irish literature in Italy. It is likely that, once his career as a creative writer seemed to have taken off, and being busy with the proofs of both Dubliners and the installments of A Portrait, Joyce became less interested in promoting his writings in Italy for a while; what is of greater interest to us, however, is that his attempts to disseminate Irish literature in the country through translation collaborations with some of his former students also almost entirely ceased.68 In the entre-deux-guerres, Joyce’s efforts would be primarily focused on promoting the translation of his own works, as we will see in the next chapter.

References aan de Wiel, Jérôme. 1999. Mgr. O’Riordan, Bishop O’Dwyer and the Shaping of New Relations Between Nationalist Ireland and the Vatican during World War One. Études irlandaises 24: 137–149. ———. 2003. The Catholic Church in Ireland, 1914–1918: War and Politics. Dublin; Portland: Irish Academic Press. Barry, Kevin. 2000. Introduction. In Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, James Joyce, ed. Kevin Barry, ix–xxxii. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bibbò, Antonio. 2015. Carlo Linati and James Joyce Translating Synge’s Riders to the Sea. Two Different Ways of Introducing the Irish Literary Revival in Italy. In The Difference of Joyce, ed. John McCourt, Fabio Luppi, Sonia Buttinelli, and Mariadomenica Mangialavori, 233–250. Rome: Edizioni Q. Binelli, Andrea. 2019. Circulating Like a Ballad in the Dark: Joyce, the Wake and the Anarchist Translation. Joyce Studies in Italy 21: 203–222. Boni, Giacomo. 1905a. Hibernica (con 24 illustrazioni). Nuova antologia di lettere, scienze ed arti 40 (796): 577–592. ———. 1905b. Hibernica – II – Fine (con 21 illustrazioni). Nuova antologia di lettere, scienze ed arti 40 (797): 41–61.

68  The main exception was the publication of Joyce and Vidacovich’s translation of Riders to the Sea in 1929, in the literary journal Solaria. This was, however, a missed opportunity as it did not seem to attract much attention within Italian literary circles, let alone any theatrical production. Moreover, while Synge was known in Italy as an Irish playwright, there is no paratextual evidence of his association with Ireland in that instance.

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Borgatta, Gino. 1914. Il problema della rinascenza irlandese e la nostra questione meridionale. In La nuova Irlanda, Horace Curzon Plunkett. Biblioteca della rivista La Riforma Sociale, 1–48. Turin: Società Tipografico-Editrice Nazionale. Borsa, Mario. 1906. Il teatro nazionale irlandese. In Il teatro inglese contemporaneo, 257–284. Milan: Treves. Bulson, Eric. 2001. Getting Noticed: James Joyce’s Italian Translations. Joyce Studies Annual 12: 10–37. Buonaiuti, Ernesto. 1911. Impressioni d’Irlanda. Nuova antologia di lettere, scienze ed arti 46 (955): 454–465. ———. 1912. Il governo autonomo all’Irlanda. Nuova antologia di lettere, scienze ed arti 47: 501–508. ———. 1913. Impressions of Ireland. Trans. Bernard Maguire. Dublin: M.H. Gill & Son. Buonaiuti, Ernesto, and Nicola Turchi. 1914. L’Isola di smeraldo (Impressioni e note di un viaggio in Irlanda). La civiltà contemporanea 18. Milan; Rome: Bocca. Cairns, David, and Shaun Richards. 1988. Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Carter, Nick, ed. 2015. Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Cecchi, Emilio, and Carlo Linati. 2012. Carlo Linati e Emilio Cecchi. Un carteggio, ed. Simone Dubrovic. Rome: Vecchiarelli. Centro studi per la storia del Modernismo. 1972. Fonti e documenti. Urbino: Istituto di storia dell’Università di Urbino. Chapman, Wayne K. 1995. The “Countess Cathleen Row” of 1899 and the Revisions of 1901 and 1911. In Yeats Annual No. 11, ed. Warwick Gould, 105–123. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Chini, Chiara. 2016. Ai confini d’Europa. In Italia e Irlanda tra le due guerre. Florence: Firenze University Press. Come combatte l’Inghilterra nella guerra attuale. 1915. Rome: Officina Poligrafica Editrice. Dal Lago, Enrico. 2014. Count Cavour’s 1844 Thoughts on Ireland: Liberal Politics and Agrarian Reform Through Anglo-Italian Eyes. In Transnational Perspectives on Modern Irish History, ed. Niall Whelehan, 88–105. New York: Routledge. Del Greco Lobner, Corinna. 1998. D’Annunzian Reverberations in a Rejection Slip: Joyce and “Daniele Defoe”. Journal of Modern Literature 22: 395–399. Del Vivo, Caterina. 1991. Joyce, «Il Marzocco», Daniel Defoe. Il Vieusseux 12: 43–54. Ellmann, Richard. 1982. James Joyce, New and Revised Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fantappiè, Carlo, ed. 1997. Lettere di Ernesto Buonaiuti ad Arturo Carlo Jemolo, 1921–1941. Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali. Ufficio centrale per i beni archivistici.

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Farmar, Tony. 2017. The History of Irish Book Publishing. Cheltenham: The History Press. Fienga, Dino. 1916. L’insurrezione irlandese. Napoli: Studio editoriale dell’Eco della cultura. ———. 1921. L’Inghilterra contro l’Irlanda. 2. ed. S.  Maria Capua Vetere: La Fiaccola. FitzGerald, Joan. 1991. James Joyce’s Italian Translation of Riders to the Sea. In Perspectives of Irish Drama and Theatre, Irish Literary Studies 33, ed. Jacqueline Genet and Richard Allan Cave, 93–100. Savage: Barnes & Noble. Frank, Nino. 1967. Mémoire brisée. Anecdotiques. Paris: Calmann-Levy. Fraser, James Alexander. 2018. Writing Journalism, Writing Betrayal: The Formation of a Journalistic Voice. In Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings: “Outside His Jurisfiction”, ed. Katherine Ebury and James Alexander Fraser, 145–171. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Gerbi, Antonello. 1927. Tredici variazioni sopra un tema irlandese (I–VII). Il Convegno VIII (5): 270–280. Gibbels, Elisabeth. 2009. Translators, the Tacit Censors. In Translation and Censorship: Patterns of Communication and Interference, ed. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, and David Parris, 57–75. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Gregory, Augusta. 1921. Hugh Lane’s Life and Achievement, with Some Account of the Dublin Galleries. With Illustrations. London: John Murray. Hagan, John. 1913. Home rule: l’autonomia irlandese. Rome: Bretschneider. Heffernan, Brian. 2014. Freedom and the Fifth Commandment: Catholic Priests and Political Violence in Ireland, 1919–21. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Joyce, James. 1940a. Anna Livia Plurabella. Trans. Nino Frank. Prospettive 4: 13–15. ———. 1940b. I fiumi scorrono. Trans. Nino Frank. Prospettive 4: 14–16. ———. 1957. Letters of James Joyce. Ed. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Viking Press. ———. 1966. Letters of James Joyce. Ed. Richard Ellmann, vol. 2. New  York: Viking Press. ———. 1975. Selected Letters of James Joyce. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New  York: Viking Press. ———. 1992. Poesie e prose. Ed. Franca Ruggieri. I Meridiani. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 2000. Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing. Ed. Kevin Barry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016. Lettere e saggi. Ed. Enrico Terrinoni. Trans. Sara Sullam, Giorgio Melchiori, and Renato Oliva. Milan: Il Saggiatore. Kenny, Colum. 2018. Scissors and Paste. Arthur Griffith’s Use of British and Other Media to Circumvent Censorship in Ireland 1914–15. Media History 24. Routledge: 335–349. Keogh, Dermot. 1995. Ireland and the Vatican: The Politics and Diplomacy of Church-State Relations, 1922–1960. Cork: Cork University Press.

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———. 2008. John Hagan and Radical Irish Nationalism, 1916–1930: A Study in Political Catholicism. In The Irish College, Rome, and Its World, ed. Dáire Keogh and Albert McDonnell, 242–257. Dublin; Portland: Four Courts Press. Linati, Carlo. 1940. Irlanda e Italia. In Irlanda, ed. Pier Fausto Palumbo, 9–12. Rome: Edizioni Roma. Lussu, Emilio. 2008. Tutte le opere. Da Armungia al Sardismo 1890–1926. Ed. Gian Giacomo Ortu, vol. 1. Cagliari: Aìsara. Mason, Ellsworth. 1956. James Joyce’s Shrill Note. The Piccolo della Sera Articles. Twentieth Century Literature 2: 115–139. McCarthy, Andrew. 2011. Publishing for Catholic Ireland. In The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume V: The Irish Book in English, 1891–2000, ed. Clare Hutton and Patrick Walsh, 244–263. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCourt, John. 2000. The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904–1920. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2004. The Triestine Joyce. In The Reception of James Joyce in Europe: Germany, Northern and East Central Europe, ed. Geert Lernout and Wim Van Mierlo, 320–328. London; New York: Thoemmes Continuum. ———. 2008. His città immediata: Joyce’s Triestine Home from Home. In A Companion to James Joyce, ed. Richard Brown, 123–136. Malden: Blackwell Publishers. ———. 2018. Into the West: Joyce on Aran. In Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings: “Outside His Jurisfiction”, ed. Katherine Ebury and James Alexander Fraser, 127–144. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. McIntosh, Gillian. 2011. M.  H. Gill, later Gill and Macmillan. In The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume V: The Irish Book in English, 1891–2000, ed. Clare Hutton and Patrick Walsh, 511–528. Oxford University Press. Meek, Donald E. 1996. Modern Celtic Christianity. In Celticism, ed. Terence Brown, 143–157. Studia Imagologica; v. 8. Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. Melchiori, Giorgio. 1994. Joyce scrittore italiano. In Joyce: il mestiere dello scrittore, 99–118. Turin: Einaudi. ———. 1995. Joyce’s Feast of Languages. Seven Essays and Ten Notes, Joyce Studies in Italy 4. Ed. Franca Ruggieri. Rome: Bulzoni Editore. Moran, James. 2005. Staging the Easter Rising: 1916 as Theatre. Cork: Cork University Press. Nolan, Emer. 2002. James Joyce and Nationalism. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. O’Connor, Anne. 2017. Translation and Language in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A European Perspective. London: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Neill, Patrick. 2005. Polyglot Joyce: Fictions of Translation. Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. O’Riordan, Michael. 1916. La recente insurrezione in Irlanda: esposizione delle sue cause e delle sue conseguenze attinta da fonti ufficiali inglesi e da rapporti di pubblicisti inglesi. Rome.

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Parente, Fausto. 1971. Ernesto Buonaiuti. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana. Pavolini, Paolo Emilio. 1919. Deirdre: un’antica leggenda ricantata in poesia inglese. Rivista d’Italia 22: 19–34. Pelaschiar, Laura. 1999. Stanislaus Joyce’s “Book of Days”: The Triestine Diary. James Joyce Quarterly 36: 61–71. Phelan, Mark. 2013. Irish Responses to Fascist Italy, 1919–1932. PhD Thesis, NUIG. Polezzi, Loredana. 2009. Reflections of Things Past: Building Italy Through the Mirror of Translation. In Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker, vol. 2, 262–282. London: Routledge. Ruggieri, Franca. 2016. Introduzione. II. Roma (agosto 1906–marzo 1907). In Lettere e saggi, James Joyce, ed. Enrico Terrinoni, trans. Sara Sullam, Giorgio Melchiori, and Renato Oliva, 143–152. Milan: Il Saggiatore. Schenoni, Luigi, and Corinna del Greco Lobner. 1983. Note: The Formiggini Letter. James Joyce Quarterly 21: 81–84. Svevo, Italo. 1995. “Faccio meglio di restare nell’ombra”: il carteggio inedito con Ferrieri seguito dall’edizione critica della conferenza su Joyce. Ed. Giovanni Palmieri. Lecce: Piero Manni. Synge, John Millington. 1917. Il furfantello dell’Ovest e altri drammi. Trans. Carlo Linati. Milan: Studio Editoriale Lombardo. Taine, Hippolyte. 1905. Histoire de la littérature anglaise. 12th ed. Vol. 4. Paris: Hachette. ———. 1965. History of English literature. Translated by H. Van Laun. Vol. 4. New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co. Townshend, Charles. 2005. Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion. London: Penguin. Tuccillo, Fulvio. 2008. Il Caso Fienga: Le testimonianze di una vita straordinaria. Biblioteca Nazionale Di Napoli. http://www.bnnonline.it/index.php?it/158/ il-­caso-­fienga. Accessed 8 Aug2020. Ure, Peter. 1962. The Evolution of Yeats’s “The Countess Cathleen”. The Modern Language Review 57: 12–24. Valera, Paolo. 1921. L’Inghilterra che ammazza un popolo. Milan: La folla. Vivanti, Annie. 1919a. L’orco biondo, pesantemente sbianchettato dalla censura di guerra. Il Popolo d’Italia, April 30. ———. 1919b. Una nazione martire. Annie Vivanti parla con De Valera. Il Popolo d’Italia (October 4). Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2006. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press. Wawrzycka, Jolanta. 2009. Translation. In James Joyce in Context, ed. John McCourt. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Yeats, William Butler. 1934. Collected Plays. London: Macmillan. Zanotti, Serenella. 2013. Italian Joyce. A Journey Through Language and Translation. Bologna: Bononia University Press.

CHAPTER 3

False Start: Carlo Linati and the Irish

It is always a gamble this matter of translation, but this one seems to have good hopes. (Yeats to Lady Gregory, 23 July 1913)

3.1   Linati’s “discoverta degli irlandesi” Yeats’s letters of the first decade of the twentieth century manifest an increasing desire to expand the national scope of the Abbey Theatre productions. This was to be achieved through the translation and production of “foreign masterpieces, especially those of Molière, akin to the folk drama, and of Goldoni,” as he wrote to the editor of The Times on 14 June 1910 (Yeats 2002: acc. #1370),1 as well as through having the Abbey’s plays circulating abroad and translated for foreign audiences. One of the countries Yeats had in mind was Italy: just one month after writing to The Times, in a letter to Arthur Henry Bullen, Yeats commented that “at this moment there is a considerable revival of poetical drama in Italy,” adding that “I want to get my work translated on the Continent and the best way to do that is through the influence of men like Cippico,2 it is partly with 1  The letter appeared in The Times and then in other London periodicals, such as The Standard on 15 June. 2  Antonio Cippico was a poet and scholar from Zadar (Dalmatia), who at times acted as Yeats’s agent. He had strong connections with anti-imperialist circles in Vienna, and this

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Bibbò, Irish Literature in Italy in the Era of the World Wars, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83586-6_3

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the same object that I am getting Craig’s designs.”3 This internationalizing drive had been a constitutive element of the Irish Literary Theatre since its establishment, when Edward Martyn tried to have his plays produced in Germany as far back as 1898, with the goal of moving beyond the London stage (Gregory 1972: 6). This phenomenon has been the subject of academic discussion (Morash 2002: 275), with scholars emphasizing the eagerness of the Abbey, and other Irish companies, “to take selected performances of their repertoire on tour in Ireland and abroad” (Kurdi 2018: 615). This primarily involved performances in English aimed at English-speaking audiences in the United States and England, however, and to a lesser extent also in mainland Europe. In Maria Kurdi’s words, “a tradition of touring productions developed that was rooted in the need of Ireland’s theaters to elicit responses from a variety of audiences and provoke reflections from non-Irish theatergoers and critics” (Kurdi 2018: 615). This was soon accompanied by a number of translations into several languages, whereby contemporary Irish drama became part of foreign repertoires and interacted with foreign literary systems. Irish drama was introduced to Italy by Carlo Linati, a respected figure at the start of the century and the first irlandesista who accompanied his interest in Irish literature with a consistent program of translations. Linati regarded Irish drama as offering a precious opportunity to find inspiration for his own material, which, in keeping with his post-symbolist leanings, was rather influenced by Yeats’s early works. His subsequent encounter with the works of Lady Gregory and Synge, meanwhile, drew his attention to the realist elements of Irish drama, and Linati began to consider it akin to the specific strand of Lombard realist and expressionist writing he practiced. As we will see, this encounter was to influence his most prolific years as a writer, and his entire career as one of the most prominent Italian translators of his time. One of Linati’s main motivations for exploring Irish literature was to highlight its links with the local works of Lombard writers. This was brought him closer to Italian nationalists. From autumn 1906 until 1928, Cippico worked as lecturer in Italian (reader from 1911) at University College London (Cella 1981). He produced essays on Kipling and a translation of King Lear in 1906, which might explain why Yeats thought of him when he needed someone to assess the quality of Vidacovich and Joyce’s translation of Countess Cathleen in June 1912. 3  In the same letter, he mentioned that Countess Cathleen was “to be done by Chappell with music by Hubert Bath or Leoni” (Yeats to A. H. Bullen, 15 July 1910, Yeats 2002: acc. #1391). Franco Leoni would be a key figure in the dissemination of Yeats’s work in Italy.

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arguably consistent with the general understanding of Ireland as a region of the United Kingdom, a part of the Empire rather than a country in its own right, but was also particularly significant as a response to the most recent futurist depiction of Milan, and Lombardy, by association, as modern and European. Uninterested in the futurist movement,4 Linati focused instead on Lombardy’s rural traditions and natural landscapes, precisely the same elements that underpinned his understanding of Irish literature. This notion was in keeping with the main aspects of Irish literature stressed by other key Italian mediators such as Mario Borsa and Ernesto Buonaiuti, who focused on the rural and unsophisticated qualities of Irish culture. Borsa, in particular, wrote a significant book on English drama—including a substantial section on the Irish revival, focusing primarily on Yeats—in which he emphasized the differences between the primitive theater of the Irish countryside and the urban and sophisticated London scene (Borsa 1906: 257–284).5 A central figure in the Milanese literary scene and a good friend of Marinetti’s from his symbolist years (Linati 1946: 102; Della Torre 1972; Adamson 2007: 88), Linati was an expressionist writer with a penchant for ethnographic accounts and metaliterature. He was primarily concerned with presenting himself as the last scion of the expressionist Lombard tradition comprising Giuseppe Parini, Alessandro Manzoni, Carlo Dossi, and Gian Pietro Lucini, while emphasizing its country and rural roots. In the years of his literary apprenticeship, he rubbed shoulders with the late blooms of that tradition, including Lucini himself, Cesare Angelini, Eugenio Levi, and Giacomo Prampolini. Linati’s discovery of the Irish [“discoverta degli irlandesi” (Della Torre 1972: 53)] can be seen as an attempt to combine this Lombard tradition with the modernism of the Irish revivalists, while distancing himself from his early Dannunzianism. Enzo Ferrieri, his future editor at 4  Nonetheless, in his letter to Giuseppe De Robertis about Cristabella and Tribunale Verde, Linati mentioned his “essay of futurist philosophy” [saggio di filosofia futurista] coming out a few months before Marinetti’s manifesto, “when nobody talked about futurism yet. It was in the air though, due to Wells’s books; and it is certainly from there that Marinetti took the title for his flagship” [e ancora di futurismo non si parlava. Era però nell’aria, per i libri di Wells: e di là di certo attinse il titolo, Marinetti, per la sua bandiera]. (Gabinetto G.P.  Vieusseux, Archivio Contemporaneo ‘A.  Bonsanti’, Fondo De Robertis, Florence, Correspondence - IT ACGV DR.1. 168.11, Linati to De Robertis, 2 April 1915, handwritten). See also Guzzetta (2004: 105–116) 5  Borsa’s 1906 book enjoyed a certain success and was published in English translation two years later by John Lane (Borsa 1908). Borsa’s notion of Irish literature will be discussed in more detail in 2.4.

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Il Convegno, would eventually say that a Lombard writer like Linati was drawn to the “primitive life” of Irish drama and that the sobriety of Synge’s language, in particular, represented an aesthetic goal for someone who often felt his rich and intricate style, heavily influenced by D’Annunzio, to be a burden.6 Such an approach characterized Linati’s take on Irish drama and affected its reception in Italy from the mid-1910s to the early 1920s. As we will see, his choice of Irish writers to translate, representing his personal Irish canon, was consistent with this idea of Ireland as essentially rural and primitive, an image that would only be disrupted by his late 1910s’ encounter with James Joyce, and even then, only in part. Though almost forgotten today as a creative writer, Carlo Linati established himself as one of the most interesting newcomers on the Italian literary field, in the second decade of the twentieth century. He made his breakthrough in 1912 with Duccio da Bontà (Linati 1912), while his 1915 I doni della terra confirmed his gravitation toward the center of the Vociani group. Prezzolini and Papini, the founder-director of La Voce and one of its key contributors, respectively, regarded Linati as one of the literary magazine’s main writers; this status was consolidated with the publication of Sulle orme di Renzo—Linati’s Manzonian travelogue and arguably his masterpiece—in 1919 by the Società editrice della Voce, in the sole hands of Prezzolini at the time. A frequent contributor to literary magazines, Linati was a well-respected writer, as is confirmed by the flattering articles and booklets penned by Paolo Argira7 and Giovanni Papini, who included him among the likes of Dante, Walt Whitman, and Leonardo Da Vinci in 24 cervelli, the 1917 edition of his collection of “uncritical” essays. Linati’s output was particularly aligned with the aesthetic principles of the Vociani, being both autobiographical and lyrical (Baldini 2018: 51–54). I doni della terra, in particular, was a collection of epiphanic prose poems that had previously appeared in both La Voce and La Diana, and published 6  “How come he liked the Irish so much so that he translated a great part of their best theater? It was maybe the love for primitive life, so intense in Synge, imbued with the harsh language of farmers and tinkers, fanned by the overwhelming ocean, which even inspired Linati to write a hymn to the wind […]. It was probably a sort of compensation for his inability to adapt his ample and vast style, full of details, to the naked theatrical language and become a playwright himself” (Ferrieri 2003: 117–118). 7  Paolo Argira was the pseudonym of Fiorina Centi. The booklet (Argira 1917), simply titled Carlo Linati and published in 1917, was developed from an earlier article published in the Neapolitan futurist and interventionist literary magazine La Diana in 1916 as “Sagome. Carlo Linati” (Argira 1916).

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in 1915 by the Milanese Studio Editoriale Lombardo, a fledgling publisher that had been founded only two years earlier by Gaetano Facchi (Caccia 2013: 190). Linati’s involvement with the latter enterprise most likely went beyond that of mere advisor (Modena 1997; Modena 2001: 40), and the company would go on to publish the greater part of Linati’s early Irish translations. The prose poems collected in I doni della terra were judged by Papini to be almost perfect, with the latter praising Linati for having avoided the “frame narratives that do not play to his strengths – and it is a good thing that he discovered at least one of his limits in time – our dear Linati has made a firm commitment to lyricism without digression or contamination.”8 Duccio da Bontà, on the other hand, was a typical vociano short novel—autobiographical, fragmented, and lacking a traditional plot—that primarily focused on unearthing the psychology of the characters, in the vein of Slataper’s Il mio Carso (1912). As we will see, Linati’s proximity to the Vociani also affected his take on Irish literature, but it is not what initially prompted him to explore it. The story of Linati’s encounter with Irish literature has been widely investigated (Fantaccini 2009: 165–177, 2013; Pasquero 2018, Talbot 2011), but it has rarely been considered in relation to his development as a writer on the one hand, and the dynamics of the Italian literary field on the other, particularly with reference to the group of the Vociani. As alluded to, Linati’s long career reached its near-peak in the early 1910s. Indeed, in 1914, the highly influential critic Emilio Cecchi wrote that, though Linati’s Irish translations were worthy of praise, he could not help but feel that the writer’s style was rather “constrained” and “stifled” by the task of reproducing the work of such a less talented author: that author being William Butler Yeats. This is a common trope in reviews of translations penned by respected writers at the time. Paolo Argira too wrote that Lady Gregory’s style was “rendered in such a smooth and elegant Italian, that one could suspect that the text of the plays was not, in reality, so graceful and vibrant of such frank humor, and that those characters were not sketched with equal craftsmanship. My apologies, Lady Gregory!”9 Since 8  “incorniciature narrative che non eran fatte per lui - ed è un buon segno che si sia accorto in tempo d’uno almeno dei suoi limiti - il nostro Linati s’è deciso risolutamente per la lirica senz’aggiunte e mistioni” (Papini 1917: 49–50; see also Argira 1916). 9  “resa in una veste italiana così agile ed elegante da farvi sorgere il sospetto che forse nel testo le commedie non sieno veramente così snelle e vibranti d’umorismo schietto e che quei caratteri non sieno poi squadrati con tanta maestria. Mi perdoni Lady Gregory!” (Argira 1916: 157).

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Linati’s output up to this point had consisted mainly of lyrical prose, a trend that carried through to his later works, his interest in Irish theater might seem eccentric. It is, however, less surprising if one considers that in 1910, the year Linati discovered Irish literature, he was a relatively young writer who was in the process of exploring new avenues of creativity. His first book, Il tribunale verde, had only been published in 1906, and the subsequent years involved experimenting with narrative structures that might be better able to deal with the interactions between complex characters than his early prose poems. This is true, in particular, of the two works that earned Linati a prominent place in the Italian literary field of the 1910s: Duccio da Bontà and Barbogeria. Prose did not seem to be enough for Linati, however, and the encounter with prominent composer Franco Leoni could not have come at a better time. It is arguably the latter who inspired Linati’s interest in dramatic forms, and opera in particular, as all of his early attempts in that area are linked in one way or another with the Italian composer. Leoni had been a successful composer of operas in London straddling the two centuries: one of his most famous creations was The Oracle in 1905 (Blyth 2001); he also composed Mazzemarello in 1912 a comic opera whose libretto was written by Linati himself (Linati 1913). Though the opera was never produced (Streicher 2005) and Linati’s career as a playwright never crowned with success, this nonetheless reveals an interest in dramatic language that goes beyond his translations, while arguably being fueled by them. In the same period, Leoni introduced Linati to the works of Yeats, Synge, and Gregory, and suggested that he translate them. Immediately fascinated, Linati set off for London in the summer of 1913, in the company of Leoni and Gaetano Facchi. They met with Yeats on that occasion, whom Linati would later describe as: A lean, vigorous, tall man, with a very straight and chiseled face, like that of a mystic or a warrior; one of those very loyal and strong Northern faces, with lively and keen eyes, bright behind his thick glasses, and a bold tuft of hair waving on his forehead.10

Following the meeting, Yeats agreed that “Carlo Linati shall have the sole rights of translation into Italian for theatrical performance but not for 10  “[U]n uomo alto, asciutto, vigoroso, con una faccia tutta diritta e tagliente tra di mistico e di guerriero, una di quelle faccie nordiche piene di lealtà e di forza, con un par d’occhi che lampeggiano vivi ed arguti dietro le grosse lenti e una ciocca di capelli che gli ondeggia baldanzosa in su la fronte” (Yeats 1914: xxxviii).

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cinema performance of such plays by the said W. B. Yeats as he may select with the exception of the musical rights in the play known as “COUNTESS CATHLEEN” P R O V I D E D.”11 Arguably, The Countess Cathleen was excluded for the simple reason that an operatic version of the play had already been prepared by Yeats and Leoni themselves, though it “remained in the realm of enthralling might-have-beens” (Foster 2003: 440). Leoni’s role is crucial not only because he was the one to introduce Linati to Irish drama, but also, more importantly, because he influenced the ways in which Linati would try to disseminate Irish literature in Italy. We will return to these complex strategies in the next paragraph, after detailing the nature of Linati’s translation project. The dates on the contracts (Yeats et al. 2018: 424–32) show that, while Linati might have planned the translations of Yeats, Gregory, and Synge as a single project, he waited until each individual translation job was finished before acquiring the rights for the next.12 However, the publication order—Yeats (1914), Gregory (1916), and Synge (1917)—does not correspond to the order in which the works were translated, as Linati mentioned having finished translating Synge’s Playboy and Deirdre in December 1914 (Linati and Cecchi 2012: 30). Yeats’s Tragedie irlandesi [Irish Tragedies] was published by Facchi’s Studio Editoriale Lombardo in 1914, and included four plays. As Linati remarked in his substantial introduction, which also represented one of the first extensive surveys of Irish drama, and of Yeats, in Italy: I have decided to introduce here Yeats through four works offering four different aspects of his theatrical thought: the mystical-diabolical (The Countess Cathleen); the peasant-pagan (The Land of Heart’s Desire); the magical-druidic (The Shadowy Waters); the national-symbolic. (Cathleen Ni Houlihan)13

 Agreement with Carlo Linati, 27 August 1913 (Yeats 2002: acc. #2249).  The agreement with Lady Gregory was signed on 10 March 1914, one month before the publication of his translation of Yeats, while the agreement with the Synge Estate to secure the translation rights for Riders to the Sea was only signed on 17 December 1916, a few months after the publication of Lady Gregory’s Commedie irlandesi in May. 13  “Io ho qui voluto presentar[e Yeats] in quattro lavori che offrono quattro aspetti diversi del suo pensiero drammatico: quello mistico-diabolico (The Countess Cathleen); quello villareccio-­pagano (The Land of Heart’s Desire); quello magico-druidico (The Shadowy Waters); quello simbolico-nazionale (Cathleen Ni Houlihan)” (Yeats 1914: xxx–xxxi). 11 12

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Linati would also present a choice of four plays from the “Goldonian” (Gregory 1916: x) production of Augusta Gregory—Spreading the News, The Rising of the Moon, Hyacinth Halvey, and The Travelling Man—as Commedie irlandesi [Irish Comedies], and from that of John Millington Synge—The Playboy of the Western World, The Shadow of the Glen, Deirdre of the Sorrows, and Riders to the Sea. The variety of Linati’s choices shows that he intended to provide an ample outline of various aspects of the Abbey productions, including what he called “tragedies,” “comedies,” and peasant drama. This is also apparent if we consider the definitions attached to Yeats’s plays, which suggest he aimed to present as comprehensive a selection as possible. Although this is accompanied by an effacement of other prominent aspects of Irish theater, as we will see later, Linati’s intent is quite clear. From his prefaces down to the very titles, he arguably intended to offer an introduction to the new drama of Ireland and wanted to acquaint Italians with the very existence of Irish literature. The insistence on the adjective “irlandese” in the first two titles, as well as the rather lengthy comment on the difficulty of identifying the Irish canon “within the vast river of Anglo-Saxon literature” [“entro il gran fiume della letteratura anglosassone”] (Yeats 1914: ix), clearly reveals the mediator’s commitment. 3.1.1  A Budding Writer, an Amateur Translator As mentioned, Linati was not at the time a professional translator,14 and his choices were intertwined with his aesthetic interests and affinities: I confess that, deep down, I was lured by the slightly arrogant idea of enlarging the emotional domain of my writing by putting it in touch with those ultramontane emotions, so that it would be encouraged to explore new and daring forms. […] I believe that if one wants to provide an exact idea of the original, the best thing to do is not to translate literally, but paraphrase with genius and transfigure as Italians. If one wants to carry it out as a good

14  Additionally, it should be noted that his command of English was probably less than perfect, as evidenced by Paolo Emilio Pavolini in his learned 1919 article on the myth of Deirdre (1919). Linati would usually write to Yeats in French, and to Joyce and Pound in Italian. However, he did not resort to French versions of the plays for his translations, as was often the case in Italy at the time. For an interesting reconstruction of the development of the figure of the “professional translator” in Italy, see Biagi (2018; 151–2).

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writer. […] When I say with genius, I mean that one needs to make the other ours, appropriating the foreign emotion, Italianize it.15

Linati regarded the practice of translation as appropriation, a position that was quite common in Italy at the time, especially among intellectuals of the contemporary Florentine avant-garde (De Lucia 2018: 91–112). Irish literature was a way for Linati to reinvigorate the Italian repertoire, while also building his own tradition based on a constant dialogue with foreign sources, as astutely argued by contemporary critics such as Pietro Pancrazi.16 When we consider Linati’s sudden and unexpected interest in Irish theater, two main questions arise: what role did these translations serve in the context of Linati’s career on the one hand, and the Italian literary scene on the other? How is the focus on Ireland articulated? We will seek to respond to these questions by considering the ways in which ideas of Ireland are presented in Linati’s Irish output, and emphasize the importance of Irish writing in his promotion of Lombard literature. We will start by exploring the first point. Clearly discernable in Carlo Linati’s work, particularly from the early years of his career, is a tendency to engage in a rather unsystematic exploration of a variety of media, genres, and registers (Della Torre 1972: 19–65), a practice that, at times, makes it arduous to trace a clear path. Commenting on Gregory’s Commedie irlandesi in 1916, Emilio Cecchi praised such eclecticism, commending Linati for having “enough self-­ assurance to work on texts of that kind, on emotional matter that is so distant from his.”17 Linati’s first “Irish season” (1914–1922) testifies to his attempt, as a newcomer, to gain a definite position in a rapidly ­changing wartime literary field, employing Irish literature as a tool. The years 15  “In fondo al mio pensiero c’era, lo confesso, la lusinga un po’ arrogante di poter giungere ad allargare in quel modo i domini emotivi della mia letteratura, metterla in contatto con quelle emozioni oltramontane in modo che ne avesse a ricevere incitamento verso nuove forme e audacie. […] Sono del parere che per dare un’idea esatta dell’originale il meglio sia non tradurre letteralmente, ma genialmente parafrasare e italianamente trasfigurare. Questo se si vuol fare opera di buon scrittore. […] Dico genialmente. Occorre render nostro l’altrui: appropriarsi l’emozione straniera: italianizzarla” (Linati 1941a: 25–29). 16  “[T]hose who know Linati’s writings can see that, through Synge’s plays, he has tried to solve an aesthetic question that is partly his own.” [“chi conosce gli scritti del Linati […] s’accorge che in queste traduzioni, Linati ha cercato di risolvere attraverso i drammi di Synge un problema d’arte che è, in parte, anche il suo.” (Pancrazi 1919)] 17  “ben sincero dominio di sé per darsi in un lavoro di quella specie, su un materia sensitiva così distante dalla sua” (Linati and Cecchi 2012: 103).

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preceding the Great War saw, among other things, the development of a lively network of magazines linked to avant-garde movements (e.g. Leonardo, La Voce, Lacerba), which aimed to influence the literary field through active involvement in the publishing industry (Cadioli 2017: 55–94). In its early years, Studio Editoriale Lombardo was one of these small publishers. Fully integrated into the network of avant-garde companies producing books intended for a niche audience of literati, it was relatively free of commercial constraints. This is also confirmed by the fact that Facchi availed the likes of Papini and Prezzolini as collaborators for some of his early publications.18 As alluded to, this is not the only point of contact between Studio Editoriale Lombardo and the Florentine avant-garde movement. Mario Puccini and Linati, two of Facchi’s main collaborators, were in touch with Papini and Prezzolini, and as mentioned, Linati’s first acclaimed works, Duccio da Bontà (1914)19 and I doni della terra (1915), both published by Studio Editoriale Lombardo, were in tune with the aesthetics of the Vociani. Despite some noteworthy differences, which will be discussed later, theirs was the niche market of choice for Linati’s Irish translations. This is clearly stated in a letter to Prezzolini in which Linati emphasized how Synge had met with success in French avant-garde magazines, while also trying to interest him in publishing Irish drama in La Voce at a time when the plan with Facchi was not yet clearly defined.20 Equally shared was a firm rejection of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s aesthetics. Studio Editoriale Lombardo’s commitment to Lombard literature, as well as to leaving the Dannunzian model behind, was made quite clear by the publication of Gian Pietro Lucini’s Antidannunziana in 1914, Facchi’s first published book. It is easy to see this text, at least in part, as a manifesto for the fledgling publishing house. Linati’s relationship with D’Annunzio was similar to that of other early Novecento newcomers in Italy: having been a significant presence during his years of apprenticeship, and especially in Portovenere (Linati  1910) (Della Torre 1972: 34, 50), D’Annunzio had now become an inconvenient model from which he felt the need to distance himself. Linati’s works are riddled with explicit 18  The two intellectuals edited some of their political articles in a nationalistic pamphlet entitled Vecchio e nuovo nazionalismo [Old and New Nationalism], which was being printed by Facchi around the same time as Linati’s translation of Yeats’s plays. Vecchio e nuovo nazionalismo’s first run was printed on 20 April 1914, while Tragedie irlandesi the following day. 19  This second edition followed the 1912 one, published by Mario Puccini. 20  Biblioteca cantonale Lugano, Archivio Prezzolini-Fondo Prezzolini, Correspondence, folder Linati, I. n. 4, Linati to Prezzolini,. 2 June 1914, Milan, handwritten.

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declarations of love for Manzoni’s “sharp,” “clean,” and “Lombard” prose as opposed to D’Annunzio’s flourish and abundance (Linati 1922a: 210–1). Quite significantly, Linati’s rejection of aestheticism also manifested itself in other ways, namely, through his frequent comments on Oscar Wilde. In the autobiographical Barbogeria (1917), also published by Studio Editoriale Lombardo, Linati made the link between his decadent past and Wilde quite clear. Adriano, the autobiographical protagonist, confesses to his beloved Brigida: All my new friends pretended to be sick, fatigued, victims of strange spiritual diseases: moreover, they loved to flaunt their lanky walks and wear the face of fallen angels. Wilde’s tragedy was in the air and they were set to act like him: they were always looking for new affectations, adjusting to the most ridiculous snobbish inventions, a perfect match for their impudence and their clean-shaven little faces. They affected a keen taste for witticisms and quodlibets, and had a habit of glorifying triviality, laziness, cowardice and incoherence. Their primary concern was to show the world how the dying century had collected in them the most caustic and dainty weariness.21

In early-1900s’ Italy, criticism of Wilde’s behaviors, more so than his works, was quite common among literati, even within the circle of aesthetes variously linked to D’Annunzio and Il Marzocco, a review published in Florence since 1896 and instrumental in spreading the principles of 21  “I miei nuovi amici si fingevano tutti guasti di stomaco, affranti di membra, vittime di strani morbi spirituali: di più amavano pavoneggiarsi in camminature dinoccolate e farsi dei visi da angeli decaduti. La tragedia del Wilde era nell’aria, ed essi, sempre in busca di ricercatezze nuove, s’eran buttati ad imitarlo adattandosi le più ridicole invenzioni dello snobismo, che si conciliavano assai bene con le loro personcine invetriate e i loro visucci glabri. Affettavano un gusto particolare per la freddura e il quolibet e avevan per vezzo di glorificare la frivolezza, la pigrizia, la viltà e l’incoerenza. Insomma era lor costante premura di mostrare al mondo come il secolo morente avesse adunato in loro le più acri e delicate sfinitezze” (Linati 2014: 126). Emilio Cecchi’s review (La Tribuna, 14 agosto 1917) is testament to how allegiance to aestheticism was one of the key elements in the struggle to gain more cultural capital: “When Italy will become a civilized country, it will be clear how the craft of the real decadent, the real amateur, the real aesthete is rare, difficult and respectable. And aesthetes and amateurs will talk about themselves with the rightful knowledge and respect. However, for now, in this novel, Linati did not manage to do that” [“Quando l’Italia sarà un paese civile, si capirà quanto sia rara, impegnativa e rispettabile la professione del vero decadente, del vero dilettante e del vero esteta: e gli esteti e i dilettanti parleranno di sé con la dovuta scienza e il dovuto rispetto. Ma intanto, in questo romanzo, Linati non ha saputo farlo” (Linati and Cecchi 2012: 110–111)].

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Pater, Ruskin, and Wilde himself in Italy.22 Criticism of both Wilde and D’Annunzio is a common feature of Linati’s works of the 1910s, and is arguably part of the latter’s attempt to distance himself from the Florentine aesthetic movement and foreground his belonging to his native Lombardy and its cohort of earthy poets. By the time of Linati’s anti-Dannunzian rebellion, Wilde was a stable presence in Italian aesthetic circles. His influence on Italian aesthetes was more often alluded to than explicitly acknowledged, partly due to the Irish writer’s reputation in Italy and the almost universal condemnation of which he was a victim. Yet, as Rita Severi and Elisa Bizzotto have shown, D’Annunzio and his acolytes, including, Ugo Ojetti, Giuseppe Saverio Gargano, Aldo Sorani, and Angelo Conti, were heavily indebted to Wilde’s aesthetic theories and intellectual posture. D’Annunzio owned several copies of Wilde’s major works, including the first 1895 French translation of The Picture of Dorian Gray and copies of De Profundis in Italian, which were also “copiously annotated” (Bizzotto 2010: 129). Il Marzocco, in particular, was the site of the encounter between the future Italian Vate and Wilde. In the “Prologo” to Il Marzocco, signed by D’Annunzio and Giuseppe Saverio Gargano in 1896, they “not only subscribed to Pater’s defense of impressionistic criticism in The Renaissance (1873), but also to Wilde’s more sensational doctrines laid out in the ‘Preface’ to The Picture of Dorian Gray and in Intentions” (Bizzotto 2010: 126). It is not surprising, then, that Linati should attack Wilde and his imitators at the same time as uttering anti-D’Annunzio barbs. More significant for our purposes, though, is that Linati seemed to employ Yeats, and Irish drama more generally, as a symbol for his rejection of the aesthetic principles of his youth. Wilde was one of the three major Irish writers mentioned by Linati at the very start of his introduction to Tragedie irlandesi in 1914, along with Shaw and Yeats himself. On that occasion—having extolled Shaw, Yeats, and Wilde as the Irish writers that had allowed Irish literature to shed its minority status within the realm of Anglophone literature—Linati explicitly dismissed Wilde on account of 22  “Wilde’s presence permeated Italian aesthetic culture. Based in Florence, then the center of Italian cosmopolitanism and anglophilia, Il Marzocco set out to spread the fashionable European cult of Beauty. Alongside D’Annunzio, its contributors included some of the most progressive Italian intellectuals of the time: the well-known poet Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912), the journalist, minor poet and Decadent Giuseppe Saverio Gargano (1859–1930) and the young journalist Ugo Ojetti (1871–1946), the last of whom was to make an important contribution to Wilde’s reception in Italy in the second year of the journal’s run” (Bizzotto 2010: 126).

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the fact that “his native propensity for derision and sarcasm ended up drowned in a morbid aesthetic fetishism, which was none other than the extreme consequence of the cult of pure beauty that had been sanctified by Ruskin and by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.”23 The key phrase here, of course, is “morbid aesthetic fetishism”: unlike with Wilde’s works, “those savoring Yeats’s poetry for the first time found it rich with intoxicating flavor: they could find in it the wilderness of the land that had generated it blended with the subtlest fragrances of the cultured and inquisitive poetry of the latest elegiac and erotic poets.”24 Or, as Linati wrote to Cecchi, Yeats’s sentimentalism was counterbalanced by “a new pain that tended towards vaster, more rugged, more acquiescent, more infinite desolation.”25 Linati’s rejection of Wilde and his Italian counterpart D’Annunzio seems to go hand in hand with his praise of Yeats as the expression, in Romantic terms, of his tight relationship with his land. It might be overstating the case to claim that Linati saw himself as the Yeats to D’Annunzio’s Wilde, but the first years of Linati’s acquaintance with Irish literature show his great predilection for Yeats and various attempts to emulate him. A number of the prose poems constituting I doni della terra were directly inspired by what Linati called Yeats’s villareccio-pagano and magico-druidico modes, featuring the “popolo silvano” (Linati 1915: 63), the Lombard equivalent of the Good People, as well as a direct quotation from The Land of Heart’s Desire—albeit misspelled—and intertextual references to his own translation of the play.26 The whole collection was itself a homage to Yeats’s syncretic approach to myth, mixing Pagan goddesses with Christian legends and folk fairy tales, a testament to 23  “quella sua nativa forza d’irrisione e di sarcasmo finì per subissare in un morboso feticismo estetico che altro poi non era se non l’estrema conclusione dei culti di pura bellezza già consacrati dal Ruskin e dalla Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” (Yeats 1914: x). 24  “apparve ricca di un aroma inebriante a chi lo gustava la prima volta, perché vi sentiva dentro tutto il selvatico della terra che l’aveva generata misto alle più sottili fragranze della poesia colta e investigatrice degli ultimi elegi ed erotici” (Yeats, 1914: x). 25  “un dolore nuovo verso una desolazione più ampia, più brulla, più rassegnata, più infinita” (Linati and Cecchi 2012: 22). 26  Toward the end, Linati quotes a line from Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire (“And my invisible breathen [sic] fill the house,” Linati 1915: 94). In the same section, the narrator mentions the “popolo silvano” “crossing thresholds.” However, the invasion of the house by the fairies is pleasant in Linati’s narrative: “And here I am, enjoying it, like an old fool. Today the sun is shining.” [“Ed io qui, vecchio matto che me la godo. Oggi è giorno di sole” (94)]. The references to his translation include the title of a section, “Visioni di Dicembre,” a direct hint at the Italian title of Yeats’s play: Visioni di maggio.

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Linati’s attempt to assume Yeats’s “posture.”27 It is also quite telling that Linati did not refrain from correcting Cecchi’s mistaken assumption that The Land of Heart’s Desire was inspired by D’Annunzio’s La figlia di Iorio (Linati and Cecchi 2012: 23).28 In this vein, Linati’s reference to Yeats’s own rejection of D’Annunzio is arguably significant: in his 1929 memoirs, Memorie a zig-zag, he gave another account of his meeting with Yeats, “a fast, effective, bizarre and unpredictable talker” [“un parlatore rapido, efficace, bizzarro, imprevisto”], and recounted him ironically comparing D’Annunzio’s poetry to “plucking a sparrow” [“spennare un passero.” (Linati 1929: 23)]. Linati’s Irish canon was anti-Wildean, and therefore anti-Dannunzian, yet another way for him to join the Vociani in their rejection of the Vate. It is not surprising, then, that Linati should attempt to publish a preview of his Yeatsian translations in La Voce, as we know he did from his correspondence with Prezzolini,29 thus trying to construct a complex narrative, involving more outlets, and acquire a stronger position in the field. Linati recognized a certain convergence of interests between the Vociani and himself. He arguably thought that La Voce might be interested in Yeats, since they had been the first to publish French symbolist poets (Simonetti 1981: p. viii), with whom he still associated the Irish poet to 27  Jérôme Meizoz maintains that the author’s “posture” is their identity in the literary field, realized by the individual writers themselves in interaction with the context (see Meizoz 2007). In a study on Franco Fortini, Irene Fantappiè has recently argued that a posture can be “constructed through imitation” and that authors like Fortini can “rewrite” another writer’s posture in order to construct their own (Fantappiè 2021: 62). We can see Linati trying to “rewrite” Yeats’s (and later Synge’s) posture in Italy in the process of constructing his own authorship. Linati’s letter to the then director of La Voce, Giuseppe De Robertis, strikes a similar note: “Do you know my Yeats version? If you do not have the book, write to me, as I would love for you to have it, as that is not a mere and simple version, but almost an interpretation of an author that I feel close to my spirit for his imagination and desolation” [“Ella conosce le mie versioni dello Yeats? Se non possiede il volume, mi scriva, che avrei caro l’avesse, che quella non è versione pura e semplice ma quasi interpretazione di un autore che per lati di fantasia e di desolazione sentirei [unclear word] affine al mio spirito.” (Gabinetto G.P.  Vieusseux, Archivio Contemporaneo ‘A.  Bonsanti’, Fondo De Robertis, Florence, Correspondence  - IT ACGV DR.1. 168.11, Linati to De Robertis,. 2 April 1915, handwritten.)]. 28  It may be interesting to note that in D’Annunzio’s copy of Linati’s edition—held in the writer’s private library at the Vittoriale degli italiani (Brescia, Italy)—one of the very few marks in the text has been made right beside the section of the preface in which Linati discusses The Land of Heart’s Desire. 29  Biblioteca cantonale Lugano, Archivio Prezzolini-Fondo Prezzolini, Correspondence, folder Linati, I. n. 3, Linati to Prezzolini, 28 December 1913, Milan, handwritten.

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some degree, and were partial to plays whose merit lay in the text rather than in their dramatic quality. This publication, as with other similar attempts by Linati, eventually fell through, probably also thwarted by the Vociani’s prejudice against theater (Baldini 2018: 48–9). Such elements should therefore caution us against associating Linati’s works too closely with the Vociani. While it is undeniable that he shared many of their aesthetic principles (e.g. autobiographism, rejection of the traditional novel form and, at least to a certain extent, fragmentism), in the years leading up to the Great War, Linati was also laying the groundwork for a project that would characterize a substantial part of his career: the formation of a Lombard group of writers to serve as a counterpoint to the Tuscan-centered Italian avant-gardes. The foundation of Studio Editoriale Lombardo was linked to this project, to which Linati would devote most of his efforts until the early 1920s. Prior to Gaetano Facchi joining and taking over the enterprise, Lucini, Puccini, and Linati were the main proponents of Studio Editoriale Lombardo, with “the company’s main aim being to define a different Lombard regional identity.”30Quite soon, though, at the end of 1912, their plan changed. Aware of the importance of complementing the publishing house with a literary magazine, following the example of La Voce, the three intellectuals decided to found a Lombard periodical entitled Il Politecnico—a homage to Carlo Cattaneo’s cultural magazine of the same name (1839–1844; 1859–1869), which had been a beacon of cultural innovation in pre-Unitary Milan—the publication was ideally intended to serve as a Milanese polemical response to La Voce. The so-called integrated system (Ragone 1999: 31) of magazine-­ cum-­publishing house was a strategy that had been implemented by La Voce, among others, and Lucini, Puccini, and Linati’s plan indicates their awareness that such a systematic approach was important in early twentieth-­ century publishing. The project came to nothing, however, and just a few months later, Linati was trying to secure a space for his Irish writers in the pages of Italy’s most avant-garde literary magazine, La Voce. While differences between the Lombard group and the Vociani still remained, Linati was aware of the cultural capital associated with the Florentine publication, and of the potential symbolic gain arising from his Irish translations being associated with it.

30  “la società abbia per scopo precipuo una differenziazione regionale lombarda” (Lucini to Puccini, 21 November 1912, Varazze, quoted in Corrias 2014: 260).

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Linati was, however, generally reluctant to join groups or movements (Linati 1929: 11), and the idea of putting together a Lombard school, with a dedicated review and publishing house, would remain his only attempted venture in that direction.31 When the consortium between Lucini, Puccini, and Linati fell through because the three could not convince Alessandro Casati to back their project financially, a fourth unexpected player entered the scene: Gaetano Facchi. Linati had met Facchi in his early years in Milan, and the young man was now able, and willing, to fund the publishing project. The involvement of Facchi had one main consequence: while earlier plans considered moving Puccini’s Ancona-­ based publisher to Milan, Facchi’s investment meant that theirs was going to be a wholly new publishing venture, aptly named Studio Editoriale Lombardo (Corrias 2014: 93–4). All was ready for the publication of Linati’s first translations of Irish drama. The publication of the plays of Yeats, Gregory, and Synge was less carefully planned than one would imagine, despite the end result, that is, three collections of plays published by the same publisher in fairly similar elegant editions. During his London encounter with Yeats, Linati had only acquired the rights to Yeats’s play, while the agreement to translate Gregory and Synge’s plays would come later. As we have seen, correspondence also reveals that Linati was not initially certain that he would publish all his translations with Studio Editoriale Lombardo. A letter to Emilio Cecchi from 22 October 1915 confirms that Mario Puccini planned to publish a comedy by Lady Gregory, in Linati’s translation, with his eventually failed publishing endeavor, the Libreria Editoriale Scolastica (Linati and Cecchi 2012: 76). Moreover, as mentioned earlier, Linati tried to have his Irish translations, and essays, published in La Voce and in other literary magazines. This keenness to have Yeats’s plays, in particular, published in different outlets was arguably also linked to Linati’s awareness that they were the least likely to succeed on stage, as they were more suitable for reading, and so better suited to being appreciated in book form than in a theater. The literary quality of Yeats’s play was a key element of Linati’s interpretation of them and, as such, was given a central role in his introductory essay. Linati’s essays were generally regarded as incisive but journalistic, particularly toward the end of his career, when his output primarily consisted of re-editions of the translations of his heyday, literary memoirs, and 31  As we will see in 3.3, the idea of founding a Lombard school in the early 1920s was rejected by Linati, despite the fact that he was being hailed as its main exponent.

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collections of nostalgia-ridden ethnographic essays on his beloved Lombardy.32 However, his proemi (prefaces) to his three volumes of Irish translations provide us with a significant testimony to his growing concern with Irish literature, as well as his notable attempt to progressively distance himself from Irish politics. The publication of the Tragedie irlandesi, in particular, was instrumental to establishing the new canon of Irish literature in Italy. Along with Shaw and Wilde, Linati also claimed more borderline figures for Ireland, such as William Blake and Edmund Spenser, thus moving beyond the narrower canon proposed by Mario Borsa in 1906, in which the likes of Wilde and Shaw were deemed English because they were part of the London theater scene (Borsa 1906: 172–3). While Linati was slightly self-conscious about considering those authors Irish, he nonetheless showed, with such choices, how variable and unstable such a canon was. A certain ambivalence about English authors with Irish connections was quite prevalent at the time: when reviewing Yeats’s Tragedie, Emilio Cecchi too was convinced of Blake’s Irishness, and in a telling letter to Cecchi himself, Linati claimed Lionel Johnson for the Irish literary scene, a position consistent with that of Thomas MacDonagh, among others (Gibbons 1991b: 563). While being born in Ireland or to Irish parents appears to have been a primary motivation for considering a writer Irish, these claims do not seem to follow any univocal pattern: some writers, like Blake, were considered Irish on account of alleged family connections,33 and others, like Spenser, on account of their having lived in the country. 32  According to Mario Praz, “Linati primarily focuses on whatever is eccentric, scapigliato, vagabond, and he provides us with less of an outline of a foreign literature than a self-portrait as an epigone of Lombard scapigliatura, late bloom of Romanticism à la Gautier, pleasant, bizarre, curious. Always looking at the picturesque elements, he ends up barely scraping the surface of things: his criticism’s flaw is approximation.” [“Linati si ferma soprattutto su ciò che è eccentrico, scapigliato, vagabondo, e quello che egli finisce per darci non è tanto un quadro della letteratura straniera quanto un ritratto di se stesso, epigono della scapigliatura lombarda, tardo rampollo del romanticismo alla Gautier, ameno, bizzarro, curioso. A forza di veder tutto in funzione di pittoresco, egli non va oltre alla superficie delle cose: la sua critica pecca di approssimatività” (Praz 1950: 8)]. 33  While this looks like the most likely reason, it is also possible that Linati was influenced by Yeats’s work as editor of Blake: “By giving Blake an Irish grandfather, and therefore a Celtic lineage, Yeats could link Blake to the “Celtic Twilight” that was so important to him at that particular stage of his own poetic development. Needless to say, the Blake “constructed” by Yeats and Ellis “functioned” as the “real” Blake for readers of the 1893 edition, even though Yeats also unabashedly rewrote lines of Blake’s that he considered inferior” (Lefevere 1992: 8).

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While a certain confusion regarding writers’ nationality was common, especially when the language could not offer easy clarification, such an ample and welcoming Irish canon was unusual in early-twentieth-century Italy. Irish writers tended to be lumped together with their English (or Anglophone) counterparts, and their Irishness was frequently erased in public discourse. Instead, enthusiastic mediators like Linati tended to err on the side of inclusiveness. Italy would not be presented with such a generous canon of Irish writers again until the mid-1930s, but as we will see, the reasons for this would be eminently political then. The motivations behind Linati’s move, though, could also be regarded as opportunistic, in the sense that an ampler Irish canon would carry greater symbolic capital. Assimilating writers like Blake and Spenser into that category was certainly consistent with Linati’s position-taking strategy. The presentation of a varied and numerous group of writers as belonging to the Irish tradition would enhance the significance of that tradition, something that would benefit Linati, in turn, as the advocate of Irish literature within Italy. While his strategy was not entirely successful, as we will see in the next sections, Linati always showed a clear awareness of editorial dynamics, coupled with a constant effort to associate his name with Irish writers, initially in general, and then with a specific focus on Joyce. Linati’s writings and letters show the extent of such an awareness, with frequent references to the Irish as “our” Irish (Linati 1923: 269) and, later, claims of ownership of Joyce in Italy (Trotta 1991: 409). 3.1.2  “The general admiration of the Irish for criminals”: Linati and Irish Politics Along with this liberal canon of Irish writers, another central element of Linati’s introductions is his attitude toward Irish politics. Never a card-­ carrying member of any political party, he was nonetheless aware of how much the colonial status of Ireland affected the output of the Irish Literary Theatre, and vice versa. The distinctive entanglement of Irish literature and politics was also a sensitive issue for the Abbey playwrights, with more didactic nationalist plays often sidelined in favor of the less straightforwardly political productions of Yeats, Synge, Moore, and Gregory. It was also at the center of other mediators’ take on Irish literature: both at home and abroad, these two aspects seemed almost impossible to decouple. In the first half of the century in Italy, hardly any account of Irish literature

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omitted reference to political issues.34 Perhaps more surprisingly, the reverse is also true, with most Italian and Italy-based commentators on Irish politics tending to engage with Irish literature in their writings. A chief example is Mario Borsa, himself the author of an influential book and English and Irish theater, whose well-informed, and rather partisan, 1932 biography of Roger Casement made reference to Linati’s work itself, going as far as to include a few pages on the Irish literary revival, as “the Easter Rising could not be understood without knowing something of the profound movement of ideas that preceded and prepared for it.”35 At times, however, such an entanglement could be seen as a hindrance. Italy’s involvement alongside Britain in the Great War, in particular, turned the Irish question into a delicate topic. Linati was enrolled in the Italian army at the time, and arguably refrained from explicitly providing an unflattering portrait of an allied country. Moreover, in 1916, he agreed to contribute translations of six Yeats poems to a special issue of Ettore Cozzani’s literary magazine L’Eroica, entirely devoted to celebrating Italy’s friendship with England. While the issue would eventually be published in February 1919, contributions were prepared during the war, and the absence of even a passing reference to Ireland is glaring.36 Thus, Linati’s translations provide an excellent example of the general attitude toward Irish affairs in Italy during the Great War. While certainly aware of the political elements conveyed by Irish drama, he did not dwell on them when importing Irish plays into Italy, and could be regarded as having progressively distanced himself as the books were issued. If one looks at the preface to Yeats’s plays alone, it is clear that the text, dating back to 1914, stressed the political element in Irish theater, and the centrality of Yeats’s role in that regard. Linati also very appropriately defined Yeats’s theater as national, and not nationalist (Yeats 1914: xiv), showing an 34  See, among others, Federico Oliviero, who provided two detailed surveys of Celtic and Irish literature in 1910 and 1912, showing a keen interest in Irish patriotic poetry (1912: 508), as well as an awareness of the most recent trends of Irish letters, e.g. mentioning the works of James Stephens as early as 1912 (513). 35  “Ma la sommossa di Pasqua non si potrebbe comprendere senza conoscere qualche cosa del profondo movimento ideale che l’ha preceduta e preparata” (Borsa 1932: 17). 36  As detailed in 2.1, wartime Italy tended to ignore Ireland’s claim to independence. The depoliticization of Irish theater could thus have seemed a good strategy to Linati in 1916. However, postwar Italy would be more receptive to Irish political claims. Had Irish theater been labeled as an expression of a nationalist and anti-British nation in a more straightforward fashion, it might have attracted more attention in the Italy of the mutilated victory. This, however, is a matter of speculation and the question is unlikely to be settled.

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awareness of, and in part foreseeing, Yeats’s difficult relationship with direct propaganda. In so doing, Linati resorted to an unacknowledged quotation from Francis Bickley’s 1912 essay on Synge, in which the critic maintained that, according to Yeats, “to use poetry, as the men of The Nation had done, for the enunciation of political opinions, was to degrade it. He thought that the artist’s patriotism should be implicit rather than explicit; that literature should be national, not Nationalist” (Bickley 1912: 56–7).37 If we then consider the preface to Gregory’s Commedie irlandesi, written in February 1916 and printed in May, one month after the Easter Rising, there is surprisingly no mention of Irish politics; this is despite the inclusion of a translation of The Rising of the Moon, a play focusing on the involvement of Irish people in anti-British secret societies, and “for many years the [Abbey] theater’s most frequently performed play” (Morash 2002: 161). Perhaps significantly, this play was translated as Alba di luna [The Dawn of the Moon], a more Romantic rendering of the potentially rebellious overtones of the original title, which are also erased in the translation itself. Throughout the translation, the political content is constantly downplayed: the “plan to free the country” (Gregory 1975: 27) suggested by the Ragged Man becomes a more generally criminal “dirty trick on the police” [qualche bel tiro alla polizia] (Gregory 1916: 40), to cite just one conspicuous example. Curiously, too, Linati only claims to have translated three plays in his introduction (Gregory 1916: ix) and avoids any reference to The Rising of the Moon, which, one might conclude, was only added at a later stage as a sort of afterthought. The edition of Synge’s plays, published after the Rising, features only the scantest mention of any political implication in his works, despite the appearance of more surprising anti-nationalist statements. When introducing The Playboy of the Western World, Linati does mention political issues, but in a way that betrays his conservatism and non-committal attitude:

37  While he did not subscribe to Bickley’s narrow views concerning the Irish canon (“Anthologies of Irish poetry usually start with Goldsmith, who was Irish only by birth and a poet only by eighteenth century standard,” Bickley 1912: 50), Linati seems significantly dependent on Bickley as far as the matter of French influence, especially in Yeats’s late poetry, is concerned: “The most potent influences among the young English writers of those days, which already seem so far off, were the French decadents and symbolists: Verlaine, Mallarme [sic], Maeterlinck and the rest” (Bickley 1912: 59). As we know from a recent re-edition of Linati’s translations, Bickley’s book was present in the writer’s personal library (Yeats et al. 2018: 15).

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This play deals with a very controversial issue: the general admiration of the Irish for criminals. Such sentiment is very widespread in Ireland, and so is the idea that people’s rebellions should triumph and succeed through sheer physical violence, as was the case with both Parnell’s insurrection and the recent uprising of Sinn Féiners. (Synge 1917: xviii)38

This statement can only be interpreted as a misunderstanding of a remarkably similar, and again unacknowledged, passage in The Aran Islands, a book loved by Linati, who would eventually go on to translate it (Synge 1920a, b, 1944). The passage in question, though, is considerably different in the original. In particular, Synge had written that the “impulse to protect the criminal is universal in the West”, not in all Ireland, and that this “seems partly due to the association between justice and the hated English jurisdiction, but more directly to the primitive feeling of these people, who are never criminals yet always capable of crime, that a man will not do wrong unless he is under the influence of a passion which is as irresistible as a storm on the sea” (Synge 1982: 95). Linati conflated Synge’s passage about the “primitive” inhabitants of the West with the rather conservative and factually inaccurate judgment passed on recent uprisings in Ireland, both real and invented, since Charles Stewart Parnell never led an insurrection. As is clear, “[i]n The Aran Islands, Synge never characterizes this impulse as revolutionary in any real sense, and in Playboy he actively satirizes the villagers’ attempt to ascribe revolutionary potential to Christy on the basis of his alleged crime” (Cusack 2009: 184), a position that led contemporaries to read his work in rather conservative terms as an expression of the censure of the Anglo-Irish establishment on the more radical nationalist movements. This tendency to take the people of the Playboy as representing all Irish people was nonetheless quite common in the international reception of the play:

38  “La commedia si svolge intorno a un motivo assai ardito: l’ammirazione del popolo irlandese per i delinquenti in genere. Questo sentimento è assai popolare in Irlanda dove dall’insurrezione di Parnell alla recente rivolta dei Sinn Feiners ha sempre dominato il concetto che le ribellioni popolari dovessero trionfare ed imporsi mediante la sola forza fisica.” Similar notions were quite common at the time and can be read in the reports signed by Temistocle Filippo Bernardi, the Italian diplomat at the helm of the consulate in Dublin. According to Bernardi, Sinn Féin was a “party of disorder” [partito del disordine], which mostly appealed to uncultivated rural masses, who generally despised the law and Great Britain (Chini 2016: 37).

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when the 1911 Abbey touring production of Playboy came to New York, the issue of the status of the Irish as one ethnic group among many, jockeying for position at a time of massive immigration, was still very much to the fore. Hence what had been perceived in Dublin as a negative representation of a specific area in the West of Ireland (which in turn was a synecdochical representation of the country as a whole) equated even more directly in the United States to Ireland as a whole, where distance blurred the more subtle distinctions of Irish place. (Morash and Richards 2013: 130)

For Linati, as well as “[f]or the American audience, the West of Ireland has gone beyond synecdoche; the West of Ireland is Ireland” (Morash and Richards 2013: 130). Linati’s taking the statement in question at face value and widening its scope to include the whole of Ireland, however, had tangible consequences on the dissemination within Italy of images associated with the Irish. The myth of the Irish as a fighting and lawless people was becoming a significant element of the political discourse in Italy at the time, and it is not surprising that Linati’s (mis-)quotation should resurface at various intervals in the works of Italian theater critics (e.g. Pancrazi 1919). The editorial history of d’Amico’s review of Linati’s versions of Synge will clarify this aspect. In November 1918, Silvio d’Amico was clearly influenced by Linati’s own preface and mentioned that This play presents some of the typical characters of the Irish land and its humanity, which the English have had the tendency to hold in contempt and revile for centuries. The play has an atmosphere of uncultivated sanity, of rough superstition, of hostility to official law, of admiration for the rebels and criminals, of naive cult for physical strength and for the simple joys of the senses, which is easy to misinterpret as defamatory.39

Though astutely, and perhaps ambiguously, hinting at the defamatory character of the statement, d’Amico nevertheless echoed a motif that was quite common at the time. A year and a half later, though, in reviewing Emma Gramatica’s performance at Teatro Valle in Rome, he tellingly felt the need to add that such “hostility to official law, of admiration for the 39  “Di fatto quest’opera scenica rappresenta, della terra e della umanità irlandesi, proprio alcuni di quei caratteri tipici che da secoli gl’Inglesi più sono avvezzi a disprezzare e vituperare. Vi circola un’atmosfera di incolta sanità, di rozza superstizione, di ostilità alla legge ufficiale, di ammirazione al ribelle e al delinquente, di culto ingenuo per la forza fisica e per le semplici gioie dei sensi, che si presta molto ad essere fraintesa come diffamatoria” (d’Amico 1918).

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rebels and criminals” was “natural in a country where the law is primarily an instrument of oppression and tyranny” [“naturale in un paese dove la legge è anzitutto strumento di oppressione e di tirannia” (d’Amico 1963: 198)], indicating that postwar Italy seemed more inclined to appreciate Irish culture over English, as discussed in the first chapter. In 1917, though, things were quite different. Linati’s simplistic views rather revealed his awkward relationship with any sort of revolutionary movement and his conservative reaction to the Easter Rising, which would function as a watershed in his understanding of Irish politics. In that regard, Linati lumped together Synge’s (and the Abbey’s) Anglo-Irish approach to nationalism and British propaganda. The issue is quite central in Linati’s dissemination of Irish literature in Italy, because this confusion occurs at the expense of both Sinn Féin and Catholic nationalists. The literary production associated with these two groups was rarely heard of in Italy in the first two decades of the century, also thanks to the relatively limited scope of Linati’s translations, which did not include figures such as Padraic Colum and Terence MacSwiney, to name but two. By the time of Linati’s translations, the main voices at the Abbey Theatre had progressively been distancing themselves from the “people-nation” (Cairns and Richards 1988: 58–88); this affected Linati’s choices, but also resulted in significantly simplistic political notes and broad generalizations. Linati manufactured an image of Ireland, and of Irish peasants in particular, that was particularly convenient: a syncretic image that was consistent with long-­ standing received ideas of Ireland as rural and mystical, but also rebellious and distinct from England. The first years of Linati’s introduction of Irish literature to Italian readers, then, saw an interesting and quite surprising development. Linati began with an inclusive idea of Irish literature in his preface to Yeats, in which he claimed not only an ample number of writers for Ireland but also a variety of styles and forms, as well as conflicting political and religious allegiances. In his subsequent publications, he seemed to hone his personal image of Ireland. It is also possible that Linati’s strategy of toning down—and simplifying—the political element of Irish texts had primarily aesthetic motivations. As part of his strategy of appropriating Irish literature, he arguably decided to focus on elements that could find echoes in Lombard literature. The political element did not meet these criteria, the magical only for a brief time, but the mystical qualities did, as did what he referred to as Irish writing’s “gritty verismo” [“verismo terriero” (Linati 1932: 43)]. At the start of the century, the translations and articles written by the Lombard Linati exuded a sense of

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longing for Ireland that was instrumental in reinforcing his rootedness in his native Lombard culture, making the Italian reading public aware of the deep affinity between these two Celtic peoples. Such affinity, though essential to fueling Linati’s imagination, conveyed quite a monolithic image of Ireland to the Italian reader. We will see in the following text how this state of affairs was arguably influenced by his encounter with, and focus on, the works of John Millington Synge, which would also contribute to his leaving aside elements connected to folklore and mythology. The next section, however, will explore his, and others’, various attempts to establish a theatrical audience for Irish drama in Italy. My dear Friend: I am so sorry you have been ill. I will be at station at about twenty before 11. The Molèire [sic] play to day was wonderful — one can get no idea from the unacted words. (Yeats to Lady Gregory, 8 June 1905)

3.2   The (Few) Fortunes and (Many) Misfortunes of Irish Drama in Italy Writing to Carlo Linati at the end of 1919 about the “stormy” [“burrascosa” (Joyce 1966: 456)] Munich production of Exiles, Joyce could not be unaware that he was touching a sensitive point. In Linati’s first letter to Joyce, the translator from Como had mentioned that I have been trying hard to acquaint Italian theater audiences [with Irish drama] It looks like my efforts are about to be crowned with some form of success, as actors and actresses are asking me to produce Synge’s plays; and Emma Gramatica will produce the Playboy in Florence next year during the Carnival season.40

With his Triestine period drawing to a close and a move to Paris imminent, Joyce seemed extremely pleased with Linati’s interest in his works and maintained that he would be “honored” if Linati could succeed in having his only play, Exiles, produced in Italy. He also added, in relatively obscure 40  “[D]a anni io mi affatico a far conoscere in Italia anche scenicamente [il teatro irlandese]. Ora, pare che i miei sforzi stiano per essere coronati da qualche successo, perché da attori e attrici mi vien richiesta la rappresentazione delle pièces del Synge; ed Emma Gramatica metterà in scena nella prossima stagione di Carnevale Il furfantello a Firenze” (quoted in Pasquero 2012: 201).

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Italian phrasing, that an unperformed play was like “un espulso morto.”41 After more than five years of attempting to familiarize Italians with Irish dramatic productions, few were more aware than Carlo Linati of the truth of Joyce’s words: a play that is not produced on stage is like “an unborn child.” As we will see, Linati’s efforts at bringing Irish theater to the Italian stage had been indefatigable, yet the outcome had been hardly satisfying. In 1919, Italian theater audiences were largely unaware of the recent works that had revived Irish theater in the period straddling the two centuries, and the vast majority would not gain such awareness until at least the Second World War, despite frequent attempts by both mediators and practitioners. As mentioned earlier, these included James Joyce himself, who had tried to have his translations of Riders to the Sea and Countess Cathleen produced in Italy, and who would only succeed in bringing Irish theater to the stage in English, while in Switzerland during the Great War. In those special circumstances, Joyce produced The Heather Field, The Importance of Being Earnest, Mrs Warren’s Profession, and The Dark Lady of the Sonnets as the manager of the English Players, the company he founded with Claud W. Skies in April 1918 (Ellmann 1982: 440–447). Thus, while he abandoned the idea of staging Countess Cathleen, his repertoire included Irish figures such as Edward Martyn, Synge, Wilde, and Shaw. Joyce’s Italian translations, however, were never produced in those years. Back in Milan, Carlo Linati showed a greater commitment, going to great efforts to have his translated Irish plays produced in postwar Italy. Unlike other leading mediators of Irish theater in Europe (i.e. Karel Mušek, see Pilný 2011), Linati would always remain an amateur playwright, eventually remarking that his theater translations were, in fact, intended to be read rather than performed.42 Nonetheless, Linati’s eventual awareness of his 41  The translation of this enigmatic expression provided in Ellmann’s collection is “dead deportee.” This is an acceptable translation, as “espulso” can be someone who is “expelled” from a place, but it seems plausible that Joyce was also employing an archaic phrase that can be found in nineteenth-century medicine books, referring to a grimmer image, that is “an unborn child.” As is often the case, a simple, straightforward interpretation of Joyce’s words is a hopeless and ultimately useless task, but what is important here is the idea that an “unperformed play” is somehow “dead on arrival” (Joyce to Linati, 10 December 1919, in Joyce 1966: 456–457). Joyce was duly concerned with the production of his plays and had already expressed his concerns to B.W.  Huebsch (Joyce to B.W.  Huebsch, 7 July 1915, Joyce 1966: 350). 42  In later letters to Enzo Ferrieri, Linati mentioned the idea of producing both Exiles and Deirdre (6 April 1944) “resa un po’ più teatrale nel dialogo” [with dialogues made a bit

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shortcomings as a playwright was not matched by what we might call his dissemination strategy. As noted, the first contracts he signed to acquire the rights to translate the Abbey plays only covered performance rights and made no mention of publishing agreements of sorts, although these were certainly discussed from the start of negotiations.43 In the late 1910s, Linati was keen to have the plays performed and did his best to make it happen, as testified by his correspondence with Facchi and Joyce in particular. The postcards Linati sent Facchi from his military post in Breganze (near Vicenza) in 1919 tell the story of Synge’s early misfortunes in Italy and related projects that were never realized. With regard to the former, Linati was keen to inform Facchi of his bitter disappointment at the fiasco of Emma Gramatica’s production of The Playboy of the Western World in Florence: “Have you heard about our Playboy’s disaster at the Niccolini in Florence last Tuesday? Long live Italy! Long live Synge!”44 Another postcard tells a different story, capturing Linati’s excitement at the potential production of Synge’s Deirdre, with sets by Gordon Craig and starring the famous theater and cinema actress Alda Borelli who had played Mila, the lead character in D’Annunzio’s La figlia di Iorio, in 1910. The mention of Edward Gordon Craig probably begs some clarification. Craig was conspicuously absent from the dissemination of Irish theater in Italy. Despite his strong connections with the Abbey, and Yeats in particular, and though he lived in Florence from 1907, the English stage designer was never truly involved in any attempts to bring the Abbey plays to Italy. Linati’s postcard is testimony to what seems, to this day, to have been the only

more dramatic] (14 June 1944) by Ferrieri himself (Archivio Ferrieri, Centro Manoscritti, Pavia, Correspondence, folder Linati, items: 114 and 115). 43  Yeats’s correspondence confirms this state of affairs, as we can gather from his 23 July 1913 letter to Gregory after his meeting with the Italians: “My dear Lady Gregory: Leoni has just been in. He wants the Italian rights of plays of yours & mine for a new publishing house founded by certain young men. It is to be connected with a theatrical scheme and it is proposed that various young Italian composers should turn into opera (opera with speech = opera comique) Land of Hearts Desire, Spreading the News, Shadow of the Glenn etc.)” (Yeats 2002: acc: #2221). In a later letter to Prezzolini (2 June 1914), Linati claims to have publishing rights only for Yeats’s plays, while he had production rights for four plays by Lady Gregory and two by Synge (Biblioteca cantonale Lugano, Archivio Prezzolini-Fondo Prezzolini, Correspondence, folder Linati, I. n. 4, Linati to Prezzolini,. 2 June 1914, Milan, handwritten). 44  “Evviva l’Italia! Evviva Synge!” (Carte Carlo Linati, Biblioteca comunale di Como, Fondo Manoscritti, Correspondence, Linati to Facchi, 3 March 1919, handwritten).

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exception.45 The plan, however, fell through, as did most of Linati’s other efforts. Nevertheless, for a number of years following his translations, the writer never seemed to doubt that the plays could be successful on stage and was ready to accompany Leoni in another rather bold endeavor. Since at least 1910, Franco Leoni had started adapting Yeats’s plays into operas. Roy Foster mentions that “[i]n the summer of 1910 [Yeats] was rescued from penury only by an offer of £100 from Chappells for the rights to The Countess Cathleen, which Franco Leoni wanted to adapt into an opera. WBY agreed with the inevitable condition that Craig do the stagings” (Foster 1998: 424). Apart from the obvious need for ready money, Yeats also seemed interested in the new medium and, when preparing the Bullen’s volume Plays for an Irish Theatre, illustrated with scenes by Craig, he also returned to The Countess Cathleen, adapting it for Leoni’s operatic project and adding new lyrics (such as ‘Lift the White Knee’ in the second scene, which he proudly told Gregory took him only twenty minutes to write). In Paris he met Leoni himself, who now wanted to take over the opera from Chappells and stage it at Covent Garden with Clara Butt. This rather nonplussed WBY, who gathered that Butt had a wonderful voice but no artistic standing. Still, he authorized Leoni to see Craig about the production, which remained in the realm of enthralling might-have-beens.” (Foster 1998: 440)

While this is the only adaptation involving Yeats himself, Leoni’s project was a consistent and long-standing plan that occupied him for the better part of the 1910s. Once Leoni returned to Italy, he therefore tried to bring his project to Milan in collaboration with the Società Lyrica Nova, which would also publish the librettos. The “theatrical scheme” (Yeats 2002: item 2221) as Yeats had called it, was planned from the very beginning of his venture with Linati and Facchi, and nine operas were announced to be staged at the Teatro dei Filodrammatici in Milan. Almost all featured music by Leoni himself, sometimes under a pseudonym (e.g. C. Chewski,

45  Carte Carlo Linati, Biblioteca comunale di Como, Fondo Manoscritti, Correspondence, Linati to Facchi, 17 April 1919, Breganze (Vicenza), handwritten. If we are to believe Linati’s, possibly fictional, account of his only meeting with Gordon Craig, the main issue was the latter’s request of 30,000 liras for the sets (Linati 1923: 268).

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E. Gounard),46 but only five were eventually produced, including the last one (Linati’s A gara con le rondini), which was actually staged at the Teatro Lirico (Streicher 2005). Of the nine operas, two were original works by Linati, who was still trying his hand at playwriting, and three were adaptations of plays by Yeats (1919a), Gregory (1919), and Synge (1920c). While information on the performances is scant, there is no sign that these librettos were later produced by other companies, suggesting that they met with limited success. Leoni justified this by attributing it to the political turmoil in Italy at the time (Corner 2002), as we can infer from a letter Yeats wrote to Allen Wade: Yes you may do “Land of Hearts Desire”. Franco Leoni has turned it [into] an opera so you could do it in that form possibly if you had a mind to. He had he claims a success with it in Milan but not to the point of royalties owing to the pitching of certain bombs by heated politicians at certain other politicians in some Milan Theater. (18 October 1921, Yeats 2002: acc. #3992)

These operas do, however, testify to Linati’s (and Leoni’s) attempts to disseminate the Abbey plays in Italy. They also show the inextricable connection between Linati’s translations and his original writing that we noted earlier. The Filodrammatici operas were both adaptations and entirely new works, which indicates that, in the postwar period too, Linati saw himself as a playwright of sorts and employed the Abbey plays as a training ground to explore new creative avenues. The relative scarcity of plays among the translations he produced over the following decades is therefore arguably linked to Linati’s simultaneous abandonment of theater as a potential route for his own career. He would return to translating theater only fifteen years later—in 1936—and then more consistently toward the end of his career during the Second World War, in a very different climate. As we will see in the next section, Linati’s active involvement with Irish literature started to wane in the early 1920s. He stopped producing translations and limited his critical contributions. He did, however, lectured on Irish theater47 and continued in his attempts to have his 46  In his letter to Lady Gregory, Yeats mentioned “various Italian composers” (Yeats 2002: acc. #2221). While the names chosen by Leoni suggest other nationalities, the reason for the use of pseudonyms might be the commitment he had made with Yeats. 47  The Circolo del Convegno, in Milan, hosted a lecture by Linati titled “Il teatro irlandese” on 16 June 1925 (cf. Modena 2010: 70).

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versions produced on stage for a few more years, before finally giving up. These late efforts included approaching the diva Eleonora Duse when she returned to the stage in 1921, as well as reaching out to a number of nascent avant-garde companies in Milan in 1924, in particular, Enzo Ferrieri’s Teatro del Convegno and Gualtiero Tumiati’s Sala Azzurra. These separate attempts tell quite an interesting story. While Linati was initially keen to involve first-class performers, in keeping with his commitment to Yeats, the frustration of his early plans imposed a change of strategy. If successful actresses such as Duse or Borelli were not to be the faces and voices of Irish theater in Italy, and Emma Gramatica was not appreciated by the critics, perhaps the nascent independent theaters would prove a better fit, and commercial success could be replaced with the appreciation of a niche audience. Milan and Rome were the most vibrant centers for such activity, and Linati decided to try the former. This endeavor too was destined to come to nothing. Despite Ferrieri’s interest in Irish literature (see 3.3), his Teatro del Convegno staged Joyce’s Exiles for the first time in 1930, ten years after the publication of Linati’s translation, and none of the others. While always hoping for Ferrieri’s involvement, Linati was still busy, in 1924, trying to find the right company to produce The Playboy. It was in that year that he contacted Gualtiero Tumiati, founder of Sala Azzurra. Active from 1924 to 1925, Tumiati’s was one of the first avant-garde theaters in Italy and was run by the actor and his wife, the painter and scenographer Beryl Hight. Linati wrote to Ferrieri that he thought Tumiati “would be the perfect actor for the Playboy, because of his sharp, dark and slightly clownish voice.”48 His letter to Ferrieri, though, shows that he still felt a bond with the editor of Il Convegno, but realized his interest in Irish drama—bar Joyce—was rather faltering: “Although, as I said, before bringing it up with him again, I wanted to talk to you. Since they are not, so to speak, on your program, though, I am prone to think that you don’t like them, or at least not very much.”49 Once again, Linati’s plan was not crowned with success. By 1924, then, the fate of the Abbey plays on the Italian stage had proved disappointing. There remain, however, two potential, though ultimately fruitless, breakthroughs deserving 48  “sarebbe attore adattatissimo [sic] pel Furfantello per la sua lingua snella e scura e un po’ claunesca…” (Trotta 1995: 12). 49  “Ma, come ti ripeto, prima di riparlargliene, volevo un po’ sentire te. Il fatto, del resto, che non l’hai, per così dire, messe in cartellone, mi fa supporre che a te non piaccia, o poco” (Trotta 1995: 12).

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closer attention: Emma Gramatica’s stubborn productions of The Playboy of the Western World and Eleonora Duse’s brief fascination with Riders to the Sea. 3.2.1  Emma Gramatica Emma Gramatica’s long and complex involvement with Irish theater was not specifically linked to Linati as a mediator. To a certain extent, this confirms a typical aspect of the dissemination of Irish literature in Italy previously emphasized in the introduction. Except in rare circumstances, mediators of Irish literature had a tendency to act independently or in small groups, and individual acts of mediation rarely involved a shared strategy or the establishment of networks. Emma Gramatica’s productions were not part of Linati’s systematic dissemination strategy; they seem instead to have arisen from her specific interest in Shaw’s oeuvre and Synge’s Playboy rather than any particular investment in Irish drama. Nevertheless, her work, and the critical response it received, contributed to raising the awareness of Irish drama in Italy. The publication of Linati’s translations of Synge was generally hailed as a great achievement by Italian literati and theater critics. Unlike Yeats and Gregory, Synge was generally considered a pure playwright and his works, produced with success all over Europe, were welcomed as a much-needed addition to the repertoire of Italian theater (d’Amico 1918; Tilgher 1924; Praga 1979: 135). Silvio d’Amico’s review of Linati’s translation of Synge is a case in point. As mentioned earlier, it indicated a greater appreciation, in postwar Italy, for Irish culture over its English counterpart, also due to political reasons. Aside from the unsurprising maneuver of political adjustment discussed in 3.1.2, however, Synge’s significance was not lost on d’Amico. He even went so far as to end his review by emphasizing the need for Italian actors about to take on the challenge of producing Synge (arguably a direct reference to Gramatica) to “learn” how to interpret the Irish playwright’s characters.50 Unfortunately, Emma Gramatica’s production would not prove up to his standards.

50  “There are rumors about producing one [of Synge’s plays] in Rome. Will our actors be up to the task? If they won’t, they’d better learn. It’s high time.” [“si parla finalmente di rappresentarne uno in Roma. Saranno i nostri comici in grado di condur l’impresa? Se non sono, bisognerà che imparino. Ormai è tempo” (d’Amico 1918)].

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Emma Gramatica was one of the most prominent actresses in Italy at the start of the century. An apprentice to Eleonora Duse, she had a long-­ standing interest in foreign, and particularly Anglophone, playwrights. From the early 1910s, in particular, she established a constant dialogue with Shaw’s works, and it was largely thanks to her performances, together with Antonio Agresti’s translations for Mondadori, that Shaw became a household name in Italian theaters. In fact, a rather disgruntled d’Amico even described her as “passing for Shaw’s so-called official interpreter in Italy” (d’Amico 1929: 88).51 A complete analysis of her interpretations of Shaw cannot unfortunately be carried out here, but despite their success, they were not unanimously well received. Critics, including Ettore Albini and Silvio d’Amico in particular, maintained that Gramatica’s Shavian plays were a substantial betrayal of the writer’s intentions and tended to domesticate them, in order to make them more acceptable to Italian audiences. D’Amico was often harsh in his criticism and found fault, in particular, with Gramatica’s romantic style of acting, which did not suit Shaw’s irony and pragmatic heroines. Regarding her 1920 interpretation of Vivie in Mrs Warren’s Profession, d’Amico went as far as to say that Gramatica’s acting style was not suited to an “energetic, strong-willed, anti-romantic” heroine like Vivie, and that she had, instead, brought a “small, timid, romantic and whiney creature” to the stage. He concluded that “rarely have we seen the creation of an author so misunderstood.”52 D’Amico’s review is quite noteworthy, particularly coming from an admirer of Gramatica who had, however, often shown concern with her tendency to explore roles that were, according to him, beyond her reach as an actress.53 Synge’s plays had allegedly been recommended to Gramatica by Shaw himself (Lunari 1967: 15), though there is no trace of this in the 51  For Gramatica’s commitment to Shaw’s oeuvre, see Roma 1929. For a contribution on the popularity of Shaw in Italy in the 1920s, see Berst (1985). 52  “creatura energica, diritta, antiromantica”; “piccola creatura timida, romantica, lacrimosa”; “rare volte ci è accaduto di vedere così svisata la creatura d’un autore” (d’Amico 1963: 209). 53  “The fact that a Romantic actress like her tries to find and reveal herself in a variety of modern theatrical literatures is her natural right, so to speak, and it would be stupid to forbid it. It is however legitimate to ask her why she should insist on those writers, among the foreign writers she cherishes, that are most alien to her temperament.” [“Ch’ella, romantica, vada a cercare le occasioni di ritrovarsi e rivelarsi nelle più diverse letterature drammatiche moderne, è una specie di diritto naturale, a cui sarebbe sciocco segnar divieti. Ma è lecito domandarle perché, fra i poeti stranieri che predilige, ella insista su alcuni, i quali sono i più estranei al suo temperamento” (d’Amico 1929: 88)].

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playwright’s surviving letters. While her interpretations of Shaw’s works had been key to their dissemination in Italy, she did not manage to achieve the same result with Synge, whose lack of success in Italy d’Amico attributed to the actress: If it is the case that only some people in the audience half-understood the play, and if its beauty was only perceived in a confused way, and never actually penetrated, we believe that the responsibility lies with the Valle actors, and primarily that most clever actress, Emma Gramatica.54

D’Amico’s backhanded compliments did not soften the sting of his criticism. While the lack of primary evidence certainly makes it difficult to ascertain its justness, it is useful to note that other critics, usually more favorable toward Gramatica, leveled similar criticism, including Marco Praga and Ettore Romagnoli in particular. Only Linati, still trying to raise awareness of Synge’s works, spoke positively of Gramatica’s production, albeit, unsurprisingly, in oxymoronic terms, labeling it a “stormy success” [“successo burrascoso”]55 (Linati 1919a: 373). Criticism primarily addressed two points: the Irishness of the play and the complex issue of Christy’s masculinity, as rendered by Gramatica. According to Praga, some critics even disapproved the play for being “too Irish” [“troppo… irlandese”] for a “Latin audience” [“pubblico latino”], without, however, elaborating on the point. Praga strongly disagreed with this claim, stating that a play as universal as this belonged to the “entire world” [“mondo intero” (Praga 1979: 135)] and that the only issue was the production itself. The dialectics between regionalism and cosmopolitanism seemed to favor the latter pole, and Italian critics of the 1920s tended to gravitate toward that end of the spectrum. Most critics, however, were in agreement that the main issue was Gramatica’s interpretation of Christy. Praga, in particular, 54  “Crediamo che, se il lavoro è stato compreso soltanto a metà e non da tutto il pubblico, se la sua bellezza è stata soltanto confusamente sentita e non penetrata, ciò debba attribuirsi alla interpretazione che ne è stata data dagli attori del Valle, e principalmente da quella intelligentissima attrice che è Emma Gramatica” (d’Amico 1963: 200). 55  He mentioned that also in a letter to Joyce from 18 May 1920, Linati wrote: “The other night, 16th M[ay] at the Valle in Rome, Synge’s Playboy was a success, in my translation, after last year’s flop in Florence: there will be more nights and the critics are favorable.” [“L’altra sera 16 M[aggio] a Roma, al Valle, ha avuto successo anche Playboy di Synge, nella mia traduzione, e che a Firenze era caduta un anno fa: si replica, e la critica è assai favorevole.” (quoted in Pasquero 2012: 207)].

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commenting on the 1923 production of Il Furfantello56 at the Milanese Teatro Manzoni, noted the lack of irony that usually characterized her interpretations and maintained that Gramatica was “even irritating with her constant monotonous whining” [“persino irritante nel suo continuo monotono piagnucolio”]. Instead, Christy should be Humble and fearful when he introduces himself, cowardly when he is afraid of the guards, to be sure; but after then, when he feels safe, protected, admired and courted, he should be a boaster, arrogant and cheerful; he should never lack a certain rough cunning, and in the end he should be furious.57

The question is, of course, a complex one. It should certainly be noted that Emma Gramatica had been successful in other masculine roles, including Hamlet, and even her first Shaw production—Candida, in 1911—had seen her play the role of Marchbanks (Gatti 2002). Once again, d’Amico was her harshest critic. In his review of Mrs Warren’s Profession, he made reference to Gramatica’s then recent interpretation of Christy Mahon from The Playboy of the Western World in May 1920. By choosing the title role for herself, Gramatica had made a mistake, as she had given life to a a naughty boy of uncertain sex, a horrible, awkward goof, whose looks made both the starting premise of the play, and its development, impossible; and those fresh and colorful words of love were inadmissible in her mouth.58

The reference to “words of love” and “her looks” is quite a clear indication of d’Amico’s uncomfortable reaction to the ambiguity of the production, ostensibly emphasized by Gramatica’s choice. D’Amico’s reviews consistently foreground Gramatica’s sexuality; he employs the language of pathology (“manie virili”) to characterize her interpretation, and goes as

56  According to Renato Simoni (1951: 722–725), the performance was met by the booing of the public in Milan, at the Teatro Manzoni. 57  “Umile e pauroso quando si presenta, vigliacco quando teme i gendarmi, sì: ma poi gradasso dev’essere, spaccone e allegro allorché si sente sicuro, protetto, e si vede ammirato e corteggiato; né privo di una almen grossolana furbizia; e alla fine furente” (Praga 1979: 137). 58  “ragazzettaccio di sesso incerto, orribile, goffo e cretino, il cui aspetto non rendeva possibile né il punto di partenza dell’opera né tutto il suo svolgersi; e sulla sua bocca non erano ammissibili le fresche e colorite parole delle scene d’amore” (d’Amico 1963: 201).

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far as to cast doubt on her femininity (“d’un’artista vera e, se Dio vuole, autenticamente donna”): And let’s not even talk about certain virile manias, that are entirely unworthy of a serious artist and, God-willing, of an authentic woman (despite famous examples proving the contrary): Emma Gramatica rejoiced in sighing Marchbanks’ words, in Candida or, even worse, in making faces in that lively Playboy by Synge, which she led to a fiasco that will take a while for us to forgive.59

It is understandable that the petite Gramatica might not be entirely successful as the boisterous Christy. However, her interpretation could be read as a critique of the “grand style” of acting prominent in Italian theaters at the time. Moreover, her style might certainly have emphasized some of Christy’s qualities, but the contrast proved too strong for critics and audiences alike. Though not entirely successful, her interpretation of Christy may indeed have been interesting, with her thin voice and restless acting style emphasizing the puerile and nervous aspects of the character. More importantly, the various scenes in which cross-dressing is a key point of the dramatic action may have resulted in a foregrounding of their shocking potential. Gramatica’s interpretation of Christy cannot be fully assessed due to the lack of documentary evidence, but it certainly testifies to the revolutionary potential of Synge, and of such a daring interpreter as Emma Gramatica. 3.2.2  Eleonora Duse Eleonora Duse’s interest in Synge was not her first encounter with Irish drama. In the late 1890s, when the actress was at her prime, Wilde had invited both the actor-manager Cesare Rossi and Duse, who was then part of his company, to read Salome and almost succeeded in convincing them to produce it (Re 2002: 130). According to Giuseppe Garibaldi Rocco, the first Italian translator of the play (Wilde 1901, 1907), Duse had 59  “E non parliamo di certe manie virili, tutt’altro che degne (nonostante esempi celebri in contrario) d’un’artista vera e, se Dio vuole, autenticamente donna: quelle per cui Emma Gramatica s’è compiaciuta nel sospirare, in abito da maschio, le parole di Marchbanks in Candida, o, peggio, nel fare le smorfie di quel saporitissimo Furfantello di Synge, ch’ella ha condotto (e stenteremo un pezzo a perdonarglielo) all’insuccesso” (d’Amico 1929: 89. My emphases).

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wanted to play the title role, but changed her mind because of the author’s scandalous reputation (Severi 2010: 111). Wilde’s first major success in Italy, Salome was first translated under the supervision of the author while he was living in Naples, and published in 1901, but it was Richard Strauss’s opera, conducted by Toscanini at La Scala in 1906 and a staple production in Italy between the wars, which contributed the most to the notoriety of the text. Since Wilde’s Irishness was rarely acknowledged in his reception abroad, however, Duse’s interest in Synge’s Riders to the Sea is rather more meaningful for the purposes of our investigation, if only because it characterized an important moment in her career, that of her returning to the stage in the early 1920s. Learning that, in May 1921, Eleonora Duse was considering putting his translation of Synge’s Riders to the Sea on stage must have seemed like a godsend to Linati: at that point only a glimmer of hope remained that Italian audiences would finally be acquainted with the Abbey plays he had translated during the war. Following the less-than-encouraging result of his and Leoni’s operatic adaptations, the fiasco of Emma Gramatica’s first production of the Playboy, and the failure to organize a production of Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows with Alda Borelli and Gordon Craig, the idea that the comeback of a legendary protagonist of the Italian stage might be associated with Synge was met with obvious enthusiasm by Linati. Such enthusiasm is palpable in the letter he sent Duse on 14 May 1921, prompted by Silvio d’Amico, along with a copy of his Syngean versions. Eleonora Duse certainly met the criteria of “first-class theater in Italy by competent artistes”60 established by Yeats when yielding the performance rights to Linati, and the prospect of working with her was enough to rekindle Linati’s now seemingly lukewarm interest in Irish drama. In 1921, Eleonora Duse was planning to return to the stage twelve years after her last performance as Ellida in Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea in Berlin. The play she eventually chose for her return was that same Ibsen play, which she performed, with Ermete Zacconi’s company, in Turin on 5 May 1921. At the same time, though, she was considering several other scripts, which all shared one common trait: they dealt with elderly, struggling, and self-sacrificing mothers, such as Helen Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts. While Ellida Wangel, the main character in The Lady from the Sea, was somewhat of an exception, being a young woman, Duse, now in her mid-sixties,  Agreement with Carlo Linati, 27 August 1913. (Yeats 2002: item 2249).

60

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played her without make-up and wearing her hair white. This acting choice further pushed the boundaries of Duse’s proverbial striving for naturalness and spontaneity, something she achieved in the past through the use of “stage make-up and powder in order to create a ‘natural’ effect of ‘authentic’ pallor.” In her comparison between Duse and Sarah Bernhardt, Lucia Re called it “the artifice of the non-artifice” (Re 2004: 92). The other two plays she performed in that period also featured elderly female main characters, La porta chiusa by Marco Praga, and Cosi sia by Tommaso Gallarati Scotti. In the early 1920s Duse was, according to Cesare Molinari, exploring motherhood and, in particular, the drama of “lost motherhood” (Molinari 1985: 233). This is also confirmed by other projects that eventually fell through, such as Pirandello’s La vita che ti diedi (Molinari 1985: 243), as well as the only film she ever starred in, Cenere (1916), based on a novel by Grazia Deledda. The character of Rosalia, in Cenere, is quite interesting in this respect, in its “liberating the diva from her role as erotic spectacle and instead showcasing her active agency and heroic self-sacrifice for others” (Subialka 2018: 276). Her acting also confirmed her newfound interest both in selfless maternal love and in downplaying the melodramatic elements of old-fashioned divas, while “deliberately deconstruct[ing] the nineteenth-century Romantic and positivist mystique of the prima donna” (Re 2004: 92). It is not surprising then, that she should have considered playing the role of Maurya, the tragic maternal figure in Riders to the Sea. The role would have perfectly aligned with the kind of exploration she was engaging in, as well as with her reneging the figure of femme fatale she had started to perform (Subialka 2018: 287). According to Linati’s own account, Eleonora Duse was so impressed with Maurya that, like Joyce, she too knew some of Maurya’s lines by heart. She had charged d’Amico, a recent but soon-to-be important acquaintance of hers, with the task of contacting Linati and asking for his translations of Synge. It was 14 May, and Linati responded to Duse that very day. He tried to persuade her to perform Deirdre, maybe even attempting to rouse her interest by mentioning Alda Borelli’s interest in acting in it. In his letter, Linati also mentioned that his versions were “rather more literal than theatrical” and that they would need some rewriting in order to be ready for the stage.61 61  “As you will see, my versions are rather more literal than theatrical, since I was, back then, concerned with how to best reproduce the rural and colorful strength of Synge’s language; it goes without saying that, were they to face the challenge of the stage, it would be

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Paradoxically, this might have appealed to Duse, who, as we know from d’Amico, “did not want ‘experienced’ theater practitioners. She wanted ‘pure’ people who did not know the trade” [“non voleva i ‘pratici’ del teatro. Voleva i ‘puri’; che non conoscessero il mestiere” (d’Amico 1929: 59)]. Moreover, Synge’s was the kind of innovative theater that Duse was interested in performing, and represented a compromise between her declared intent of focusing on writerly scripts and her tendency to still choose plays featuring strong protagonists who would allow her to shine once more. Deirdre of the Sorrows did not seem to entice Duse, but Riders to the Sea did. For some time, then, Duse entertained the idea of staging plays by Synge and also, according to d’Amico, Yeats (d’Amico 1929: 59). A more complete exploration of their encounter and Duse’s interest in Irish theater cannot, unfortunately, be carried out based on primary sources, but must rely instead on a short piece by Linati, published some twenty years later. Linati’s account prefaced a book on Ireland that carried conspicuous anti-British overtones, published during the Second World War. Here, Linati provided a brief record of their brief encounter. As is known, Linati’s accounts are not always entirely reliable, especially as far as chronology is concerned, but some elements still deserve further comment. In his 1940’s book, Linati reminisced that the dialogue was not limited to postal correspondence, mediated by d’Amico. In fact, the two also met at the Hotel Cavour in Milan, prompted by a telegram from Duse herself, sometime “after the publication of my versions of Synge’s plays” [“dopo la pubblicazione delle mie versioni dei drammi di Synge” (Linati 1940: 11)]. The account of the meeting is entirely focused on the actress’s fascination for, and desire to interpret, the character of the old Maurya, “an old mother […] who eventually accepts her fate, as God imposed it on her” [“una vecchia madre […] che accetta alla fine la sua sorte poiché Dio gliel’ha imposta” (Linati 1940: 11)]. In Linati’s description, Duse is necessary to alter them here and there, in order to make the dialogue as smooth as possible, without betraying the original: I have already done so with Deirdre when Alda Borelli wanted to stage it a year ago.” [“Com’Ella vedrà, le mie versioni sono piuttosto letterali che sceniche, essendo io preoccupato, a quel tempo, di rendere meglio mi fosse possibile la robustezza contadinesca e colorita del linguaggio Syngiano; ed è certo che dovendo esse affrontare il cimento scenico occorrerebbe ritoccarle qua e là in modo da dare al dialogo, senza tradire l’originale, una massima fluidità e scioltezza: il che io già feci per “Deirdre”, che la Signora Alda Borelli voleva rappresentare anno fa.” (Archivio Eleonora Duse, Istituto per il Teatro e il Melodramma, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, Correspondence Linati, Linati to Duse, 14 May 1921, Milan, handwritten)].

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dressed entirely in black, her clothes shabby, and had a sad and tired face; when she spoke it was as if she was bound in a strange restlessness, an incoherence, almost a painful bewilderment. Ireland was for an instant the topic that made her stop and pay attention. I spoke to her about Yeats, about his great fanciful plays whose sets had been designed by Gordon Craig. But she soon came back to the character she loved so much, to that old Maurya keening every son the ocean took from her, in a way that reminded one of Aeschylus. She confessed that the idea of taking her role had kept her awake the whole night: she had learned some passages by heart.62

Duse progressively transforms, before Linati’s eyes, into a domestic version of Maurya herself, a mater dolorosa, eager to take on a role she already seemed to inhabit in real life. Anti-British propaganda was probably not Linati’s main goal here, but it is arguable that linking a national treasure with a pro-Irish stance, and endowing her with maternal qualities, would have been met with appreciation by the Fascist bureaucrats who commissioned the booklet. While Duse’s plan to produce Synge’s play eventually fell through, other sources suggest that the actress had more than toyed with the idea. As a matter of fact, while staying at the Hotel Cavour in May 1921, Duse met not only with Linati but also with another Italian lover of Irish theater, Mario Borsa. In his Memorie di un redivivo (1945), Borsa tells how Duse had read his 1906 book on theater and “since then, had always dreamed of acting in one of Yeats’s works”63 rather than in a play by Synge. She had read Linati’s translation of Cathleen ni Houlihan, but seemed much more interested in Countess Cathleen, which she asked Borsa to translate for her. Borsa’s account, which includes reference to a letter he 62  “come un’irrequietudine strana la teneva tutta, un’inconsistenza, quasi uno smarrimento che dava pena. Ma I’Irlanda fu per un istante l’argomento che la fece ferma ed attenta. Le parlai dello Yeats, dei suoi grandi drammi fantastici che Gordon Craig aveva inscenato. Ma ella ritornò presto al personaggio che tanto amava, a quella vecchia Maurya che per ogni figliolo che l’oceano le rapiva faceva una lamentazione degna di Eschilo. Mi confessò che l’idea di impersonarla l’aveva tenuta desta per tutta una notte: ne aveva imparato a memoria dei brani” (Linati 1940: 11–12). 63  “aveva sempre sognato, fin d’allora, di interpretare un giorno qualche lavoro dello Yeats.” (Borsa 1945: 80) Duse’s interest in Irish theater was also mentioned by Tomasi di Lampedusa in his 1926 article on Yeats. Lampedusa must have learned of this from Borsa or sources close to him, as he also recalls that Duse was interested in Countess Cathleen (Lampedusa 1926: 44).

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allegedly wrote to Yeats asking for a copy of the play, is rather puzzling, since both plays were in Linati’s collection, which Duse had already received from Linati himself, but nevertheless it serves as another piece of evidence of the actress’s keen, albeit infertile, interest in Irish theater. Linati’s account from 1940 was not, however, the only time he wrote about Duse. He had also done so in his fiction, in a distinctly different fashion. The Duse he allegedly met in the postwar years was a very different character from the protagonist of Linati’s 1922 novella, Malacarne. In that work, Isabella Malacarne, an actress loosely based on Duse herself, is the daughter of an Italian gentleman of Scottish descent, who lived in Kent as a young lady (Linati 1922b: 30). After moving to Italy, she started reading Italian classics, including D’Annunzio, and embarked on a successful career as an actress. She became one of the best performers of her time, starring in both classical (e.g. Aeschylus, Shakespeare) and contemporary drama (e.g. Synge, Ibsen, Hebbel), with her key roles including Lady Macbeth and Deirdre (likely from Synge, though it is not clarified in the text). A victim of her passion for acting, she decided to quit her career, and her last play was none other than Synge’s Riders to the Sea: It had been five years since the night when Isabella had performed in her last creation: the old Maurya from Synge’s Riders to the Sea. While the Milanese audience had not liked the marine play that much, her interpretation of that Irish Niobe was incomparable in both the potency of its truth and the majesty of its Aeschylean mannerisms. Since then, though, nobody had seen her again.64

The scant mention of D’Annunzio, a key author and lover of the real Eleonora Duse, suggests that Isabella found her ideal drama in the aforementioned classical and contemporary playwrights. Lucia Re has argued that Duse’s collaboration with D’Annunzio had been ruined beyond repair by the publication of Il fuoco in 1900 (Re 2004: 117) and that while she had “hoped to find in D’Annunzio a modern Italian writer of great literary value who would still give her space as the absolute prima donna […] [t]he texts that D’Annunzio wrote for her, modern and even 64  “Ora cinque anni erano trascorsi dalla sera in cui Isabella s’era prodotta nela sua ultima creazione, la vecchia Maurya dei Cavalcatori a Mare di Synge. Quantunque il dramma marinaresco fosse poco piaciuto al buon pubblico di Milano, ella aveva fatto della Niobe irlandese una creazione inarrivabile per potenza di verità e maestà di atteggiamenti eschilei. Ma da allora nessuno più l’aveva veduta” (Linati 1922b: 14–15).

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visionary in some respects, were not made to glorify the image of Duse as the sole attraction on the stage” (Re 2004: 106). Linati, it seems, was yet again attempting to move beyond D’Annunzio’s legacy, as well as attempting to appropriate his former muse. Unsurprisingly, at this stage in his career, he did so while upholding a European canon of writers that would be appreciated by Joyce and that, while giving Synge a prominent role, was not limited to Ireland. The novella, moreover, is set in the area of Bergamo, in the valley near Selvino. The setting is key, as the actress is herself a synecdoche for Lombardy: You will remember those Phidian eyes, when they looked down with adorable tenderness, when they smiled with stormy cheerfulness, when they made that face bright or dark with such a variety of splendor that one was reminded of a Lombard countryside under a summer lightning storm.65

As we will see later, Linati’s involvement with the so-called Lombard school was at its lowest point here: while still interested in Lombardy as a setting for, and the focus of, most of his writings, he was progressively losing confidence in the possibility of establishing a movement of writers from his native region. Still, it is quite apt that he should choose a Duse-­ like character to represent his ideal merging of modern Irish theater and Lombard nature. This worked for Linati on a variety of levels. It emphasized the parallel between Ireland and Lombardy that he had promoted for most of the previous decade, but it also allowed him to appropriate a symbol of D’Annunzianism, and convert her into a symbol of this new theater. At the same time, the focus on both classical drama, Shakespeare and Ibsen, accounted for Linati’s attempts to move beyond the restrictive remit of Irish theater, which was one of his main aims at the time. Despite intermittent efforts to have his translations brought to the stage, and infrequent articles and lectures, the intricate symbolism inherent in the novella can be seen as an ideal swan song to Linati’s most Irish years. Synge’s epic characters and Yeats’s writerly drama could have been a good compromise for Duse’s comeback, and Linati’s anti-Dannunzianiam would have fueled his enthusiasm for the theatrical venture. That the symbiosis only happened in Linati’s fiction is quite telling too; after this 65  “Lei si ricorderà quegli occhi fidiaci che si chinavano con tenerezza adorabile, che ridevano con ilarità tempestosa, che facevano su quel viso la luce e la notte con tale varietà di splendori da richiamare la scena d’una campagna lombarda sotto un lampeggiamento estivo” (Linati 1922b: 82–83).

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umpteenth failure, he would go on to devote less and less energy to the dissemination of Irish literature, with the exception of Joyce, and abandon his plans for a Lombard school of writers.

3.3   The Irish Season of Ferrieri’s Il Convegno In an oft-cited article from 1949, Carlo Linati clearly expressed his early conviction that Ireland and his native Lombardy were somehow connected, like “two sisters” (Linati 1949). As we have seen, this was attributed to the two regions’ shared Celtic origins and was pivotal to encouraging—or at least fueling—his exploration of Irish literature. Linati’s war years were also characterized by an intense and somewhat inward-looking exploration of Lombardy (which was also the region where he served most of his time in the army) and by the idea of starting a Lombard magazine as a counterpoint to the Tuscan-centered publications hegemonic in Italy at the time. While the first attempt at reviving Carlo Cattaneo’s Politecnico did not materialize, the early 1920s proved a better time for such a venture, and Linati became integral to Enzo Ferrieri’s Il Convegno, albeit never in any official capacity. Il Convegno started out in 1920 as a magazine aimed at providing a vast and inclusive body of literary and critical works. While most periodicals in Italy were closely associated with literary movements, the Milan-based intellectuals who joined forces to start Il Convegno felt the need for an organ that would be less partisan and more open to a variety of influences from both Italy and abroad. Il Convegno aimed to circulate translations of texts and critical essays from both the centers of modernism and its margins; it did not limit itself to literature but included architecture, cinema, art and music, thus providing a composite and dynamic picture of the cultural field. Surprisingly, and somewhat contradictorily, one early, avowed intention of the project was to serve as the mouthpiece of regional writers from Lombardy. The Irish literature that Linati was a herald of seemed therefore the perfect fit for the magazine. However, Linati and Ferrieri had different ideas as to how to articulate the dialectics between foreign literatures and the magazine’s regionalism. Primarily concentrated in the magazine’s early issues and then scattered throughout its almost twenty years of publications, Il Convegno’s engagement with Irish literature deserves critical attention. It is interesting both as a specific case study of the reception of Irish literature in Italy and as a surprisingly comprehensive and paradigmatic example of how what looks

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like a single flux of imported literature can often be broken down into different, somewhat conflicting, receptive strategies and motives. As a matter of fact, the Irish writers translated or discussed in the pages of Il Convegno— primarily Joyce, Synge, James Stephens, Lennox Robinson, and Seán O’Casey—were presented as Irish only on a minority of significant occasions. Often, they were deprived of any critical or national framing, and simply anthologized. The Irish writers translated in Il Convegno between 1920 and 1936 were, in various ways, all linked to the renaissance in Irish writing that had characterized the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries, though some (like Joyce) were not strongly linked with the Celtic Revival and the Abbey Theatre. All, however, with the exception of Synge, were alive, and all could be said to belong to contemporary Irish literature, while their works are now generally perceived as representing different literary strands: Synge and Stephens are primarily linked with the early stages of the revival, while O’Casey and Robinson are two of the early protagonists of the realist school that became increasingly influential from the 1920s onward. Joyce, meanwhile—despite the reappropriation of his work to Irish literature—is chiefly seen as an exponent of European high Modernism. The patterns of reception in Italy did not entirely mirror these divisions. In particular, the translations of Irish writers published in Il Convegno did not seem to respond to a simple, shared interest in contemporary Irish literature, but rather reflected a more complex attitude. An analysis of both the translations and the paratext—with a particular focus on the associated correspondence—reveals that the impulse behind such translations was of a substantially different nature in each specific case. As hinted at in the introduction, this is a key aspect of the reception of Irish literature in Italy, as even cultural and literary mediators who shared a cultural space (such as the same periodical or publisher, for instance) often did not belong to the same networks and did not subscribe to similar aesthetics. It is often the case, when dealing with translation flows, that one finds oneself in the situation described by Anthony Pym when analyzing the English translations of Spanish and Portuguese literature in the nineteenth century: We thus find that what might otherwise appear to be the one translation flow, the one set of translations going in the one direction, in fact comprises at least two very different cultural dynamics, with very different translators, different translation strategies, different historical reasons for translating and indeed different concepts of what translation is. There is no reason why the one directionality should be channeling the same contents. (Pym 2013: 93)

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What makes the case of Il Convegno so interesting is that it concerns a single literary magazine presenting a variety of approaches to Irish literature that one would normally associate with different literary outlets. Such a situation of heterogeneous mediation had to do with the nature of the magazine, but also with its peculiar role in the rapidly changing literary field of 1920s’ Italy. Nonetheless, the attention paid to Irish literature in the magazine seems initially to have been connected with its original plan to be a mouthpiece for Lombard writers. Such case studies are of crucial importance when investigating the dissemination of a single literary tradition, as they allow us to focus on the conflicting impulses regulating cultural traffic. It is all the more interesting where peripheral literatures are concerned, and, in particular, literatures that, for various linguistic or political reasons, are rather difficult to disentangle from wider literary systems, as is the case of Irish literature in the English, or rather Anglophone, literary context. Considering specific cases of reception is key to emphasizing the boundaries (or lack thereof) between the macro-system and the specific tradition struggling for recognition and seeking to differentiate itself from other works in the same language (as in the Irish case) or the same literary space (as is the case with most Irish literature until the twentieth century, and regional literatures written in dialect more generally). One of the reasons that Il Convegno represents such an interesting case study is its nature as a little magazine. Little magazines have recently been recognized as a specific form on a global scale. It is therefore worth taking a step back and introducing both the form in question and the specific case of Il Convegno, before moving on to its relationship with Irish literature. Little magazines are hard to define, as any definition involving overly strict criteria such as size, content, or distribution is bound to prove too restrictive. A recent book by Eric Bulson defines them as “a national form with limited mobility while still inspiring fantasies of a cosmopolitanism that it only occasionally fulfilled” (Bulson 2016: 8). Bulson chooses to focus on Il Convegno as a clear example of what a little magazine was in the Italian context. As alluded to, Il Convegno was the brainchild of Enzo Ferrieri, a key figure in the cultural life of Milan and Italy between the wars.66 The magazine ran from 1920 to 1940, with Ferrieri 66  Ferrieri, who died in 1969, would remain at the center of Italy’s cultural life after the Second World War, especially in his capacity as director of radio and theater dramas and theater critic. For an overview of Ferrieri’s career, see Modena (2010).

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always at its helm. In keeping with its name—Italian for “meeting” or “conversation”—Il Convegno was not the mouthpiece of any particular school or movement, but instead positioned itself as an “anthological magazine” [“rivista antologica”], as Ferrieri introduced it in the first issue of February 1920. As such, it was devoted to eclecticism, since, as Ferrieri explained, “we would not want to shed light on our guests with one single lantern, giving out the light of the absolute. We humbly confess we do not own it, nor do we see others shining.”67 The variety of interests of which Il Convegno was expression was also embodied by a series of activities connected with the magazine itself. Il Convegno had its own bookshop (which also operated as a sort of small lending library, from 1921), a small publishing house (1921), a lecture hall (1922), and a small avantgarde theater (1924). It was also one of the first Italian periodicals to pay critical attention to cinema, by issuing the Cine-convegno supplement (1933–1934). The lecture hall and theater, in particular, would play a relevant role in the reception of Joyce in Italy. Such openness, which was combined with a then-uncommon attention to foreign literatures, set Il Convegno apart from more partisan contemporary reviews such as the Florentine La Voce or the more conservative Rome-based La Ronda. The magazine’s influential contributors included some of the major intellectuals of the time: Giacomo Prampolini (German, Scandinavian, and Slavic literatures); Giuseppe Prezzolini and later Montale (French literature); Eugenio Levi and Cesare Angelini (Italian literature); and, of course, Carlo Linati and briefly Emilio Cecchi (American, British, and Irish literatures). Ferrieri’s model in founding Il Convegno was also a foreign one, precisely that of the French La nouvelle revue française (nrf ), founded by André Gide, Jacques Rivière, Gaston Gallimard, and Jean Paulhan in 1908, and still active today. The two periodicals went so far as to start a collaboration, which was extremely fruitful, 67  “non vorremmo illuminare gli ospiti nostri con una sola lanterna, che dia lume di assoluto. Questa umilmente confessiamo di non possedere né si vedono intorno altre che splendano” (quoted in Ponti 2003: 34). This was also Linati’s ideal, as expressed in an earlier letter to De Robertis, then director of La Voce, in which he said that many writers did not want to contribute to La Voce because it used to claim too aggressive a stance toward other schools and movements, and that it would be better to “make the Magazine more welcoming and inclusive” [“improntare la Rivista ad una maggiore accoglienza e larghezza” (Gabinetto G.P.  Vieusseux, Archivio Contemporaneo ‘A.  Bonsanti’, Fondo De Robertis, Florence, Correspondence  - IT ACGV DR.1. 168.8, Linati to De Robertis, 18 February 1915)].

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particularly for the less well known and established Convegno. Several French modernists connected with the nrf contributed to Il Convegno and vice versa (Ferrieri 2020: 54–57); these literati would often translate each other’s contributions and review each other’s books. There were Italian critics at the time, who interpreted this exchange as another symptom of Milan’s long-standing francophilia, but Ferrieri saw things differently. Both magazines in these post-war years were developing strategies for cultural renewal that depended on the construction of collaborative networks, which would allow nations to communicate with one another. And they both had something to gain: the nrf picked up a sympathetic Italian ally, while Il Convegno earned cultural prestige. (Bulson 2016: 134)

This kind of communication was not limited to prominent figures in the French literary field; thanks to mediation by the “wonders worker” (Joyce 1957: 95) Ezra Pound, it also involved transatlantic partners such as The Dial and The Little Review, a relationship that was particularly significant in the early years of Il Convegno. Ferrieri and Linati would introduce the works of Anglophone Modernists to Italian audiences, while also introducing Italian writers to the Anglophone readership of The Dial. It is therefore not surprising that Il Convegno was often criticized not only for its openness and variety, but also for the associated evils of publishing an excessive number of translations and proposing European models that were not generally deemed adequate for Italy, such as avant-garde theater (e.g. Jacques Copeau) and Modernist prose (Joyce, Svevo, Proust). The idea of “manufacturing the figure of the modern European writer” as “someone opposed to nation-based provincialism and open to modes of literary communication that emphasized cross-cultural, trans-historical connections” (Bulson 2016: 137) accurately describes the magazine’s literary politics from the mid-1920s onward. However, the case of Synge’s and Joyce’s translations will show that this does not entirely account for Il Convegno’s ultimately failed plan to counterbalance its cosmopolitanism with its investment in the regional. Eugenio Montale summed it up, in 1924, when he claimed that Ferrieri’s magazine was the successor of La Voce and La Ronda, serving as a common ground for the “best writers of our new literature who try to reconcile a healthy peasant sentiment with the influences of the new era,” while being more “eclectic and open” and avoiding the “polemical attitude […] of those two magazines” [“eclettico e aperto”; “la parte più polemica […] delle due riviste rammentate” (Montale 1996: 17).

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The list of Irish authors that were translated in Il Convegno is quite telling, while the list of translated works is, perhaps, more telling still. A clear pattern can be discerned in the translations of Irish literature, while the role of Linati and Ferrieri is also apparent: 1920: Stephens, James. “Tre donne che piansero.” Trans. by Enzo Ferrieri. Il Convegno 1, no. 1 (February): 67–77. Joyce, James. “Esuli (Prima Parte).” Trans. by Carlo Linati. Il Convegno 1, no. 3 (April): 27–52. Joyce, James. “Esuli (Seconda Parte).” Trans. by Carlo Linati. Il Convegno 1, no. 4 (May): 27–46. Joyce, James. “Esuli (Terza Parte).” Trans. by Carlo Linati. Il Convegno 1, no. 5 (June): 22–37. Synge, John Millington. “Impressioni sulle isole Aran.” Trans. by Carlo Linati. Il Convegno 1, no. 6 (July): 20–26. Synge, John Millington. “Impressioni sulle isole Aran.” Trans. by Carlo Linati. Il Convegno 1, no. 7 (August): 23–28. Stephens, James. “L’uomo cieco.” Trans. by Enzo Ferrieri. Il Convegno 1, no. 8–9 (October): 36–42. 1923: Robinson, Lennox. “Badare alle ragazze.” Trans. by Carlo Linati. Il Convegno 4, no. 10 (October): 468–74. 1924: Joyce, James. “Araby.” Trans. by Carlo Linati. Il Convegno 5, no. 6–7 (June–July): 301–8. 1926: Joyce, James. “Da l’«Ulysses»  di James Joyce.” Trans. by Carlo Linati. Il Convegno 7, no. 11–12 (November– December): 813–28. 1929: Joyce, James. “Un caso pietoso.” Trans. by Nina Ruffini. Il Convegno 10, no. 5 (May): 258–67. 1931: Joyce, James. “Ulisse – 1° Episodio.” Trans. by Alberto Rossi. Il Convegno 12, no. 9–10 (October): 476–502. 1936: O’Casey, Seán. “Il falso repubblicano.” Trans. by Carlo Linati and Nina Porcelly. Il Convegno 17, no. 9–10 (October): 343–88. As this list shows, the first year of publication was exceptionally rich in Irish literature, with almost every issue featuring the translation of a work by an Irish writer. No other nation’s literature enjoyed such a clear prominence during the same year. The range of writers also reveals a certain variety, with three different authors as well as different forms, including

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theater, travelogue, and short story. The publication of Irish short stories, travelogues, and realist drama echoes Il Convegno’s editorial decision to do away with the fragment writing and belletrism characteristic of La Voce and La Ronda, respectively, in Italy. It is a position that was spelled out by Ferrieri in a later preface to an anthology of the magazine—unpublished in his lifetime—in which he claimed his boldness in siding with Pirandello and his theater was a sign that he embraced less-established art forms and writers (Ferrieri 2020: 16–17). The variety increased further in 1923, with the first short story by Cork realist Lennox Robinson translated into Italian, but, from 1924 onward, only Joyce remains, with the single exception of O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman as late as 1936. This is confirmed by the critical contributions published in the same years, which are almost entirely focused on Joyce and penned by the likes of Antonello Gerbi, Italo Svevo, and John Rodker, the Mancunian writer and foreign editor for the Little Review who Joyce and Pound introduced to Ferrieri via Linati (Pound 1967: 184; Joyce 1957: 148). A pattern is emerging: what might initially be seen as a vast and genuine interest in Irish literature, largely fueled by the welcoming and explorative attitude of Il Convegno’s editor, soon revealed a specific eagerness to associate the review with one single writer who, while certainly Irish, was also increasingly regarded as the leading figure in international modernism. An analysis of the magazine’s mediation strategy provides valuable insights into a key chapter in the history of the dissemination of modernism in Italy, and the attempt to concoct a national variety of modernist prose. It also allows us to explore how Linati’s interest in Irish literature was a driving force toward that goal and how his relationship with, and appreciation of, Irish literature was linked to his increasingly hesitant commitment to his position as a Lombard writer. An analysis of the mediation strategies underpinning the translation of so many Irish writers will therefore shed light on wider issues concerning the complex, and often uncertain, position of Il Convegno in the literary field. I will therefore closely examine the presence of Irish writers in Il Convegno, with a special focus on the translation of Synge’s The Aran Islands and that of Exiles and other writings by Joyce. Most of these works were translated by Linati. As one of the central members of Ferrieri’s circle, Linati tried to establish a continuous and exclusive collaboration with the magazine toward the end of 1920, committing to providing Ferrieri with one original piece of prose (or

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translation from English) and “a couple of reviews each month.”68 Irish literature was one of the shared interests between Linati and Ferrieri, as emerges from their letters of the time, which frequently discuss Joyce, Yeats, Synge, and Gregory. As discussed, Linati himself was actively trying to disseminate Irish drama in the most influential literary magazines of the time. His numerous attempts with La Voce had, however, failed, and prior to the founding of Il Convegno, he had only managed to publish Yeats’s anti-­materialist The Hour-Glass, as L’oriolo a polvere, in the neoclassicist La Ronda (Yeats 1919b), certainly not the ideal home for the Irish realist drama and short stories he would go on to publish in Il Convegno. It is not surprising then that three of the first translated works published in Il Convegno were Irish, and one can surmise that Linati found in Ferrieri’s brainchild the ideal home for his Irish translations that he had not found in other Italian magazines. Following the publication of the first known Italian translation of James Stephens in Italy—“Three Women who Wept” (Stephens 1920)— unsigned but translated by Ferrieri himself, Linati left his mark with a translation of Exiles—the first work by Joyce ever translated in Italy—and an excerpt from Synge’s The Aran Islands. These last two translations tell very different stories of the dissemination of Irish literature in Italy. 3.3.1  Impressionist Landscape Painting on the Aran Islands While appearing later than Exiles in the pages of Il Convegno, the translation of Synge’s The Aran Islands should be considered first, as a belated and, to a certain extent, final, significant specimen of Linati’s original attitude toward Irish literature. The excerpts from Synge’s travelogue were published in two installments in consecutive issues of Il Convegno, July and August 1920. The title he gave to the selection is telling in itself: The Aran Islands becomes “Impressioni sulle isole Aran” [Impressions on the Aran Islands], in equal measures a reference to the quality of these glimpes of Synge’s book and to Linati’s impressionistic style and love of landscape painting (Della Torre 1972). The title also curiously echoes Buonaiuti’s essay discussed in 2.1, both in its referring to a partial and idiosyncratic representation of a little-known country and in alluding to the common sentimental trope of Ireland as a distant land untouched by progress. This 68  Archivio Ferrieri, Centro Manoscritti, Pavia, Correspondence Linati, item n. 8, Linati to Ferrieri, 20 December 1920, typewritten.

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is confirmed by the words Linati chose to introduce Synge to the editor of Il Convegno, in a letter from 7 July 1920: It is such a beautiful book that I would have liked to translate other passages. Now, see for yourself if it could be interesting and I can translate other passages for another installment. The readers of your magazine, though, are certainly not lovers of natural, wild and Hyperborean spectacles like me.69

In keeping with this interpretation, Linati’s short introduction to his versions describes the Aran islanders as leading “maybe the most primitive life in Europe”  [“la vita [...] forse la più primitiva di tutta Europa”  (Synge 1920a: 20)], while the excerpts are chosen from the first half of the book, which is arguably where Synge is more prone to encourage such a description. It is probably instructive to note that in the following years, these were the elements in Synge’s writing that Linati was keenest to emphasize, either comparing him to Giovanni Verga, Italy’s foremost realist, or rather verista, novelist, in an article in The Dial,70 or using him as shorthand for “raw realism” [“crudo realismo” (Linati 1924: 2)], when discussing D.H. Lawrence in 1924. This is also confirmed by Linati’s choice to focus on people’s rural activities, their language, and the importance of oral traditions in the life of the islanders. It is not surprising that Linati should consider Synge’s realism “raw,” as the latter’s account of life in Irish rural communities, far from idealizing them, revealed “an increasing acknowledgment of the material hardships endured” (Markey 2012: 211) and an involvement in their mundane occupations and concerns. Linati was, in his Lombard travelogues and fiction, rather more prone to idealizing both the landscape and rural communities; in that, he was similar to Patrick Pearse, whose “accounts of Gaeltacht life reveal a selective interest in Irish folklore that reflects a reluctance to acknowledge those aspects of popular 69  “Il libro è così bello che avrei voluto tradurtene altri pezzi. Ora, vedi tu, se la cosa può interessare, potrei tradurtene altri pezzi per un [sic] altra puntata. Ma la gente che legge la tua rivista non è certo, come me, amante di spettacoli naturali, selvaggi ed iperborei” (Trotta 1991: 405). 70  “If it were still the fashion to make literary comparisons as in the time of the excellent Plutarch, it would be interesting to draw one between the Sicilian writer, Giovanni Verga, and the Irish dramatist, J. M. Synge. For these two writers, though so widely separated geographically, are very similar, both as to the origin of their inspiration and in the development of their literary experience and style” (Linati 1921).

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tradition that did not sit well with his idealized image of Ireland as a divinely sanctioned ancient nation capable of living up to its past glory in the modern world” (Markey 2012: 212). The first of the two installments translated by Linati presents a story told by an old storyteller, Pat Dirane, one of the main characters of Synge’s account. It is an adventurous story of deception, surprising coincidences, almost severed limbs and murders. In Synge’s book, this story is followed by an ethnographic reflection on the strong links between Irish and European folklore, which in Synge has the function of showing the links between Irish and overseas traditions, traceable all the way back to the Middle Ages: It gave me a strange feeling of wonder to hear this illiterate native of a wet rock in the Atlantic telling a story that is so full of European associations. The incident of the faithful wife takes us beyond Cymbeline to the sunshine on the Arno, and the gay company who went out from Florence to tell narratives of love. It takes us again to the low vineyards of Würzburg on the Main, where the same tale was told in the middle ages, of the ‘Two Merchants and the Faithful Wife of Ruprecht von Würzburg.’ The other portion, dealing with the pound of flesh, has a still wider distribution, reaching from Persia and Egypt to the Gesta Romanorum, and the Pecorone of Ser Giovanni, a Florentine notary. The present union of the two tales has already been found among the Gaels, and there is a somewhat similar version in Campbell’s Popular Tales of the Western Highlands. (Synge 1982: 65)

Linati’s version stops right after the dramatic climax of the story, omitting the scholarly gloss here reproduced and thus any reference to European literature. This is certainly in keeping with Linati’s interest in the primitive character of the Aran islanders, but even more so with the image of Ireland as a primitive country that his prefaces and translations would generally propound in Italy. Synge’s approach of distancing himself from his narrative material and considering it from a relatively detached vantage point is virtually erased by Linati. The latter’s interest, instead, lies in presenting a portrait of Ireland and its literature consistent with a specific stereotypical image of a people cut off from other civilized countries, with whom it shares little significant cultural elements. Synge becomes, in a certain sense, one with his creation. There is also another element to consider. Erasing the reference to Florentine literature is also plausibly an attempt to avoid any possible association of Irish literature with other Italian regional identities that could distract readers from the link Linati was at such pains to establish between Lombardy and Ireland. As we will see in

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more detail later in the chapter, Linati’s identity as a Lombard writer was a thorny issue for him in 1920, but it remained intertwined with his role as importer of Irish literature to Italy; detaching himself from his Florentine literary upbringing, in this context, suggests his effort to define his position on the Italian literary scene. Linati had turned to Irish literature in an attempt to expand his sources of inspiration and reinforce his Lombard roots through his deep involvement in a cognate culture. His framing of Irish writers as melancholy, Celtic, and primitive had served to define his own literary self in a similar vein. In Sull’orme di Renzo, an account of a literary pilgrimage in the footsteps of Renzo, the protagonist of Manzoni’s The Betrothed, written in 1919, Linati had stressed a striking parallel between the Lombards and the Irish: “A man from Como and one from Naples are less alike than a Milanese and an Irishman from Connaught.”71 With regard to such practices, David Damrosch has convincingly argued that “[s]uch national reframing often happens at the hands of a work’s translators and publishers, but it can also be accomplished directly by authors seeking to build their own tradition through original compositions based on foreign sources” (Damrosch 2014: 355). Through Synge, Linati had been able to give Lombard culture a European dimension, trying to position his regionalism in the wider context of a European movement of regionalist writers who were aware of Vidal de la Blache’s lesson and focused their work on the inextricable entanglement of nature and culture, of human activities and landscape. As with most of his early translations, Linati here is at once seeking to disseminate a relatively new and little-known literature in Italy and employing it to carve out a space for himself and Lombard literature. His attitude, here, is paradoxically consonant with the general attitude of the Florentine avant-garde, from the ranks of which Linati himself issued, despite his ongoing attempts to distance himself from it. As Stefania De Lucia has recently argued with respect to German literature, translation was barely separable from an anti-­ positivist attitude of appropriation of literary texts for the likes of Prezzolini (De Lucia 2018). This is not only limited to translation proper, but also extends to other kinds of rewritings (cf. Lefevere 1992). Similar to what happened with the several Yeatsian references in I doni della terra (see 3.1), Linati’s style as a travelogue writer would be heavily influenced by Synge in the years that immediately followed his translations. While his 71  “C’è maggior differenza fra un comacino e un napoletano che fra un milanese e un irlandese del Connaught” (Linati 1919b: 25–6).

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Lombard writings present some key characteristics that set them apart from Synge’s (more attention devoted to literary resonances, less focus on ordinary people and their speech), Linati’s interest in the everyday elements of the landscape, and in natural events, was heightened, thanks to his immersion in Synge’s writings. Intertextual links with Synge’s works would crop up in most of Linati’s postwar prose and resurface in his later works in ways that have so far been largely overlooked. The strong influence of Synge was often avowed by Linati, who claimed to feel an almost brotherly connection with the playwright, despite not having had the chance to meet him.72 Echoes of Synge’s works are to be found throughout Linati’s oeuvre, especially at times in which his interest in Ireland was stronger, and in works focusing on Lombardy. In 1939 when Italy was once more ready to explore Irish theater and Linati was about to embark on the second bout of his career as an irlandesista, he published a collection of travel writings about his beloved Lombardy, Passeggiate Lariane. Containing constant references to his literary influences, the rather conspicuous absence of reference to Irish literature in the volume is notable. Upon closer inspection, though, one can detect a few Syngean passages that show how the voice of the Irish writer remained a constant point of reference for him. A passage about hoisting and shipping cattle is quite interesting in this regard, as Linati’s description of the struggle of the half-­ drowned animals is reminiscent of a famous passage from The Aran Islands that he had translated for Il Convegno, (Synge 1920b: 23–24) and would retranslate in 1944. This minor passage is all the more interesting if we consider Linati’s usual choice of subjects for his travelogues, which tended to focus primarily on almost abstract natural landscapes, with no hint of productive activity (such as the delivery of cattle), and on literary memories and encounters with literary personages and idealized characters, rather than the drifters favored by Synge. Despite the differences in tone and subject, then, Synge’s influence is a regular undercurrent in Linati’s works.73 72  “The encounter with Synge was more exciting than all the others, and left me for years the memory of a most tender friendship” [“L’incontro con Synge, sopra ogni altro, mi fu di eccitamento e mi lasciò per lunghi anni il ricordo della più tenera amicizia” (Linati 1941a: 30–31)]. Linati’s discovery of Irish literature started after Synge’s death in 1909. 73  With a similar intent, George Talbot has pointed out how A vento e sole, a travelogue Linati published in 1939—that is the year Riders to the Sea was eventually produced for the first time in Italy—echoed the atmosphere of the play in some passages describing the coast of Brittany (Talbot 2011; 141).

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This element was somewhat confirmed by the first unabridged Italian translation of The Aran Islands which would come out in 1944, in a completely different political climate, as part of the “Europa” book series by Milanese publisher Rosa e Ballo (Synge 1944). While the circumstances of publication will be explored in Chap. 5, the translation is worth mentioning here because it confirms Linati’s lifelong interest in the works of Synge and propounds a similar image of Ireland to the one Linati had begun disseminating around 30  years earlier. This hetero-image was not only achieved through the preface, which presented Synge’s account of the life on the Aran Islands as a “book of pure poetry, […] the reaction of a poet and writer’s soul in touch with a grandiose Nordic landscape, rich with all the flavor and color of primordial landscapes left almost pristine in their solitude by progress and civilization, vibrant with some of the lights of ancient epics of seas and people.”74 Engaged in a dialogue with the preface is the sensational cover of the book (Fig. 3.1), featuring three superimposed frames from Man of Aran, the successful 1934 film by Robert O’Flaherty,75 which represent the sea, the mother and son, and a fisherman busy hunting a shark. The three human figures are in black and red, but their silhouettes appear through the waves of the omnipresent sea. Such interpenetration of sea and characters, of environment and persons, is key to Linati’s (and Rosa e Ballo’s) reading of the travelogue. This is further confirmed through the shrewd use of what Genette called the force illocutoire of the paratext.76 The cover does not include the name of the author, which only features on the spine, a choice that presents the text almost as though it did not issue from the pen of an author. The lack of 74  “un libro unicamente di poesia, […] la reazione di un’anima di poeta e scrittore a contatto con un paesaggio grandiosamente nordico, ricco di tutto il sapore e il colore dei paesaggi primordiali che il progresso e la civiltà hanno lasciati pressoché intatti nella loro solitudine, e in cui vibra ancora qualche luce di un’antichissima epopea di mare e di genti” (Synge 1944: x). 75  Man of Aran was well known in Italy and won best foreign film at the Venice film festival as well as the Mussolini Cup in 1934. Liam O’Flaherty caustically mocks the film’s international success among “European dictator[s]” (O’Flaherty 2019: 124) in his 1935 satirical novel Hollywood Cemetery. 76  “A final pragmatic characteristic of the paratext is what – making free with a term used by philosophers of language – I call the illocutionary force of its message. Here again we are dealing with a gradation of states. A paratextual element can communicate a piece of sheer information – the name of the author, for example, or the date of publication. It can make known an intention, or an interpretation by the author and/or the publisher” (Genette 1997: 10–11).

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Fig. 3.1  John M. Synge, Le isole Aran, trans. C. Linati, Milan: Rosa e Ballo, 1944

mediation on the front page seems to emphasize the idea that the text sprung, in some way, from the primitive nature of the Aran Islands: the islands were narrating themselves in the book, in a certain sense. The early 1920s constituted a period of aesthetic reevaluation for Linati, and his early contributions to Il Convegno show how this was mirrored in

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his attitude toward Irish literature. While that tradition had served as a guiding light for Linati during the Great War and immediate postwar years, changes in his own poetics can be assessed through an analysis of his approach to mediating it. This also affected the Convegno’s relationship with contemporary literature (and consequently the Italian literary field) to a significant extent, as Linati was, from the outset, one of the magazine’s main contributors. While Il Convegno did not fully associate itself with any specific tradition, either national or regional, its early issues see Ferrieri toying with the idea of founding a Lombard school, an initiative that Linati grew increasingly doubtful about in the early 1920s. The two conflicting forces of regionalism and cosmopolitanism can be seen at play in these early issues, and in the ways Irish literature was framed. While the second installment of Impressioni sulle isole Aran was virtually ushered in by the letters of the late critic Renato Serra, which emphasized both Linati’s regionalism and his interest in Irish literature (Serra and Grilli 1920: 16, 21), the introduction of Joyce as a European writer took Il Convegno in a diametrically different direction. The idea of a regional identity underpinned Linati’s allegiance to both Irish and Lombard literatures. In 1920, however, this idea was beginning to falter in Linati’s mind. In the letter he wrote to Ferrieri the month after the final installments of his Aran Islands’ excerpts were published, he also addressed Ferrieri’s suggestion of making Il Convegno an entirely Lombard magazine. Linati’s response, at this point in his career, was rather surprising: he declared that he was “sick and tired of being a Lombard”77 and that the review should continue to cover both Italian and foreign writers, without limiting itself to Lombard authors. Moreover, an emphasis on Lombard literature, to which Linati did not object, should not turn the magazine into the mouthpiece of a so-called school: “it was a convenient fiction to distinguish ourselves in this pandemonium of I(talian) L(iterature). And we partly managed to do it.”78 A convenient fiction in which Linati, after the first issues of Il Convegno, no longer believed with the same degree of earnestness. Linati also rejected Ferrieri’s idea on the grounds of his conviction that the members of this self-styled Lombard school (Angelini, Bernasconi, Rebora, and Levi, among others) were not prolific enough and that he himself no longer 77  “bell’e stufo di fare il lombardo” (Linati to Ferrieri, 20 September 1920, reproduced in Trotta 1991: 406). 78  “era una comoda finzione tanto per riuscire a distinguerci in questo pandemonio della L(etteratura) I(italiana). E, in parte ci siamo riusciti” (Ibidem).

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believed in regionalism. As briefly discussed above, however, the firmness of opinion expressed in his letters was not matched by a similarly strict attitude in his translations or writings. Thus, his future work would tell a slightly different story, with him continuing to focus on Lombardy in most of his fiction while occasionally paying homage to Irish literature. Nonetheless, his interests, both as a writer and as a translator, went beyond the restrictive remit of these two fields. He sought to expand his activity as a travelogue writer to include other Italian regions, and his mediation activities to encompass other literary genres and figures, such as Lawrence, Stevenson, Hemingway, Woolf, and James. Not unlike Synge, Linati had begun to view regionalism as an attempt to locate vitality “in nomadism, vagabondage, and geographical mobility” (Mathews 2012: 183). It is probably mere coincidence that his reply to Enzo Ferrieri echoed, almost verbatim, Gabriel Conroy’s piqued response to Miss Ivors in Joyce’s “The Dead” (“O, to tell you the truth, retorted Gabriel suddenly, I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!” Joyce 2006: 165). The sentiment was nonetheless similar: two cosmopolitan men, Conroy and Linati, feeling stifled by a conservative and restrictive literary outlook, were looking for a way out in a mildly exaggerated manner. Ferrieri would continue to pursue his idea for another few years, and though Il Convegno continued to provide a forum for numerous translations of foreign writers (fewer and fewer of which were Irish, as we have seen), the magazine would also try to define a Lombard line within Italian literature. I have mentioned the emphasis on regionalism in Serra’s letters, artfully positioned right before the second installment of Impressioni sulle isole Aran. Moreover, in 1921, Cesare Angelini wrote a long article on Linati in which, among other things, he highlighted the Celtic elements of Lombard writers like Carlo Cattaneo, and the similarities between the most prominent contemporary member of the Lombard school, specifically Linati, and the Irish playwrights he had translated.79 It is not surprising, to some extent, then that, 79  Synge, in particular, and the Irish in general, were crucial to Linati’s approach to art and life, according to Angelini: “the perfection achieved by that civilization and its simple and pure sensitivity mixed with vigor and contained power must have seduced that rough Lombard man, who loves oxygen and strength, and has a taste for life and the ascent.” [“La perfezione a cui è arrivata quella civiltà e la sua semplice ed epurata delicatezza mista di nervo e di potenza raccolta devono aver sedotto ques’uomo lombardo squisitamente ruvido che ama l’ossigeno e la forza ed ha il gusto della vita e della salita” (Angelini 1921: 171)]. Angelini’s image of the Irish is therefore that of a “simple and strong” race, similar to the self-image he provided of the Lombards.

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while struggling to shed his Lombard identity, Linati would leave Irish writers aside almost entirely and would begin focusing almost entirely on American and British authors from the early 1920s. Ferrieri would follow suit within a few years and rapidly abandon the idea of a regionalist school; he later admitted that the idea was rather the product of wishful thinking, triggered by the misapprehension that Manzoni had established a Lombard tradition that had continued to those days.80 From the material published in the early years of Il Convegno, then, it is clear that Linati’s suggestion of focusing on Lombard writers without making Il Convegno an exclusively Lombard magazine was implemented by Ferrieri and his collaborators (Ponti 2003: 40). A side-effect of this seems to be the sidelining of Irish writers over the following decades. From the second half of 1920, then, Linati’s personal commitment to Irish literature was primarily linked to his promotion of Joyce, who was presented as belonging to a European, rootless tradition, and to the odd attempt to produce Synge’s plays. He almost entirely abandoned any involvement with Irish literature as a category, by refusing, for instance, to write a book on Irish theater as part of an important book series in the mid-1920s (see Chap. 4). The scant nature of the references to Irish literature in his 1932 collection of criticism (Linati 1932: 42–48) confirmed his goal of expanding his pool of writers and literary traditions, as well as propounding his perception of Joyce as a cosmopolitan writer. It also, however, testified to his desire to explore different currents of the revival that were less linked with “peasant drama” in an attempt to dissociate Ireland from regionalism. As we will see, in the early 1930s, Linati would revisit his early interest in Irish literature and contribute to the revival of this tradition brought about by Mondadori, Rizzoli, and the publishing ventures associated with Gian Dàuli, which began publishing the works of James Stephens, George Moore, and Liam O’Flaherty. 3.3.2   The Spaesato Joyce in the Pages of Il Convegno With regard to Joyce, too, the paratext helps assess the extent of Linati’s conflicted relationship with Irish literature, as it was unfolding in 1920. A few months before his translation of The Aran Islands, Linati published a 80  “Manzoni remained isolated, without progeny; some Lombard writers inherited a glimmer of his humor, of his discretion, the odd glimpse of a landscape, but none manifest his essence, that sense of the divine that in Promessi Sposi […] is inherent to the story and its spirit” (Ferrieri 2020: 42).

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complete translation of Joyce’s Exiles, split across three consecutive issues of the magazine. While the English publication of the play was released before any theatrical production had taken place, the Convegno edition respected Joyce’s wish for it to be published after the play had been staged,81 and so after the “stormy” Munich production of 7 August 1919. The details of this publication are well known (De Petris 1992; Bulson 2001) and will not be repeated here in detail. Joyce took great care in instructing Linati, down to the choice of title, and guided him through the fine points of the translation. However, Linati’s translation of Exiles has never been considered in terms of the more general issue of the dissemination of Irish literature in Italy, and such an examination has instructive insights to offer. As we know, Linati was contacted on 31 October 1918 (Joyce 1957: 121) by Joyce who, aware of both his translations of Irish drama and his good standing in Italian letters, wanted him to translate his recently published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Linati acknowledged that it was his “love of Ireland” (Linati 1929: 23) that brought him to Joyce, but he would later admit that upon reading A Portrait he was not keen on Joyce’s “arrogant babble” [chiacchiericcio arrogante] and was not particularly convinced by the stylistic revolution of the novel (Linati 1941b: 7). Still interested in translating Joyce, however, Linati then chose Exiles, Joyce’s most recent work to date and his only venture as a playwright. It may be argued that the translator was also interested in continuing his exploration of Irish drama and felt on more secure ground with a play.82 Among other elements, Linati doubted that A Portrait could be translated, “because of its typical style and its content, at the same time so ethnic and refined, so peasant and so perfectly literary, not to mention the environment, the customs, the souls that are so different from ours.”83 It is quite interesting that Linati should emphasize the 81  “I have finished a play in three acts, Exiles, but would prefer that publication in book to come after its eventual production on the stage” (Joyce to B.W. Huebsch, 7 July 1915, in Joyce 1966: 350). 82  When Joyce offered to send him A Portrait, Linati replied, “I translated Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory, but theirs is drama, and therefore is more accessible to readers, the content of their plays is not as daring and original, nor as genuinely typical as the substance of your magnificent book.” [“Io ho tradotto Yeats e Synge e Lady Gregory: ma, altroché, il loro è del teatro, e quindi cosa più facilmente accessibile ai lettori, il loro contenuto non è così arditamente originale così squisitamente tipico come quello che forma la sostanza del suo magnifico libro” (Linati to Joyce, 7 December 1919, reproduced in Pasquero 2012: 203)]. 83  “stante la sua tipica forza di stile e il suo contenuto così etnico e raffinato ad un tempo, così paesano e così squisitamente letterario, oltre a l’ambiente, ai costumi, alle anime così

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“peasant” and “ethnic” elements in A Portrait, while in the same breath backtracking on the similarities he had recently drawn between the Italian and the Irish “souls” in his articles and wartime editions of the plays of Yeats, Gregory, and Synge. The encounter with Joyce was encouraging Linati to reframe his understanding of Irish literature and provided him with a more complex image of it. An awareness that had been emerging in Linati’s early contributions was now starting to resurface. Nonetheless, the short, but quite dense, preface to the first of the three installments of the play in Il Convegno would claim that Joyce was more invested in contemporary European aesthetics than in his national literature. Directly instructed by Joyce himself, in the preface Linati explicitly linked Joyce’s “plays” [sic] with the production of the Abbey he had translated only a few years earlier, mentioning Yeats and Synge. However, he also provided a portrait of Joyce that was more nuanced, as a “born writer, at the same time ethnic and without a country, very idiosyncratic” [“di razza, etnico e spaesato ad un tempo, personalissimo” (Joyce 1920: 27)], who, like Synge, employed French prose to find his “natural expression in something that was perfectly Irish, characters, villages, spirit of rebellion and a disquieting sobriety of style, raw, supercilious, like a wood carver.”84 In a similar vein, the rest of the preface focuses on Joyce as a writer who was both Irish and spaesato, sharing traits with Synge, but also learning from Gide and Ibsen. Linati’s difficulty in defining Joyce’s work in terms of a single national tradition, as well as his inability to provide a complex definition of it, is probably best captured by his definition of Irish literature as a boîte à surprise (a box full of surprises), a phrase that at the same time suggests unpredictability and variety. This is something of which Joyce had warned Linati in a letter from 10 December 1919: [Exiles] is not of the peasant variety. Yeats told me that though he would have liked to have the play put on in Dublin, he had no actors capable of giving it. They have become too specialized in the Synge-Gregory etc. genre. But Irish types like Berkeley, Sterne, Parnell and Swift are of a totally different stamp. (Joyce 1966: 457)

profondamente diverse dalle nostre” (Linati to Joyce, 7 December 1919, reproduced in Pasquero 2012: 203). 84  “caratteri, paesi, spirito di ribellione e un’inquietante magrezza di stile, cruda, dispettosa, come uno che scolpisse nel legno” (Joyce 1920: 27).

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It is perhaps not surprising that this should happen with the publication of a play that Joyce himself saw as a way to “Europeanize” both himself and Ireland, something that one of the protagonists of the play, Richard Hand, also claims as his own artistic goal (Joyce 1992: 158). Il Convegno’s conflicting tendencies between becoming a magazine devoted to Lombard literature—as its editor Enzo Ferrieri still wanted—and a cosmopolitan organ—as Linati preferred—came to the fore in this short piece of writing. From the point of view of cultural mediation, too, Joyce’s letter is quite remarkable. He was aware of Linati’s interest in Irish literature, and arguably sought to find a middle ground between his narrow image of (spiritual, rural) Irishness and his more complex and nuanced insider’s take on Irish literature. Linati would take those suggestions on board, to some extent, but also, significantly, would define Joyce as a writer without a country (i.e. spaesato), that is, as a cosmopolitan writer whose connection with his native country and literature was partly erased by his participation in a vaster European, and primarily urban, aesthetic movement. As instructed by Joyce himself, then, Linati seems here to introduce a version of Ireland, and its literature, that was only partially consistent with his own previous depictions, and with the few descriptions of Irish literature that had been read in Italy: the Ireland of Berkeley, Sterne, Parnell, and Swift. In a manner similar to Joyce’s own journalistic output explored earlier, this could have spurred a wider and richer understanding of the Irish literary tradition, but instead it remained limited to a minority of literati. Rather than positioning Joyce within a richer and more varied version of Irish literature, the main effect of Il Convegno and Linati’s interest in Joyce was to progressively associate him with the so-called Paris-centered republic of letters, virtually erasing his Irishness in the 1920s and 1930s.85 The approach taken by Linati to mediating the works of Joyce reveals a paradox in his attitude toward Irish literature. It could be said, in some respects, that he sought to simplify the image of Ireland in Italy by presenting a rough amalgam of the country’s many traits; his interest in its literature, however, slowly fostered an appreciation of a more complex, varied repertoire of Irish writers, more consistent with the varied and conflicting versions of Irishness circulating in the country in question. The fact that Linati did not seem entirely qualified to manage this newfound complexity 85  “A new form of novel is started by Joyce. […]. Once we acquired Joyce, our review opened the way to the understanding of a modern language, through European traditions and experiences” (Ferrieri 2020: 45).

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probably had an effect on the reception of Irish literature in Italy, but it arguably also contributed to a more nuanced idea of it, at least in some marginal circles. The two translations we have discussed represent a virtual crossroads for the fate of Irish literature in Italy. They convey two different images of both Ireland and Irish literature that are worth exploring. While The Aran Islands represents Ireland in a way that is consistent with Linati’s earlier depictions of a wild, romantic, and primitive country, as expressed in the Studio Editoriale Lombardo versions of the war years, Exiles is an attempt to introduce an urban and cosmopolitan image of Ireland by emphasizing its links with current trends in European literature. As alluded to earlier, however, this would not mark the beginning of a fuller, more nuanced appreciation of Irish literature in Italy, but instead served as its temporary swan song. After 1920, both Il Convegno as a magazine and Linati and Ferrieri as individual mediators began to shift their attention to other literary traditions (in English or in other languages, and the strong focus on Irish literature that characterized the magazine’s first year rapidly lost momentum. As mentioned, the only significant Irish exception was Joyce, whose work Linati translated again in 1924 and 1926, and who was also the focus of other translations (by Nina Ruffini in 1929, and by budding Joycean Alberto Rossi in 1931) and articles. In the years following 1920, then, Linati continued to work on Joyce and presented a version of the Dublin writer that increasingly subscribed to the Paris-centered vision of him as a master of international literature, with little or no connection to any specific country. Linati’s relationship with Joyce’s major works is notoriously complicated, including a fluctuating critical response, shrewd avoidance, and unexpected translations. Emilio Cecchi, who signed the first Italian review of Ulysses in 1923, and who, for some time, was expected to occupy Linati’s role as the English literature correspondent at Il Convegno (Ponti 2003: 208–210), famously went as far as to say that Linati was: like one of those gluttons, one of those bullies who taste the roasted thrush when it is served and start banging the fork, saying: nice potatoes! To draw the other guests’ attention to those in order to finish the roast in peace.86  “come quegli Epuloni golosi e un poco sopraffattori che quando viene in tavolo, per esempio, l’arrosto di tordi con patatine, assaggiano e cominciano a dire, battendo la forchetta: buone le patatine! Per attirare su quelle l’attenzione dei commensali, e finirsi in pace i tordi” (Cecchi 1923a). 86

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However, Linati would end up translating the first extracts from Ulysses to appear in a national publication in Italian,87 despite having also signed a relatively negative review of Ulysses in Il Corriere della Sera (Linati 1925). Linati was keen on making the issue featuring the first translations of Ulysses “a magnificent, a sensational thing; you cannot believe how much enthusiasm and admiration there is for Joyce abroad!” Linati also intended to flaunt his own personal relationship with “he who is considered the greatest living writer in the world” by publishing a personal letter addressed to him by Joyce himself and, probably more importantly, to show those “900 fools” that Joyce belonged to Il Convegno88 These translations have been the subject of several contributions, with Serenella Zanotti, in particular, providing a rich analysis of Linati’s work (Zanotti 2004, 2013).89 From our point of view, what is interesting is that Il Convegno’s Joycean translations—from Linati’s Araby to Alberto Rossi’s 1931 translations from Ulysses—confirm Linati and Ferrieri’s decision to consider Joyce an eminently international writer. In so doing, they corroborated the attitude of other influential Italian critics such as Cecchi. In the review mentioned earlier, Cecchi spent very few words on Joyce’s Irish origins and primarily linked him to European and North American writers such as Proust and James, as well as Freud. Quite tellingly, the only Irish writer mentioned by Cecchi was Swift, identified as someone who would have “badmouthed Joyce, but enjoyed reading him immensely” (Cecchi 1923b). Swift was also one of the “Irish types […] of a totally different stamp” (Joyce 1966: 87  L’ora, the Sicilian newspaper that published the very first extract of Ulysses in Italy a few months before Il Convegno (Joyce 1926a), had limited circulation and the published fragment was anonymously translated from French. 88  “una cosa superba, éclatante, perché non puoi credere l’entusiasmo e l’ammirazione che c’è all’Estero per Joyce!”; “colui che è reputato il più grande scrittore mondiale vivente”; “fessiciàttoli del 900” [Linati to Ferrieri, n.d. [1926], reproduced in Trotta (1991: 409)]. ‘900 is of course the Italian-French literary magazine founded by Massimo Bontempelli and Curzio Malaparte: they published an extract of Ulysses in French in the same year as Il Convegno and could count Joyce among the members of their editorial board. It is also worth noticing that when Piero Gobetti tried to buy the translation of Exiles from Ferrieri in July 1923, he turned down the offer and produced the play twice (in 1930 and 1946) at the Teatro del Convegno (Modena 2020: 69; Gobetti 2017: 264–265). 89  “It is well known that translation cannot take place without a certain measure of interpretation. And in Linati’s case, interpretation turns inevitably into domestication, if not censorship. In the Nausicaa fragments, for instance, the role of fireworks as an indirect representation of the effects of masturbation, which is so central to Joyce’s chapter, is completely lost. Linati’s censorious attitude is evident in his tendency to make explicit what is not said or is ambivalent” (Zanotti 2013, 142).

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457) that Joyce himself had mentioned to Linati as constituting a different strand in Irish letters.90 The strong link between Il Convegno and Joyce was consolidated over the years, though a planned special issue on Joyce was never published. Joyce’s transnational dimension is also confirmed by the articles published in the magazine, and particularly by the rather idiosyncratic 1927 piece by Antonello Gerbi, mentioned in the previous chapter. The article was divided into thirteen sections and published in two consecutive issues of Il Convegno (May and June 1927), and was largely concerned with a lengthy and rather rambling reflection on the similarities between psychoanalysis and Crocean philosophy, as well as with historical materialism. Joyce was merely a point of departure for a piece whose ultimate aim seemed to lie in identifying some sort of connection between various Jewish thinkers (Gerbi 1927a, b). Bloom’s own identity as the member of an immigrant Jewish family is of course mentioned, but what is more important, for our purposes, is that the first three pages of the article mainly focus on discussing the nature and origins of Joyce’s inspiration. While the title (i.e. “Tredici variazioni sopra un tema irlandese,” “Thirteen variations on an Irish theme”) and opening lines place clear emphasis on Joyce’s Irishness, the following paragraph complicates the issue, introducing the European character of Joyce’s prose: Joyce is English only if you think of the language he writes in. But his race and inspiration are purely Irish. But his voice has reached us at times from the caravanserais of Trieste and Zurich. But his play was booed in Munich. But his major work was published in Paris and New York, and while the title is Hellenic and archaic, its hero is an average everyday Jew. (Resident in Dublin but originally from Szombathely in Hungary)91

The sequence of adversatives certainly conveys Gerbi’s awareness of Joyce’s irreducible position within the literary system. This kind of 90  Cecchi’s take is only confirmed by the few mentions he made of Joyce in his Il Convegno article (again from March 1923) on contemporary novels in English. Here, he did not even mention Ireland, but straightforwardly qualified Joyce as a novelist from England (Cecchi 1923b: 130). 91  “Perché, inglese, Joyce lo è solo se si pensa alla lingua in cui scrive. Ma irlandese purissimo di razza e di ispirazione. Ma dai caravanserragli cosmopoliti di Trieste e di Zurigo ci è giunta di tanto in tanto la sua voce. Ma il suo dramma è stato fischiato a Monaco di Baviera. Ma l’opera sua maggiore è stata edita a Parigi e a Nuova York, e mentre il titolo ne è ellenico e arcaico, l’eroe è un qualsiasi giudeo dei nostri giorni (residente a Dublino e quindi originario di Szombathely in Ungheria)” (Gerbi 1927a: 271–272).

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“confusion” is a stable aspect of Joyce’s reception in Italy and can be explained if we look at it from the perspective we have chosen for this examination. Moreover, it seems to confirm Bulson’s point concerning how, in Il Convegno’s project to “access a wider literary system in the wake of a world war […] specific national and regional contexts and literary traditions were acknowledged but only insofar as they contributed to the idea of a Universal Europe” (Bulson 2016: 137). Svevo played a not-­ insignificant role in this regard, but while the lecture on Joyce he delivered at the Circolo del Convegno on 8 March 1927 did dwell on Joyce’s Irishness, it also thoroughly explored his relationship with Trieste. Unsurprisingly, though, the text of the lecture was not published in Il Convegno until 1937,92 at a time when political convenience made extolling Anglophone non-British writers an astute move, especially for a magazine that often found itself trying to ward off interference of the regime. Looking into the ways in which Irish literature has been recognized in Italy allows us to shed light on how the works of individual writers have been perceived in relation to national literary traditions, as well as how mediators affected, and were affected by, the constant negotiation of national identities concerning writers and literary works. It is certainly true, then, that it is thanks to early translations that Ulysses bypassed the initial censorship, as its popularity began to build up outside Ireland and that at present “Joyce sits at the heart of the polysystem of Irish cultural heritage not only by virtue of the distinctive Irishness of his works, but also because he made such Irishness visible to the world” (Torresi 2013: 223). However, while Joyce’s Irishness has been strongly reclaimed in Italy in the last decades, it was also downplayed to the point of being erased in the years between the first publication of his works and the rediscovery of Irish literature over the course of the Second World War. This process of denationalization appears even more pronounced if we take into account magazines such as Solaria and Occidente. Thus, Il Convegno increasingly established itself as a site for transnational literature; in light of this, its attitude toward Joyce reveals the magazine’s choice to privilege foreign “modernist” prose and psychological realism over regional literature. From the very start, Ferrieri’s intention had been to “combine the economic and publishing potential of Milan 92  A short extract of the lecture was indeed published in La Fiera Letteraria as “Ricordi di James Joyce” in late March (Svevo 1927), but Svevo was not pleased with the heavy cuts performed on his text.

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with a series of high-brow artistic and literary initiatives aimed at putting some distance between them and the image of the city as the capital of cultural consumerism” (Ponti 2003: 42). The long-term goal of Il Convegno was therefore to usher both Milan and the novel into highbrow circles in Italy, by heralding, among other things, European and North American realist and psychological novels. The main difference between Il Convegno and both the Florentine avant-garde and La Ronda is that the Milanese magazine aimed to reach a wider audience, while still upholding high literary standards (Baldini 2020: 98; 106–108). While it may be argued that Il Convegno was looking for a “third way” in the Italian debate between content and form in prose writing, which raged in 1930s’ Italy (see Ponti 2003: 17), it is certain that its strategy during the 1920s advocated for the role of prose (both short stories and novels) within the literary system of non-commercial literature with a strength that was matched by few competitors (see Chap. 4). Il Convegno “does not relegate […] the whole narrative and dramatic production to the commercial pole, as the Florentine avant-garde writers had done, and as is still done by La Ronda writers, who abstained from practicing those genres and invented the non-­ narrative genre of art prose” (Baldini 2020: 108). Among the competitors of Il Convegno was the Florence-based Solaria (1926–1934/1936), with which Il Convegno established an intense collaboration in the late 1920s, whose importance cannot be underrated. In those years, which also correspond to the magazine’s association with Italo Svevo’s works, many exponents of the Solaria group began to collaborate with Il Convegno, and there were even talks of establishing a Milanese branch of the Florentine review. Sergio Solmi, Giacomo Debenedetti, and Alberto Rossi, among others, seemed to drive Il Convegno closer to European Modernism and to what, in Italy, was often referred to as the psychological novel.93 This collaboration was abruptly interrupted in the early 1930s, but when Solaria was shut down by Fascist authorities, several Solariani became frequent contributors to Il Convegno. Thus, while the latter magazine’s interest in the modern European novel was at its most intense in the late 1920s, thanks, among other things, to the activities of the Circolo del Convegno,94 93  Serenella Zanotti mentions a 1930 article by Alberto Consiglio, published in Solaria, sanctioning this state of affairs: “Yoyce” [sic] is among the new “mauvais sujets” of European literature, not one of the Irish (Zanotti 2013: 153). 94  Several lectures were organized in those years that showed a keen interest in Modernist novels, among which one must mention, at least, Italo Svevo’s conference on Joyce on 8 March 1927 (Svevo 1995; for a list of the lectures, see Modena 2010).

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a general interest in foreign literature remained significant in the following decade. In this regard, Il Convegno was the ideal literary organ for Linati, who saw his engagement with foreign literature as a means to enriching his own creative undertakings: foreign literature had the goal of: modernizing Italian literature. Instead of devaluing Italian writers and critics, this foreign presence had just the opposite effect, and in the process of expanding the frame of reference, Il Convegno was not only educating a small reading public but also making it possible to imagine where Italian writers would fit into a much wider cultural universe. (Bulson 2016: 128)

Joyce was part and parcel of this process of negotiating a space within international Modernism for Italian writers. When, in 1922, Ernest Boyd wrote in the second edition of his Ireland’s Literary Renaissance that “no Irish writer is more Irish than Joyce” (Boyd 1922: 405), he was addressing a claim recently made by one of Joyce’s early French critics and advocates, Valéry Larbaud. Larbaud had claimed Joyce as an exponent of a transnational European literature, and Boyd was adamant in his opposition to the “effort now being made to cut [Joyce] off from the stream of which he is a tributary” (Boyd 1922: 404). However, the Irish and European Joyce coexist in Linati’s words as two mutually defining facets of the same writer. Joyce’s early affiliation with the Irish tradition has recently been discussed by Geert Lernout and John McCourt, among others. According to McCourt, despite Larbaud and Pound’s dismissive attitude toward Joyce’s Irishness, “there was always an understanding in Irish writing about Joyce that he was deeply implicated in and caught up with political events in his own country and that Ulysses was a fundamentally important text for understanding and later transforming Ireland and the Irish” (McCourt 2019: 100). The Irish Joyce that Linati had in mind in 1920, though, was not as involved with Irish affairs as the one identified by McCourt or the “overtly political” (Lernout 2008: 94) Irish writer Geert Lernout seemed to have in mind when he set him against the European author he intended to promote as a more accurate representation of Joyce. Linati’s Joyce is nearer the cosmopolitan writer Walkowitz considered in the passage discussed earlier: a writer engaged in a personal and political struggle to expand the notion of Irish literature, both at home and abroad. Joyce himself never objected to Linati’s mentioning the Irish elements in his prose, and was appreciative when Boyd included him in his survey of Irish

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literature,95 because it revealed an inclusiveness that was in tune with Joyce’s own non-monolithic understanding of national literature. After all, Boyd was no blind nationalist, but was instead attempting to broaden the canon of Irish literature. Nonetheless, “[t]he terms of the discussion between Larbaud and Boyd clearly demonstrate that the issue of Joyce as an Irish or as a European writer was present at the very beginning of Joyce’s international literary career” (Lernout 2008: 104), and as Lernout himself hinted at, the Italian debate on Joyce’s writings predates the Irish and French discussions. Starting with Diego Angeli’s review of A Portrait in 1917, this debate continued with Linati’s introduction to Exiles. Despite Joyce’s attempts to “[obscure] the Irishness of his literary works,” “[p]erhaps to secure the patronage of international modernists, or to avoid being labelled as provincial, or to enhance his own inventive powers,” Joyce wrote “for both Irish and international audiences” (Tymoczko 2000: 149), and the interplay between the early reception of his literary work and his attempt to become part of the literary scene in Italy is testament to his conflicting allegiances and somewhat contradictory strategies. In her The World’s Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova takes Joyce and Beckett as the two key examples of literary “revolutionaries” (Casanova 2004: 324) protesting against the center of national consecration and establishing new denationalized standards. Casanova’s approach to Irish literature has been fittingly questioned by Joe Cleary (2006) who considers it to be influenced by her unacknowledged modernist bias, among other issues. Furthermore, it may be noted that her narrative of Joyce’s Parisian consecration as instrumental in his denationalization96 did not fully take into account Joyce’s own frequent moves in other directions and the contribution of Joyce’s early reception abroad, including in Italy, in the early 1920s. Joyce’s “prematurely cosmopolitan reputation” (Boyd 1922: 404) was rapidly being established in Europe and was propounded not only by Linati and Larbaud, but also by Joyce’s first ally in the international literary field, Ezra Pound. The American poet and militant critic chose to include Joyce in his 1916 collection of imagist poetry, Des 95  “I daresay you did well to pass on Mr Gorman’s book to Mr Boyd. Mr Boyd, I notice, has added a chapter on me to the new edition of his history of the Irish literary movement. Evidently he has been reading on the subject” (Joyce to John Quinn, 5 February 1924, Joyce 1957: 210). 96  “Joyce, rejected and even banned in Dublin, was welcomed and consecrated by Paris, which made him an artist who revolutionized universal literature rather than merely an Irish national writer” (Casanova 2004: 128, my emphasis).

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Imagistes, precisely because he was the “the only Irish writer not absorbed in the [Celtic] ‘twilight’” (Pound 1967: 269). Moreover, in influential pieces such as “The Non-Existence of Ireland” (Pound  1915), Pound promoted a typically Modernist non-biographical criticism of Joyce that would strongly influence the Irish writer’s reception in Europe and the United States for decades to come. While Joyce’s Parisian consecration certainly accelerated the process, it is clear that his progressive detachment from Irish literature is attributable to an ample range of factors, involving known actors such as Ezra Pound and lesser-appreciated figures such as Diego Angeli and Carlo Linati who, however small, played a part in the process. Linati’s contribution, despite Pound’s decisive influence, was, however, at least as contradictory and ambiguous as Joyce’s, as these pages have tried to show. On the one hand, Linati made a final attempt, as late as 1932, to detach Irish literature from regionalist attitudes (focusing on Liam O’Flaherty in particular), as well as from nationalist discourses, and affiliate Joyce with this new current of Irish writings (Linati 1932). On the other hand, his early positioning of Joyce at the junction of Irish Revival and European Modernism confirms the simplified and exoticized understanding of the Irish Literary Revival in Italy. It is certainly no accident, but instead testifies to Linati’s complex and contradictory take on Joyce, that later in the same 1932 collection of essays, he affirmed the latter’s role as the beacon of the community of Parisian expats (Linati 1932: 161). Joyce the “spaesato” was progressively getting similar to Joyce the “Heimatlos” promoted by Pound. Unsurprisingly, the process of denationalizing Joyce also entailed viewing him as a non-political writer. This is rather significant if we consider another aspect of Casanova’s interpretation of Joyce’s consecration. According to the French scholar, Joyce was exemplary in his representing “literary autonomy,” especially if compared to the main exponents of the Irish Renaissance who were heavily involved in the cultural and political movement for the independence of Ireland. Joyce, however, “managed to establish an autonomous, purely literary pole, thus helping to obtain recognition for the whole of Irish literature by liberating it to some extent from political domination” (Casanova 2004: 315). While the notion of Joyce as a non-political writer has been questioned at least since the late 1970s (Corsini 1979/1992, Manganiello 1980), in favor of a more nuanced understanding of both Joyce’s explicit political stances and the implied politics of his main works, Casanova’s remark regarding the recognition of a non-political branch of Irish literature echoes some elements

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that were also present in the Italian situation, though they represented a minority position. Thus, despite Linati’s timid and rather intermittent attempts, the depoliticization of Joyce in Italy did not promote a different take on Irish literature. Instead, it confirmed the Italian bias typical of early twentieth century, whereby practically the only way to distinguish between a generic Anglophone and an Irish writer was the latter’s inevitable involvement, in some way, with the nationalist movement or at least national themes. Joyce’s Irishness was only to be rediscovered in Italy when external factors helped re-signify his belonging to Irish literature as a favorable characteristic, as we will see in Chap. 5. Linati’s initial positioning of Joyce in between his national tradition and a vaster European movement is a key moment in the reception (and perception) of Irish literature in Italy and perfectly dovetails with Joyce’s own nuanced understanding of that tradition. National affiliations were rather vague when it came to Ireland in Italy. The Italian-Irish Joyce who tried to “make it” as a journalist in Austrian Trieste before the Great War was briefly hailed for his Irishness in some niche circles. However, the future trajectory of the Italian Joyce would take him in a different direction, that of the “spaesato” European writer extolled by Il Convegno, as well as by other prominent avant-garde literary magazines such as ‘900 and the anti-Fascist Solaria. If fascist enthusiasts could still see him as simply “English,” as mentioned by Stanislaus in a 1936 letter,97 the Second World War and the ban on French and English writers would contribute to turning Joyce Irish again: “Joyce and Ulysses were not entirely lost to the clutches of cosmopolitan European modernism” (McCourt 2019: 111): Italian, Irish, European, English, and Irish again, Joyce’s reception in Italy confirmed Gerbi’s intuition of him being nothing but a geographical mystery.

3.4   Who’s He When He’s Abroad? The Revival in Italy After discussing the early reception of Irish literature in Italy, analyzing more in detail which elements of it made it beyond the Alps can be instructive. The international recognition of Yeats as a representative of Irish literature culminated in him being awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize. The 97  “Things English (and in this category they include things Joyce) are still taboo. Things Joyce doubly so” (Joyce 1966: 392).

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grounds for the award was “his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.”98 The idea of a “whole nation” behind the poet’s work was of course a convenient narrative for the Nobel committee, and Yeats tried, albeit timidly, to articulate the complexity of the Irish nationalist front in his acceptance speech, in which he outlined the struggle of a small number of courageous playwrights that would often find themselves “in a quarrel with public opinion that compelled” them “to become always more realistic, substituting dialect for verse, common speech for dialect” (Yeats 1980: 198). As explained in Gramscian terms by Cairns and Richards, the Irish Revival was not a united front, but presented conflicting “forces at play” “in a cultural struggle for the leadership and articulation of the people-nation” (Cairns and Richards 1988: 58). Yeats’s speech presented a version of the conflict between the Abbey Theatre and the nationalist movement that reflected the dialectics between the town and the country that formed a foundational aspect of the image the Abbey playwrights attempted to convey: “Synge’s work, the work of Lady Gregory, my own Cathleen ni Houlihan, and my Hour-Glass in its prose form […] bring the imagination and speech of the country, all that poetical tradition descended from the middle ages, to the people of the town” (Yeats 1980: 204). It is rather indicative that Yeats should mention Cathleen ni Houlihan as this, in particular, was one of the few instances when the politics of the Abbey were in accord with that of the people-nation (Cairns and Richards 1988: 58–88). With all its caution, however, Yeats’s speech painted a picture of a nationalist front ideally guided by the Ascendancy, a notion that he would further embrace in the early 1930s, and while not entirely glossing over the divisions within Irish society and within nationalist circles, he certainly did not foreground them and tended to be as inclusive as possible. This showed, among other things, that “‘Nationalism’ in Yeats’s Ireland was a large ideological umbrella for different sets of political beliefs that sometimes overlapped” (Bradley 2016: 10). These divisions were, to be sure, more complex than Yeats’s post-Civil War pacifying intent, as expressed in his Nobel speech, might suggest (see Cairns and Richards 1988: 58–138; Gibbons 1991a, b). What is important to emphasize here, however, is that this simplified version of Irish nationalism and the Celtic Revival was generally accepted 98  William Butler Yeats  – Facts. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2021. Thu. 12 Nov 2021. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1923/yeats/facts/ Last accessed 12 December 2020.

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in Italy, and as in Yeats’s speech, allusions to its complexity and nuances were mostly kept in the background. This was partly explained by the fact that Borsa’s and Linati’s versions of Irish drama disregarded all other theatrical ventures and only included a limited range of playwrights of the Abbey. In Linati’s case, this also involved ignoring the fact that, by the time he was introduced to their works, the company was already irredeemably at odds with the staunchest and most radical Sinn Féin nationalists as well as with the smaller theater companies that had cropped up in Ireland, such as the Cork Dramatic Society, the Ulster Literary Theatre, and the Theatre of Ireland (cf. Morash 2002: 148–152; Foster 2015: 75–113). Thus, while Sinn Féin and the Abbey playwrights only rarely saw eye to eye in matters political, the general understanding in 1900–1920s’ Italy was that a united nationalist, and mostly Catholic, front was opposing British power and fighting first for Home Rule and subsequently for complete independence. As shown by Lionel Pilkington, among others, the opposite was in fact true, to the point that often, as in the case of the Playboy, “To [the] broadly unionist and non-nationalist community, Synge’s play was perceived as taking a stand against the threatening tactics of the United Irish League and of the newly established political party, Sinn Féin” (Pilkington 2002: 60).99 The intricacies of Irish historical and mythical past that lay at the root of identity debates and confrontations in Ireland were faintly heard in Italy. While reference to a national past, and conflicting versions of it, were central to the definition of Irish identity in Ireland, only occasional ripples of the debates reached Italy. Italian mediators generally found it easy to conflate the pagan and mythical past of Ireland with its Christian, and even Catholic, tradition. The names of Samuel Ferguson, Daniel O’Connell, Yeats, Lionel Johnson, Standish O’Grady, Arthur Griffith, Padraic Collum, and Thomas Davies could be pronounced in the same breath as generic Irish poets or patriots, essentially belonging to the same movement. The stratifications of the Irish (literary) society were hardly taken into account, and a casual reader of Linati’s translations and articles would be excused for thinking that Yeats and Synge were Irish Catholics writing the story, and reinterpreting the myth, of their occupied country. Mario Borsa’s 1906 survey of the Irish National Theatre is another case in point. Borsa 99  As is known, the Playboy was contested on the night of its premiere because of its criticism of the idea of “uncorrupted Irishness which [nationalists] were so assiduously fostering” (Foster 2015: 76).

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provides a consistent and homogeneous narrative for what he dubs the Rinascenza Celtica, which is closely intertwined with the rejection of eminently British capitalism and modernity that we also find in Yeats’s nationalist poems, and which was instrumental to an exaltation of the Celtic past and construction of a utopian ideal of singular Irishness. Although Borsa’s pages carefully detail the constitutive elements of the then recent Irish literary movement, he provides a profoundly essentialist portrait of the Irish dramatic scene, in which London’s urban theaters are compared with the country playhouse of the Emerald Isle and “the peasant is the depositary of the national literature” (Borsa 1908: 288).100 In Borsa’s survey, Irish literature includes equal measures of Celtic myths and conservative Catholicism (Borsa 1906: 267; 276–7). It is thanks to his mediation, in all likelihood, that the triad composed of Yeats, Gregory, and Synge, which also constituted Linati’s early canon of Irish drama, was established in Italy. In light of the aforementioned, what did it mean for Italian mediators to label an author or a literary work as Irish at the start of the century? How did mediators’ more or less explicit choices and omissions affect the formation of a repertoire of Irish literature in Italy? In the mid-to-late 1920s, with Il Convegno engaged in becoming a more and more anthological and cosmopolitan review, the space for Irish literature in both periodicals and in the book market was severely curtailed. Even a cursory look at our database (www.ltit.it) confirms that between 1922 and 1929, the bulk of translated Irish literature consisted of writers that were not generally associated with Ireland, such as Wilde and Shaw, and others whose connection with Ireland had become, in those years, more and more tenuous, such as Joyce. However, Italian mediators of the time seemed at least to share a rather defined view of what they usually called “rinascenza” or “rinascimento,” “celtico” or “irlandese,” which they took directly from the early irlandesisti we have discussed. The two latter terms, in particular, were used almost indifferently by Italian commentators, not unlike happened in the first decade of the Revival in Ireland, where “the term ‘race’ was appended indiscriminately to the terms ‘Celtic’, ‘Gaelic’ and ‘Irish’” (Gibbons 1991b: 563). This was not without consequences: in the usually simplified accounts of Irish culture and literature, the Celtic and Irish elements were often conflated, and ingeniously mixed with the Catholic 100  “il contadino è il depositario della letteratura nazionale” (Borsa 1906: 258). Quotations from passages translated by Selwyn Brinton will be employed here and identified as “Borsa 1908”.

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element, which appeared inextricable from any representation of the Irish character at the time. The canon of Irish literature put forward by Borsa and Linati was therefore essentially Anglo-Irish—if we consider the authors—and national—though it included very few overtly political plays,101 but was presented as both Celtic and Catholic, despite encompassing the likes of Yeats, Gregory, Synge, Goldsmith, Sheridan, and even Blake and Spenser. At the same time, this broad notion of Irish literature remained mainly limited to criticism and did not bring about a comparable wealth of translations, which, as we have seen, were very few in quantitative terms. There was, so to speak, a significant gap between what was discussed as Irish and what was actually translated: a limited repertoire of translated authors always hinting at the wealth of other authors for Italian readers to discover.102 After Linati’s translations established Yeats, Gregory, and Synge as the main exponents of the Irish literary movement, Italian publishers did not seem to show much interest in other writers connected with the Revival until the late 1920s. The Tre Corone of the Revival were often discussed in the cultural pages of newspapers and literary reviews, and even in influential highbrow quarterlies such as the Florentine Nuova Antologia, and formed the ideal repertoire of Irish literature for Italian intellectuals. Some, like Synge, were even performed in theaters, though they did not always meet with success. The only Irish writer who was consistently translated into Italian and produced in theaters was Shaw, whose plays enjoyed a certain popularity in both Liberal and Fascist Italy. While critics at times mentioned Shaw’s Irish origins, he was not generally perceived as Irish. If we look at the reviews and articles published in Nuova Antologia and Rassegna Contemporanea, which devoted considerable space to Irish affairs both political and literary, it is hard to find any mention of Shaw 101  While critical works such as those by Buonaiuti and Turchi were generally more prone to discussing nationalist ideals than Borsa or Linati, it is also worth noting that in all the early Italian surveys, the most overtly nationalist plays were also missing, such as Lady Gregory’s Kincora (1905) and Dervorgilla (1907), as well as those by Lennox Robinson (Patriots, 1912), Thomas MacDonagh, Constance Markievicz, and Terence MacSwiney (The Revolutionist, 1914), to limit ourselves to those that had stronger links with the Abbey Theatre. 102  The crop is even more meager if we turn to literature in Irish: with the exception of a short story by Padraic O’Conaire published in Il Contemporaneo in 1924, in all likelihood an indirect translation from the English—again by Linati—the Italian public was not exposed to any work originally written in Irish.

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belonging to what had been called the current of Irish literature. The same applies, to a certain extent to Wilde, whose works enjoyed numerous editions, although his success on stage was essentially limited to Strauss’s version of Salome. It is, however, no wonder that Linati should mention them in conjunction with Yeats, in his first introduction to Irish literature. Both Shaw and Wilde were household names in Italy, easily recognizable as two of the protagonists of English drama of the time, and they represented the most obvious connection between the London stage and the blossoming Irish dramatic scene. The link, to be sure, had already been established by Maurice Bourgeois in his 1913 work on Synge, with which Linati was familiar.103 Despite few exceptions, to be found in particular in political commentaries, the various mediators I have mentioned and analyzed in the first chapters of this book tended to provide a substantially consistent picture of Irish culture and literature. The criticism and translations of literary texts were characterized by the emergence of certain patterns and features, both in the peritexts and in the texts themselves. The most characteristic elements of Irish literature in Italy for the first two decades of the twentieth century were that it was essentially different from English literature, it was fueled by Irish folklore, it was both Celtic and Catholic, and its form of choice was drama. Thus, Italian mediators seemed to focus on a limited, and somewhat restrictive, number of characteristics as a means of identifying a literature that would have otherwise defied any simple definition. As discussed in the introduction, “[t]ranslation wields enormous power in constructing representations of foreign cultures” (Venuti 1998: 67), but these representations often result in a process of simplification. This is connected to the mechanism whereby foreign literatures are “dehistoricized by the selection of texts for translation” (Venuti 1998: 67) and seen through the lens of the homogenizing aesthetic of the mediator, but it is arguably more common when dealing with literatures whose main language poses problems in terms of their acknowledgment, either because it is shared by other national groups or because its status as a national language is debated. In this sense, a “literature seconde” (to use a phrase coined by Gustave Charlier and borrowed by Joep Leerssen) is more likely 103  “It is remarkable how dependent on Irishmen, from the Restoration onwards, England has been for her plays, or at any rate for her comedies. Congreve, though she fostered him, Ireland cannot claim; but Farquhar was Irish, and so were Steele, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Wilde and Shaw; not to mention such lesser lights as Macklin, Sheridan Knowles and Dion Boucicault” (Bourgeois 1913: 67).

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to go through a process of simplification and “is often distinguished from its ‘mainstream’ on the basis of its perceived, indeed stereotyped ‘national characteristics’” (Leerssen 1997: 13). Narrating Ireland in Italy thus seemed to entail the production of a more or less homogeneous narrative. The non-British, or non-English, element, depending on the emphasis of the mediator, was a staple of literary discourses and would be perceived as a key characteristic of Irish literature for most of the time span under consideration, before giving way to a more explicitly belligerent anti-­ Englishness, an overt conflict rather than simple difference. The sheer existence of an Irish literature that was not tightly bound with national affairs or concerned with Irish themes, and somewhat opposed to English literature, was rarely considered by Italian mediators who were at pains to define such an elusive object. Even critics who were less prone to reading literary matters through the lens of politics, such as the Turin professor Federico Oliviero, relied on essentialist and stereotypical notions and defined Irish poetry in opposition to English, by stating that “contemporary Irish poetry […] is inspired by the sentiments now dominating the consciousness of that people: their ardent love for the fatherland, love for nature and the traditional legends of their lineage.”104 The fact that Linati increasingly attempted to silence the political element of the Abbey playwrights does not contravene his essentially romantic and national, and at times nationalist, repertoire, consisting of writers who were explicitly declaring their national allegiance. Nevertheless, the Como writer was aware of the difficulty of defining Irish literature written in the English language as simply opposed to English literature due to the intertwined histories of the two traditions. The images characterizing the start of his “proemio” to Yeats’s plays are quite telling: With Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and William Butler Yeats, the Irish current has now branched into the ample river of Anglo-Saxon literature. Though it did penetrate in it, while keeping its ethnic features, its historical vigor, the originality of its institutions, well defined. Features, vigors, originality embodying a secret, intense opposition to the British spirit.105 104  “la poesia contemporanea irlandese […] si ispira ai sentimenti che dominano ora essenzialmente la coscienza di quella popolazione: l’affetto ardente per la patria, l’amore alla natura ed alle leggende tradizionali della loro stirpe” (Oliviero 1912: 507; see also Oliviero 1910). 105  “Con Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde e William Butler Yeats la corrente irlandese si è ormai diramata per entro il gran fiume della letteratura anglosassone. Ma v’è penetrata conservando

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There are several elements worthy of consideration here, including the idea of “vigor” associated with Ireland that would become a more prominent trait in the following decades. What is interesting for the purpose of the matter at hand is how Linati brings together two images which are usually opposed from a semantic point of view: the current of Irish literature branches from within the “ample river of Anglo-Saxon literature” but it also penetrates it, which is a figuration usually associated with external elements intruding from the outside. This semantic ambiguity would characterize the reception of Irish literature in Italy for the following decades. Writers working at the margins of a purely national canon were therefore less likely to be translated or, if they were, were not generally granted rights to Irish literary citizenship: the stereotype, that is, produced a circular pattern, whereby “the characterization of a certain group may often be found to serve at the same time as the defining criterion of the membership in that group” (Leerssen 1997: 12) as in Leerssen’s compelling argument about national character.106 Early mediators would tend to solve the issue by adopting a stricter approach to the nationality of writers, but would still be caught, so to speak, off guard when dealing with individual ambivalent cases. The liminality of some writers was thus all the more evident if we consider how often their nationality wavered: to give but one example, Cecchi was happy to mention Swift, Wilde (whose imagination is “essentially Celtic”), Shaw, and even Blake as writers from the “Emerald Isle born to English literature” [“Dall’isola di Smeraldo, sono nati alla letteratura inglese” (Linati and Cecchi 2012: 177)] in his 1914 review of Linati’s Yeatsian translations, but he conformed to the general attitude when writing about them on other occasions. An element that was strictly linked to the non-English character of Irish literature is the insistence on its Pagan myths and its Celtic character. “Celtic” is perhaps the most pervasive descriptor used by Italian mediators of the texts examined here. As noted by Joep Leerssen (1996), the term intatti e ben pronunciati i suoi caratteri etnici, la vigoria storica, l’originalità delle sue intuizioni. Caratteri, vigoria, originalità informati ad una segreta, intensa opposizione allo spirito britannico” (Yeats 1914: ix). 106  Lawrence Venuti makes a similar argument based on Edward Fowler’s study on the reception of Japanese literature in the US, claiming that “[t]he Japanese novels that were not consistent with the postwar academic canon because they were comic, for example, or represented a more contemporary, westernized Japan  - these novels were not translated into English or, if translated, were positioned on the fringes of English-language literature, published by smaller, more specialized publishers (Kodansha International, Charles E. Tuttle) with limited distributions” (1998: 73).

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“Celt” is quite vague, and that vagueness was variously exploited in Italy. The Italian mediators who employed it could use it as inclusive of the Arthurian cycle (as does Linati mentioning Boiardo in his introduction to Yeats) or in a more restrictive fashion, limiting its use to Ireland. Italian mediators were nonetheless aware of, and ready to subscribe to, the notion of a supposedly shared character of Celtic nations: this is evident, as we have discussed, in Linati’s emphasis on the strong relationship between Irish, Breton, and Lombard peoples. In Borsa’s book on English theater, the main source of information about the alleged character of Celtic people and their culture was Matthew Arnold, a constant presence in the time span under consideration. Irish people were therefore seen as belonging to the wider family of Celtic peoples in Europe: they are eminently rural and wild, rebellious and feminine, and stubbornly fighting against “the despotism of fact” (Arnold 1962: 82). It is to an ingenious mix of some of these characteristics that Borsa seems to refer when describing the protagonist of Yeats’s Where there is nothing as performing a “wild spiritual upheaval” (Borsa 1908: 314) [“selvaggia ribellione dello spirito” (Borsa 1906: 284)], as well as describing Irish theater as a “sincere” and “spontaneous,” “lowly and unadorned, but genuinely poetic country playhouse” (Borsa 1908: 286–7) [“sincera” “spontanea,” “povero, disadorno e poetico teatro di campagna” (Borsa 1906: 257–8)] opposed to the capitalist organization and “huckstering vulgarity”107 (Borsa 1908: 286) [“il suo affarismo e la sua volgarità” (Borsa 1906: 257)] of London theaters, as alluded to earlier. A strong reliance on the uncorrupted character of the Irish as sketched by Arnold is manifest also in Borsa’s earlier recognition of Shaw’s “partial” Irishness: Irish by birth, but brought up in London, he has no weakness of sentiment either for the country which he has abandoned, or for that of his later adoption, which has hitherto dominated the former to its detriment. As a matter of fact, his genius is only partly Irish; for he is the very negation of that hidden and melancholy lyricism which is one of the characteristics of the Celtic temperament; while on the other hand, he has all the reckless gaiety, the keen humor, the vivacious brilliancy which are equally typical of the race. (Borsa 1908: 121)108 107  The mention of hucksters in the English translation somewhat resonates with the rejection of materialism and modernity in Yeats’s idea of national identity, as argued by, among others, Seamus Deane (1987). 108  “Irlandese d’origine, ma cresciuto in Londra, egli non ha alcun debole per il paese che ha abbandonato, come non ne ha per quello che ne è stato la rovina. Anche il suo ingegno è

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Borsa’s take on Shaw, which emphasizes the playwright’s marginal position straddling his two nationalities, also shows how this was based on an essentialist view of national character. However, Borsa was usually more prone than other observers to pigeonhole writers according to their nationality, based not just on stereotypical assumptions or birthright, but on what we might call structural grounds. While he considers Sheridan, Goldsmith, Wilde, and Shaw English, because their careers contributed to the English literary and dramatic system, and mainly addressed English audiences, Yeats, Synge, and the other Abbey playwrights are Irish because they brought into being a new, local, dramatic movement.109 Unlike Linati, for whom birth and inspiration seemed to count more, on the basis of which, then, even William Blake could be Irish, in his book on drama, Borsa pays more attention to structural elements toward his definition of an Irish canon of playwrights. As mentioned in the introduction, in order to appreciate the significance of translation and mediation fluxes, it can be productive not to focus only on the writers that were effectively discussed or translated, but to turn our attention to what was missing, in terms of genres or forms, in the Italian repertoire of Irish writings. A glaring omission in the publishers’ catalogs was Irish poetry. The discourse on the poetic achievements of Irish writers, and Yeats in particular, was virtually silenced in Italy until the 1930s, though it is possible to trace a thread of more or less successful attempts contradicting De Logu’s claim that “in the period between the two wars […] Yeats’s creative activity enjoyed no popularity at all” (De Logu 1988: 59).110 At the start of the century, Marinetti published two Yeats’s fragments from his play Deirdre, in English, presented with the title “A Dirge over Deirdre and Naise” [sic], in the elegant magazine Poesia (Yeats 1906–1907), but the future founder of Futurism did not solo in parte irlandese. Egli è la negazione di quel velato e malinconico lirismo che è una delle caratteristiche del temperamento celtico; ma ha però il brio rodomontesco, la causticità, la vivezza che sono altre egualmente tipiche qualità della razza” (Borsa 1906: 96). 109  This argument was echoed at several intervals in the history of Irish studies, and among others by Brian Friel in his 1972 essay on Shaw, “Plays Peasant and Unpeasant”, where he affirms that Shaw should not be considered part of the Irish canon because he “wrote within the English tradition, for the English stage and for the English people” (quoted in Clare 2016: 175). 110  The claim has been appropriately questioned by Enrico Reggiani, who has advanced the hypothesis that the presence of Yeats in Italy should be investigated more thoroughly, taking into account elements connected with the circulation of Irish literature (Reggiani 2010: 167–187).

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entertain any meaningful relationship with Irish poetry after that. Almost ten years later, Linati translated some of Yeats’s poems in his preface to Tragedie irlandesi (1914) and in L’Eroica (Yeats 1919c), as well as Synge’s, in an article on the dramatist’s own verses and translation from Petrarca and Leopardi (Linati 1919a), but his attempts did not extend much further than that. One of the motivations for this was probably that Linati was rarely tempted by poetry in his own creative output, with his forays into poetic criticism equally rare. Moreover, while it is clear that there was nothing to stop literary mediators from translating Irish poetry, the focus on drama, so prominent in the 1910s, arguably discouraged the perception of poetry as a significant element of Irish literature. This is quite clear when investigating the reception of Yeats. Despite the fact that one of the first mentions of Yeats in Italy, a 1905 article in Emporium signed by Ulisse Ortensi, who introduced him as a “young poet” and an “Irish prince, fully characteristic of his race, with all the richness, all the passions and all the sentiments of that race itself,”111 for a long time Yeats was almost ­exclusively perceived as a dramatist. Until the late 1930s, Yeats’s poetry was primarily limited to the paratextual margins of other publications or the activity of mediators working at the periphery of the literary system, such as Federico Oliviero (1910, 1925), Gian Dàuli (1907), Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1926), and Francesco Gargaro (1933, 1935). Tomasi di Lampedusa’s article in Le opere e i giorni was one of the first to declare the superiority of Yeats’s poetry over his drama. Lampedusa, whose knowledge of Yeats and Irish literature primarily derived from his cousin Lucio Piccolo, a correspondent of Yeats’s since 1919,112 is one of the first Italian mediators to frame Irishness in terms of both melancholy and virility, building on a point already timidly alluded to by Linati, and thus explaining the tendency of Irish writers such as Swift, Shaw, and Joyce to produce satires displaying “frenetic lightnings of violence and that unflinchingly caustic spirit” [“frenetici lampi di violenza e quello spirito irriducibilmente mordace” (Lampedusa 1926: 38)]. Borsa and Linati also influenced his notion of Yeats as a national rather than nationalist poet, to the point that Lampedusa explicitly stated that Yeats’s poetry is not militant like Goffredo 111  “giovane poeta”; “principe irlandese, in pieno carattere di razza, con tutte le ricchezze, tutte le passioni e tutti i sentimenti della razza stessa” (quoted in Fantaccini 2009: 165). See also Fantaccini (2013). 112  “WBY had corresponded since 1919 about occult matters with Lampedusa’s cousin Lucio Piccolo, poet and Rosicrucian; Piccolo described himself as a disciple of ‘il vecchio Butler, but they do not seem to have met when the Yeatses were in Sicily” (Foster 2003: 379).

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Mameli’s, the author of the Italian national anthem. Still, Lampedusa traces a direct link between Yeats and the armed struggle for independence in Ireland: he did not stir up the rebellion, nor sang the barricades, but he has outlined the lineaments of his people and how they differ from the “others” that, once his work was accomplished, a few months of violence were enough to achieve what had felt like utopia for centuries. […] Before putting a gun in the hands of the Irish, one had first to show that they existed.113

As noted by Fantaccini, in this well-informed and extremely elegant text, “the original element is the acknowledgement of a metaphysical derivation of Yeats’s poetry” (Fantaccini 2009: 172), rather than the symbolist vein which was commonly associated with him. Things started to change in the late 1920s, and the recognition of Yeats’s poetic output grew in Italy, even at the expense of his theatrical works. Yeats’s liminal position is heightened in Ruberti’s Storia del teatro contemporaneo  [History of Contemporary Theatre], where he is primarily seen as a lyrical poet rather than as a pure dramatist, whose plays are often fragmentary and rarely achieve unity (Ruberti 1928: 895). As we will see in the next chapter, a decisive contribution to the demotion of Yeats as a playwright came from Camillo Pellizzi’s Il teatro inglese [English Drama] (1934). Despite the presence of a substantial section on Irish drama in Pellizzi’s book, Yeats significantly featured, instead, in a chapter on “Epici e lirici del teatro” [“Epic and lyrical dramatists”], as a poet who had resorted to drama in order to bring poetry to the masses. The first substantial translation project concerning Yeats and Irish poetry in general, though, was carried out by Francesco Gargaro, who published a translation of a selection of Yeats’s poems in 1933 and then, in 1935, La rosa nel vento: poesie dall’inglese (da William Blake a James Stephens) [The rose in the wind: poems in English (from William Blake to James Stephens)], an anthology whose title was clearly inspired by Yeats’s work. While the book also included poems by William Blake, Dante Gabriele Rossetti, James Stephens, and George Russell (AE), Yeats’s 41 poems accounted for the lion’s share of the anthology, which was aimed at 113  “egli non ha incitato alla ribellione e cantato le barricate; ma ha a tal punto marcato i lineamenti del suo popolo e la sua differenziazione dagli “altri” che, la sua opera compiuta, pochi mesi di violenza son stati sufficienti a realizzare quello che, nei secoli, potè sembrare utopia. […] Prima di porre un fucile nelle mani degli irlandesi occorreva dimostrare che essi esistevano” (Lampedusa 1926: 41).

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providing a survey of Irish symbolism and its English roots. It is therefore no wonder that Blake’s Irishness (manifest in his “excessive and barbaric temperament, primitive and visionary soul”)114 should be evoked. A key element of Gargaro’s anthology, that sets him apart from other irlandesisti of the time, is that he did not steer away from translating Yeats’s and Stephens’s most ethnic poems, dealing with Irish mythology and folklore, while still avoiding the most overtly political texts. The so-­called ethnic qualities of Irish literature, and of Yeats’s poetry in particular, were often deemed “too different from the Italian” (Riccio 1929: 79) and “too local” (Ruberti 1928: 279) by mediators claiming that Irish poetry could not be profitably translated into Italian (Lampedusa 1926: 37; Oliviero 1925). The quality of Gargaro’s translations, which “rigorously respected Yeats’s rhyming patterns” (Fantaccini 2009: 174), did not, however, grant his anthology the wide circulation it deserved. It was not until the translations of Leone Traverso that the Italian avant-garde produced its own version of Yeats’s poetry. Traverso’s early translations were published in Il Frontespizio in 1938 and then in a minute booklet by Vanni Scheiwiller’s imprint, All’insegna del pesce d’oro (Yeats 1939), with a print run of 250 copies. It was an extremely limited selection and primarily focused on Yeats’s lyrical and love poems, though it spanned a relatively wide range of different moments in Yeats’s career, as it consisted of poems originally included in most of the poet’s collections, from The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) to The Winding Stair (1933). As noted by Franco Buffoni, Traverso’s translations are particularly effective and testify to a “poietic encounter” (Buffoni 2007: 57) between him and Yeats. In them, Traverso attempts to “minimize the importance of the subject” (Buffoni 2007: 63) in a way that perfectly combines Yeats’s symbolism and the hermeticist movement Traverso was part of.115 It was not until 1949 that these translations were included in a new and extended edition of Yeats’s poems, featuring Traverso’s revised translations and published by Cederna (Yeats 1949). The case of the (few) collections of Yeats’s poetry published in Italy arguably testifies to the very narrow portrait of the poet Yeats that was common in the country at the time and for the decades to follow. The story of the reception, or lack thereof, of Irish poetry, and particularly 114  “il temperamento eccessivo e barbarico, l’anima primitiva e visionaria” (Gargaro 1935: vii–viii). 115  For a survey of the translation activity of the third generation of hermeticist poets, see Dolfi (2004); on poetic translation in the 1930s, see Fortini (1972).

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Yeats’s, is quite instructive, as it suggests that a foreign tradition can undergo a process of specialization in the receptor’s discourses and thus struggle to be perceived differently once the stereotype has hardened. As alluded to, connected to the desultory reception of Yeats’s poetic output is the conviction that certain ethnic elements of Irish literature could not be adequately appreciated in Italy—which was also Linati’s motivation for not translating Joyce’s Portrait—and this aspect also affected the circulation of Irish mythology and folklore in Italy. These two realms were generally perceived in Italy as central elements of what distinguished the Irish nation from the rest of the British Empire. In this understanding of Irish Celtic roots as eliciting separatist and nationalist sentiments, the Italian perception of Irish culture confirms Leerssen’s take on Irish Celticism as different from the Scottish and the Welsh varieties (Leerssen 1996: 13). While Italian mediators acknowledged it as a key element to understanding Ireland, the interest in Irish folklore and its mythical past was often limited to sporadic allusions in critical surveys, with works of Irish folklore rarely being translated, unlike what happened, for instance, in Germany where Yeats’s Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry was translated as early as 1894 (Fantaccini 2009: 165). To give but one, albeit significant, example, Italian readers were not generally able to read the collections of folklore that constituted a great deal of what was written (and translated) in Ireland during the Celtic Revival. Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight (1893), for instance, that was so emblematic as to lend its name to the entire period, was not translated in Italy until the late 1980s (Yeats 1987), and the same applies to the folkloric collections put together by Lady Gregory,116 Douglas Hyde, or Standish O’Grady. While Cúchulainn, the demigod hero of the Ulster cycle, was a familiar figure among Italian irlandesisti, it is instructive to learn that Luigi Sturzo, the founder of the Italian Popular Party [Partito Popolare Italiano], would discuss Irish mythology in 1925 by referring to French sources, rather than Irish or Italian, as fittingly noted by Enrico Reggiani (2010: 167–173), highlighting an indirect link and the substantial absence of primary sources for Italian readers interested in the matter. This blind spot not only reflected the choice of writers to include in the repertoire, but also which genres were more likely to be translated. To be sure, the low status of popular and particularly fantastic literature in Italy seemed to go 116  Not unlike Yeats’s Celtic Twilight, Lady Gregory’s folk tales were translated in Italy for the first time only during a revival of Irish culture in Italy in the 1980s.

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against the dissemination of those works. It is generally accepted that Italian literature at the turn of the twentieth century could not boast a copious tradition of fantastic literature as, since the nineteenth century, Gothic and fantastic themes central to northern European romanticism were generally regarded with suspicion by Italian literati. Unsurprisingly, this also affected the reception of the works of Bram Stoker: they were either not translated or, as in the case of Dracula, translated in cheap editions with very scant paratexts featuring no information on the nationality of the author (Bibbò 2018). These elements probably help offer a better understanding of some of the omissions in the repertoire of Irish literature translated in Italy during the first decades of the century. Moreover, works more directly connected with popular literature and the folkloric tradition of Ireland, such as James Stephens’s The Crock of Gold (1912) and Lady Gregory’s collections, or more generally linked to the international production of fantastic literature such as Lord Dunsany’s works, were not translated and rarely discussed in the first phase of the Italian exploration of Irish literature. While The Crock of Gold (1912) was eventually ­translated at the end of the 1920s, Lord Dunsany would enjoy a momentary peak of popularity in 1925 due to the choice of his The Gods of the Mountain to open the first season of Pirandello’s Teatro d’Arte, as we will see in the next chapter. Nonetheless, it was not until the ban on English writers during the Second World War that other plays by Lord Dunsany were published in Italy, while Stephens’s works virtually disappeared. The Italian literary system was therefore not particularly attuned to the kind of fantastic and folkloric literature that was at the root of the Irish literary movement. Irish myths could be appreciated if they constituted the basis for the development of a play or poem, as one can read in Linati’s preface to Yeats’s Tragedie irlandesi (1914), which is reflected in Linati’s early infatuation with the theme, but were rarely published and circulated on their own. Somewhat contradictorily, the romantic view of Ireland that was widespread in Italy, therefore, made its wealth of stories central to a definition of its character, but did not significantly affect the book market and the production of translations. Thus the folklorists’ discourse was silenced in the market of Italian translations, in favour of the realism of writers like Synge. The depiction of Ireland and the Aran Island as primitive and rural, distant from European civilization and continental materialism strongly characterizes Linati’s view. In the writings of the author from Como, this is certainly linked to his aim to find a common denominator for Ireland and Lombardy, as

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noted earlier. The Lombard culture Linati had in mind was sentimental and nostalgic, but had little of the interest in magic and otherworldly creatures found in Irish revivalist literature: the most viable solution for Linati was therefore to progressively downplay that aspect of Irish literature, which was still present in his versions and in his more Yeatsian works of the war years and only reemerges ever so briefly in his Aran Island excerpts. This process is articulated in what Lawrence Venuti describes as “ethnocentric reduction of possibilities, excluding not only other possible representation of foreign cultures, but also other possible constructions of domestic subjects” (Venuti 1998: 82). The image of Ireland Linati had in mind was instrumental to constructing the domestic subjects he sought to address. In the words of Venuti, “[t]ranslation forms domestic subjects by enabling a process of “mirroring” or self-recognition: the foreign text becomes intelligible when the reader recognizes himself or herself in the translation by identifying the domestic values that motivated the selection of that particular foreign text, and that are inscribed in it through a particular discursive strategy” (Venuti 1998: 77).117 In the early 1920s, Linati moved even more decisively toward realist and psychological writing, and Yeats’s symbolism and his personal and national mythology were progressively sidelined in favor of Synge’s realism and—when Linati’s interest in the Lombard school began to wane—of “urban” works by Joyce, Stephens, and Lennox Robinson, an interest he shared with Enzo Ferrieri, as we know. In so doing, Linati was probably driven by his love of Synge and his aim to bring together the latter’s realism and the style of the Italian “veristi,” including their later interest in the life of the twentieth-­century city. Unsurprisingly, while these works could often be easily recognized by the readers as Irish since they presented explicit Irish elements, their 117  Something similar happens in Galicia, in Spain, where the reception of Anglo-Irish literature starts as a popular movement, involving an intellectual movement and not just a few isolated figures; thus, unlike in Lombardy, folklore is prominent: “When the intellectuals who made up the so-called “Cova Céltica” began to probe into the origins and identity of Galicia, they realized that Galician culture lacked the mythical heroes found in the Greek and Román tradition. It was found to be necessary to look for the cultural roots, and, as defenders of the Celtic identity of Galicia, they had no difficulty in finding legendary heroes in the Irish tradition. Such is the case of the legend of Breogán, who appears in the Lebor Gabala Erenn and who today forms an inseparable part of the Galician cultural background, being named in the Galician National Anthem” (De Toro Santos 1995: 231). See also MacCarthy (2011) and Lázaro (2006).

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belonging to a specific national literature was not insisted upon by Linati and Ferrieri at this stage. This is a puzzling attitude on their part, as noted in the previous section, since, on the one hand it can arguably be taken as a way to provide a more nuanced take on Irish literature than the one Linati himself had presented in the 1910s, but on the other it could signal the two mediators’ gradual detachment from the task of providing a narrative about Irishness for their readers. The latter option seems more probable as, apart from very sporadic occurrences, both would set aside Irish literature for about fifteen years and would not return to it until the years leading up to the Second World War. Due to Linati’s interest in the earthy elements of Irish writing, it is also worth considering that he was not tempted by the works of George Moore, both those such as Esther Waters (1894) from his Zolian season and, perhaps even more so, those closer to the aesthetics of the Revival, like The Untilled Field (1903). While Moore’s works were not available in translation until the late 1920s, his output was known among Italian mediators of Irish literature before then, as we can infer from Federico Oliviero’s essays (1914) and Mario Vinciguerra’s insightful criticism.118 However, as we will see in the next chapter, the absence of Moore and, more generally, of Irish novelists can arguably be explained with reference to the low status of the novel within the Italian system rather than to any specific lack of interest in individual novelists or Irish literature in general. These pages have attempted to show some of the difficulties in defining the borders of Irish literature in Italy, and especially focus on how the conflicting attitudes of literary mediators involved in the dissemination of Irish texts elicited different images of Ireland, and literary canons, even though they were focused on a comparatively restricted range of characteristics. In particular, the porosity of Irish literature was addressed in both the need for a set of definite characteristics, and the dynamics between a narrow repertoire of translated authors (that roughly corresponds to the authors translated by Linati and Ferrieri) and a larger and loose canon of writers that were discussed and perceived as Irish in works of criticism. This narrow repertoire is manifestly not what Linati had in mind when he 118  Vinciguerra’s essays were published in 1926 under the title Romantici e Decadenti Inglesi by a relatively minor publisher (Foligno’s Franco Campitelli) but first appeared in reviews such as Il Conciliatore.

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set out to discover Irish literature and strove to provide examples of its diverse strands, including Yeats’s symbolism, Lady Gregory’s Goldonian comedies, and Synge’s “gritty verismo.” This is confirmed by his and Enzo Ferrieri’s concerted effort to enlarge the repertoire to include Synge’s travelogues and short prose by Joyce, Stephens, O’Conaire, and Robinson, but their timid attempt did not elicit immediate results. As we will see, the development of the realist school in Ireland, along with the heightened status of prose and especially novel writing in Italy, would result in the discovery and translation of an ampler number of Irish writers, and thus deepen the awareness of Irish literature in Italy. This was also favored by an innovative set of images of Ireland, more tightly bound with the Fascist regime, which was being articulated by a new generation of irlandesisti.

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CHAPTER 4

Ireland in Fascist Italy

4.1   Political Discourses, Travelogues, and Historical Narratives Between the wars, there was a wider perception among Italian observers of the Irish Free State as a country in its own right, rather than merely as part of the British Empire. Thus, Ireland’s partially achieved independence was reflected in the images of the country that circulated in Italy. Most intellectuals of that period tended to see Ireland as a cognate country and a potential Fascist ally, and quite significantly, it was no longer compared to Italian regions but rather to the whole of Italy. This is a significant development of postwar years. Whereas until the early 1920s Italian observers were more inclined to compare Ireland’s condition to that of some depressed regions of Italy, such as the South or Sicily (see Borgatta 1914; Fienga 1916), or to regions which were supposed to strive for independence such as Sardinia,1 this attitude started to change in the wake of the Great War, with most Italian commentators now more prone to see Ireland as a separate nation, worthy of governing itself, and a 1  In a 9 December 1921 speech at the Italian Chamber of Deputies, Emilio Lussu had to clarify that his happiness about the recent Irish independence (the Anglo-Irish Treaty had just been signed) was not due to Sardinia’s harboring similar claims, despite the arguable historical, ethnographic, and geographical affinities between the two islands (Lussu 2008: 26–7).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Bibbò, Irish Literature in Italy in the Era of the World Wars, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83586-6_4

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potential ally of Fascist Italy. The apex of such attitudes can be located in 1934, when William Butler Yeats was invited to the Volta Conference as a keynote speaker, and Nicola Pascazio wrote an infamous book heralding a Fascist future for Ireland. However, not all irlandesisti shared this interpretation: almost thirty years after his influential chapters on Irish theater (Borsa 1906), Mario Borsa wrote a compelling biography of Roger Casement, one of the few documents of the period that conveyed a rebellious image of an Ireland that did not harbor Fascist sentiments, covert or otherwise. Around the same time, philosopher Mario Manlio Rossi, a Berkeley and Swift scholar, wrote a travelogue titled Viaggio in Irlanda [Journey to Ireland]  (1932). Translated by Joseph Hone in 1933 as Pilgrimage in the West, this was the only Italian work to appear in the catalog of the distinguished Yeatsian Cuala Press. Among other structural issues, however, the circulation in Italy of such unorthodox ideas suffered from the overwhelming effect of Fascist propaganda and from the fact that the sway of the intellectuals propounding such notions was relatively low either because they were anti-Fascist or because their symbolic capital was mostly acquired abroad and in academic circles, something that was particularly true of Rossi. Furthermore, their books were isolated contributions that did not form part of any systematic attempt either to propagate an alternative view of Ireland or to promote more varied translation activities that would provide narrative accrual to their discourses. Neither Borsa nor Rossi were able to directly influence the political field or the book market (nor, in fact, seemed interested in doing so), and the idea of a potentially Fascist anti-English Ireland became more prominent in Italy. It would gain further ground in the years following the 1935 sanctions for the Italian occupation of Ethiopia, and particularly after Italy joined the World War against England in 1940. After an examination of the work of these mediators, thus, the first section of the chapter will conclude with an analysis of a selection of the numerous 1940s books and pamphlets, often directly funded by the regime, that conveyed such a view of Ireland. These books and tracts were particularly numerous during the Second World War and would constitute the essential propaganda upon which the new explosion of Irish theater in Italy was based. Within the realm of politics, the prevailing view of Ireland in Fascist Italy was that it was anti-English. Political observers tended to see the now almost independent nation as essentially opposed to its former colonizer and as a proverbial “thorn in the side” [“spina nel fianco” (Pascazio 1934: 75)]. Yet interest in Ireland and its politics still gave rise to a variety of

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images of the country and its politics, which were greatly dependent on the tide of political and diplomatic relationships between the two countries: it is apparent that any consideration of the course to be taken in Ireland was, for Italy, ultimately contingent on and instrumental to the approach it chose to adopt in its dealings with London. Despite Irish efforts to be regarded by other nations as an independent entity, it was clear that Italian authorities continued to see the Irish Free State as largely subordinate to, and dependent upon, England. (Chini 2016: 142)

The 1920s, in particular, saw a lull in the relationship between Italy and Ireland from both a political and a literary standpoint, with only a few, scattered ventures in the latter field, a point already touched upon, to some degree, in our discussion of Linati. Nevertheless, some of the pieces on Irish politics that emerged in Italy during the period seem to anticipate themes that would become typical of Fascist propaganda in the mid-to-­ late 1930s. A spike of interest in Irish affairs can be detected in 1923, when Camillo Pellizzi—state representative for the Fasci branches in Great Britain and Ireland (see de Caprariis 2000), who founded the Fascio di Londra in 1921 before working with Antonio Rodoani to establish the Dublin and Belfast units—signed a number of articles on Irish politics and culture in Il Popolo d’Italia. These articles set the tone for the Fascist debate on the island. They show how, in the years of the Irish Civil War, Italian political correspondents seemed convinced that Ireland was on its way to becoming a communist country, characterized by the “rabid Bolshevism”2 of its most nationalist party, Sinn Féin, which had, since its origins, been perceived as socialist in nature. At a time when a possible alliance with Britain was still on the cards, Fascist newspapers firmly emphasized Ireland’s inability to govern itself, identifying de Valera, in particular, as a republican with Bolshevist leanings, since “Moscow’s gold probably runs there too” [“L’oro di Mosca, probabilmente, corre anche là” (Pellizzi 1923a)]. This short-lived Irish-Italian version of the red scare did not last long and, over the subsequent months, Pellizzi’s articles testify to a slow and steady change in attitude. He, and the Fascist political observers with him, was now ready to accept the no-longer-threatening island as a fellow country rather than a force bound to upset the European 2  The phrase “bolscevismo feroce” is employed in a Report from London, 4 June 1922, kept in the Archive of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (quoted in Chini 2016: 72).

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order. In Pellizzi’s articles from later in the year, “fascist attitude could again shift: the Anglo-Irish conflict had become the ‘battle of the righteous against the righteous’” (Chini 2016: 84). Along with this political evolution, we can also confidently identify in Pellizzi’s articles the progressive development of an interest in Irish affairs that would result in the scholar becoming one of the most acute observers of Irish theater in the 1930s. Despite his belief in the inability of Ireland to govern itself, he was keen to emphasize the huge intellectual contribution made by the country to England (Pellizzi 1923a). Moreover, in August and September 1923, he went to great lengths to signal that Ireland was actually free from Bolshevism (Pellizzi 1923b) and, more importantly, that, while Italy could not side with either of the two countries, “[a]s Italians, however, we must acknowledge our sense of Latin or Catholic affinity with the Western island of Saints.”3 While Pellizzi’s attitude toward England, where he was based for most of his life between the wars, is that of a long-standing admirer and supporter, it should be noted that he was also responsible for some of the anti-English stereotypes that would resurface in the 1930s, when the public opinion of Fascist Italy would turn more vehemently against the so-called perfidious Albion. A case in point is a booklet he published in 1926, Cose d’Inghilterra, in which praise of English freedom and attitude to command (Pellizzi 1926: 27) are interspersed with virulent attacks on the supposed “feminization” of the entire country,4 an element that would form part of Fascist propaganda in the future, when it would often be presented in contrast to the self-image of the virile Italian, certainly, but also the hetero-image of the melancholy Celt-turned-­ warrior Gael. For the rest of the 1920s, after the climax of 1923, relations between Rome and Dublin progressively settled into an attitude of “detached empathy” (Chini 2016: 84). Consequently, attention toward Ireland waned, with observers inclined to embrace views supporting the Free 3  “È necessario però che sia detto, da noi italiani, come noi si avverta questa affinità latina o cattolica con l’occidentale isola dei Santi” (Pellizzi 1923c). 4  “We note, in England, a process of feminization […] It is fitting to coin this ugly word: feminilism. It is the womanly vision and approach to life that encroaches on and displaces the male.” [“[N]oi avvertiamo in Inghilterra un processo di femminilizzazione. […] Bisogna coniare questa brutta parola: femminilismo. È la visione e la volontà donnesca della vita che incalza e soppianta quella maschile” (Pellizzi 1926: 123–124)]. This was, according to Pellizzi, present in all aspects of English life, including sports, as they channel and mitigate violence (Pellizzi 1926: 126).

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State, while the pro-Republican side, which opposed the 1921 Treaty that had brought about the partition of the island, found a sympathetic ear only in the newspaper La Voce Repubblicana. This was thanks to the diplomatic activity of Donal Hales, primarily aimed at framing the Irish conflict as based on social and political issues rather than on religious matters. Little else made the pages of Italian newspapers in the 1920s, however, and a resurgence of interest in things Irish, and corresponding escalation of anti-English sentiment, would not be seen again until the 1930s. In the words of W.J. Mc Cormack, “[t]he legacy of its resistance to British domination […] ensured a degree of Irish nationalist sympathy with Britain’s enemies” (Mc Cormack 2010: 94). This was in part due to the progressive detachment between Italy and Britain, as well as the former’s rapprochement with the Vatican following the Lateran Pacts of 1929. This watershed moment in Italian politics made the Fascist regime more acceptable in the Emerald Isle, where identification between Catholic belief and nationality was also strengthened by the hosting of the 1932 international Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. The Lateran Pacts also served to promote the cause of Italian Fascism over German Nazism, despite the long-­ standing ties and proximity between Germany and Ireland, since Germany’s attitude toward the Catholic Church was more problematic (Chini 2016: 130). It was also in the early 1930s that the Italian regime began to envisage a fascistization of Ireland. Perhaps surprisingly, most functionaries of the regime—including Alessandro Mariani, the Italian consul in Dublin, though not Dino Grandi, the Ambassador to London— initially failed to regard Eoin O’Duffy, head of the Blueshirts para-Fascist movement, as a potential ally (though some attempts were made to approach him), with efforts being focused instead on Éamon de Valera, the leader of the anti-Treaty side, no longer considered a dangerous Bolshevik. Moreover, as we will see, a change in the situation was preceded, in particular, by the visits of Nicola Pascazio and Pier Filippo Gomez Homen, two envoys of the CAUR [Action Committees for the Universality of Rome] in 1934. According to Mariani, who believed that the movement for Irish independence shared many similarities with the Italian Risorgimento, Italy should establish a stronger relationship with Ireland, and therefore show interest in its culture because, in the near future, the island “might burn bridges with London” (Chini 2016: 141) What is clear from studies such as Chini’s is that most politicians involved in Irish-Italian affairs were aware that, in order to improve the relationship between the two countries, Italians needed to become more familiar with

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Irish culture and vice versa. This was the view of the aforementioned Pascazio, for example, who maintained that cultural exchanges between the two countries should be more intense and that “the tenets of Italian propaganda should be Rome and the affinities between fascism and Catholicism” (Chini 2016: 144). Nonetheless, the early 1930s did not see a broad range of publications from Fascist commentators until Pascazio’s 1934 book. Thus, the first publications of the decade that testify to a surge in interest in Irish politics—presenting ideas of Ireland worthy of discussion—are two books, both published in 1932, that did not issue from Fascist quarters: Mario Manlio Rossi’s Viaggio in Irlanda and Mario Borsa’s La tragica impresa di sir Roger Casement [The Tragic Endeavour of Sir Roger Casement]. These very different texts contained two rather conflicting versions of Ireland that also departed significantly from the notion of a Catholic, proto-Fascist country that the regime sought to propagate. Rossi and Borsa each drew on a long-standing familiarity with both England and Ireland (dating back to the end of the previous century, in Borsa’s case), based on direct access to primary sources, to provide a passionate and nuanced representation of the newly established state. 4.1.1  Pilgrimages in the West. Rossi and the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy Mario Manlio Rossi was a philosopher with a profound knowledge of English empiricism, and translator of the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley, of whom he also co-wrote a biography (with Joseph Hone, in 1931), prefaced by W.B. Yeats. Not a card-carrying member of the Fascist party, his Italian university career was therefore thwarted, and until 1947, he spent most of his time teaching philosophy in secondary schools, until he left for Edinburgh to teach Italian at the city’s university. Rossi met Yeats in 1931 and became his friend and correspondent.5 His philosophical travelogue, Viaggio in Irlanda, presented personal memories of his 1931 trip to Ireland and his time spent with Yeats, Lady Gregory, Oliver St. John Gogarty, and other protagonists of the Celtic Revival, a connection that afforded him the honor of etching his initials on the famous autograph tree in Coole Park. The following year, an abridged version of this travelogue was translated into English by Hone and published by the Yeatsian Cuala Press as Pilgrimage in the West (Rossi 1933). Rossi thus 5

 The correspondence is reproduced in Fantaccini (2009: 74–111).

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became one of the few foreign authors, and the only Italian, to be included in this collection. Viaggio in Irlanda is a profoundly idiosyncratic book on Ireland and its politics, and quite unique in Italy. Rossi is exceptionally well informed on Irish affairs by Italian standards, and in a short preface to his translation, Hone stated: “Nothing came amiss to Doctor Rossi, from our games and our horses to our literature and our politics” (Rossi 1933: iii), aptly highlighting the wide range of Rossi’s interests. Rossi was one of the very few Italian observers, and certainly the most prominent, to adopt a pro-Anglo-Irish stance, emphasizing the role of the Ascendancy in the construction of a national sentiment. Issued by Doxa, a Protestant publishing house based in Milan, the book claimed that only the Anglo-Irish could have genuine national sentiment, as they had undergone the proper political evolution having experienced the Reformation (Rossi 1932: 131). Rossi sets the tone in the early chapters of the book with his description of Dublin as an English “city on the road to being celticized” (Rossi 1933: 5–6).6 The running theme is the construction of the Irish national sentiment. While Rossi maintains that Catholicism had a nationalizing function in Ireland (Rossi 1932: 68), he is also keen to foreground the guidance provided by the Protestant elites educated at Trinity College who created “the true modern Irish patriotism” [“il vero patriottismo irlandese moderno” (Rossi 1932: 128)], which went, according to him, unrecognized by the Home Rule movement (Rossi 1932: 85). In an unsurprising Arnoldian maneuver, Rossi claims that the Irish cannot govern themselves—a point also made by Pellizzi—but are learning to do so, he suggests, because they are learning from the Anglo-Irish: The Irishman in Dublin (unless I am generalizing based on individual cases) is no longer the stubborn and dreamer lost in the countryside. He is becoming a man of immediate reality: and even his spirit, so distinctively political, is becoming less tough and thorny.7

He claims, however, that they are also losing some of the quintessential traits of Irishness in the process, specifically their “spirit of revolt and 6  Quotations from passages translated by Hone in his selection will be employed here and identified as “Rossi 1933”. In all other cases, translations are mine. 7  “L’Irlandese a Dublino non è più (a meno che io non generalizzi casi singoli) il fantasticatore ostinato e perduto della campagna. Sta divenendo un uomo di realtà immediata: e anche il suo spirito, così caratteristicamente politico, sta perdendo durezza e spinosità” (Rossi 1932: 20).

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everyday irony” [“lo spirito di rivolta, […] l’ironia quotidiana” (Rossi 1932: 28)]. According to Rossi, the Ascendancy serving as a conciliatory force between the two social and religious groups was also the mission of Berkeley and Swift and was adopted by the proponents of the Celtic Revival, who kept Irish folklore alive in English, and founded the Abbey Theatre, “the best theatre in the world” (Rossi 1933: 31) [“il miglior teatro del mondo” (Rossi 1932: 139)]. Lady Gregory, to whom the volume is dedicated, “created something that was not there before: a shared soul for Catholics and Protestants, for poets and artists, for enemy or just different spirits.”8 This is why Rossi could not subscribe to any notion of pure Irishness such as that proposed by Daniel Corkery (Rossi 1932: 145) and the other “extremists of Gaelicism” [“estremisti del gaelismo” (Rossi 1932: 127)], which would only consider the Catholic and Gaelic tradition and “throw away endless elements that have now become Irish, the true conquests of the Gaelic spirit.”9 Moreover, he claimed landlords and tenants did not have any more conflicts because the Anglo-Irish were very few, approximately 5%, isolated, and longing for a peaceful life: “they love this land and will not abandon it because they feel they still absolve a vital function there.”10 Given these elements, it is little wonder that Rossi was a proponent of a very inclusive canon of Irish writing. Probably influenced by the Irish and Italian literary fields of the early 1930s, he focused his attention on prose-writers, claiming that “one could almost speak of Irish prevalence in English fiction” [“quasi si potrebbe parlare di predominio irlandese nella ‘fiction’ inglese” (Rossi 1932: 124)], and specifically on authors such as Goldsmith, Swift, James Stephens, and even Eugene O’Neill, making him one of the first to assimilate O’Neill into Irish literature, which would become so commonplace in wartime Italy. Coming from such a well-defined point of view, it is no surprise that Rossi viewed The Countess Cathleen as Yeats’s masterpiece, in which the author’s early nationalism is strikingly portrayed, in the words of Anthony Bradley, as “a way of challenging materialism, whether English or Irish,” which had led, in England, to “a soulless, mechanical, and merely utilitarian society, whereas in Ireland he saw (in an alliance of the best of the Anglo-Irish and 8  “ha creato quello che non c’era: un’anima comune per i cattolici e per i protestanti, per i poeti e per gli artisti, per spiriti nemici o soltanto diversi” (Rossi 1932: 182–3). 9  “gettare a mare una infinità di altri elementi che sono ormai divenuti irlandesi, che sono le vere conquiste dello spirito gaelico” (Rossi 1932: 159). 10  “essi amano profondamente ed intimamente questa terra e non l’abbandoneranno perché sentono di avere in essa ancora una funzione vitale” (Rossi 1932: 127).

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the peasantry) the possibility of an organic community” (Bradley 2016: 17). The novelty of Rossi’s approach to Irish affairs did not go unnoticed given that, in a perceptive review published in Leonardo, Delio Cantimori specifically highlighted that one of the key elements of the volume was its correction of the traditional framework of the political struggle in Ireland, moving it beyond the contrast between Catholics and Protestants and, in particular, foregrounding the participation of Anglo-Ireland in Irish national life (Cantimori 1933: 371). As alluded to earlier, however, Rossi would also play a part in the Irish literary world, thanks to the prompt translation of his Viaggio in Irlanda as Pilgrimage in the West in 1933. In a similar way to the translation of Ernesto Buonaiuti’s 1911 pamphlet, this is an example of images traveling back and enlarging the scope and international support for a cultural revival that saw its vigor within Irish society progressively dwindling. The synergy between Hone and Rossi, as well as their strong links with the Anglo-Irish community of the Free State, were instrumental in this process. Yeats showed a keen interest in Hone’s translation and went as far as to criticize it in quite blunt terms,11 despite not being fluent in Italian. From its very title, Hone’s translation hinted at a selection of themes: Viaggio in Irlanda became Pilgrimage in the West, thus foregrounding the focus on the least Anglicized areas of the country, and somewhat suggesting that Anglo-Irish intellectuals had absorbed the mystical west of Ireland in a spiritual way, as pilgrims. The book was also advertised as a homage to Lady Gregory, and a translation of its ending had appeared in The Irish Press four days after her death.12 The English-­ language text had less than half as many chapters as the Italian original (17 compared to 36) and saw the omission of the most controversial passages relating to alcohol consumption, the origins of lynching in Galway, bad weather as an obstacle to Galway becoming a transatlantic harbor, and, perhaps more significantly, the country’s sectarian divisions. While some of these choices can be attributed to the different implied readership of a Cuala Press book—readers already familiar with most of the historical background information provided by Rossi—it is also true that Hone seems to have primarily selected the sections conveying an image of a rural Ireland in need of the Ascendancy’s guidance, while controversial 11  “I think your method of translation is a mistake in this Essay” (Yeats to Hone, 5 March 1932, Yeats 2002: acc. #5605). 12  Rossi, Mario Manlio. 1932. Sunset on the Lake at Coole. The Irish Press, May 26.

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comments—such as criticism of Corkery’s notions of pure Gaelic and Catholic Irishness, as well as several anecdotes concerning the Irish people’s belief in banshees and leprechauns—were erased. As Rossi’s book appeared in the Cuala Press imprint, run by Elizabeth and Lily Yeats, it is safe to assume that it was intended to contribute to Yeats’s long-lasting strategy of buttressing the cultural foundations of Protestant Ireland, a venture in which transnational products such as Viaggio in Irlanda/Pilgrimage in the West could participate through translation. As convincingly argued by Roy Foster, the years immediately following Lady Gregory’s death correspond to Yeats’s increasing preoccupation with, and support of, the Ascendancy’s commitment to the Irish nation, a topic he aptly developed in his introduction to Hone’s and Rossi’s book on Berkeley. There Yeats extolled “the cultural achievement which he now believed the Ascendancy had bequeathed to the country” in what was “a spectacular inversion of the opinions which he had declaimed in his Fenian youth” (Foster 2004: 111). In his correspondence, Yeats clarified how aware he was of the importance of a transnational approach. In a letter to Hone, dated 20 November 1930, he wrote: I want protestant Ireland to base some vital part of its culture on Burke, Swift & Berkley [sic]. Rossis help is of course of the first importance. Gentile & other Italian philosophers found themselves on Berkeley & Rossi has the further advantage of being an authority on Berkeley’s immediate predecessors & contemporaries. You & I are absorbed in Ireland but he sees Berkeleys European position. (Yeats to Hone, 20 November 1930, Yeats 2002: acc. #5409)13

The “Italian philosopher,” as Rossi was often referred to, was to enhance the European dimension of this strategy, thanks to his international standing and cultural trajectory. While the importance of Rossi’s contribution to both the Irish and the Italian literary scene was duly acknowledged by Yeats and Hone, his image of Ireland remained essentially isolated in Fascist Italy. Encouraged by

13  This point is expanded upon by W.J. Mc Cormack: “the Berkeley available to Yeats in 1927 was not the model of 1733 (or earlier); it was the complex of Berkeleyan text-ininterpretation advanced by Croce, Gentile, Papini, Rossi and Hone from a place avowedly totalitarian” (Mc Cormack 2010: 100).

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Yeats’s invitations and compliments,14 the philosopher would continue to explore the complexities of Irishness in the future, though never with a comparable degree of effort as demonstrated in Viaggio in Irlanda. He contributed articles to both the Italian and the Irish press and, notably, produced a masterful anthology of Swift’s works (1942). This was a great accomplishment and proved that Rossi was not inclined to passively accept wartime censorship against England by reneging his allegiance to the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, which he described in this book as a victim both of the rebelliousness of the Irish and the “centralism of the government of London” [“centralismo del governo di Londra” (Rossi 1942: xxix)]. His introduction to Swift touches very briefly on Ireland, but this reference is worthy of note, because it is one of the few instances in which a mediator considered the issue of Irish national character in a literary classic, a topic generally overlooked in works dating back to the eighteenth century. Yet, Rossi claims that Swift was the first to perceive Ireland, as a nation – naturally from the Anglo-­ Saxon perspective, far from granting Catholics any role in government, but with a profound human compassion for the dispossessed.15

Still striving to provide an image of Ireland that was more complex than that presented by his fellow countrymen, he once again attempted to reverse the stereotypes, even going so far as to describe the English as victims of countless rebellions “inspired by Catholic powers” [“suscitate dalle potenze cattoliche” (Rossi 1942: xxix)]. Rossi’s explicitly idiosyncratic version of Irishness would become a constant element in his works— though its prominence waned after the early 1940s—and would be cast in a minority position by the increasingly pro-Irish Catholic stance of the Fascist regime.

14  “I hope you have not finished with Ireland — You & Hone have deepened our sense of eighteenth century Ireland. Those who went before you were mere recorders of facts & dates” (Yeats to Rossi, 20 June [1934], Yeats 2002: acc. #6061). 15  Swift fu il primo che sentirà l’Irlanda, come una nazione—naturalmente dal punto di vista degli anglosassoni, ben lontano dal concedere ai cattolici qualunque parte nel governo, ma con una profonda pietà umana per i diseredati (Swift 1942: xxix).

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4.1.2  Mario Borsa and the Myth of Roger Casement Mario Borsa, a political and cultural journalist, correspondent for The Times in Milan, and essayist with a strong interest in British affairs, was not initially a supporter of an Irish Ireland. One of his Great War pamphlets, L’Inghilterra e i suoi critici [England and its Critics] (1917a), was a pro-­ Britain paean and a critique of Germany’s aggressive anti-British politics.16 In this 1917 pamphlet, no mention is made of the Rising, and in paying homage to the fallen of the Great War, Borsa pointedly refers to the Dublin university students enrolled in the British army, presented on an equal footing with their Cambridge counterparts, Welsh miners and Lancashire cloth-workers, without alluding in any way to the Irish anti-conscription movement (1917a: 43–44). Nonetheless, he was always a very curious observer of Ireland and its culture and was in touch with some of its prominent figures. When Seán T. O’Kelly was in Rome in early 1920, he contacted many Italian journalists and intellectuals, including Mario Borsa, who was working at Il Secolo at the time and with whom he frequently exchanged correspondence. As discussed earlier, in 1906, he had written quite an influential book on English theater, in which two substantial chapters were devoted to G.B. Shaw and the Irish Literary Theatre. In his introduction to the latter, Borsa had made it quite clear that it was not possible to understand the Irish literary revival, and particularly its excellent theatrical outcomes, without taking into account the political situation of Ireland. But the opposite was also true, and he had not changed his mind when he interspersed the first chapters of his 1932 biography of Roger Casement17 with a substantial number of pages not only on Irish history but also on the Irish literary revival, in particular, as the Easter Rising could not “be understood without knowing something of the profound movement of ideas that preceded and prepared it” (Borsa 1932: 17). He was also aware of the scarce attention that had been devoted to the matter in Italy, but at least showed familiarity with the works of Carlo Linati. As noted earlier, Irish literature and politics seemed almost impossible to decouple. Borsa’s 16  The booklet, not surprisingly, was promptly translated into English by Fisher Unwin in London. A similar intent had another shorter pamphlet written by Borsa in 1917 and sold as a supplement to Il Secolo: L’ora dell’Inghilterra (Borsa 1917b). 17  As mentioned above, the Italian public was generally familiar with Casement. Apart from frequent articles in newspapers, one should at least mention the translation of Spindler’s Das geheimnisvolle Schiff (Spindler 1930) and a chapter in Ugo Caimpenta (pseudonym of Gian Dàuli), Lo spionaggio inglese (1936).

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sympathetic view on the Irish question is also mirrored by his change of attitude in defining the Irish canon. In his 1906 book on theater, Borsa had tended to lean toward only recognizing authors who were part of the Irish literary system as Irish. Here, however, he seems to widen his definition to include those with an interest in Irish matters or who were in some ways linked to the Irish revival. Borsa’s canon of Irish writers featured the usual names, including the realist O’Casey and Joyce, but political allegiances seem to be the ultimate deciding factor for the Italian writer. As discussed in the introduction of the two mentions he makes of Arthur Conan Doyle, only when the writer is presented as starting a petition to convince the King to have mercy on Casement, he is identified as an Irish writer. Thus Mario Borsa presented a very well-informed and partisan portrait of Roger Casement, from his experiences in the Congo which inspired him to defend human rights, to his participation in the 1916 Easter Rising. Borsa’s book on Casement is particularly interesting, not only for its treatment of such a complex aspect of Irish history, but also because the book was part of the successful “Drammi e segreti della storia” [“Dramas and secrets from history”] series published by Mondadori, one of Italy’s prominent publishers at the time. The series targeted a wide readership who wished to acquaint themselves with historical events “that best present the eternal play of passions that nobly or basely inspire human actions” by way of books based on historical research but written so as to have “the gift of bringing them to life through lively, vivid narration,” as the editorial advertisement put it.18 The book therefore enjoyed significant distribution, and while Borsa was no supporter of the regime, it is arguable that his unabashedly pro-Irish text could be marketed by Mondadori as consistent with the government’s anti-British slant. This is not surprising, as Arnoldo Mondadori enjoyed a special relationship with Mussolini (Bonsaver 2007: 43–54) and was one of the publishers who managed to negotiate a decent amount of freedom from the restrictions of the regime, precisely by employing the regime’s directives to his advantage. Borsa’s extremely sympathetic portrait of Casement is a product of the transnational fascination with the Irish revolutionary and human rights activist,19 18  “in cui meglio si palesi l’eterno giuoco delle passioni che nobilmente o bassamente ispirano le azioni umane”; “il dono di rievocarle in narrazioni agili e colorite” (Borsa 1932: 304). 19  For Casement’s afterlife, literary and otherwise, see Garden (2020), Lenehan (2018), and the special issue on Roger Casement of Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies, April 2016. url: http://breac.nd.edu/articles/category/roger-casement/

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but also provided Borsa with yet another opportunity to familiarize Italians with Irish history and culture. From its early chapters, the book features most of the elements we have already seen at play in the works of early irlandesisti, including the need to bypass England as a conduit for Irish news (Borsa 1932: 15). The historical narrative thus provides a detailed introductory section on Irish history in which, despite some inaccuracies, Borsa sets the tone for the entire book as a survey of the centuries-long atrocities perpetrated by the English in Ireland. Some of the points are typical of Italian-Irish narratives, in particular the constant parallel with the Italian Risorgimento. Comparisons of this nature, either stretched or more sensibly argued, are frequent in the book, from the parallel between the “desperate insurrections” [“sommosse disperate” (Borsa 1932: 17)] of the Italian and Irish rebels,20 to claims that the Catholic University in Dublin was of similar political significance to the Italian University in Trieste (Borsa 1932: 44), and from noting similarities between Lombard and Irish women (Borsa 1932: 134) to stating that Howth reminded the author of Sorrento (Borsa 1932: 190). The parallels do not end there and testify to Borsa’s ability to navigate the troubled waters of Fascist politics by alluding to controversial issues in a subtle and covert manner. The comparison between Casement and Cesare Battisti (Borsa 1932: 249) is a case in point. As mentioned earlier, Battisti was a Triestine irredentist who was hanged in July 1916 for treason, just weeks before Casement. Despite Battisti being a socialist, the regime sought to manipulate his legacy to present him as a nationalist hero and martyr. It can be argued that, by choosing Battisti, Borsa, a militant anti-Fascist, was covertly celebrating a fellow-socialist who could not be considered contentious by the regime. In terms of images of Ireland disseminated by Borsa, his representation of the country and its people is based on two main elements, which at once confirm age-old stereotypes, but also, so to speak, confer more specific qualities upon them. While at times Borsa resorted to the traditional notion of the Irish as primitive and rural (Borsa 1932: 48), and also prone to indulging in imagination rather than living in the real world (Borsa 1932: 50), he also explains their restlessness and rebelliousness in the face of subjugation by “a foreign power and unfair laws” [“autorità straniera e […] cattive leggi” (Borsa 1932: 38)]. The Irish are characterized by their 20  Mario Manlio Rossi too compared the Easter Rising rebels to “Mazzinians” [“mazziniani” (Rossi 1932: 106)].

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“ideal intransigence, indifference to the means, even if they are criminal, obsessions with their goals, which might be chimerical, extremism”21; it follows, then, the rebels of 1916 were heroic, and their sacrifice a “noble spectacle of faith” [“nobile spettacolo di fede” (Borsa 1932: 17)]. The book’s relative moderation is decisively set aside in the last climactic chapter—significantly titled “Up the Rebels!”—in which English atrocities are described in great detail and Borsa ruefully predicts the establishment of the northern border. As such, he firmly maintains that a united Ireland is the only viable solution to the “political and religious antagonism, artificially kept alive by England” [“antagonismo politico-religioso […] tenuto vivo artifiziosamente dall’Inghilterra”] which was necessary to “dominate and keep Catholic and nationalist Ireland subdued” [“dominare e tenere sottomessa l’Irlanda cattolica e nazionalista” (Borsa 1932: 281–2)]. These elements clarify the interest of Borsa’s book, which is a great example of how passive reliance on age-old stereotypes, such as the differences in temperament between a supposedly solid Catholic and nationalist front and a Protestant occupier (Borsa 1932: 40), could be exploited by an acute political commentator to redefine the Irish question and complicate it by focusing on historical elements such as British atrocities and Imperial realpolitik. In a similar vein, the “noble folly” of Irish revolutionaries is explained by them all being children of the Celtic Revival. Once again, the nationalist front is presented as united, with no substantial differences being identified between the Catholic nationalist movement and the Anglo-Irish element. The myth of the revolution of “poets, professors, teachers, journalists, actors, librarians, painters, students”22 is also evoked, and it is their sacrifice that made them immortal, with the Court Martial inscribing them in the “Golden Book of Irish history” [“Libro d’Oro della storia irlandese” (Borsa 1932: 208)]. 21  “l’intransigenza ideale, l’indifferenza dei mezzi, che possono essere criminosi, l’ossessione dei fini, che possono essere chimerici, l’estremismo” (Borsa 1932: 217). 22  “The leaders were for the most part intellectuals: poets, professors, teachers, journalists, actors, librarians, painters, students. Their noble folly could not be understood if one did not know what their spirits had been fed with. They were all children of the Celtic Revival […]. They were all young people fallen from heroic legends into the middle of a reality they did not know and were unable to assess.” [“I capi erano per la maggior parte degli intellettuali: poeti, professori, maestri, giornalisti, attori, bibliotecari, pittori, studenti. La loro nobile follia non si capirebbe se non si sapesse di che cosa si era nutrito il loro spirito. Erano tutti figli della Rinascenza Celtica […] Erano giovani spiovuti dalla leggenda eroica e caduti in mezzo a una realtà che essi non sapevano né potevano valutare” (Borsa 1932: 208)].

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4.1.3  A Fascist Ireland? A watershed in the relationship between Fascist Italy and Ireland came in 1934: as alluded to earlier, two reports on the political and cultural life of Ireland were commissioned by the regime, the first from Nicola Pascazio, and the second from Pier Filippo Gomez Homen, both of whom were sent to Dublin by the Fascist CAUR. Pascazio, in particular, whose mission started in January 1934, was instructed to make contact with Eoin O’Duffy, with a view to establishing an Irish branch of the committees. His report was then published in book form as La Rivoluzione d’Irlanda e l’Impero Britannico [The Irish Revolution and the British Empire] (1934). In this occasionally crude and superficial volume on recent Irish history, Pascazio often expresses the idea that Ireland could be drawn toward a Fascist dictatorship through O’Duffy and his Blueshirts. Although much less focused on the literary field, and rather more political in its analysis, the volume followed in the footsteps of Borsa in terms of both the simplification of the nationalist front and the expansion of the national literary canon, without displaying any of the literary and political acumen of the Milanese journalist. The primary point of interest in this propaganda piece, riddled with blunders (to note just one example, Pascazio falsely equates Fenians and Sinn Féiners) and confusing timelines, is the further establishment of key hetero-images of Ireland, further building upon notions already present in the works of Borsa and other early irlandesisti such as Hagan and Valera: the Irish are an intelligent and clever people (Pascazio 1934: 12), naturally allergic to slavery and prone to rebellion and fighting: “They fight in the streets, with balls, with fists, or they hone their weapons in the barracks. Truce is not an Irish word.”23 Needless to say, the Irish are Catholic and are the “last sentinel of the Catholic Western World amidst the clouds of Nordic people, the dangers or heresy, the decline of the spirit.”24 Pascazio was a staunch supporter of a Fascist future for Ireland and firmly believed that O’Duffy’s Blueshirts could rule the country, establishing a corporative state (Chini 2016: 126). As we have noted, even works primarily focused on political issues could not fail to mention the literary sphere: the 23  “O ci si batte nelle strade, a palle o a pugni, o si affilan le armi nelle caserme. Tregua non è una parola irlandese” (Pascazio 1934: 13). 24  “una sentinella dell’Occidente cattolico tra i nembi del nordismo, i pericoli dell’eresia, il declino dello spirito” (Pascazio 1934: 11).

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Abbey Theatre was “the gym of the nationalist youth” (Pascazio 1934: 27), and “literati and poets would be the avant-garde of the national insurrection” [“l’insurrezione nazionale, vedrà in capofila letterati e poeti” (Pascazio 1934: 16)] The Irish are instinctively anti-British and righteously rebelled against their prejudice and religious oppression (Pascazio 1934: 18–19). The Act of Union is defined as “[t]he union of the shark with his prey” [“L’unione del pescecane e della sua preda” (Pascazio 1934: 29)], borrowing the phrase from Lord Byron. This is a typical rhetorical move: exploiting criticism leveled at England by English writers would become one of the staples of Fascist propaganda during the Second World War. Pascazio’s conclusion (which echoes that of Gomez Homen, the envoy sent by the CAUR to Ireland in July 1934) is that the Italians should be made more acquainted with Ireland, with special emphasis placed on the common roots of Fascism and Catholicism. Thus, Italians needed to acquire firsthand information on a sister country such as Ireland because “the British wall […] often hides from us and the world, the light of truth”.25 Pascazio’s and Gomez Homen’s reports did not directly translate into decisive action by the Fascist regime to influence the development of Fascism in Ireland, but instead planted the seeds of a future relationship between the two countries. With the diplomatic relationship with Britain growing progressively more tense, particularly in the aftermath of the Ethiopian crisis of October 1935, Ireland and Italy grew closer. This is in spite of the fact that Ireland supported the international sanctions against Italy, “thus becoming one of the reference points for small nations within [the Society of Nations]” (Chini 2016: 146) and that de Valera declared his opposition to Italy’s 3 October 1935 invasion of Addis Abeba the day after it happened. A few days later, Irish representatives in Geneva would vote in favor of the sanctions (Franchi 1993). At times, however, Ireland’s position on the matter appeared vague, to the point that future, mainly Italian, scholarship was at times led to assume that the country had not supported the sanctions (e.g. Cascetta 1979: 144). The myth about Ireland not backing the sanctions probably arose from the Irish front being divided, with Michael Curran, rector of the Irish College, and the Tánaiste (deputy head of the government) Seán T. O’Kelly opposing them while constantly emphasizing the close relationship between Ireland and Italy, and the Republican newspaper An Phoblacht 25  “Il muro britannico […] cela spesso a noi e al mondo, la luce della verità” (Pascazio 1934: 41).

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criticizing de Valera’s acquiescence to British diplomacy. As such, when the conflict between Italy and Britain became more heated, Ireland was seen by Mariani’s successor, consul Romano Lodi Fè, as a possible ally against the Empire (Chini 2016: 152). The rapprochement between Italy and Ireland, then, with the latter being extolled as the quintessentially anti-English country, continued to progress throughout the mid-to-late 1930s. Ireland remained a secondary interest in Fascist Italy (O’Driscoll 2019: 26), and it was only thanks to the growing distance with Britain that both political and cultural mediators began paying more attention to the Emerald Isle. This was initially helped by Irish public opinion coming down on the side of Franco during the Spanish Civil War (see McGarry 1999; Stradling 1999) as well as by key changes in the diplomatic sphere. At the start of 1938, Lodi Fè was replaced by Vincenzo Berardis at the Regia Legazione in Dublin, while Michael MacWhite was chosen as Irish minister to Italy, in Rome. The diplomats decided to focus on the common traits between Ireland and Italy, including their Catholic roots and corporative politics. It is in the light of this proximity that de Valera traveled to Italy in March 1939 to attend Pius XII’s investiture. At the same time, Fascist propaganda was growing progressively keen on portraying Ireland as anti-Britain. As MacWhite had perceptively observed in December 1938, Ireland only became relevant when it could be used as a “convenient weapon with which to belabour John Bull.”26 While Italy was still uncertain as to whether it should join Germany in a European War, the English were already perceived as enemies by the Fascist regime. Thus, a surge in propaganda can be observed in the run-up to Italy’s joining of the war against Great Britain: some Roman publishing houses linked to the Fascist regime began to bring out a large number of anti-­ English essays, pamphlets, and reports: gradually a whole field of anti-­ English propaganda emerged. An early example was Carlo Scarfoglio’s L’Inghilterra e il continente,27 [England and the Continent]  in 1937, which shows how anti-English propaganda in the war years was “a direct continuation of that started at the time of the Ethiopian war and the ‘unfair sanctions’” (Gallerano 1994: 208). The focus of these books was  Quoted in O’Driscoll (2019: 26).  While Ireland was not one of the primary topics of the booklet, it was translated into English and circulated in Dublin in 1941/1942, as we can gather from a report of the Ministry of Popular Culture (Minculpop) (Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome, Minculpop, Direzione Generale Servizi della Propaganda—Propaganda presso gli stati esteri, envelope n. 138 “Irlanda,” 16 January 1942). 26 27

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on English “cupidity and greed,” typical qualities of a people of “pirates,” whose “Anglo-Saxon philocapitalist Protestantism” was opposed to the “Roman Catholic spiritualism” (Gallerano 1994: 209). This arguably affected the depiction of the Irish too, whose Catholicism became an unavoidable feature in these publications. While historians have questioned whether this propaganda was successful in coloring the Italian people’s perception of the enemy (Gallerano 1994: 211–5), what is interesting for the purposes of our examination is that it frequently featured sympathetic portraits of Catholic Ireland as the chief victim and thorn in the side of Protestant Britain. Cultural and literary points were often made, as was common when dealing with Irish politics, and the resulting canon of Irish writers was progressively enlarged. Renato Simoni’s series of very inspired and well-written articles certainly deserves critical attention for its participation in the prewar expansion of the repertoire of Irish writers in Italy (and as such will be discussed in the next section), but the texts are also interesting if read in the context of the contemporary production of anti-­ British literature that accompanied Italy’s baneful march toward the Second World War. Simoni, a playwright and director with a penchant for dialect theater, and by no means an orthodox Fascist, explored similar themes to those presented by the more virulent propagandists, despite his relative distance, in spirit, from the crude propaganda of the regime. Simoni’s image of Ireland was explicitly based on Arnoldian elements, “typical of the Hibernian Celts, their theoretical, physical and metaphysical rebellion against solidity and the weight of facts.”28 In a manner typical of the 1930s, however, it also emphasized the people’s virility and litigiousness (Simoni 1938c). Ireland’s rebelliousness against “the weight of facts” and against the “hated English government” [“detestato Governo inglese” (Simoni 1938e)] is consistent with how the country was portrayed in Italian anti-English propaganda literature of the time. According to Simoni, this rebelliousness results in an anti-English stance that can be traced back to the stereotypes of Irish theater and even to the stage Irishman, traits of which Simoni recognized in both Synge’s Christy and Yeats’s Cuchulain. This often went hand in hand with the feminization of the English, an early example of which we have observed in Pellizzi (1926), and the corresponding virilization of the Irish portrayed not just

28  “proprio dei celti d’Ibernia; [la] loro ribellione teorica, fisica e metafisica contro la solidità e il peso dei fatti” (Simoni 1938e).

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as rebels but as models of heroism for their English counterparts, as in Franzero’s29 article in Nuova Antologia in 1936: But any good Irishman will tell you that it is futile to attempt to judge Ireland according to logic and law. It features disparate elements, religious hatred, racial hatred, the mirage of an Irish republic, all the atmosphere of great romantic idealism. And no Englishman can read of the most recent Irish revolution, fought by a handful of youths against the colossal English system, without feeling it would have been a source of pride to fight like that for England.30

While Simoni’s articles only contributed to this campaign from the sidelines and, one might think, reluctantly, given the unorthodoxy of their author, they were soon reprinted in Irlanda, edited by Pier Fausto Palumbo in 1940. The comparatively well-crafted book formed part of a series titled “Il mondo d’oggi” [“Today’s World”], which was financially supported by the regime31 and aimed to describe lesser known nations such as Turkey, Egypt, Hungary, Latvia, and Bulgaria. This volume’s importance lay in the fact that it drew together voices that, until that point, had been separate: these included Carlo Linati (by now an authority on Ireland), Serafino Riva (author of an esteemed monograph on Synge), and Nicola Turchi (co-author of L’isola di smeraldo). The volume frequently underlined the close links between art and politics in Ireland, as well as the huge significance of Catholic religion in the country. While the 29  Franzero, a writer and journalist, lived in London for many years and worked for a number of English newspapers, often writing reports from the United Kingdom. He was also interested in Irish literature, writing, among others, a biography of Oscar Wilde (1938), which achieved some success. 30  “Ma ogni buon irlandese vi dice che è inutile voler giudicare l’Irlanda con la logica e la legalità. Vi sono elementi disparati, odio religioso, odio di razza, miraggio di una repubblica irlandese, tutta l’atmosfera di un grande idealismo romantico. E nessun inglese può leggere la storia dell’ultima rivoluzione irlandese combattuta da un manipolo di giovani contro la colossale organizzazione inglese senza sentire che sarebbe stato un orgoglio combattere così per l’Inghilterra” (Franzero 1936: 207). 31  Ciarlantini, a Fascist MP, was at the helm of Edizioni Roma, and managed to obtain substantial annual fund (30,000 liras) for his “Il mondo d’oggi” project, though it eventually proved insufficient [Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome, Minculpop—Sovvenzioni— “Edizioni Roma.” Ciarlantini Franco. Cerè gr. uff. Enea: envelope n. 99 item 587; Edizioni Roma, casa editrice. Ciarlantini Franco. 1. Collana Militare; 2. Mondo d’oggi: envelope n. 233 item 1724].

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presence of a protestant elite crops up at times, particularly in Simoni’s chapters on the history of drama, the portrait of the Irish by Riva was clearly influenced by the works of Daniel Corkery and focused entirely on the Catholic and Gaelic tradition, extolling the virile and primitive qualities of the Irish, in a way that bore remarkable echoes of Fascist propagandists. When talking about Gaelic sagas, for instance, Riva claimed that they belonged to the same tradition as Arian heroic narratives, but they reflect “a rustic and primitive quality, the edges of which have not been knocked off by encounters with many other already rich and effeminate races, as happened to the Mediterranean Aryans.”32 The tone and editorial quality of other similar publications on Ireland or Britain was not, however, comparable: as the years went by, they became both more frequent and superficial. Most took a leaf out of Pascazio’s report in order to represent the Anglo-Irish conflict as a centuries-long fight between the cruel British Empire and its Catholic victim, as in Irlanda e Roma by Amy Bernardy (1942), published by I.R.C.E. [“Istituto per le Relazioni Culturali con l’Estero”, “Institute for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries”], and in L’Irlanda e la Gran Bretagna by Luigi Villari (1941). Luigi Villari was an employee of the Italian Foreign Office and a diplomat in the United States. His book provides a relatively well-­ informed survey of recent Irish history, though all key events are framed in such a way as to emphasize British faults (e.g. the chapter titled “Destruction of Irish factories,” “Distruzione dell’industria irlandese,” Villari 1941:15) as well as the similarities between Italy and Ireland (Villari 1941: 76). The image of Ireland that emerges from Villari’s account is of a peaceful country where the overwhelming majority, represented by the Catholic community, lived in harmony with the few, impoverished Protestants (Villari 1941: 72), unlike in the Ulster counties, which remained part of the Empire (Villari 1941: 73). Villari’s bias is even clearer in the final pages of the text, in which he claims at various points that the forthcoming defeat of Great Britain would help Ireland gain full independence and “Italy cannot help but regard with satisfaction the progress and prosperity of the Irish people, towards whom it has always felt great fondness.”33 Another key example of the regime’s propaganda was the 32  “una rusticità e primitività non levigata dall’incontro di tante altre razze già ricche e effemminate come avvenne agli Ari mediterranei” (Riva in Palumbo 1940: 42). 33  “L’Italia non potrà non vedere con soddisfazione il progresso e la prosperità del popolo irlandese, per il quale ha sempre avuto un sentimento di viva simpatia” (Villari 1941: 76).

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anthology of anti-English writings cleverly titled Gli inglesi contro gli inglesi [The English against the English] (1940) and consisting of extracts from the works of prominent English writers critical of the British Empire. In this case, one can see the reversal of the enthusiastic canons of Irish writers that circulated at the time: the Englishness of Swift or Shaw, inconvenient when aiming to avoid the meshes of censorship, was now advantageous because it presented the enemy front as divided and prey to internecine conflicts. In a similar vein were the rather more crude publications of the German Information Center, which dedicated a whole series to British colonial atrocities and regularly manipulated the words of Anglophone intellectuals who were critical of the establishment. These booklets were often disseminated in various languages and translated from German: an interesting case is Shaw’s Le atrocità di Denshawai ed altre atrocità britanniche [The Denshawai atrocities and other British atrocities] (1940). The collection of which this book was the seventh volume was tellingly titled L’Inghilterra senza maschera [England Unmasked]. It included a dozen publications of the same nature, with pointed titles such as La politica tirannica dell’Inghilterra in Egitto [England’s tyrannical politics in Egypt] and Il despotismo dell’Inghilterra in Irlanda: relazione documentata [England’s despotism in Ireland: a documented report]. Shaw’s volume was, of course, originally published in 1904 as “The Denshawai Horror,” part of the preface to John Bull’s Other Island—the play was still unpublished in Italy at the time—and distributed as propaganda. As we will discuss in the final chapter, the status acquired by Ireland and Irish writers during the early years of the war would directly affect Italian theater and further expand, and muddle, the notion of Irish literature in Italy.

4.2   Enlarging the Repertoire The unsystematic explorations and roads only partially taken by Italian irlandesisti during the Fascist regime are the main focus of the following sections. These will investigate the encounter of the Italian public, from the mid-1920s, with an Irish literary corpus whose fluid status and frequent overlapping with English literature was, and still partially is, a source of confusion. While the literary criticism of Ruberti, Pellizzi, and Vinciguerra, to name but a few, acknowledged the specific traits of Irish literature, translations of contemporary Irish writers were still comparatively rare (and would remain so until the end of the decade). With few

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exceptions, the Irish writers who made it into the Italian book market oscillated between being seen simply as English and being recognized as part of an independent Irish national literature in its own right. In fact, for most mediators, the fact that authors belonged to a specific national tradition did not constitute a meaningful feature. Nonetheless, while Pirandello’s rather surprising choice of Lord Dunsany’s The Gods of the Mountain for the opening night of his Teatro d’Arte, in April 1925, had no direct consequences, less influential mediators such as Gian Dàuli were able to provide the Italian public with relatively updated (and even daring) depictions of Irish literature. Dàuli’s endeavors partially failed to make a deeper dent in the literary discourse of the cultural elites, arguably due both to his marginal role in the literary field34 and a mixture of publishing inexperience and misfortune. Moreover, Irish literature remained primarily the bailiwick of small publishers and was often rather diluted in the pool of English literature in the catalogs of leading publishers such as Mondadori. The chapter also acknowledges Dàuli’s adventurous enterprises and profound knowledge of the Irish Revival (James Stephens, George Moore, and the now almost unknown Brian Oswald Donn Byrne were among the Irish writers he endeavored to promote) as well as other, admittedly unsystematic, attempts to expand the repertoire of Irish literature in Italy. These range from Linati’s translation of a Seán O’Casey play, to the role of Mondadori in the progressive canonization of George Moore, to the mishaps and censures that ostensibly affected Liam O’Flaherty’s status within the Italian literary system. While a certain awareness of Irish literature as a discrete entity within the Anglophone sphere seems to have become increasingly commonplace in 1920s Italy, books entirely dedicated to Irish writings were still very few: sections on Ireland were more likely to be found within broader surveys of English or European literature, such as Vinciguerra (1926) and Ruberti (1920, 1928). This would not change significantly over the course of the following decade. The lack of books entirely devoted to Irish letters should not surprise us, however, and is attributable, in part, to marketing and academic factors. It is Treves, publisher of the most ambitious 34  This is also, to a certain extent, what happens to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of Il gattopardo [The Leopard] (1958). While his lifelong interest in Irish literature, and in Yeats in particular, only resulted in few contributions (e.g. Lampedusa 1926), his position on the sidelines of the literary scene was arguably a determining factor in the lack of dissemination of his take on Irish literature.

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collection of studies on world drama in the 1930s, who indirectly explained the phenomenon in a discussion with Silvio d’Amico, editor of the book series, about the possibility of publishing new volumes on less established traditions (e.g. Hungary and Poland). He bluntly told d’Amico that, aside from his own volume on Italian drama, none of the other texts (on French, Spanish, English, and German drama) had sold a sufficient number of copies, often less than the first run. Furthermore, the postwar period in Italy saw the university system being remodeled, with the formal establishment of new disciplines. English Studies was among these new areas, and scholars have noted its growing pains in the late 1910s and early 1920s (Cattaneo 2007: 8). It is no wonder, then, that an awareness of the specificity of Irish literature should be so disputed. Equally, it is understandable that the national canons encompassed by such a recent field—still lacking solid academic foundations, to the point that even reliable reference works were mostly absent until Praz and Pellizzi, among others, published their literary histories in the 1930s (Cattaneo 2007: 27–28)—should be so tentative and changeable. 4.2.1  Pirandello and Lord Dunsany at the Teatro d’Arte in Rome As alluded to earlier, the mid-to-late 1920s was a period of relative neglect of Irish literature in Italy, but the few translations and critical texts that were published still primarily focused on drama. Linati’s repertoire remained a point of reference for both critics and practitioners, with a number of additions that will be analyzed here, such as Lord Dunsany, a conveniently depoliticized of Seán O’Casey and the progressive assimilation of Eugene O’Neill into the Irish tradition. The majority, though, were plays by the English Shaw, admired by Mussolini himself (Ludwig 1933: 214) and one of the best-represented foreign playwrights in Italian theaters and in the book market, thanks to the prompt and regular translation of his works by Mondadori.35 Nonetheless, a glance at the list of other Irish productions staged during the first decade of the Fascist regime would reveal the usual suspects—Yeats, Synge, Joyce—with the addition of a 35  The complete edition of Shaw’s plays was launched by Mondadori in 1923, with Antonio Agresti’s translation of Plays Unpleasant (Commedie sgradevoli). Most of Shaw’s dramatic works would be published in the series, with at least two notable exceptions: John Bull’s Other Island and Geneva.

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significant performance of Lord Dunsany’s The Gods of the Mountain in 1925, mounted by Pirandello at the Teatro d’Arte in Rome. Before discussing the encounter between Pirandello and Dunsany, though, we will consider the presence of Irish dramatists in criticism. While theater billboards did not feature many new names during those years, critical works were more prone to exploring new territory. The few surveys conducted were instrumental in expanding the repertoire of Irish drama and enriching it with greater nuance, admitting playwrights that had been neglected by early irlandesisti and acknowledging new trends within the Irish tradition. A look at the reference works of the time reveals the progressive establishment of a consistent narrative, in keeping with the aforementioned repertoire proposed by Linati and less reliant on political elements than would be the case in the 1930s and 1940s. Evident, for instance, in Guido Ruberti’s book on European theater, the emerging narrative emphasized originality rather than politics, and considered the qualities differentiating Irish writers from British writers in terms of uncommonness: To find someone saying something, if not entirely original, then at least out of the ordinary, we need to look to some authors who, though of English origin, are not shy to declare themselves of a different race: the Jewish Israel Zangwill; the Irish John Millington Synge, W.B. Yeats, lady Gregory, lord Edward Dunsany, O’Casey Sean [sic].36

As we can see from these lines, Ruberti understands Irishness (and Jewishness) in racial and essentialist terms, thus confirming widespread assumptions common during the Fascist regime. Apart from reinforcing racial stereotypes concerning the “primitive and furious playfulness” [“giocondità primitiva e furiosa” (Ruberti 1928: 895)] of the Irish, Ruberti’s take also testifies to the long-standing influence of Linati’s approach to the Irish canon, particularly prominent in the second edition of his history of drama37: the pages on Irish theater are clearly dependent 36  Per trovare chi dica qualche parola, se non del tutto originale, per lo meno inconsueta, bisogna ricorrere a qualche autore che pur appartenendo alla patria inglese, non esita a professarsi di un’altra razza: l’ebreo Israele Zangwill; gli irlandesi John Millington Synge, W.B. Yeats, lady Gregory, lord Edward Dunsany, O’Casey Sean [sic] (Ruberti 1928: 890). 37  In the second edition of Ruberti’s history of drama, one can identify a significant increase in the space devoted to Irish playwrights, from a few lines on Yeats and Synge as “proper artists, imbued to their roots with the tragically melancholy sentiment of their great and unlucky land” [“artisti di razza, imbevuti sino alle radici dal senso malinconicamente tragico

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on Linati’s introductions, down to the use of stock phrases such as the “great river of English literature” [“gran fiume della letteratura inglese” (Ruberti 1928: 892)] and to the cursory comparison between Lady Gregory and Goldoni. Despite a few awkward mistakes (e.g. Ruberti seems to think that O’Casey’s surname is Sean), the author demonstrates an awareness of the modernity of Irish theater and is able to combine his sources—primarily Linati, Borsa, and Tilgher—in order to emphasize how one can identify the “notion of personality being transformed and incessantly created under the stimulus of various external and internal agents” in the Playboy,38 revealing a certain familiarity with Tilgher’s interpretation of Synge as anticipating some of the themes of Pirandello’s poetics. Ruberti’s mention of Dunsany right after the triumvirate of Irish theater is testament to the circulation of the latter’s name in the Italian theater world at the time, a rare addition to the list of Irish playwrights known in 1920s Italy. The production of his The Gods of the Mountain at the opening night of Pirandello’s Teatro d’Arte was, without a doubt, one of the most disappointing might-have-beens in the story of Italian reception of Irish drama in the 1920s. Pirandello pursued the Teatro d’Arte venture between 1925 and 1928, as an early and timid attempt at a state-funded theater (Alonge 1997: 74–5) based at the Teatro Odescalchi in Rome. Originally the idea of Stefano Landi and Orio Vergani, it soon became obvious that Pirandello wanted to make it his own creation (Alonge 1997: 72–3). In April 1925, Pirandello thus decided to open his first season as manager of one of the first Italian theaters heavily subsidized by the state, with a double bill consisting of his Sagra del Signore della Nave (1924) and a play by an as-yet virtually unknown and never performed Irish playwright, Lord Dunsany. It was an important night, with Mussolini himself among the audience, though the king, whose potential presence had been rumored, did not eventually attend. Despite the significance of Pirandello’s choice, it does not seem to have been linked to a general interest, on his part, in Irish theater, and nor to more than a passing interest in Dunsany’s work. The playbill is quite informative in this regard: Dunsany’s Irishness is mentioned—with relevance attributed, in particular, to his mixing of della loro terra grande e sventurata”] in the first edition (1920: 278–79) to a full chapter in his Storia del teatro contemporaneo (1928). The two editions show that the work enjoyed some circulation, and it is not surprising to see it quoted in a 1947 Italian preface to Paul Vincent Carrol’s Shadow and Substance (Casella 1947: 14). 38  “concetto della personalità che si trasforma e si crea ininterrottamente sotto lo stimolo dei vari agenti esteriori ed interiori” (Ruberti 1928: 894).

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Irish and Indian legends—but the unnamed author of the text is also quick to establish Dunsany as an international writer, primarily known for his American productions (see Tinterri 1987: 352). The Glittering Gate is also mentioned as having being staged by the Abbey in 1909, and subsequently in French by Georges Pitoëff, “in a translation by Bourgeois, who also translated Synge.”39 Pirandello worked hard at adapting the play, which he claimed was deemed by Dunsany himself to be not possible to stage.40 Pirandello’s production of The Gods of the Mountain would remain unique in his career as a theater director and manager but would have lasting consequences in relation to his work as a writer, according to Susan Bassnett, and is likely to have been one of the influences behind his own unfinished play I giganti della montagna (Bassnett 1987, 2013). Similarities were also identified by Camillo Pellizzi, who likened Dunsany to some Italian writers, including Pirandello himself, because of a kindred “spiritual atmosphere” [“Atmosfera spirituale” (Pellizzi 1934a: 248)].41 Dunsany’s strong connections with Ireland and the Abbey Theatre were also commented upon in the numerous articles elicited by the opening at the Teatro d’Arte, with Silvio d’Amico rather surprisingly mentioning, in L’idea nazionale, that Dunsany was ostracized by the Abbey for not fully supporting the nationalist ideals of the theater (d’Amico 1963: 494). As discussed previously, a general misunderstanding of the nuances of Irish politics meant that the Abbey was regarded, in Italy, as part and parcel of the nationalist front in Ireland, while the conflict between its members and other elements of the nationalist project was rarely acknowledged. Other critics focused more on Dunsany’s Irishness to introduce him to the Italian public. Tilgher, in his 4 April 1925 review in Il Mondo, was keen to emphasize the lyrical and mystical qualities of the play, along with its Celtic ability to make the public believe in a “barbaric world of idols and Fairies”: “the strange stories of Lord Dunsany seem like revivals from the Celtic 39  “nella traduzione del Bourgeois, lo stesso che aveva tradotto il Synge” (Fondo Silvio d’Amico, Museo dell’Attore, Genoa, folder: Lord Dunsany, unnumbered item). 40  Interview to the weekly Epoca, quoted in Bolognese (1992). 41  Pellizzi especially highlighted their emphasis on “[f]ate, chance, the relativity of human destinies, the flimsiness of conventional and moral laws, the ascendancy of men born strong and predestined to command, the absurdity of human endeavors to impose stable, favorable forms on the perpetual and tragic flow of destiny and life” [“Fatalità, caso, relatività dei destini umani, inconsistenza delle leggi convenzionali e morali, predominio degli uomini nati forti e predestinati al comando, ridicolezza delle fatiche umane intese a dare forme stabili, convenienti, al flusso perpetuo e tragico del destino e della vita”] (Pellizzi 1934a: 248).

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Mabinogion” (Tilgher 1973: 338, translated in Tinterri 1987: 354). More importantly, however, he described the playwright as a compromise between Yeats and Shaw: “A fellow countryman of Yeats, and also of Bernard Shaw, he is, like them, a lover of mystification and of the joke, of the long savored paradox and the well-placed boutade. This too is Celtic” (Tilgher 1973: 339, translated in Tinterri 1987: 355). As such, he placed Dunsany at the intersection between Irish and European theater, testifying yet again to the liminal position of the Irish playwright. Lord Dunsany’s role in literary surveys of the time was equally ambiguous; his political stance was usually interpreted, by the likes of Pellizzi (1934a: 248), as siding with the British Empire, yet he was consistently listed among the Irish by most scholars, testimony to the aforementioned minority tendency of seeking to disentangle Irish writers from the tight bond with Irish politics and themes, while highlighting other, primarily aesthetic, characteristics. In the mid-1920s the opportunities for Dunsany to be introduced to Italian theatergoers seemed numerous, and despite the aforementioned fluctuations, his connection with Irish theater was well established. As mentioned, around the same time, Joyce recommended to Nino Frank that he should publish one of Dunsany’s plays in ‘900 (Frank 1967: 43). The plan did not come to pass, and we can surmise that, given its cosmopolitan attitude, the review would most likely have downplayed Dunsany’s Irishness, but Dunsany’s inclusion in such an influential organ, in close proximity to his Roman production, might have fostered an interest in the writer and a deeper understanding of his work in Italy. Moreover, according to Tinterri, Pirandello planned to add another play by Dunsany to the program, A Night at the Inn, and Dunsany himself was rumored to do a lecture tour in Italy: “clearly, he was intended to play a large part in the work of the newly established theater” (Tinterri 1987: 352). It is also known that, before choosing Marta Abba as the main actress of his company, in January 1925, Pirandello briefly considered hiring Emma Gramatica, an actress who had been performing in his plays since 1918 and whom he greatly respected.42 Pondering unrealized possibilities, one could imagine a collaboration between the two, leading to further explorations of Irish theater. In fact, the short-lived Teatro d’Arte did not produce any more plays by Lord Dunsany or any other Irish playwright.

42  Memoria del teatro italiano. Attori e attrici (1861–2011) (URL: http://memoria-attori. amati.fupress.net/S100?idattore=63&idmenu=8 Accessed 20 November 2020).

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4.2.2  Irish Theater Before the Second World War: Depoliticizing O’Casey, Assimilating O’Neill As anticipated, the first decade of the Fascist regime is not very eventful when it comes to the reception of Irish theater. Following numerous, mostly failed, attempts by Carlo Linati and Emma Gramatica, in particular, to create an audience for Irish theater in Italy, most scholars, translators, and publishers with an interest in Ireland seemed to turn their thoughts to prose and almost entirely abandon drama (bar Shaw, of course). Even the translation of Riders to the Sea by Joyce and Vidacovich, published in Solaria in 1929, can be seen as part of the review’s commitment to a transnational idea of European literature and, more directly, its association with Joyce (see Bulson 2001), rather than as a means of engaging with Synge and Irish literature, which were otherwise absent from the pages of the Florentine review. Nonetheless, from the mid-1930s onward, early signs began to emerge of a revival of Irish drama; along with the political discourses analyzed earlier, this would eventually influence the surprising proliferation of translations and productions of Irish plays in Italy during the Second World War. An ideal point of departure is the year 1934, in which the International Conference on Theater was organized in Rome in October, and Camillo Pellizzi, a renowned scholar whom we have encountered as representative of the Fasci all’estero, published his book on English theater that included a substantial section on the Irish dramatic movement. Pellizzi was not alone in bringing about a reassessment of Irish theater. In 1936, Il Convegno published Shadow of a Gunman, translated by Carlo Linati and the mysterious Nina Porcelly,43 the first work by Seán O’Casey to be published in Italy,44 with a dense introductory essay by Alessandro ­ Pellegrini. Serafino Riva published a survey of Irish theater in 1937, which 43  According to her obituary in the Irish Independent from 3 February 1970, Nina Esposito Porcelly was the “daughter of the well-known maestro, Michael Esposito, who, in 1899, founded the Dublin Orchestral Society.” The obituary then goes on to inaccurately affirm that she had translated several works by Yeats and Lady Gregory along with Linati and that she taught English and Anglo-Irish literature in Milan for “more than 50 years.” Little else is known of her, and her name was dropped when the play was published again in 1944 by Rosa e Ballo. 44  Few attempts had been made in Italy until then to publish O’Casey, a problematic author due to his socialist leanings. Alessandra Scalero invited Gian Dàuli to read The Plough and the Stars in 1930, as we can gather from his reply (Fondo Gian Dàuli, Carte Gian Dàuli, Biblioteca Civica Bertoliana, Vicenza, folder 17: Scalero Sandra, Alessandra Scalero to Gian

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was heavily influenced by Daniel Corkery, while Renato Simoni, one of Italy’s most respected playwrights and drama critics, signed a noteworthy series of articles on Irish drama during his two-month stay on the island. As we will see in the following section, this echoed a renewed interest in Irish prose writing primarily fostered by Gian Dàuli, which would eventually see participation by established publishing houses such as Mondadori and Rizzoli. The two phenomena have something in common, most significantly that, with the notable exception of Dàuli, the main focus was on Irish realist writers. The Volta Conference was organized by the Reale Accademia d’Italia in 1934 and convened in Rome in October. Intended to showcase the new organization of Italian theater to the world, it can be viewed as the beginning of the Fascist “comprehensive intervention of modernization and ideological homologation” (Paladini Volterra 1999: 26). It was nominally chaired by Pirandello, but the true organizer was Silvio d’Amico, who was rapidly becoming one of Italy’s most influential drama critics. His aim for the conference was to promote the establishment of statefunded theaters (“teatri stabili”) in Italy. It is with this in mind that he invited a number of playwrights, directors, and theater managers, who had established similar institutions in their respective countries (e.g. France, Germany, Portugal, and the Soviet Union), including Yeats, as the “first of delegates” (Fried 2015: 198; Arrington 2021a). Yeats accepted the invitation, despite his being “disillusioned with the regime, a distaste that is evident in his derogatory, multiple references to fascism’s ‘bundle of dry sticks’ in his writing and speeches from the mid-1930s” (Arrington 2021b: 25; see also 103 and 126). A significant number of the invitees did not, however, attend or even grace the organizers with a reply. Among these were Shaw (Fried 2015: 133–5) and O’Neill, who were invited through Henry Furst, despite the latter advising against it, on account of O’Neill being a “leftist and anti-fascist” (Fried 2015: 120). Moreover, a very late letter, dated only five days before the official opening of the Conference, mentions Joyce as one of the possible “English” invitees, but there is no evidence of an official invite ever having been sent (Paladini Volterra 1999: 51). Yeats did attend, and his speech, which was also published with abridged translations in both Italian and French, was, substantially, a rehashing of his Nobel Prize speech, albeit with some Dàuli, 9 August 1930), but nothing came of it. Despite Dàuli’s interest in Irish literature, he was rarely involved in theatrical ventures.

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noteworthy changes. Probably inspired by the nature of the Volta Conference, the writer primarily focused on the political aspects of his work as a playwright and manager of the Abbey (which he described as a very quarrelsome environment), while omitting, for instance, most of the passages concerning poetry in Irish, and especially the poet Raftery, which were part of his Nobel speech. At the Volta Conference, Yeats significantly referred to Lady Gregory, Synge, and himself as “typical of an Ireland that was passing away. The Ireland of what the historians call ‘the Protestant Ascendancy’, and it was right that we should give to the new Catholic Ireland that was about to take its place, a parting gift, the Irish National Theatre” (Yeats 1934: 6). This definition was, in retrospect, a missed opportunity as it did not seem to foster a more nuanced understanding of the different elements of Irish drama. As we have seen, with the notable exception of Yeats’s friend Mario Manlio Rossi, Italian scholars for the most part tended to lump all Irish writers together and to superficially regard them all as Catholic. A second aspect worth mentioning is the prominence afforded by Yeats in his speech to the Cork realists. He included Seán O’Casey in this school and defined it as a later expression of the Revival he and the Abbey playwrights had started in Ireland. This sort of appropriation was not an isolated event. While Yeats had, on various occasions, tried to claim realist writers like O’Casey and O’Flaherty as part of his tradition, “a continuum stretching back via Joyce to J.M. Synge […] most commentators chose to bracket O’Flaherty with O’Casey and Joyce as leaders of a counter-Revival realism in art” (Kiberd 2002: 497–8). In light of such considerations, it is not surprising that he also linked them with James Joyce, probably the most interesting aspect of the entire speech in terms of the creation of a national tradition abroad, since Joyce was still primarily hailed as a cosmopolitan, rather than an Irish, writer. In so doing, he also virtually erased Joyce’s Italian years45: probably an early sign of what would become a long-standing tradition in Irish studies, which was only corrected toward the final decades of the twentieth century. Despite the wide and influential audience, which included Gordon Craig, Yeats’s speech did not have an immediate impact in Italy in terms of an understanding of the Irish literary system.

45  “[Joyce] was an exile, at first in Zurich, then in Paris, in flight from the objects of his hatred, bearing in mind always in minute detail, even to the names over the shops, the Dublin that he hated but could never forget” (Yeats 1934: 8).

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The most fruitful seeds in this regard were in fact planted in those same months, but in the realm of reference books. One of the main book series in the field in the 1930s was “Il teatro del Novecento” edited by Silvio d’Amico, organizer of the Volta Conference and soon to be director of the Real Accademia d’Arte Drammatica. D’Amico agreed on a program with the established publishing house Treves, which included surveys on Italian, French, German, Russian, and English drama. The venture was a long time in the making, since it started around 1926, but the first two volumes (on Italian and German theater) were only published in 1932 and 1933, respectively. Before requesting Camillo Pellizzi’s collaboration for the volume on English theater, d’Amico had, quite naturally, contacted Carlo Linati. The pioneer of Irish theater in Italy was none too keen on the idea of writing a book about English theater and candidly admitted that he was only conversant with Irish drama.46 He did, however, agree to co-author the book with the help of a friend and expert of English theater, none other than “maestro Franco Leoni di Bergamo.”47 However, by mid-1927, Linati’s lack of enthusiasm was becoming clear, and he even went as far as to claim that he had only accepted the project “as a favor to good old d’Amico.”48 It was Linati himself who suggested that they should sound out two young experts, Mario Praz and Camillo Pellizzi, both based in England at the time, to see if either would be interested in replacing him. In 1928, d’Amico got in touch with Pellizzi, who enthusiastically accepted, but it was only in mid-1932 that the latter submitted a first version of the manuscript.49 The hefty handbook (around 400 pages) enjoyed reasonable success and was widely reviewed, but only sold less than half its print run.50 It was, however, promptly translated into English by Macmillan,

46  Fondo Silvio d’Amico, Museo dell’Attore, Genoa, folder “Linati Carlo,” Linati to d’Amico 16 March 1926, Milan, handwritten. 47  Fondo Silvio d’Amico, Museo dell’Attore, Genoa, folder “Linati Carlo,” Linati to d’Amico 9 June 1927, Como—Rebbio, handwritten. 48  “per far piacere al buon d’Amico” (Fondo Silvio d’Amico, Museo dell’Attore, Genoa, folder “Linati Carlo,” Linati to Dall’Oro, 25 June 1927, Como—Rebbio, typewritten). 49  The emphasis of the book was on “teatro contemporaneo,” to the point that the twoyear delay between submission (in 1932) and publication (in 1934) was met with dismay by Pellizzi as he felt the need to update it. 50  Fondo Silvio d’Amico, Museo dell’Attore, Genoa, folder “Collezione Teatro del ‘900,” Treves—Direttore Generale (unclear signature) to d’Amico, 30 June 1938, typewritten.

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thanks to the help of, and with a preface by, Orlo Williams, whose daughter Rowan translated it (Pellizzi 1935)51 and met with general praise.52 While d’Amico had initially requested a volume on English drama that should include “a chapter or a short appendix on North-American theater,”53 the space devoted to Irish writers ended up being so significant that d’Amico himself suggested that Pellizzi should give over separate chapters to American and Irish drama.54 We might surmise that Pellizzi did not object to this request, being a keen observer of Irish matters both political and literary who had, in fact, taken the opportunity to publish a number of articles on Irish drama while completing his book, both in his usual outlet, Corriere della Sera (1931; 1934b), and in Scenario (1932), the newly established theater magazine edited by d’Amico himself. His take on theatrical criticism is clear from these articles, which often read like early drafts of book chapters: theater is a way to gain an insight into the mind of a people and a privileged vantage point from which to discuss the political attitudes of a nation. In his article on George Russell, in particular, he acknowledged how difficult it was for Ireland to be perceived as an independent country, despite the “volcanic eruption of Irish minds who have restored to Ireland all its sentiment and pride in its distinct national personality,” as [t]his blossoming of Irish literature is so closely linked to the spiritual events of other countries that many still struggle to concede to it an independent national profile. How many remember that Shaw is Irish? For the most part, he himself appears to forget.55 51  Quotations from passages translated by Williams will be employed here and identified as “Pellizzi 1935”. 52  Derek Verschoyle, the reviewer of The Spectator agreed with his Italian counterparts in criticizing the lack of aesthetic judgment, but praising it “as an essay in social history and philosophy” (Verschoyle 1935). 53  “un capitolo, o una breve appendice, su quello Nordamericano” (Fondo Silvio d’Amico, Museo dell’Attore, Genoa, folder “Collezione Teatro del ‘900″, d’Amico to Pellizzi, 28 January 1929, typewritten). 54  Fondo Silvio d’Amico, Museo dell’Attore, Genoa, folder “Collezione Teatro del ‘900,″ d’Amico to Pellizzi, 27 August 1932, Castiglioncello, handwritten. 55  “eruzione vulcanica di ingegni irlandesi che hanno fatto riacquistare all’Irlanda tutto il senso e tutto l’orgoglio della propria distinta personalità nazionale”; “[q]uesta fioritura letteraria irlandese è talmente legata a vicende spirituali di altri Paesi, che molti ancora oggi stentano a riconoscerle un profilo nazionale autonomo. Quanti si ricordano che Shaw è irlandese? Per lo più, sembra dimenticarlo egli stesso” (Pellizzi 1934b).

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Moreover, a constant parallel with Italian politics is characteristic of the work of this founder of the Fasci all’estero and future president of the National Institute of Fascist Culture [INCF, Istituto nazionale di cultura fascista]; he believes, for instance, that Russell’s theories, expressed in The National Being, could be quite useful to Italy too, where “an economic democracy led by a spiritual aristocracy” could lead “to the establishment of a corporative state.”56 Pellizzi, who would go on to become one of Italy’s prominent sociologists (Breschi and Longo 2003), was prone to explaining literary matters in political and sociological terms and approached English theater as a means of expressing the struggles of the English bourgeoisie rather than as an aesthetic endeavor.57 Though a significant chapter is devoted to Irish theater, Pellizzi’s awareness of the complexities of Irish drama is perhaps even more evident from the other chapters of Il teatro inglese. As discussed earlier, Yeats is not included in the Irish section. Pellizzi often mentions Yeats’s nationalist ideals, but places him among the “Other novelists and poets [that] attempted drama” (Pellizzi 1935: 175) [“Altri narratori e poeti [che] hanno tentato il teatro” (Pellizzi 1934a: 232)]: “He believed in poetry as it was possible to believe in it at the end of the nineteenth century […] like a magic and miraculous power” (Pellizzi 1935: 177–8),58 but struggling to find a way to bring poetry to the masses, he “turned his thoughts towards drama” (Pellizzi 1935: 178) [“rivolse i suoi pensieri al teatro” (Pellizzi 1934a: 236)]. It is a notion that would become commonplace, particularly in the years of belated appreciation of his poetic skills in Italy, thanks to the translations by Francesco Gargaro (Yeats 1933, Gargaro 1935) and Leone Traverso (Yeats 1938, 1939a, b). The result was that Yeats had no followers: “Ireland admired him, and was grateful for all his noble efforts; but his dramatic work remained sterile whether as a model or a stimulus” (Pellizzi

56  “una democrazia economica guidata da un’aristocrazia spirituale”; “verso la costituzione dello Stato corporativo” (Pellizzi 1934b). 57  Despite being generally praised by reviewers, the book was often criticized as being less a history of English theater than a history of the English bourgeoisie through its theater. What was missing, according to Sandro Volta among others, was the idea of theater as “conjuring an imaginative world” [“creazione della fantasia” (Volta 1934)], with Pellizzi’s analysis guided by social concerns rather than aesthetic considerations. 58  “credeva nella poesia come si poteva credere nella poesia alla fine dell’Ottocento inglese: in una poesia […] come una forza magica e taumaturgica” (Pellizzi 1934a: 235).

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1935: 180).59 In his account of Irish drama, Pellizzi showed profound expertise, discussing both the Abbey’s early exponents (e.g. Lady Gregory and Synge) and its latest blooms, including the realist school, a rarity by Italian standards. He was not only conversant with the by-now traditional repertoire put together by Linati, but also familiar with lesser known dramatists such as E. Martyn, W.F. Casey, G. Shiels, and P. Colum, “the first to find the happy medium between the rather external or farcical realism of Lady Gregory and the lyrical realism of Synge” (Pellizzi 1935: 223–4).60 Indeed, Lady Gregory is one of his favorites because “she revealed the Irish to themselves,” and he regards her plays as “tragicomedies” because the comic element is usually caused by a tragic premise: Irish patriotism […] did not resent this form of humor, which sprang from a deep sympathy, and which aimed, not so much at rebuking corrupt habits (which after all did not exist on the island), as at making the Irish conscious of the defects and weaknesses most common in the national character; it was in fact also a contribution, indirect but valuable, towards the struggle for a free nation. (Pellizzi 1935: 209)61

The cliché of the innocent Irish is further rearticulated in the section on Synge. While Pellizzi was still keen on the traditional view of the simple and primitive Irish, he is also aware that realist dramatists like Synge (as well as Gregory) taught “the Irish of to-day […] not to have too high an opinion of themselves” (Pellizzi 1935: 214).62 It is also worth noting that Synge was by now considered a classic, with the author stating that “the story of the [Playboy] is well known” (Pellizzi 1935: 214),63 including to Italian readers.

59  “L’Irlanda lo ammirò; gli fu grata di tutte le sue nobili fatiche; ma la sua opera teatrale rimase […] sterile di esempi e sviluppi” (Pellizzi 1934a: 238). 60  “il primo che abbia trovato una terza via e misura fra il verismo un poco estrinseco o farsesco di Lady Gregory, e il realismo lirico di Synge” (Pellizzi 1934a: 293). 61  Il patriottismo irlandese [...] non si ribellò a questo genere di comicità che nasceva da una profonda simpatia, e che mirava, non tanto a castigar costumi corrotti (inesistenti, del resto, nell’isola), quanto a rendere gl’Irlandesi consapevoli dei difetti e delle debolezze più diffuse nel carattere nazionale; era insomma anche questo un contributo, indiretto ma prezioso, alla lotta per l’affrancamento della nazione (Pellizzi 1934a: 274–5). 62  “i moderni Irlandesi […] a non farsi soverchie illusioni sul conto proprio” (Pellizzi 1934a: 281). 63  “Il tema [del Playboy] è noto” (Pellizzi 1934a: 281).

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Two other elements would have long-standing consequences: Pellizzi’s interpretation of Eugene O’Neill and Seán O’Casey. With regard to O’Neill, it is thanks to Pellizzi that Italian theatergoers were consistently, and with serious critical engagement, introduced to the former’s Irish origins for the first time, referenced in his 1931 article and in the American chapter of Il teatro inglese. As we will see, this was particularly consistent with the Fascist notion of nationality by blood. Influenced by Irish realism, O’Neill “is a writer with a very decided, singular and rebellious personality, of Irish descent and affinities” (Pellizzi 1935: 254).64 By means of the sort of triangulation frequently employed by Italy’s irlandesisti, Pellizzi associated O’Neill with Synge by comparing them both with the works of Giovanni Verga, the Italian verista novelist and playwright (Pellizzi 1934a: 283 and 335). Pellizzi’s treatment of O’Casey is also quite interesting and representative of a process of depoliticization of the playwright that can be traced back at least to Oreste Rizzini (Pellizzi’s former boss at the Corriere della sera) in 1926. In “Sean O’Casey. Il bracciante drammaturgo” (1926), Rizzini started the Italian tradition of glossing over O’Casey’s socialism and even tried to paint him as a rural worker, despite his having primarily worked in urban contexts. While this framing was clearly more palatable in a period in which the Fascist regime was waging the so-called Battaglia del grano [Battle for Grain] (which started in 1925), it also served to cleverly detach O’Casey from the class of dangerous urban socialists to which he belonged. Pellizzi contributed to this representation. He discussed O’Casey in the context of the Cork realists but clarified that it was difficult to pigeonhole him within any particular school or movement, declaring him instead to be a “confratello” (Pellizzi 1934a: 313) of O’Neill and an expressionist writer. These playwrights, though Pellizzi mentioned Liam O’Flaherty in the same breath, were characterized by cynicism as they began their careers when “war and revolution are an experience already suffered” (Pellizzi 1935: 236) [“guerre e rivoluzioni sono [...] un’esperienza fatta” (Pellizzi 1934a: 309)]. What is more, not only did he avoid mentioning O’Casey’s socialism, he also emphasized his Catholic mentality, especially with reference to The Plough and the Stars. One last point is deserving of clarification. The slight surge in interest in Irish theater in the latter part of the 1930s was not, as has been suggested, caused by Ireland’s alleged neutral position toward Italy’s attempt 64  “[è] scrittore di personalità spiccatissima, singolare e ribelle: imparentato, anche per ragioni di sangue, cogl’Irlandesi” (Pellizzi 1934a: 331).

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to strengthen its colonial empire in Ethiopia. The widespread idea that Ireland did not back the sanctions against Italy is a myth that has proved hard to dispel, as discussed earlier. Little political or diplomatic significance can be attributed to the several contributions concerning Irish drama (and prose and poetry likewise). On the contrary, the authors that were translated, for example, O’Casey, were often depoliticized and made more acceptable to the Fascist regime. As we will see with regard to the reception of Liam O’Flaherty, an anti-English sentiment was, at times, employed by Italian mediators in their depictions of Irish writers, but, usually, this did not concern specific political and diplomatic issues, at least until the run-up to the Second World War. The dense introduction provided by Alessandro Pellegrini to the translation of The Shadow of a Gunman published in Il Convegno is a case in point. Pellegrini provided a detailed introduction about the general characteristics of the Irish tradition, in a manner consistent with the notion that Irish literature always needed to be introduced as if from scratch to Italian readers. This was a common element shared by the various mediators who showed an interest in Irish literature after Linati’s discovery. In his essay, Pellegrini celebrated Ireland’s recently “regained independence” [“ritrovata […] indipendenza” (Pellegrini 1936: 330)] and compared the country with Italy during the Risorgimento, while also participating in the ongoing depoliticization of O’Casey by claiming that the Plough and the Stars flag was simply the flag of the Republic of Ireland, and not, as was in fact the case, the flag of the socialist Irish Citizen Army. Changes in theater management in Italy were numerous in the 1930s and inclined toward progressive centralization of power, including centralized schedules and control of funds and companies, resulting in stricter, or at least more pervasive, censorship.65 This did not target any specific national tradition, however, and seemed to follow a similar trajectory to censorship in the book market, which, as studies have shown, was more concerned with controversial topics and political allegiances than specific nationalities (e.g. Ferme 2002; Billiani 2007; Bonsaver 2007; Talbot 2007; Rundle 2010), something that shifted during the war years when the campaign against enemy countries and races became more pervasive 65  “It was not a case of a systematic plan, implemented methodically […] but […] it seems irrefutable to state that at the end of the Thirties, the Italian scene saw a high degree of bureaucratic control and almost total submission to the will of the governing powers” (Pedullà 2009, 36).

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(Fabre 1998, 2007; Dunnett 2002, 2015). Thus, the reception of Irish writers in the years between the wars seems to have relatively little to do with their nationality and more to do with their (alleged) political position and the potential use of their poetics to fuel domestic debates such as that concerning state-funded theaters. The traditional parallel with England is also less prominent than in the past, though a relatively fixed and simplified idea of Ireland as Catholic and combative gained ground within literary circles. This happened despite attempts by the likes of Pellizzi to provide a more layered survey of Irish drama, emphasizing the quarrelsome character of the Abbey playwrights presented by Yeats himself at the Volta Conference in 1934. Pellizzi also sought to place emphasis on the contrast between Catholic and Protestant dramatists, but most mediators were still prone to gloss over the differences. A Catholic and rural, Gaelic and mystical Ireland was also at the core of the very insightful articles written by theater critic Renato Simoni in August and September 1938, and, in particular, the book on Synge published by Serafino Riva (1937). These two critics provide us with a very clear blueprint for what would happen to Irish literature in Italy during the impending war years. While we have already considered the political value of Simoni and Riva’s contributions to reframing Irishness as bellicose anti-Englishness, an approach that would be key to the propaganda efforts of the Fascist regime, it is also interesting to note how their definitions of an Irish canon go beyond even the most daring attempts made by Linati, Turchi and other early irlandesisti to include all writers connected, in one way or another, to Ireland. A playwright and director himself, Simoni was one of the most influential critics of the period, and had been in charge of the theater pages for Il Corriere della sera since 1914. Influenced by Yeats, he repeated the latter’s mantra that, after Parnell’s failure, Ireland had turned to art to save her soul (Simoni 1938d) and that “urban realism replaced rural realism and dealt with the issues of Irish nationality.”66 Despite being aware of transnational influences (Maeterlinck and Antoine for Yeats, for instance), Simoni goes as far as to say that whatever it is that made Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels popular, “what children like about it, is essentially Irish” [“ciò che in essi piace ai fanciulli, è essenzialmente irlandese” (Simoni 1938b)] and that Irish literature should count Congreve, Sterne, Wilde, Shaw, and Joyce among its ranks (Simoni 1938a). Serafino Riva, on the other hand, 66  “un realismo che, di contadinesco, s’è fatto urbano, e discute i problemi della nazionalità irlandese” (Simoni 1938d).

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drew on Hilaire Belloc’s Europe and Faith to claim that even the Anglo-­ Saxons should be considered Celtic (1937: 4), going as far, in a later publication, as to highlight Edgar Allan Poe’s Irish origins. This view would become predominant during the war, when it would result in a surprising expansion of the repertoire of Irish writers in Italy. Riva’s book on Synge is also interesting for how it confirms the tendency among Italian scholars to dismiss the Protestant element in Irish literature. A contributor to Religio, a journal edited by Ernesto Buonaiuti, Riva extolled the “wildness and primitivism of [Irish] literature” (“selvaticità e primitivismo della […] letteratura [irlandese],” Riva in Palumbo 1940: 42) and, in the wake of Buonaiuti and Turchi, connected the Celtic-Pagan substrate with Catholic heritage, virtually dismissing the Anglo-Irish component (Riva 1934: 160–1). Heavily influenced by Daniel Corkery’s sanitized Revival and his “idealization of uneducated peasant culture as the model for independent Ireland” (Fanning 2014: 112),67 Riva’s book on Synge did not enjoy very wide circulation, but his contribution to Palumbo’s book on Ireland (Palumbo 1940) ensured a certain dissemination of his ideas. His approach, however, reflected the attitude that would heavily characterize the perception of Irish drama during the war. If Irish literature was destined to be repeatedly introduced to Italian readers, most scholars seemed to believe that the only way to avoid confusion between Irish and English literatures was to simplify their differences and construct two easily opposed traditions.

67  Fanning continues as follows: “The idealization of pre-seventeenth-century culture as a template for twentieth-century Ireland was taken seriously by nationalists and anti-liberals of different stripes. In the rhetoric of the time this variously meant turning back the clock on the Reformation to achieve a Catholic Restoration as well as cultural de-colonization by means of a Gaelic Restoration – or both. In this context, cultural nationalists and Catholic conservatives found common cause against the foreign ideas that, from their various perspectives, had subordinated the Irish people to an imported modernity. In its crudest form the conflict was one between isolationists who sought to protect Ireland’s authentic culture, however understood, from outside contamination and their intellectual opponents” (Fanning 2014: 112).

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4.3   The Largest Province of Irish Literature: Irish Prose in Fascist Italy A number of attempts were made, in the 1920s, to familiarize Italian readers with Irish prose writing, but they had not triggered any significant production of translations or critical discussions. One missed opportunity that stands out, in particular, is an article published by John Rodker in Il Convegno. Instigated by Pound, Rodker described the literary English field as divided between Georgians and Imagists, with the latter group presented in a more positive light. A very dense article, it also introduced the “Irish prose-writer James Joyce, perhaps the most personal and potent of the group and a bold creator of myths and syntactic devices,”68 making reference to the translation of Exiles in Il Convegno, A Portrait, and Ulysses. Rodker also discussed other Irish writers, such as James Stephens and George Moore, “Irish, interesting […] and author of scores of novels” [“irlandese, interessante […] e autore di parecchi romanzi” (Rodker 1921: 124)]. This short article acknowledged the variety of national traditions usually included under the umbrella of English literature, in a manner quite characteristic of Il Convegno’s early years, but the writers Rodker mentioned would wait nearly a decade before being translated into Italian. Often referred to in the debates on the modern novel, Joyce was progressively decoupled from the repertoire of Irish writers. A typical example of this is Silvio Benco’s 1925 article in Il Baretti, in which the Triestine intellectual and friend of Joyce’s affirmed, that, while in a “biological sense” [“senso biologico”] Joyce was Irish and an Irish writer, he could not be “confined to Irish literature” [“restringere nella letteratura irlandese” (Benco 1925; see also Bendelli 2007: 86)]. With Joyce almost entirely lost to the cause of Irish literature, the Italian appreciation of Irish novelists had to take different, less traveled roads. The protagonists of this new discovery of Irish literature would initially be literary mediators, such as Gian Dàuli, working on the sidelines of the book market, but later in the 1930s, more established publishers such as Mondadori and Rizzoli took on the task, and Irish literature entered the mainstream catalog of Italian publishing.

68  “prosatore irlandese James Joyce, forse il più personale e potente del gruppo, ardito costruttore di miti e di movenze sintattiche” (Rodker 1921: 123).

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4.3.1  Gian Dàuli and the New Canon of Irish Literature In the history of the reception of Irish literature in Italy, Gian Dàuli is often underestimated, but his activity as a literary mediator is strikingly representative of the entanglement of unsystematic explorations and roads not taken that characterized the matter at hand. Following the pioneering attempts by Linati in the 1910s and early 1920s, scholars and critics alike progressively came to appreciate the specificity of Irish literature within the Anglosphere, but the Italian reading public was generally less familiar with it. Translations of contemporary Irish writers were still comparatively rare, and those who made it into the Italian book market were chiefly perceived simply as English. Nonetheless, mediators such as Gian Dàuli strove to provide the Italian public with informed depictions of Irish literature, as well as with a varied repertoire of translations. His endeavors were only partially crowned with success, but he contributed to deepening the understanding of Irish literature in Italy. Given its complexity and courage, Dàuli’s adventurous dissemination of Irish literature deserves more critical attention than it has been given so far. James Stephens, George Moore, and Brian Oswald Donn Byrne were among the Irish writers Dàuli tried to promote, along with Yeats’s prose, showing an awareness of Irish literature that was almost unparalleled in Italy. As has been discussed, one of the most characteristic elements of Irish literature in Italy up until the mid-1920s was that it was primarily made up of drama. Things began to change in the mid-1920s, after the end of the War of Independence and the Civil War in Ireland, when Italian mediators showed a deeper interest in a more diverse repertoire of Irish literature. One of the protagonists of this attempt was Dàuli, a writer, journalist, publisher, and magazine editor who hailed from Vicenza and who had spent some time in Liverpool at the start of the century, familiarizing himself with the British literary scene and allegedly coming into contact with the likes of Shaw and Yeats. This often-­ overlooked literary mediator was one of the most interesting and unconventional literary figures of his time, whose standing both with respect to Italian literature and to the Italian reception of foreign literature deserves to be reassessed. His career at the margins of the literary establishment and his daredevil attitude to publishing and translating were so proverbial that

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his biographer Michel David dubbed him “a man of disorder” (David 1989: 11).69 Dàuli tried to provide an image of Ireland, and of Irish literature, that was somewhat different to that offered by most irlandesisti of the time, in that it was almost entirely devoid of political elements and mainly based on prose-writers rather than playwrights. While his repertoire was profoundly different from Linati’s, the latter’s idea of depoliticizing Irish literature and presenting it as non-English rather than anti-English was fully embraced by Dàuli. As we will see in the following section, Mondadori did not share this attitude, most likely due to its constant negotiation and compromises with the regime’s officials, and took a more resolute anti-­ English stance in publishing Liam O’Flaherty. In some ways, Dàuli picked up where Linati had, temporarily, left off: he started exploring Irish prose writing, a realm of Irish literature that Linati had only briefly engaged with in the early 1920s. Dàuli was even more straightforward than Linati in claiming that his take on Irish literature mainly focused on aesthetic and literary elements rather than on its political character. In his 1928 preface to George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man (Moore 1929),70 he acknowledged some differences between English and Irish literature before, surprisingly, concluding that such differences would eventually disappear and be assimilated by the predominant “English spirit.” We are in different territory, here, to Mario Manlio Rossi’s pro-Anglo-Irish approach: politics is largely absent, as are nationalist claims, which are quite decisively downplayed by Dàuli: If foreigners are so drawn to English literature that they abandon their own language in favor of it, as with the Polish Conrad, for example […] the acclimatization and nationalization of the Irish, the Scots, the North Americans 69  It does not seem unrelated that Dàuli, whose real name was Giuseppe Ugo Nalato, had a wealth of pseudonyms, including Paolo Caimpenta and Ugo de Caimpenta. “Gian Dàuli,” however, was certainly more than just another nom de plume: it was the identity with which he made a name for himself and was recognized in the literary market, and in private correspondence, for most of his life. 70  The translation was published in 1929, but Dàuli dated his introduction September 1928. Dàuli’s preface was in the second volume of a book series titled “Il genio anglosassone” [“The Anglo-Saxon Genius”], a title which was very visible on the book cover. It was Dàuli’s second attempt to familiarize Italian readers with literatures in English after the ultimately failed book series “Anglia” with Ancona’s publisher Lucerna. Other novels that were published in the “Il genio anglosassone” book series were Jude the Obscure and Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy.

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and the indigenous peoples of the colonies is bound to be even easier. Do we not, in fact, see the English spirit prevailing over the Irish in writers like Wilde and Shaw?71

Despite such a surprising and untimely death sentence, it is worth pointing out that, according to Dàuli, Irish writers still retained some key characteristics that differentiated them from their English counterparts. In order to emphasize that the exponents of the Irish revival “still kept the soul and the spirit of their motherland and their race,”72 Dàuli primarily resorted to aesthetic differences. The range of novelists he included in his repertoire of Irish writers was rather diverse, ranging from the fin-de-siècle “romantic” Moore to the revivalist Stephens and Donn Byrne, but notably omitting the crude and realist works of O’Casey and O’Flaherty that were being explored in the period by Linati, Rossi, and others. Dàuli’s awareness of how narrow the Italian repertoire of Irish literature was up to that point is evident from the following passage from the same introduction, in which, after praising Yeats and Synge’s works, he adds: Hence the opinion that the great renaissance of Irish literature is essentially attributable to poetic and dramatic works, with the contribution of short stories and novels being entirely negligible. We do not, however, believe this to be the case; on the contrary, it seems to us that the art of narrative not only plays a significant role in the sphere of Irish poetics – it is, in fact, its largest province.73

It is certainly debatable that poetry was a significant element of Irish literature in Italy, but Dàuli’s words suggest that the failure to translate Irish  Se già accade che stranieri sono attratti dalla letteratura inglese al punto d’abbandonare la propria lingua per essa, come nel caso del polacco Conrad […] anche più facilmente avverrà la acclimatazione e nazionalizzazione degli irlandesi, scozzesi, americani del nord e degli indigeni delle colonie. Non vediamo prevalere, infatti, in scrittori come il Wilde e lo Shaw lo spirito inglese su quello irlandese? (Moore 1929: 6). 72  “conservano ancora l’anima e lo spirito della terra natale e della propria razza” (Moore 1929: 6). 73  “Donde l’opinione che la grande rinascita dell’arte irlandese sia dovuta essenzialmente ad opere poetiche e drammatiche e che trascurabilissima sia l’opera novellistica e romanzesca. Non ci sembra, però, che tale concetto corrisponda alla verità; giacché riteniamo, anzi, che l’arte narrativa non solo formi parte importante del territorio della poesia irlandese, ma ne sia la provincia più vasta” (Moore 1929: 7). 71

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novelists up to that point, or indeed readily associate them with Irish literature, could in some cases be explained by their not being easily pigeonholed into the relatively narrow definition of that tradition that circulated in Italy. Hence, from that moment onward, he would go on to devote a great deal of energy to the dissemination of Irish novels, albeit—as was often the case for somebody so prone to fleeting passions—for an intense but relatively short period of time. While aspects relating to the perception of Irish literature should not be overlooked when seeking to explain the almost complete absence of Yeatsian prose in Italian translation until 1926, and Irish short stories and novels until the late 1920s, it is arguably more relevant to consider elements more immediately linked to the receiving context, specifically the Italian literary system in the early decades of the twentieth century. It was very rare, in those years, for highbrow Italian writers to turn to the short story or novel as their preferred means of expression, while the main literary magazines of the time championed fragmentism and belletrist lyrical prose (La Voce and La Ronda, respectively). Things changed toward the end of the 1920s, however, when the Italian literary system saw the early signs of a return to the novel, concerning both domestic output and translation. The mid-1920s marked a turning point in this regard, with frequent attempts by intellectuals such as Giuseppe Antonio Borgese (see below) or the young Giacomo Debenedetti to promote the novel as the symbolic form of modernity. Publishers, meanwhile, were attracted by the potential financial gain associated with developing a catalog of modern novels, driving them to launch book series such as “Slavia,” “Scrittori di Tutto il Mondo,” and Mondadori’s “Romantica” (planned in 1926), which focused on foreign prose. These series voiced the need of a combative minority of Italian literati and publishers to influence the literary system by circulating Italian and foreign novels as an element of change. In this highly receptive landscape, the belated success of Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno (published in 1925) and, even more significantly, the arrival of the young Alberto Moravia’s Gli indifferenti on the shelves in 1929 confirmed the interest in narrative prose that had been brewing for the better part of the decade. The nascent recognition of prose fiction, and particularly novels, in 1930s’ Italian literary circles was also reflected in a newfound interest in Irish novels and short stories. As has been extensively documented in past scholarship, the late 1920s and much of the decade that followed saw Italian literati (Fascist or otherwise) tirelessly debating the nature of the novel and, more specifically, the form a Fascist novel should take. The

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major literary journals of the time, including the long-running Il Convegno and the more recent Occidente, Quadrivio, ‘900, and Solaria, to name but a few, all devoted much attention to the literary form, both through translations and critical articles. Even more interesting is that many debates were in fact sparked by translations of, and discussions surrounding, foreign literature that appeared in periodicals (see Luti 1995; Billiani 2016). The debate on the collective novel as a possible Third-Way solution (see Ben-Ghiat 1996) to the conundrum of the best form for the Fascist novel, for example, was triggered by the translations of novels by Dos Passos and Kormendi, and most emphasis was placed on works by Proust and Joyce (Piazzoni 2007: 131–144; Baldini 2019). Dàuli’s work as both a publisher and translator engaged with many of the same questions explored in these debates. In the mid-to-late 1920s, he worked tirelessly to construct a repertoire of Anglophone writers, translating some works himself and featuring others in book series or publishing ventures he directed. It was his innovative contention that the renaissance of Irish literature was primarily attributable to prose writing rather than poetry and drama. This was a very timely claim in late 1920s Italy, and intersected with Dàuli’s own long-standing struggle to promote the status, and assert the importance, of the novel in Italian literary circles, a task he carried out by, among other things, commissioning the translation of foreign novels by some of the best Italian translators of the time: Alessandra Scalero, Annie Lami, Alberto Spaini, Mario Puccini.74 Dàuli’s work in the late 1920s and early 1930s was both enthusiastic and chaotic, characterized by short-lived publishing ventures such as Delta, Dauliana, and most notably Modernissima, and editing various book series for more established publishers such as Bietti, Stock, and Lucerna. His frenetic approach meant that writers could find themselves moving from one publisher to another, and entire book series, which had been carefully planned, would change name and imprint (this was the case with “Anglia,” which moved from Lucerna to Stock, becoming “Il genio anglosassone”), before grinding to an abrupt halt after only a handful of issues. Of all his projects, Dàuli is best known for “Scrittori di tutto il mondo” [“Writers from all over the world”], a successful book series published by Modernissima from 1929, with print-runs of between 5000 and 10,000 and high prices that would ultimately make the venture financially unsustainable. The 74  As is known, Cesare Pavese too submitted an application to Dàuli as a translator at the start of his career.

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series was then sold to Enrico Dall’Oglio, who continued to publish it under his Corbaccio imprint. Dàuli showed exceptional flair for recognizing the masterpieces of the most appreciated authors of international modernism—including Céline, Wilder, Dos Passos, and Döblin—with which his own (now mostly forgotten) experimental novels were often compared in the 1930s. Dàuli’s activity as a cultural mediator was always intended as a way to explore new literary avenues, thus feeding his own narrative output, while injecting new life into Italian literature both from a formal and a thematic point of view. The novels he chose to publish were “as far away as possible from the Ronda’s belletrist literature” (Marchetti 2014a) and the topics were equally unconventional for the Italian literary system of the time: “Freudianism, homosexuality, sexual drive, negritude, Jewish atmospheres, Americanism” (Marchetti 2014a). Hailed as the first of the Americanists by some critics, including Marchetti and David, it is possible to argue that Dàuli was one of the first Italian mediators to try to introduce finer distinctions to the conversation on the Anglosphere, paying attention to cultural and national differences, but always with the Italian literary scene as his primary focus. This is clear when we consider the space devoted to Irish literature in his work. While his engagement with Irish writing was certainly significant, the country’s literature was not the idée fixe for Dàuli that it was for Linati. It was acknowledged and appreciated for various, often contingent, reasons, but it was not predominant and was instead part of a more elaborate exploration of English literature as a complex and non-monolithic category. This is common to other irlandesisti of the time and arguably the main difference between the pioneering years of Linati’s activity and the relatively more sluggish 1930s. Nonetheless, it is possible to delineate the kind of repertoire he was trying to put together, by observing the list of Irish publications connected with his mediating activity: Yeats, William Butler. “La Rosa dell’Ombra.” Trans. by Gian Dàuli. La Fiera Letteraria 2, no. 27 (4 July 1926): 5. Yeats, William Butler. “Il cuore della rosa.” Trans. by Gian Dàuli. Le Opere e i Giorni 5, no. 8 (1 August 1926): 14–19. Moore, George. Le confessioni di un giovane. Trans. by Gian Dàuli. Il genio anglosassone 2. Rome: Alberto Stock, 1929. Shaw, George Bernard. La professione di Cashel Byron. Trans. by I. Morelli. Milan: Dauliana, 1929. Stephens, James. L’orcio d’oro. Trans. by Tullio Brondi. Milan: Delta, 1929.

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“Opere complete di Donn Byrne” [Complete Works of Donn Byrne]: Raftery il cieco e sua moglie Hilaria. Trans. by Gian Dàuli. Milan: Modernissima, 1930. Il capro d’oro. Trans. by Mario Pensuti. Milan: Modernissima, 1930. Il fratello Saul. Trans. by Mara Fabietti. Milan: Modernissima, 1929. La baia del destino. Trans. by Ada Salvatore. Milan: Modernissima, 1930. La casa del boia. Trans. by Maria Parisi. Milan: Modernissima, 1929. La crociata. Trans. by Lucia Krasnik. Milan: Modernissima, 1930. La donna trasformata. Trans. by Cesare Meano. Milan: Modernissima, 1930. La raffica. Trans. by Maria Parisi. Milan: Modernissima, 1930. Le donne folli. Trans. by Mario Pensuti. Milan: Modernissima, 1930. Messer Marco Polo. Trans. by Enrichetta Conte. Milan: Modernissima, 1930. Racconto senza titolo. Trans. by Lucia Krasnik. Milan: Modernissima, 1930. Il campo dell’onore. Trans. by Mara Fabietti. Milan: Modernissima, 1930. To illustrate the prolific nature of Dàuli’s publishing activity, suffice to say that Irish authors only represented a small proportion of all publications he was involved with in some way or another in those years.75 While the main difference between his repertoire and Linati’s is that Dàuli was obviously more interested in prose—even as regards the works of Yeats and Shaw—than drama or poetry, it is also worth noting that he also focused on a more diverse range of writers. The themes and images of Ireland conveyed by such a selection were also somewhat in contrast with those explored by Linati’s authors of choice and the relatively established canon of Irish writers in Italy at the time. Political elements were mostly avoided (with the slight exception of two of Donn Byrne’s historical novels), and folkloric and generally Celtic themes were foregrounded: this arguably explains why Dàuli never showed an interest in publishing the works of Seán O’Casey or any exponent of the realist school of the 1930s, though we cannot rule out the possibility that he was merely unaware of them, as there is no mention of them in the paratextual materials either. Ireland was presented as a country in which history and myth, and paganism and Christianity were inextricably intertwined, an image that was consistent with that conveyed by Yeats’s early works. It is not surprising, then, that Dàuli’s Irish season should start with his translation of two short 75  A bibliography of works by Dàuli, translated by him or appeared in book series and publishing houses directed by him, was heroically put together by Marchetti (2014b).

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pieces of prose by Yeats, whom he greatly admired and even claimed to have met during his stay in England at the start of the century, though no concrete evidence has been found to corroborate this. Nonetheless, he wrote about Yeats as early as 1907 in the Gazzetta di Venezia, focusing on the poet’s Celticism and not limiting himself to his drama, as other early irlandesisti had done, but, quite remarkably, extolling Yeats’s qualities as a writer of prose. Two decades later, in the early years of his career as a literary translator, he became the first to translate Yeats’s prose in Italy. His version of “The Heart of the Rose” (1926), in particular, played a key role in the Italian reception of Yeats, not so much because of its quality as a translation or because it fostered a deeper understanding of the poet’s relationship with Irish folklore, but rather because it arguably encouraged Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa to publish his innovative essay on Yeats in the same literary journal (Lampedusa 1926).76 In line with his interpretation of Yeats, Dàuli’s notion of Ireland was of a Celtic and rural country, essentially different from England, whose inhabitants were more inclined to relish “ephemeral fireworks” (“fuochi d’artificio effimeri”) than deal with “concrete reality” (“realtà concreta,” Moore 1929: 9) like the English, but whose literature could be decadent, Romantic, and escapist, and thus not confined to the realist spheres emphasized by the early irlandesisti.77 According to Dàuli, who relied explicitly on Matthew Arnold’s traditional account of the Celtic element in literature, Irish people were characterized by their individualism, humor, and anarchic spirit, as well as by their tendency toward superficial attachment to political and aesthetic principles (Moore 1929: 9). George Moore was thus regarded by Dàuli as the quintessential Irish writer due to his relentless shifting between genres, forms, and political allegiances. The late-naturalist psychological realism of Confessions of a Young Man would have a significant influence on Dàuli’s career as a writer in his own right and would partly inform his 1932 novel La Rua, which was widely translated and compared to Joyce’s Ulysses at the time (David 1989: 61). The Irish character as conveyed by Dàuli is characterized by a great degree of indeterminacy—“it is not 76  Michel David, Dàuli’s biographer, maintains that this might have been the case in a letter to Vanni Scheiwiller (Università degli Studi di Milano, Centro Apice, Archivio Scheiwiller, folder “Lampedusa” Giuseppe Tomasi (temporary n. 6912), correspondence, Michel David to Vanni Scheiwiller, Padova, 25 May 1967). 77  We have discussed how Yeats’s symbolism and interest in the supernatural, core elements in Linati’s early work on the poet, were progressively downplayed in favor of Gregory’s and Synge’s realism.

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therefore easy to pinpoint the essential features of the Irish spirit”—and instability: “To the essentially anarchic Irish, aestheticism offers the most favorable ground on which to build their air castles, which they will hasten to tear down tomorrow with a single breath.”78 It is therefore not surprising that Dàuli should also be interested in folkloric elements, as can be inferred from his publication of Tullio Brondi’s translation of James Stephens’s The Crock of Gold in 1929. One of the least known authors of the Irish Revival in Italy, despite having being invited to Florence for the Third International Book Fair in 1928, Stephens enjoyed a niche following in Italy, where readers such as Gargaro appreciated the “weird and, I would say, almost childlike humor” [“umorismo strano e direi quasi fanciullesco”] of his “bizarre, highly eccentric novel” [“bizarro stranissimo romanzo” (Gargaro 1935: xx)].79 Nonetheless, we can surmise that the irony of the novel mostly fell on deaf ears in Italy, where the folkloric tradition it harked back to was virtually unknown, as discussed earlier. The Crock of Gold may be said to resonate with Dàuli’s more escapist mode, and the ingenious mixture of dreamlike atmosphere and disquieting realism that would characterize some of his later works, both novels like Cabala bianca (1944) and children’s books such as Zio Floflò (1933). Ever since his 1907 article on Yeats, the Italian author had been fascinated by the fantastic elements of Irish literature, which he described as at once “vague and precise” [“vaga e precisa” (Dàuli 1907)], a definition that also perfectly captures the style of Stephens’s novel. It seems likely that Dàuli had intended to translate the works of more Revivalist writers. His notebooks contain frequent references to such plans, and he had copied out the first pages of Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight,80 confirming an interest in Irish folklore, and in the Celtic Revival that was almost unparalleled in Italy. It is probably this path that led him to turn his attention to the Irish-­ American writer Brian Oswald Donn Byrne. 78  “non è dunque facile precisare i caratteri essenziali dello spirito irlandese”; “Agli irlandesi, essenzialmente anarchici, l’estetismo offre il terreno più propizio ove edificare i loro castelli aerei che domani essi s’affretteranno a distruggere con un soffio” (Moore 1929: 9). 79  Francesco Gargaro would also provide a unique translation of Stephens’s poetry in an anthology that also included poems by Yeats and AE. Another example of little-known translations of Stephens’s work into Italian is the inclusion of several excerpts from his The Insurrection in Dublin (1916) by Mario Borsa in the latter’s book on Roger Casement (1932: 196–200). 80  Fondo Gian Dàuli, Carte Gian Dàuli, Biblioteca Civica Bertoliana, Vicenza, folder 13, item 7.

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Dàuli’s unique take on Irish literature set him apart from other Italian mediators, and was confirmed by his most spectacular failure, the publication of the complete works of Donn Byrne (1889–1928), an Irish-born American author of historical novels that were strongly influenced by the Irish Revival. Dàuli first came across a volume by Donn Byrne on a stand in Genoa—curiously across the road from where Daniel O’Connell had died—where he was in the habit of browsing the books American seamen would leave behind. He first came across a volume of verses by Ernest Dowson that sent him on a trip down the memory lane, since he had read the London-based poet and member of Yeats’s Rhymers’ Club, during his youth in Bristol. He was then given Donn Byrne’s Blind Raftery and His Wife, Hilaria for free by the bookseller. The random discovery of Donn Byrne’s works was a key event for Dàuli, who wrote to him at the start of 1926 and received an enthusiastic reply, which was duly included in the preface to the first of the published translations (Donn Byrne 1930: xvii-­ xviii). He was especially interested in the primitive nature portrayed in Donn Byrne’s works. Donn Byrne, Dàuli claimed with enthusiasm, was better than any of the Irish poets: I did not hesitate to place him above all other Irish writers, even a Swift, a Wilde, a Shaw, a Yeats, a Singe [sic], a Stephens or a Joice [sic], not because he is the greatest of them all (where would one begin with such comparisons?) but because he has something the others lack, a certain chord that touches the heart, a sense of intimacy and contemplation as emanates from the house in which one is born, in the open countryside, in the March winds, the scent of the earth and the plants.81

Two elements are crucial here: Dàuli’s apparent intention to present this novel as a readable and enjoyable book (the kind of book a working-class man can read on his break while working on a ship) and the links he established with the great names of English, and primarily Irish, poetry: Yeats, Wilde, and so forth. In the same preface, Dàuli was also very keen to emphasize that this Irish writer—he glosses over Donn Byrne’s 81  “non esitai a porlo più in alto di tutti gli altri scrittori irlandesi anche se si chiamano col nome di uno Swift, di un Wilde, di uno Shaw, di un Yeats, di un Singe [sic], d’uno Stephens, d’un Joice [sic], non perché egli sia più grande di tutti (come si fa a istituire certi paragoni?) ma perché egli ha qualche cosa che manca agli altri, una certa corda che tocca il cuore, un senso di intimità e di raccoglimento come spira dalla casa in cui si è nati, in mezzo alla campagna aperta, tra i venti del marzo, l’odore della terra e delle piante” (Donn Byrne 1930: xv).

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hyphenated identity—had not been translated anywhere else: the Italian translation of Donn Byrne’s Raftery was the first in Europe, meaning that Italy was not trailing behind France or Germany on this occasion (Donn Byrne 1930: xx-xxi). This was a clever move on Dàuli’s part, allowing him to achieve at least two goals. On the one hand, he seemed to refer to Italian readers’ habit of buying French translations of books that were unavailable in Italy, leading to a potential loss for Italian publishers (see Rundle 2010: 92). On the other hand, he appears to anticipate one of the strategies engaged in by Mondadori (see below): by framing translation as the colonization and occupation of new (literary) territories, he addressed one of the main concerns of Fascist bureaucrats (and Mussolini himself), whose opposition to translations stemmed in part from the idea that they implied a lack of agency on the part of Italian literati. In his exploration of Irish literature, Dàuli found in Donn Byrne a perfect example of an Irish writer who was not anti-British but who, at the same time, foregrounded some essential qualities of Irish literature as opposed to other literatures in English. Toward the end of his preface, which was also meant as an introduction to the “Complete works of Donn Byrne” series, Dàuli mentioned that Raftery, the protagonist of the first novel, was a traditional wandering Irish poet, who composed his poetry in Irish: “Uncomplicated verses written in simple language that convey the most pathetic sentiments of his soul,”82 yet again referring to the stereotype of the melancholy and simple Celtic nature. The popular verses of poor Irish farmers are “the soul of its people […] like this story, which has the power to move even those from other lands and of other races.”83 While this romantic image of Irish literature was rather consistent with Linati’s, Donn Byrne (and Gian Dàuli with him) emphasized the rural and “simple” elements of the alleged Celtic nature to an even greater extent than the early irlandesisti and foregrounded the “Saxon/Celt opposition.” In Joep Leerssen’s words: In its literary repercussions, this image translated itself into the polarity between realism and symbolism. An Irish self-image of mysticism and sensitivity to the supernatural instills the work of Yeats and his generation (the ‘Celtic Twilight’). Although this vision was resisted by other important Irish 82  “Versi facili, che esprimevano con linguaggio semplice le sensazioni più patetiche dell’anima sua” (Donn Byrne 1930: xxiii). 83  “l’anima del suo popolo […], come il presente racconto, che ha la potenza di commuovere anche la gente di altre terre e di altre razze” (Donn Byrne 1930: xxiv).

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authors such as Shaw, Joyce and Beckett, the sentimental-mystical image has remained dominant and has been exported to most Western nations. (Leerssen 2000: 193)

These words aptly sum up Dàuli’s version of Irishness, somehow falling in line with the version usually exported to other Western countries, though slightly different to the one conveyed by the translations of early Italian irlandesisti, as discussed in 3.4. His original plan for the complete works of Donn Byrne was to conclude the series with a short prose titled Ireland. The Rock from Whence I Was Hewn, which was to be preceded by a study of the author. The translation was completed but never published, and can be browsed at the Gian Dàuli Archive in Vicenza, but there is no trace of the study. Ireland, the second part of which is a literary tour of the island, described as a “land of wandering and popular bards and romantic love” (Donn Byrne 1927: x), would confirm Donn Byrne’s non-bellicose Irishness, with the author being equally critical of the Easter Rising, the English, and the subsequent wars. But the entire discourse on Irish politics is somewhat erased84 to make room for a long paean for Irish simplicity that goes as far as to claim that electricity should not be extended to the countryside. In his letter to Dàuli, Donn Byrne wrote that “if one Italian out of a million reads my books (if he be the right one) I’d be pleased” (Quoted in Donn Byrne 1930: xviii). Unfortunately his prediction was not too far off the mark. The Italian public did not show any significant interest in the Irish-American writer (confused by the “Donn,” some believed he might be a member of the clergy, according to David 1989: 35), and the decision to publish twelve novels in the space of a year also proved misjudged. Dàuli had made a similar mistake in his approach to Jack London’s works. Despite the latter’s success in Italy, Dàuli’s rather too enthusiastic publishing strategy had led to an economic fiasco that brought the Modernissima publishing house to its knees (Tranfaglia and Vittoria 2000: 363). Dàuli’s indefatigable work as cultural mediator was certainly not matched by his managerial abilities, or lack thereof: the publishing ventures he embarked on in the late 1920s could be regarded as excessive in number, and often overlapped in terms of target readership, choice of authors, and general 84  “The rebellion of 1916, which made Ireland free or changed nothing, according to what conclusion you have arrived at, was either abominable treachery or clearheaded heroism – you take your choice according to your politics!” (Donn Byrne 1927: 57–8).

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focus. Most ended in a similar manner to “Il genio anglosassone” series, which had to be sold below market value once the financial backers realized it was no longer profitable. It is certainly difficult to pinpoint the reasons for the failure of the “Complete Works of Donn Byrne,” and as is the case so often with literary products, the matter is ultimately imponderable. Dàuli was aware that advertising was needed to attract readers and sought to encourage reviews in mainstream papers, but these efforts were either late—a review signed “b.f.” in the Corriere della Sera was only published in January 1932—or never came to fruition.85 Despite Dàuli’s miscalculations, this publication spree cannot be regarded as a complete misfire. His career was severely damaged by the Donn Byrne fiasco, and his activity as both a publisher and a writer would grind to a painful, though temporary, halt over the subsequent years.86 Nevertheless, he did 85  Dàuli tried to involve Linati himself, who had in the past been happy to review his books, but on 6 February 1931 Linati claimed that “I only write sporadically about English books, since in the papers I contribute to they are frowned upon, I am afraid” [“non parlo che molto occasionalmente di libri inglesi, perché nei giornali dove collaboro pare che non faccia molto piacere” (FGD, CGD, correspondence Linati, Carlo, Linati to Dàuli, 6 February 1931, Milan, typewritten), which sounds overly cautious on Linati’s part at this moment in history. 86  When, in the 1930s, Ireland was primarily seen in Fascist Italy as a thorn in Britain’s side, Dàuli briefly took part in this new trend. He temporarily abandoned the ideals that had fueled his brief but incredibly productive career as a publisher, translator, and mediator of middle- and highbrow foreign literature and reinvented himself as a writer of propaganda books in collaboration with Andrea Lucchi and Aurora, publishing widely between 1934 and 1941, including L’Impero Abissino (1935) and Lo spionaggio inglese (1936) under the pseudonym Ugo Caimpenta. Significantly, several pages in the latter book are dedicated to Roger Casement, one of the victims of English repression after the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland. This is one of the few references to Irish history we can find in Dàuli’s works and, as I mentioned, it is quite uncharacteristic from somebody who tended to downplay Irish nationalist issues, usually a key point for other Italian mediators with an interest in Irish literature. Similarly, during the Second World War ban on English writers, he did not take advantage of the situation except, once again, to promote Donn Byrne’s novel Raftery, this time through a theatrical adaptation that would ultimately never see the light of day. The end of the Second World War saw Dàuli ready to embark once again on his less reprehensible activity as a publisher and editor. A few months before his death, his head was full of projects spanning from women’s and children’s magazines, to book series for Garzanti, Mondadori, and Bompiani, as well as the relaunch of his publishing house, Modernissima, with which he intended to issue works by Vita Sackville-West and his Irish writers: Yeats, Moore (Eloise and Abelard, an odd choice, was almost ready to be published, FGD, CGD, folder 16, item 1, Moore, Eloisa e Abelardo, typescript of translation with corrections by hand), and, with incorrigible optimism, Donn Byrne, but also Hesse, Kafka, The Spoon River Anthology, Gone with the Wind, and even Proust. His relatively premature death nipped these exciting projects in the bud.

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succeed in seeing one of the writers he had sought to introduce to Italian audiences achieve some recognition: George Moore. Though Donn Byrne remained an unfamiliar name in Italy (as it mostly was in Ireland and the rest of Europe), the publication of George Moore sparked an interest in the Irish writer that would continue for a number of decades. The Lake, which Dàuli himself had originally planned to include in the “Il genio anglosassone” series, was published by Rizzoli in 1933, and Esther Waters, Moore’s Zolian novel, was consecrated by Giuseppe Antonio Borgese with its inclusion in Mondadori’s prestigious “Biblioteca Romantica” series in 1934. Dàuli’s interest in middlebrow novels (e.g. the works of Donn Byrne and Jack London), primarily conveyed through his Modernissima venture, would also arguably influence the editorial choices of Mondadori’s book series such as “I libri della Palma” and “Medusa.” The case of George Moore is deserving of critical examination because it shows how a different notion of Irish literature was introduced, albeit timidly, through this often neglected writer who, almost unexpectedly, achieved Italian notoriety. Moore was often mentioned in early articles on the Irish Revival in Italy, particularly for his participation in the dramatic movement, as well as in some surveys of fin-de-siècle English prose (see Olivero 1914), but it was not until Mario Vinciguerra’s article (1926) that he gained more sustained critical attention. Vinciguerra emphasized Moore’s “restless individualism” [“indiviudalismo irrequieto” (Vinciguerra 1926: 175)] and his inability to “tolerate party discipline in the political struggle” [“sopportare una disciplina di partito nella lotta politica” (Vinciguerra 1926: 175–6)]. He also rapidly dismissed Moore’s anticlericalism as an impossible and “childlike” [(“fanciullesc[a],” Vinciguerra 1926: 176)] solution in contemporary Catholic Ireland. This could arguably be expected from Vinciguerra, a fervent Catholic and future contributor to Buonaiuti’s journal Religio, alongside Serafino Riva, but it became a staple of the Italian Moore.87 Dàuli had also refrained from mentioning the author’s anticlericalism in his preface to Moore’s Confessions, and when The Lake was published by Rizzoli in 1933, the unsigned preface did mention the fall of the priest, distraught by his sensual feelings for a woman, but also his rebirth in comparatively vague terms, as a “new man with a different life” [“uomo nuovo con una vita differente” (Moore 1933: 8)]. The erasure of the Protestant tradition is also confirmed in 87  Alberto Lázaro makes a similar point about Moore’s reception in Spain (Lázaro 2006: 67). For a more thorough exploration of Celticism in Galicia, see de Toro Santos (1995).

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Vinciguerra’s essays as a constitutive element of the reception of Irish literature. In an essay on Father Bernard Vaughan included in the same volume, he went as far as to say that all Irish writers who had been consecrated in London “consciously or unconsciously carried a mentality that was neither Saxon nor puritan, but invigorated by their support of Catholicism over the English church, the church of the invaders.”88 This is one of the interesting points of his article on Moore: albeit in passing, Vinciguerra had hinted at a minority strain of anticlericalism in Irish literature and associated it with Moore’s individualistic attitude, something that was also usually absent from the Italian understanding of Irish writers canonized by Linati, generally represented as a united group. With Vinciguerra, we begin to see the early, and still undeveloped, signs of an understanding of Irish literature as slightly more detached from the monolithic version initially presented by Linati. It took Vinciguerra to emphasize Moore’s participation in the Naturalism movement and his fascination with Zola, an element that would be rearticulated by Dàuli and Praz in the following years. Interestingly, Vinciguerra seemed to imply that Moore’s anticlericalism represented a moment in his evolution as a writer that corresponded to a “misunderstanding” (1926: 176) with his country. It is as though he is suggesting that certain aspects of his character made him less Irish, and his Irishness could only be confirmed if he came to share the alleged characteristics of his people, and specifically its spiritual dimension and sentiment of solidarity toward other peoples who were part of the British Empire (Vinciguerra 1926: 175). It is arguable that the fixed idea of Irishness that was common in Italy at the time served as an almost unchallenged category in Vinciguerra’s criticism, despite the few centrifugal elements that we have touched upon: in this light, Moore could only be truly Irish if expressing Catholic sentiments. And yet, the seeds of a notion of restless and individualistic Irish literature were planted. Moore was a key element of such a vision, which was advanced in a very detailed—and somehow uncharacteristic—manner by Gian Dàuli some years later in the aforementioned preface to Confessions of a Young Man. According to Dàuli, George Moore was the writer who encapsulated the quintessential Celtic spirit: “He is the most typical embodiment of Irish adaptability; he comes across as a typical individualist, whose art does not evolve in any 88  “coscientemente o incoscientemente, portavano una mentalità né sassone né puritana, ma esaltata nell’affermazione del Cattolicesimo contro la Chiesa di stato inglese, la chiesa degl’invasori” (Vinciguerra 1926: 206–207).

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real sense, but is instead driven by a succession of whims.”89 This idea is consistent with Vinciguerra’s notion that in Moore, “we see, above all, the instinctive need of the born impressionist to revitalize his material, to develop a new palette.”90 However, it also drew on the hetero-image of Irish people as inconsistent and unreliable as opposed to the cold and efficient English (see Leerssen 1997, 2000). The most notable feature of Dàuli’s introduction to Moore and Irish literature was therefore his insistence on the Irish character as inconsistent and “essentially anarchic” [“essenzialmente anarchic[o]” (Moore 1929: 9)], and, in fact, typically consisting of stark contrasts. James Joyce’s Ulysses, for instance, made the realist and visionary, savage and melancholic, cynical and humorous spirit of the Irish almost incandescent, artistically interpreting that combative and uninhibited, subversive and naysaying humor shared by all Irish writers, from the old master, Johnathan Swift, to Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw.91

While this was somehow consistent with Linati’s newfound emphasis on a brutalist strain in Irish literature that we will discuss in the following section, it also paved the way to portraying Moore as a typical Irish writer, full of contrasts, both “anti-romantic and given to romantic excesses, cynical and doleful” [“anti-romantico con eccessi romantici, cinico e dolorante” (Moore 1929: 19)]. Dàuli’s version of Irishness, which initially seemed more straightforward than Linati’s in that it conveyed a simpler narrative involving apolitical stories foregrounding the Celtic and Catholic element, was in fact complex and full of contradictions. Dàuli’s insistence on apolitical writers, or on their least political works, would continue to convey his heterodox idea of a primitive Ireland that was at once different from Britain without being politically opposed to it. In fact, as discussed, he claimed that national differences within the Empire would eventually disappear “with the various Anglo-Saxon literatures combining to form a 89  “Egli è l’incarnazione più tipica del mimetismo irlandese; si presenta come un individualista tipico, la cui arte non adempie una evoluzione vera e propria, ma ubbidisce semplicemente a un susseguirsi di capricci” (Moore 1929: 11). 90  “c’era soprattutto il bisogno istintivo di un impressionista nato di rinnovare il proprio materiale, di rifarsi una tavolozza” (Vinciguerra 1926: 175). 91  “quasi incandescente lo spirito realistico e visionario, crudele e malinconico, cinico e umoristico, degli irlandesi, rappresentando artisticamente quell’umore battagliero e spregiudicato, sovvertitore e negatore, che è comune a tutti gli scrittori della sua razza, dal vecchio maestro di tutti loro, Jonathan Swift, a Oscar Wilde e a Bernard Shaw” (Moore 1929: 8).

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single literature” [“formando delle varie letterature anglo-sassoni un’unica letteratura” (Moore 1929: 6)]. It is not surprising that, with the changing political tide, his non-bellicose take on Irishness should be sidelined in favor of the Fascist view of Ireland as a rebellious anti-English and potentially Fascist nation, but his literary efforts were ultimately, at least partially, successful. 4.3.2  Mondadori and Contemporary Irish Writers The publication of George Moore’s novels, The Lake by Rizzoli (1933) and Esther Waters by Mondadori (1934), marks the entrance of Irish writing into the mainstream of Italian publishing. With the exception of the English Shaw and Wilde, until the 1930s Irish writers were uniquely associated with either avant-garde literary journals or small independent publishing ventures such as the Studio Editoriale Lombardo, Dauliana, Stock, Modernissima, and Delta. The 1930s saw the inclusion of Irish writers in the catalogs of more mainstream and middlebrow publishers such as Mondadori and the recently established Rizzoli. The two companies had acquired a central position within the Italian book market between the wars. They both enjoyed a certain favor with the Fascist regime, with Mondadori being commissioned to print the so-called libro di stato for primary schools (Palazzolo 2011) and Rizzoli having become the official printer of the Enciclopedia Italiana in 1929. The Lake was initially earmarked for publication by Stock in the “Il genio anglosassone” series, along with Confessions, as we learn from Alessandra Scalero’s correspondence, which also informs us that a translation by Domenico De Paoli was ready.92 When Stock changed their plans, the small Industrie Riunite Editoriali Siciliane (IRES) briefly took over the project, but ultimately walked away as the book was deemed too expensive and “literary.”93 Eventually, it was Rizzoli who published it in 1933, in a small and elegant edition translated by Mario Casalino. Moore’s inconsistent nature was once again the focus of the short preface, where his work was described as going “from naturalism to symbolism to the poetic aspirations of his Celtic spirit” [“dal naturalismo al simbolismo all’aspirazione poetica della sua 92  Fondo Scalero, Biblioteca Civica di Mazzè (Turin), correspondence, Scalero to I.R.E.S., 1 May 1931, typewritten, folder 104, item 27. 93  “letterario” (Fondo Scalero, Biblioteca Civica di Mazzè (Turin), correspondence, Scalero to Eugenio Biondo 11 August [1931], typewritten, folder 104, item 16).

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anima celtica” (Moore 1933: 8)], though the emphasis is on Zola and Gautier as influences rather than on Yeats. Mario Praz’s introduction to Esther Waters echoes similar concerns. The choice to publish Esther Waters in the “Biblioteca Romantica” collection, a highbrow book series conceived by Borgese as a pantheon of great canonized writers, was, in itself, a sign of consecration. As Scalero had written to IRES when proposing The Lake, Moore was “now a classic writer.”94 It is worth noting, though, that Moore was canonized by Borgese not thanks to his Irish works, but rather his pre-Revival naturalist novels. His Irishness was duly acknowledged by Praz and linked to Moore’s carelessness,95 but its importance was more thematic than strictly formal: The novel does not reach vertiginous peaks, its pages are dominated by a grey hue, if you like, making it not inappropriate to compare a page of Moore’s writing to an Irish landscape.96

Moore is a naturalist writer who, like “Verga, a returnee from the sophisticated North: ‘discovers’ his home land and in it the source of his deepest inspiration,”97 and Praz is keen to emphasize that he is not a “calligrapher” but a writer who is very concerned with the plot (Moore 1934: 526), in keeping with the rediscovery of the novel in early-to-mid-1930s’ Italy. The key issue of the influence of the Goncourt brothers’ Germinie Lacerteux had already been raised by Vinciguerra and is also examined by Praz, who took Vinciguerra’s conclusions even further: Germinie Lacerteux does not emanate that sense of harmony, of something concluded and necessary, so striking in Esther Waters. Moore has an ear for the rhythm of time and destiny; the Goncourts, by comparison, seem like

94  “uno scrittore ormai classico” (Fondo Scalero, Biblioteca Civica di Mazzè (Turin), correspondence, Scalero to Maggi, 21 January 1931, typewritten, folder 104, item 146). 95  “Con noncuranza irlandese, il giovane George era lasciato libero di far quel che volesse, e scorrazzava a cavallo per la campagna” (Moore 1934: 529). 96  “Il romanzo non attinge vertiginose cime, una tonalità grigia, se si vuole, domina nelle sue pagine, sicché il paragone d’una pagina del Moore a un paesaggio d’Irlanda non è inappropriato” (Moore 1934: 530). 97  “Verga, reduce dal sofisticato Nord: «scoprì» la sua terra natale, e vi trovò la sua più profonda ispirazione” (Moore 1934: 530).

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dainty water color artists who, on some perverse whim, decided to work as reporters.98

Yet again, Praz emphasizes an aspect that is concerned with narrative accomplishments rather than belletrist style. Though not completely erased, Moore’s Irishness is sidelined, to say the least, in the 1930s Italian translations of Moore, overshadowed by his individualism.99 This is consistent with the position of Borgese with regard to “Biblioteca Romantica”: a world (though, mostly European) pantheon of timeless prose writers not bound by geography or political allegiances, who should be “turned into Italian classics” (Biagi 2018: 172) through translation. After been hailed as a key exponent of the Irish Revival, Moore is progressively framed as an individualist whose European, and primarily French, influences shape him as a quintessentially cosmopolitan writer. The elegant “Biblioteca Romantica,” directed by the Italian German Studies scholar and novelist Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, was a highbrow series that primarily included canonized nineteenth-century authors, featuring elegantly bound volumes that cost up to 20 lire—compared to 10 lire for a “Medusa” book and 3.5 lire for a novel of “Romanzi della Palma” (Rubino 2010: 163), to limit ourselves to the Mondadori series. “Biblioteca Romantica” was Borgese’s brainchild, conceived of in 1926, though publication only began in 1930 and ended in 1942 when Borgese was an exile in the United States. According to Daria Biagi, the “Biblioteca Romantica” can be regarded as the editorial counterpart to Borgese’s complex reflection on the nature of the novel, a necessary “repertoire of shared readings” (Biagi Forthcoming: 25) he tried to put together in order to further the debate on the novel in

98  “Da Germinie Lacerteux non emana quel senso d’armonia, di cosa conclusa e necessaria, che colpisce tanto in Esther Waters. Il Moore ha orecchio pel ritmo del tempo e del destino; i Goncourt, accanto, fan l’effetto di delicati acquerellisti che, per un capriccio perverso, si fossero messi a fare i reporters” (Moore 1934: 529). 99  This is in keeping with a perceptive article from the Times translated and published around the same time in Occidente: “He regarded himself at the time as an apostle of a Celtic renaissance; but he went to Ireland intuitively, as with everything he did, for the good of his art. He went not to revitalize Ireland, but himself, and The Untilled Field was the first fruit of his rebirth” [“Egli credeva allora di essere l’apostolo di un rinascimento celtico; ma egli andò in Irlanda intuitivamente, come sempre fece ogni cosa, per il bene della sua arte. Egli andò per rinnovare non l’Irlanda ma se stesso, ed Il Campo incolto fu il primo frutto della sua rinascita” (Unsigned 1933)].

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Italy.100 While the collection primarily included novels from the long eighteenth century, it also made space for Cervantes’s Don Quixote and for Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, testifying to the fact that Ultimately, the selection process was never based on formal criteria that were strictly apparent (chronological considerations, text length), but rather on a logic of genre, governed by a certain aesthetic-epistemological vision that saw ‘prosaic meaning’ – considered by Borgese to be underdeveloped in Italian culture  – as the only means of re-establishing unity beyond the abyss of the modern. (Biagi Forthcoming: 176)

No contemporary authors featured in the series and, as we have seen, even George Moore, who had conveniently died only in January 1933, was represented by a novel from 1898. Despite being a groundbreaking book series, presenting carefully crafted translations and promoting the novel form, something that was in itself innovative, “Romantica’s” signature focus on eighteenth-century writers contributed to it coming across as a less-than-revolutionary publishing endeavor. While George Moore was included in the “Biblioteca Romantica,” Liam O’Flaherty, the other major Irish writer to make his appearance in Italy in the 1930s, was among the first batch of authors included in the most daring publishing enterprise attempted by Mondadori in the same decade: “Medusa,” a collection entirely devoted to contemporary foreign literature. The differences between the two collections are also significant as they reflect the different status of the two writers in Italy. The bolder “Medusa” series focused on quality contemporary writers and aimed to intercept a refined readership that would otherwise have read the original versions or the French translations. Mondadori’s plan, described in the controversial Almanacco della Medusa 1934, was to “free our country from its subjugation to other European languages, through which the Italian public normally came to know the books published in the rest of the world, often after a long time and chosen according to rather dubious criteria” (Mondadori 1933: 9–10, translated in Rubino 2010: 162), and sought to target not only the elites but also the common reader, as the print run of a “Medusa” book “would start at between 2,000 and 6,000 100  “what distinguishes the Romantica from the previous experiment, and from all other publishing series on the national scene at the time, however, is its systematic focus on a specific literary genre and the express intention to produce fifty volumes that could serve as a canon of the modern novel for the Italian public” (Biagi Forthcoming: 171. See also 175).

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but might reach as many as 20,000 copies with successive re-editions” (Rundle 2010: 41). “Medusa” was not the first series to focus on contemporary fiction in translation, following on from the likes of “Slavia,” “Scrittori di tutto il mondo” by Modernissima and others (Ragone 1999: 137; Rundle 2010: 79), but it soon became the most successful, thanks to Mondadori’s “new operational structure” (Sullam 2015: 183) that featured the series as part of a systematic effort to cover different genres and cater for different readerships. The “Medusa” series would play “a key role in fully establishing the novel at all levels of the Italian literary system” as well as in the “promotion of quality contemporary novels marked by a high degree of readability” (Sullam 2015: 180). Thus, despite the well-­ known fact that Luigi Rusca had planned in vain to launch the series with a translation of Joyce’s Ulysses (Albonetti 1994: 81), the series found itself on a more secure footing with novels that might be defined as middlebrow (Sullam 2015: 187). It is in the “Medusa” series that the first Italian translations of works by Liam O’Flaherty would be published. As alluded to earlier, O’Flaherty was the other writer who, in addition to Moore, Stephens, and Donn Byrne, contributed to a renewed Italian perception of Irish literature in the 1930s. This new instance of renovation of the Irish-Italian repertoire was once again connected with Carlo Linati. Although his commitment to Irish literature had waned in the 1920s, around the same years in which Dàuli was exploring the new prose of Ireland, Linati was also trying, albeit with less enthusiasm and commitment, to rehash his repertoire of Irish writing. A watershed contribution in this sense is his 1930 article “Voci della nuova Irlanda,” which he would republish in his well-received 1932 collection Scrittori anglo-americani d’oggi [Anglo-American Writers of Today] (1932). While this article did not result in a new program of translations as had happened in his pioneering 1910s, alongside Dàuli’s enterprise, it heralded a new wave of Irish writing in Italian and was quite influential on the choices made by Mondadori in the 1930s. The article shows that Linati had remained mostly unaware of the nuances of Irish politics, affirming rather disingenuously that with the establishment of the Irish Free State, “the dream of many patriotic rebels and intellectuals could be considered to have been achieved,”101 leaving a pacified Ireland behind, deprived of its most significant literary voices: “Tired of rising up, the dear vision has spent the last 101   “il sogno di tanti ribelli patriotti ed intellettuali poteva dirsi coronato” (Linati 1932: 43–44).

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decade at rest. Its poets have emigrated or died or turned English. […] Ireland’s great twilight is over.”102 While the Irish Revival was over, a new generation of writers (though Linati reminded his readers that some were in their 50s) was ready to take over. These writers’ works “no longer have the regionalistic quality typical of the works of their predecessors: they bear hints of European inspiration and have been westernized, in a way, though traces of the crudely rustic remain beneath the surface.”103 If for Vinciguerra, in 1926, absorbing European “intellectualistic” influences meant becoming less Irish (Vinciguerra 1926: 198), here Linati seemed more inclined to accept a complex and less monolithic notion, identifying James Stephens as a turning point in this regard. These pages are somewhat surprising, coming from Linati. Having spent the better part of the 1910s trying to erase the political element from his notion of Irish literature, the writer seemed to imply that a lack of political commitment made the works of Irish writers who came after the political turmoil less interesting. While some of the characteristics he originally attributed to Irish literature are still there, for example, its rural and mystical qualities, his acknowledgment of the rebellious attitude is a welcome corrective to his early depiction of the country and its literati. It is quite surprising, then, albeit in keeping with the general attitude we discussed in the previous section, that O’Casey’s work should partly be depoliticized by Linati, with no mention made of his socialism. He was, however, heralded as one of the main exponents of Irish “brutalism”: “In his works, the heroic or imaginative or comically peasant comedy of Synge and his imitators is transformed into violently realistic drama. […] It could be said, however, that he heralded a new literary Ireland, or rather a new spirit, a new trend: of brutality.”104 This serves as a gateway for Linati to introduce the real protagonist of his article, Liam O’Flaherty, a “young writer of talent who is having a great success” and who takes this

102  “Da un decennio, stanca d’impennarsi, la cara fantasia riposa. I suoi poeti o sono emigrati o son morti o si sono fatti inglesi. […] Il grande vespro irlandese è finito” (Linati 1932: 44). 103  “non hanno più quel carattere regionalistico ch’era proprio delle opere dei loro predecessori: risentono d’inspirazioni europee e si sono in certo modo occidentalizzate, pur serbando nel loro fondo un che di rudemente paesano” (Linati 1932: 44–45). 104  “Con lui la commedia eroica o fantasiosa o comicamente paesana del Synge e dei suoi imitatori s’è trasformata in un dramma violentemente realistico. […] Si direbbe però che con lui si sia inaugurata una nuova Irlanda letteraria o meglio un nuovo spirito, una nuova moda: quella della brutalità” (Linati 1932: 45).

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“tendency to the extreme.”105 Yet again, then, Linati found himself in the position of introducing a writer, whom he qualifies as “a bit of a Bolshevik” [“un po’ bolscevizzante” (Linati 1932: 46)], to the Italian reading public for the first time. In his apparent efforts to construct a new image of Ireland not dependent on regionalism, it is unsurprising that he linked O’Flaherty with Joyce, the writer he regarded at the time as the least regionalistic of the Irish and who is aptly presented as one of the “expatriates” [“fuoriusciti” (Linati 1932: 157–162)] in the same collection. By far the most substantial section of the article is devoted to O’Flaherty’s The House of Gold (1929), which Linati compares to Ulysses due to the length of the fabula (24  hours), though seeming to ignore the censorship the novel had endured.106 Linati is able to recognize that both O’Casey’s and O’Flaherty’s bleak realism was new in nature, and that the two authors were aiming to evoke “effects of violence and desperation” (“effetti di violenza, di disperazione”) but in a way that was more “honest” (“sincero”) than the Romantic depictions of litigious Irishness (Linati 1932: 47). He concludes with a note on the nature of the Irish people in the post-revolutionary period, which is surprisingly at variance with the very start of the same article: “Finishing the book feels like waking from a nightmare: the nightmare of this young, unsubdued people, still brimming with the anguish and turmoil of their unquiet nature.”107 “Voci della nuova Irlanda” would have remained a late bloom of Linati’s Irish criticism had it not been for the success of Liam O’Flaherty in the mid-to-late-1930s. Around the time Linati’s article was published in book form, interest in O’Flaherty started, and his name often cropped up among mediators looking for new literature to translate.108 The then-fledgling book series “Medusa,” destined to become one of the most important 105  “Questa tendenza è stata portata all’eccesso, da un giovine scrittore di talento e che ha oggi forti successi: Liam O’Flaherty” (Linati 1932: 45). 106  The House of Gold was the first novel banned by the Irish Free State, for alleged indecency. Ignored by Linati, Liam O’Flaherty’s issues with the Irish censorship board did not pass unnoticed by Mario Manlio Rossi, who discussed them in the chapter on the conservatism and moralism of the Free State of his Viaggio in Irlanda (1932: 122). It was Yeats who recommended O’Flaherty’s work to Rossi, and in particular The Puritan (Yeats to Rossi, February 1932, quoted in Fantaccini 2009: 86–7). 107  “Si finisce il libro e par di svegliarsi da un incubo: l’incubo di questo popolo giovine, non sedato, pieno ancora del travaglio e delle agitazioni della sua natura senza pace” (48). 108  To cite but one example, a letter from the magazine Domus reached Alessandra Scalero in November 1932, inquiring, among other things, about works by O’Flaherty (Fondo Scalero, Biblioteca Civica di Mazzè (Turin), correspondence, Domus Editorial Board

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collections of foreign novels in Fascist Italy, published three of his short stories and one of his novels, The Black Soul (1924). The circumstances of publication of the latter as L’anima nera in 1933 (O’Flaherty 1933a) show Mondadori’s ability to navigate the muddled waters of Fascist publishing. O’Flaherty was first introduced in the Almanacco della Medusa 1934, a publication intended to offer a preview of the catalog for the year 1934. The Almanacco is itself a very interesting publication, for the centrality it affords translators as the real protagonists of the publishing venture, even featuring pictures of these traditionally invisible contributors to literature. Taking advantage of the increasingly pervasive anti-English sentiment, O’Flaherty is presented as “Irish and therefore anti-English” [“irlandese e cioè anti-inglese” (Mondadori 1933: 161)], the extreme culmination of the decade-long process that had altered the perception of Irish writers from merely non-English to determinedly anti-English. O’Flaherty was also a “a bit of a revolutionary, at least in the representation of so much evil and corruption” [“un po’ rivoluzionario, almeno nella rappresentazione di tante malvagità e corruzioni” (Mondadori 1933: 161)] evidencing Mondadori’s shrewdness in replacing sensitive words, such as the “bolscevico” employed by Linati with a less controversial “rivoluzionario,” which could also echo the Fascist claim of being a revolutionary movement. Apart from a quoted passage, the rest of the paragraph is essentially plagiarized from Linati’s article, including the emphasis on this new “brutalist” strain in Irish literature. Both the short stories and the novel confirm the nightmarish nature of O’Flaherty’s fiction, the “strange blend of nihilism and Nietzscheanism” (Kiberd 2002: 499), a rather odd choice for a book series that was supposed to include texts that “from a moral point of view can be accessed by everyone, or can easily be made to do so with some skilled retouching.”109 The “nightmare” is cleverly linked to the rebelliousness of both O’Flaherty and the Irish people, while no mention is made of the profound disillusionment of this “revolutionary” writer, arguably to avoid any allegation of defeatism. Although O’Flaherty’s “involvement in radical politics, always marginal and unclear, was neither sustained nor disciplined” (Kiberd 2002: 491), his leaning toward Bolshevism was an issue for Italian cultural mediators who, as we have just (unclear signature) to Alessandra Scalero, 10 November 1932, Milan, handwritten, folder 121, item 31). 109  These criteria were expressed by Arnoldo Mondadori himself in a survey conducted by Lavoro Fascista (translated in Billiani 2020: 126).

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seen with Mondadori, did their best to gloss over it. Despite Mondadori’s caution, however, the Almanacco was eventually censored “because of its write up of German Jews” (Rundle 2010: 149). To make matters more complex, quite surprisingly, in 1933, Occidente had published an extract from O’Flaherty’s travelogue I Went to Russia (O’Flaherty 1933b). Occidente was a Rome-based literary journal whose subtitle was “synthesis of the literary activity of the world” and was open to influences from “new work coming out of Europe and North and South America” (Ben-Ghiat 2001: 51). While the travelogue depicted Russia in less than complimentary terms, it was satirical in its intent, and O’Flaherty, apparently, remained a staunch supporter of the Soviet Union well after his stay there, if we are to believe his 1934 memoirs.110 However, the relatively short extract did not give readers the opportunity to appreciate the unreliability of the narrator and could instead read like an actual indictment of Russia. O’Flaherty was also included by the editorial board of the magazine in a montage of pictures of famous writers, including Woolf and Joyce, titled “Gli scrittori di Occidente,” a sign that they considered him a key reference and arguably planned to publish more works by, or about, him. Despite these early signs of success, however, it was clear from early on that O’Flaherty’s reception in Italy was destined to become more complex. For instance, his adherence to Bolshevism was mentioned in a reader’s report for Mondadori, in the context of deliberations over whether to publish Famine in the “Medusa” book series (Albonetti 1994: 563).111 Nonetheless, the fame achieved by O’Flaherty—thanks to the 1935 film based on his novel The Informer (1925), directed by his cousin, John

110  “I understood that probably the greatest folly of my life was … the criminal mockery of the book which I wrote on my return about my experiences and impressions in that workshop, where the civilization of the future is being hammered out … I had crossed the Soviet frontier into Poland in a state of exalted enthusiasm for all I had seen and determined that I would do everything in my power to excite all whom I could reach by word of mouth or by writing to help in the task of winning over humanity to the Soviet cause” (O’Flaherty 1934: 135). 111  The report also makes passing references to O’Flaherty’s being Irish: “O’Flaherty’s verismo is typically Celtic,” employing the same category (that of “verismo”) that had been employed by Linati to define Synge’s work and associate it with Giovanni Verga’s [“il verismo di O’Flaherty è sempre lirico, tipicamente celtico” (Archivio storico Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Fondazione Alberto e Arnoldo Mondadori, Milan, Segreteria editoriale estero— Negative reports 1932–1947, par. 4 c. 8 f. 866 (Liam O’Flaherty), item 11, unsigned reader report, without date and place, handwritten)].

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Ford—led to a general interest in his works in the late 1930s.112 Bompiani was also keen to publish Famine in 1938, but the translation was not authorized (Piazzoni 2007: 178),113 while several of O’Flaherty’s short stories were either commissioned or published in literary journals and magazines. In 1935, a translation of his short story “Chimney Pot” was published in L’Italia letteraria (O’Flaherty 1935), while two 1937 letters from Mondadori seem to refer to the publication of two separate short stories by O’Flaherty in Il Popolo or elsewhere, without any remuneration for the translator, or by Mondadori itself.114 One of the pieces referred to in the letters is most likely a typescript of the translation of “Wolf Lanigan’s Death” that can be found in Scalero’s archive115 and that, to the best of my knowledge, was never published. Another story, this time of more manifest political content, was published in Omnibus, a weekly magazine essentially aligned with the regime that often featured news about Ireland, presenting it as a thorn in the side of Britain. It was “Guerra a Dublino” (O’Flaherty 1937), a translation of “Civil War,” but despite the timeframe, there is no evidence that it was the second one mentioned by Mondadori. Despite the general interest, then, O’Flaherty was perceived as a difficult author, whose works were impossible to publish, as stated in a reader’s report from 1941 for House of Gold, which focused on the lack of morals of all characters in the book.116 While some works that better leant themselves to the anti-Allied forces propaganda campaign were published before or during the Second World War—including the anti-American satire Hollywood Cemetery, published in 1943 by Nerbini (O’Flaherty 112  While this study has not dealt with cinema for reason of space and focus, it appears noteworthy to signal a film adaptation by Maria Basaglia, “Ultima giovinezza” (1939), based on a novel by O’Flaherty, Mr. Gilhooley (1926). 113  The novel was eventually only published in 1955 by the Florentine publisher Parenti, translated by Stanis La Bruna. 114  While Luigi Rusca in June talks about “the short story” [“la novella” (Fondo Scalero, Biblioteca Civica di Mazzè (Turin), correspondence, Luigi Rusca to Alessandra Scalero, 2 June 1937, Milan, typewritten, folder 119, item 108)], Emilio Ceretti in July talks about “another short story” [“una nuova novella”] by O’Flaherty (Fondo Scalero, Biblioteca Civica di Mazzè (Turin), correspondence, Emilio Ceretti to Alessandra Scalero, 17 July 1937, Milan, typewritten, folder 119, item 112). 115  Fondo Scalero, Biblioteca Civica di Mazzè (Turin), folder 10, item 2. 116  Giuliana Pozzo’s report for House of Gold ends with a handwritten note signed R. [Luigi Rusca], stating: “No, tell the proponent that publishing such works is impossible” [“No spiegare al proponente che non è possibile pubblicare opere del genere” (Albonetti 1994: 562–3)].

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1943)—most of his novels would only hit the book market after the war. The bleakness of his realism, combined with his Bolshevism and defeatism, most likely represented an obstacle for Italian cultural mediators seeking to publish his works in Fascist Italy, despite the surprising and politically motivated interest in Irish writers that would characterize the war years. The 1930s was a decade of expansion for Irish literature in Italy, when political and diplomatic circumstances favored an enlargement of the remit of Irishness. Though a discernible surge in publications would only start at the beginning of the Second World War, it is in that decade that the foundations for an amplification of the Irish repertoire were laid, with more and more Italian irlandesisti claiming an increasing number of names for Irish letters. In 1935 the Enciclopedia Italiana proposed a canon of Irish writing that included the Anglo-Irish Swift and Goldsmith, and even the American O’Neill, albeit timidly, thanks to the contribution of Walter Starkie. Most, if not all, prodigal sons were returned to their diasporic home, including Joyce. Significantly, in 1941, Omnibus also published a short narrative by Vitaliano Brancati, titled “Joyce e la signorina,” clearly indicative of a new understanding of him as an Irish writer. Brancati’s narrative is all about Joyce’s entanglement with Ireland. According to the “signorina” of the title, a recurring presence in Brancati’s column, “[a]dopting a falsetto voice, Joyce sang us a captivating song about Ireland. He called for freedom for his land, and independence from the English.” He saw Ireland everywhere, even in a “glass paperweight.”117 Such a strong link between Joyce and the political struggle of his country was quite unique in Italy, but was perfectly in keeping with Omnibus’s politics and a sign of the new political value of publishing Irish writers and producing their works on stage, which will be the focus of the following chapter.

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Paladini Volterra, Angela. 1999. Il Convegno Volta fra potere, cultura e diplomazia. Il carteggio con le ambasciate. Biblioteca teatrale: 25–52. Palazzolo, Maria Iolanda. 2011. Mondadori, Arnoldo. Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana. Palumbo, Pier Fausto, ed. 1940. Irlanda: con cartina geografica e molte illustrazioni in tavole fuori testo. Il Mondo d’oggi. Rome: Edizioni Roma. Pascazio, Nicola. 1934. La Rivoluzione d’Irlanda e l’Impero Britannico. Rome: Editrice Nuova Europa. Pedullà, Gianfranco. 2009. Il teatro italiano nel tempo del fascismo. 2nd ed. Altre visioni 63. Corazzano (Pisa): Titivillus. Pellegrini, Alessandro. 1936. Della tragedia irlandese e Sean O’Casey. Il Convegno 17: 329–342. Pellizzi, Camillo. 1923a. Lettere dall’Inghilterra. Cose d’Irlanda e di altrove. Il Popolo d’Italia, January 6. ———. 1923b. L’isola del trifoglio. Il Popolo d’Italia, August 23. ———. 1923c. Bobbio. Il Popolo d’Italia, September 9. ———. 1926. Cose d’Inghilterra. Milan: Alpes. ———. 1931. Un drammaturgo moderno. Eugenio O’Neill. Corriere della Sera, October 28: 3. ———. 1932. Lady Gregory. Scenario 1: 9–12. ———. 1934a. Il teatro inglese. Il Teatro Del Novecento 3. Milan: Treves. ———. 1934b. Scrittori d’Irlanda. Il poeta AE. Corriere della Sera, September 3: 3. ———. 1935. English Drama. The Last Great Phase. Trans. Rowan Williams. With a foreword by Orlo Williams. London: Macmillan. Piazzoni, Irene. 2007. Valentino Bompiani. Un editore italiano tra fascismo e dopoguerra. Milan: LED. Ragone, Giovanni. 1999. Un secolo di libri: storia dell’editoria in Italia dall’unità al post-moderno. Turin: Einaudi. Riva, Serafino. 1934. La religione nella poesia inglese. Religio 10: 153–161. ———. 1937. La tradizione celtica e la moderna letteratura irlandese. I: John Millington Synge. Rome: Religio. Rizzini, Oreste. 1926. Sean O’Casey. Il bracciante drammaturgo. Corriere della Sera, April 6: 3. Rodker, John. 1921. La letteratura inglese del nostro tempo. Il Convegno 2: 122–124. Rossi, Mario Manlio. 1932. Viaggio in Irlanda. Milan: Doxa. ———. 1933. Pilgrimage in the West. Trans. Joseph Maunsell Hone. Dublin: The Cuala press. ———. 1942. Introduzione. In Swift, Jonathan Swift, ed. Mario Manlio Rossi, ix–xxxv. Milan: Garzanti. Ruberti, Guido. 1920. Il teatro contemporaneo in Europa. 1st ed. Vol. 2. Bologna: Cappelli.

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———. 1928. Storia del teatro contemporaneo. 2nd ed. Vol. 3. Bologna: Cappelli. Rubino, Mario. 2010. Literary Exchange between Italy and Germany: German Literature in Italian Translation. In Translation Under Fascism, ed. Christopher Rundle and Kate Sturge, 147–177. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rundle, Christopher. 2010. Publishing Translations in Fascist Italy. New  York: Peter Lang. Scarfoglio, Carlo. 1937. L’Inghilterra e il continente. Rome: Edizioni Roma. Shaw, George Bernard. 1940. Le atrocità di Denshawai ed altre atrocità britanniche. Berlin: Centro tedesco di informazioni. Simoni, Renato. 1938a. Ovest. “Carnival” a Galway. Corriere della Sera, August 4. ———. 1938b. Rapsodia swiftiana. Corriere della Sera, August 14. ———. 1938c. Risse e arcadie del genio irlandese. Corriere della Sera, August 27. ———. 1938d. Il teatro dell’Abbazia. Corriere della Sera, September 13. ———. 1938e. L’irlandese come personaggio. Corriere della Sera, September 29. Spindler, Karl. 1930. La nave misteriosa. (Episodio della Rivoluzione Irlandese del 1916). Trans. Margherita Mancini Taddei. Florence: Bemporad. Stradling, Robert. 1999. The Irish and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–39: Crusades in Conflict. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sullam, Sara. 2015. (Middle)browsing Mondadori’s Archive: British Novels in the Medusa Series, 1933–1945. Textus. English Studies in Italy 28: 179–201. Swift, Jonathan. 1942. Swift. Edited by Mario Manlio Rossi. Translated by Mario Manlio Rossi. Milano: Garzanti. Talbot, George. 2007. Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tilgher, Adriano. 1973. Il problema centrale cronache teatrali 1914–1926. Genoa: Edizioni del Teatro stabile. Tinterri, Alessandro. 1987. ‘The Gods of the Mountain’ at the Odescalchi Theatre. New Theatre Quarterly 3: 352–357. Tranfaglia, Nicola, and Albertina Vittoria. 2000. Storia degli editori italiani: dall’unità alla fine degli anni Sessanta. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Unsigned, George Moore. 1933. Occidente 2: 167. Verschoyle, Derek. 1935. The Theatre. Review of “English Drama. The Last Great Phase”, by Camillo Pellizzi. The Spectator, 609: December 27. Villari, Luigi. 1941. L’Irlanda e la Gran Bretagna. Rome: Tosi. Vinciguerra, Mario. 1926. Romantici e decadenti inglesi. Foligno: Franco Campitelli. Volta, Sandro. 1934. Review of “Il teatro inglese” by Camillo Pellizzi. Il Dramma 10: 43–44. Yeats, William Butler. 1933. Da William Butler Yeats, ed. Francesco Gargaro. Rome: Edizione della rassegna italiana. ———. 1934. The Irish National Theatre. Rome: Reale Accademia d’Italia.

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———. 1938. Poesie: Olio e sangue, I cigni selvaggi a Coole, Bisanzio, L’isola del lago d’Innisfree. Trans. Leone Traverso. Il Frontespizio 10: 646–649. ———. 1939a. Poesie. Trans. Leone Traverso. Milan: All’insegna del pesce d’oro. ———. 1939b. Salpando verso Bisanzio. Trans. Leone Traverso. Corrente di vita giovanile 2: 6. Yeats, W.B. 2002. Electronic Resource. In The Collected Letters of W.B.  Yeats: Unpublished Letters (1905–1939), ed. John S.  Kelly and Past Masters. Charlottesville: InteLex Corporation.

CHAPTER 5

We Are All Irish in the Eyes of Mussolini: Irish Theater in the War Years

5.1   Anton Giulio Bragaglia and the Italian Theater Scene The increase in publications of Irish literature alluded to at the end of the last chapter did not involve prose or poetry to any significant extent. Despite the budding interest in those forms that we have explored, the role of Irish drama in the Italian literary scene during the Second World War was much more decisive than that of Irish narrative or poetry. In those years, the ambiguous and fluid status of Irish literature allowed Italian intellectuals of different, and often contrasting, aesthetic and political beliefs to negotiate a space for innovation within both Fascist and newly liberated Italy. Drawing on underexplored archival resources1 and 1  The story of Bragaglia’s archive was shrouded in mystery for a long time. A Centro Studi Bragaglia was active in Rome until the 1980s, but it was inaccessible for decades and its holdings have only recently been relocated at the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, in Rome. Luckily, at the time of submission, the archive was just opened to the public and it was thus possible to include precious materials which confirm and corroborate the findings presented in Bibbò (2019) and primarily based on correspondence found in the Ridenti Archive (Centro Studi del Teatro Stabile, Turin) and the Gian Dàuli Archive (Biblioteca Civica Bertolliana, Vicenza). The underexplored Ridenti Archive, in particular, contains over 170 letters written to Ridenti by Bragaglia or his assistants and proved particularly useful in order to establish the centrality of the Rome-Turin axis in the Irish and Irish-American revival in Italy.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Bibbò, Irish Literature in Italy in the Era of the World Wars, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83586-6_5

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through an analysis of the role of cultural mediators such as Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Lucio Ridenti, and Paolo Grassi, it is possible to investigate a crucial moment of change within both Italian politics and theater, emphasizing strands of continuity between Fascist and post-Fascist practices. I will first establish the importance of Anton Giulio Bragaglia within Italian theater in the interwar period, emphasizing how his role as mediator of foreign theater in general, and his promotion of Irish theater in particular, played a key part in restructuring the Italian dramatic scene during the transition from Fascist to post-Fascist Italy. After the pioneering years of Carlo Linati’s discoverta and the sporadic attempts by Emma Gramatica’s and other companies, Irish drama had nearly disappeared from the Italian stage. As we have discussed, with the exception of the English Wilde and Shaw, productions of Irish plays in the 1920s and 1930s were rare and generally linked to exceptional circumstances, such as the staging of Lord Dunsany’s The Gods of the Mountain by Luigi Pirandello in 1925 and that of Synge’s The Well of Saints by Bella Sainati in 1929. From 1939 onward, however, things started to change and Italy saw a significant and unexpected proliferation of translations of Irish drama. The surprising surge in translations and productions of Irish theater during the Second World War can be traced directly to a specific alignment of circumstances and, in particular, to the efforts of a small network of mediators (including intellectuals, theater directors, magazine editors, and critics) variously connected to the charismatic figure of Anton Giulio Bragaglia. Bragaglia had a long artistic career, spanning futurist photography and Commedia dell’Arte. One of Italy’s first stage directors in the modern sense (Alberti 1974: 37–47), he had established the Teatro degli Indipendenti in Rome in 1923, which quickly became one of the most successful independent theaters in Fascist Italy. He brought the works of Albert Jarry, Arthur Schnitzler, Eugene O’Neill, and Bertolt Brecht to Italian audiences, along with numerous emerging Italian playwrights (e.g. Umberto Barbaro, Alessandro De Stefani, and Riccardo Bacchelli), in keeping with the theater’s innovative vision. Notwithstanding his numerous productions of Italian plays, and frequent statements on the need to Italianize the national stage, Bragaglia was especially interested in discovering new and promising foreign playwrights (Scarpellini 1989: 332). He was also aware of the strong appeal of foreign authors for Italian theatergoers, and it was in the light of this conviction that he and Luigi Bonelli organized a hoax during the early years of the Teatro degli Indipendenti. At a time when Russian ballet was very popular both in

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Europe and Italy, Bonelli himself wrote a few satirical plays under the pseudonym of anti-­Bolshevik Russian playwright Wassili Cetoff Sternberg. The plays, performed from 1925, were very successful, and Cetoff was hailed as one of the great playwrights of the time, but little was known about him. It was only at the end of February 1927 that Bonelli (allegedly Cetoff’s translator) came out onto the stage after the premiere of his L’imperatore and revealed the truth (Alberti et al. 1984: 283–286; Piccolo 2009). This was not to be Bragaglia’s only subterfuge involving the nationality of playwrights, as we will see in 5.1.2. Bragaglia’s international renown provided him with a greater degree of freedom during the Fascist period, compared to other uomini di teatro, as was the case, albeit on a larger scale, for Benedetto Croce (Grassi 1962: 343). One of the results of his distinction was that, in 1937, Bragaglia was appointed director of the largely state-funded Teatro delle Arti, in Rome. The Teatro delle Arti occupied a unique position in the  Italian theater scene of the 1930s. Situated in the same building as the Confederazione fascista professionisti e artisti [“Fascist Confederation of Professionals and Artists”] (Pedullà 2009, 198), it was neither a commercial nor an experimental theater; its liminal status translated into a repertoire that mixed orthodox canonical plays with more audacious choices, such as Pietro Aretino’s La cortigiana, which often pushed the boundaries of acceptability and Fascist censorship (Alberti 1974: 290). The Teatro delle Arti received substantial subsidies from the Duce himself, but despite such patronage, Bragaglia’s choices were quite daring and followed in the footsteps of his innovative Indipendenti productions of the mid-to-late 1920s. In particular, considering the increasing severity of state censorship from the mid-1930s, the Teatro delle Arti’s productions featured a surprising number of foreign playwrights and controversial themes. This was made possible both by Bragaglia’s connections with the regime and by the theater’s relatively small capacity (approximately 600 seats). The Teatro delle Arti represented a sort of safety valve for the regime, “a fig-leaf of cultural respectability” (Griffiths 2005: 80), which granted it a certain reputation for not crushing dissenting or unorthodox voices, and it is certainly telling that their productions did not enjoy the same freedom when touring Italy (Zurlo 1952: 330), particularly from June 1940 onward. If the creation of the Commissione per la bonifica libraria [variously translated as Commission for Book Reclamation (Bonsaver 2007: 169–187) or Commission for the Purging of Books (Rundle 2010: 170)] that began in 1938 was a defining moment for the

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book market,2 June 1940, when Italy entered the war on the side of Nazi Germany, marked an equivalent watershed for Italian theater. On 6 June 1940, the Italian Copyright Agency (SIAE—Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori) circulated an order prohibiting English and French “opera lirica, drammatica, operetta, rivista, composizione musicale” [“opera, play, operetta, revue, musical composition” (SIAE 1940a)], which, up to that point, had represented a considerable percentage of the works staged and published in Italy. The reduction in the number of plays by English and French authors was sudden and radical, though the ban did not extend to classic authors such as Shakespeare and Molière and, since the United States had not yet joined the war, Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, and other successful playwrights were not officially banned. The impact of the regulation was therefore less immediate and pervasive, but the United States’ progressive closeness to the Allied forces meant that theater managers began to look at ways to sidestep any future difficulties. Moreover, as we will see in the next section, the relative void left by English and French plays would be filled by Irish ones, as their nation was not directly involved in the war.3 This would have far-reaching consequences both in terms of Italian appreciation of Irish drama and the reform of the Italian theater scene. 2  The Commissione per la bonifica libraria, established by Dino Alfieri’s Ministry for Popular Culture in September 1938, was created to remove all Jewish works from the Italian book market. The agricultural term bonifica referred to the Fascist state’s campaign of reclaiming land for cultivation, started in 1924. “In naming the commission in this way, then, Alfieri was […] explicitly placing the commission in a tradition of great Fascist public works.” (Rundle 2010: 170) 3  While the theatrical world was disrupted by the new regulation, censorship seems to have affected the book market in a way that showed less concern for the nationality of the authors than their political ideals or their being Jewish. Nonetheless, an anonymous hand wrote in a reader’s report for Joyce’s Ulysses: “Joyce is Irish and in Ulysses there is anti-British sentiment. The book could be good at the moment.” [“Joyce è irlandese e nello Ulysses c’è un sentiments anti-britannico. Il libro potrebbe andar bene in questo momento.”] [Archivio storico Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Fondazione Alberto e Arnoldo Mondadori, Milan, Segreteria editoriale estero—Negative reports 1932–1947, envelope 7, file 583 (James Joyce)]. While the unsigned report is not dated, it is safe to argue that it was written around May 1940. It is around that time that “an enthusiastic Linati informed Pound that the publisher Mondadori, who had managed to secure Italian rights to Ulysses, had offered him the chance to translate the novel. Now that the problem of a publisher had been overcome, all Linati had to do was to set himself to work. But again nothing happened. The myth of the untranslatability of Ulysses was durable and even strengthened by the hesitations, abdications and immediate rejections of innumerable potential translators.” (Zanotti 2013: 165)

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5.1.1  The Rediscovery of Irish Theater in Wartime Italy The decision to keep Ireland out of the war was an extremely important moment in Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Éamon de Valera’s development of a foreign policy that would separate Ireland from the United Kingdom once and for all. However, Irish neutrality “did not protect Ireland from all the war’s effects” and it somehow provided her with a “strange, ghostly existence ... both in and outside the war” (Wills 2008: 5–11). As Clair Wills has shown, Irish literati could not avoid getting involved in, and reflecting upon, the Second World War, and the translation of their works abroad, while mostly out of their hands, contributed to that process. With Italy joining the war, Irish literature was in a very convenient position to gain access to Italian territory: it could be staged safely, because Ireland had not officially joined the Allies’ side, and was widely recognized as an alternative to both English and, later, North-American literature (Bigazzi 2004: 9). As we will see, Irish neutrality also indirectly confirmed the narrow image of the country constructed by Italian nationalist narratives in the years leading up to the war: more so than ever in the past, Ireland was then a simple, monological entity, a rural Catholic country bravely opposed to the plutocratic perfidious Albion, and friendly to Fascist Italy. Irish playwrights underwent something of a rediscovery after so many years of almost total absence from the Italian stage. Works by Yeats, Synge, Lord Dunsany, Shaw, Wilde, O’Casey, Robinson, and Carroll were translated for the first time or republished, and often staged by some of Italy’s leading companies, including Emma Gramatica’s, and in important venues such as the Quirino and Eliseo in Rome, and the Manzoni in Milan. For Gramatica, it meant a return to Synge’s Playboy, a sign that her repeated and frustrating failures of twenty years earlier had not diminished her interest in the Irish playwright. As we will see, most translations appeared in Il Dramma, a Turin-based popular magazine that specialized in publishing theater news and scripts (which were highly sought after by amateur theater companies), but other periodicals manifested an interest in Irish drama too including, among others, Letteratura and Incontro, which featured two short plays by Yeats (The Words upon the Window-Pane and The Cat and the Moon, respectively) translated by Luigi Berti (Yeats 1939, 1940). In the meantime, Linati was apparently asked by Enzo Ferrieri (at this stage working for the public service broadcaster) to

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“unearth some unknown Irish play,”4 though it is not clear if they were intended for the declining Il Convegno or for radio productions. This kind of request was particularly common also along the Rome-Turin axis that connected Bragaglia and Lucio Ridenti, editor of Il Dramma. Neither Bragaglia nor Ridenti had ever shown any keen interest in Irish theater. It is particularly surprising, then, that between December 1939 and December 1943, Il Dramma published 24 Irish plays, and almost as many English or American plays presented as Irish, while Bragaglia produced several of them at the Teatro delle Arti. These two facts are closely related, not only because of the strong longstanding collaboration between Ridenti and Bragaglia, but also because plays that were translated and performed at the Teatro delle Arti were almost invariably published in Il Dramma shortly afterwards. Bragaglia’s deep involvement in Ridenti’s editorial choices is confirmed by their correspondence, archived at the Centro Studi del Teatro Stabile in Turin, in the Ridenti Archive (Perrelli 2018) as well as in the recently digitized Fondo Bragaglia at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, although the former never had an official role on the magazine. What is certain is that Il Dramma heavily relied on Bragaglia’s supply of freshly translated scripts to flesh out its pages, which suffered from a paucity of plays in wartime. I will now consider the extent to which this surge in interest was provoked by a genuine appreciation of Irish theater, and the impact it had on the Italian theater scene. An analysis of the pages of Il Dramma immediately confirms the extent to which the surge in translations (and productions) was linked to the Italian regime’s recent decision to join the war. The very first issue of Il Dramma published after 10 June 1940 featured a clear statement of anti-­ English sentiment, in the place usually reserved for op-eds. The column was surmounted by a pencil outline of George Bernard Shaw’s face and featured a rather blunt criticism of English people as devious and rapacious: THE ENGLISH are a race apart. WHEN HE [the Englishman] WANTS A THING, HE NEVER TELLS HIMSELF THAT HE WANTS IT. ... As the great champion of freedom and national independence, he fights wars with half the world and annexes it, and calls it colonization. […] He does 4  “scovare […] qualche ignota cosa irlandese” (Archivio Ferrieri, Centro Manoscritti, Pavia, Correspondence, Linati to Ferrieri, 8 October 1940, Rebbio (Como), typewritten, folder 58, item 110.)

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e­ verything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; HE ROBS YOU ON BUSINESS PRINCIPLES […] HE BULLIES YOU ON MANLY PRINCIPLES (Shaw 1975, 205)5

Although the connotation is altered slightly in the Italian version (e.g. “a race apart” becomes “una razza curiosa”, “a curious race”, while “manly” rather ironically becomes “umanitario”, “humanitarian”), and emphatic capitals are added, the text is taken from Shaw’s The Man of Destiny. The anti-English barb was originally (i.e. in the 1897 play) uttered by Napoleon, and constituted the climax of the comedy. It was, of course, particularly convenient for pro-Fascist propagandists to have such an anti-English statement attributed to one of Britain’s most renowned playwrights. While Shaw’s Irishness was a central element of most Fascist propaganda, it is not the crucial aspect here, as his being a subject of the British Empire was equally effective from a propagandist point of view. This is indirectly confirmed by the following issues of the magazine, which included, in the same location, similar criticisms attributed to British writers such as Lord Byron and Aldous Huxley, as well as prominent Italian writers such as Alfredo Oriani and Gabriele D’Annunzio. This strategy is similar to that adopted around the same time by Fascist propagandists, and involved showing the British Empire as profoundly divided, and harshly criticized by its own subjects. As discussed in the previous chapter, in these publications, anti-British criticism was often coupled with a pro-Irish stance and Ireland’s absence from the war, though legitimate, was seen as bordering on treason (Wills 2008: 7). Ridenti was exceptionally quick to align his magazine with the regime’s official stance. The publication of Irish scripts soon followed; two plays by Synge featured in the following issue and in the October issue, and two by Wilde were published in September.6 Around the same time, Bragaglia was planning Teatro delle Arti’s 5  “L’INGLESE è una curiosa razza. QUANDO EGLI VUOLE UNA COSA, NON DICE A NESSUNO CHE LA VUOLE. […] Come combattente per la libertà e l’indipendenza nazionale, egli fa la guerra a metà del mondo, la annette e chiama ciò colonizzazione. […] Egli fa tutto per principio patriottico. TI SPOGLIA PER UN PRINCIPIO COMMERCIALE, TI SOPRAFFÀ PER UN PRINCIPIO UMANITARIO.” (Shaw 1940) 6  Bragaglia did not appreciate the publication of Wilde: “Dear Lucio, there’s so much good unpublished stuff and you reprint Wilde! It’s deplorable.” [“Caro Lucio, c’è tanta bella roba inedita da pubblicare e tu ristampi O. Wilde! Deploro.”] (Archivio Ridenti, Centro Studi del Teatro Stabile, Turin, Correspondence Bragaglia, Anton Giulio, Bragaglia to Ridenti, without date, but post March 1940, handwritten)

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1940–1941 season and made sure to include as many safe plays as possible in the pre-program, including two Irish scripts: Synge’s Riders to the Sea, for the second year in a row, and The White Steed by Paul Vincent Carroll, his first play to be translated in Italy. This did not, however, constitute an increase compared to the 1939–1940 season, which had included Synge’s play and the staging of an as-yet unpublished translation of Seán O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock.7 Should we then conclude that Bragaglia’s interest in Irish theater had arisen independently of the Fascist ban on English plays? This is partially true. Synge’s folkloric tones and “gritty verismo” [“verismo terriero” (Linati 1932: 43)] certainly appealed to Bragaglia, who had frequently staged adaptations of the works of Giovanni Verga, the Italian writer most often compared to Synge at the time (Pellizzi 1934: 283). Bragaglia seemed genuinely interested in these plays and even dubbed them masterpieces in a letter to his long-standing friend and key connection in Buenos Aires, Giuseppe Giacompol.8 Moreover, as discussed before, O’Casey’s political ideals did not represent an obstacle as they had been virtually erased by Italian mediators. In Bragaglia’s correspondence, one can still, however, find traces of a lingering concern related to O’Casey’s potentially dangerous elements, and the Ministry of Popular Culture (Minculpop) encouraged him to both make sure the public would be reminded that the action took place in Ireland and to “take out sentences that might remind people of local [i.e. Italian] issues.”9 Nonetheless, private correspondence demonstrates that concerns over the nationality of 7  Alessandra Scalero’s translation would only be published in 1943, in Il Dramma (O’Casey 1943). According to Michael MacWhite, the production was a fiasco: “About the time I went to Rome in 1938, they became interested in Irish plays and needed my assistance in the production of some of them and of ‘Juno and the Paycock’. Neither the producer or the actors knew what it was all about and the actresses refused to wear the costumes representative of the women of the Dublin slums.” (IE UCD Archives, Papers of Michael MacWhite, P194/648, MacWhite to MacLiammóir, c. 1955, handwritten). 8   Fondo A.G.  Bragaglia, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Corrispondenza: 1940, sub-folder 1940: II semester, Bragaglia to Giacompol 5 March 1940, copy letter, typewritten. It is also thanks to Giacompol that Bragaglia could come by American books: “I am enthusiastic about the second parcel of American books, which have so far made the fortune of our theatre” (“mi hai entusiasmato col secondo invio dei libri americani i quali sinora sono la fortuna del nostro teatro”, Fondo A.G. Bragaglia, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Correspondence: 1941, sub-folder 1941: II semester, Bragaglia to Giacompol 10 November 1941, copy letter, typewritten). 9  “togliere qualche frase che può richiamare fatti di casa nostra.” (Fondo A.G. Bragaglia, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Correspondence: 1939, Minculpop (signed by Giulio Pacuvio) to Bragaglia, 22 October 1939, Rome, typewritten.)

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playwrights predated the June 1940 SIAE circular. Bragaglia’s dependence on the regime for subsidies—up to one million lire per year, according to Alberti (1974: 361)—cannot be overstated. He was always keen to have Mussolini’s approval and made sure that the Duce bought two season tickets each year for his theater as a form of endorsement. Indeed, one of the countless invitations Bragaglia sent to Mussolini sheds some light on the exceptional status enjoyed by Irish theater in Italy from the start of the war, before Italy’s involvement in it was official. The letter, dated 16 January 1940 (six months before the official ban), lists the plays that Bragaglia wanted Mussolini to attend. One line, referring to J.M. Synge’s play Riders to the Sea, is particularly significant: “Cavalcata al mare di Singe [sic] (irlandese)” (Alberti 1974: 295).10 Bragaglia’s zeal in indicating the nationality of the playwright is quite surprising at this stage, and shows, perhaps, that even his early interest in Irish theater had at least been inspired by political considerations, and was meant as a not-too-­subtle ruse to continue producing foreign plays without breaking either explicit or tacit rules.11 Whatever the motivation, these choices prompted two closely related effects: a wider recognition of the specificity of Irish literature in Italy, and a subsequent expansion of the Irish repertoire. In order to appreciate this, it is instructive to look at the statistics put together by the SIAE itself in the years both leading up to and during the Second World War. These statistics, published in the yearly publication Lo spettacolo in Italia, provide interesting information concerning the number of shows performed in Italy (theater, music, and cinema) and their revenue, broken down by region, along with the percentage of foreign shows divided by country of 10  Similarly, Bragaglia’s correspondence with translator and scout Alessandra Scalero implies that he had been looking for Irish plays as early as June 1939. (See in particular, Fondo A.G.  Bragaglia, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Correspondence: 1939, Scalero to Bragaglia, 14 June 1939, San Vittore (Aosta), typewritten.) 11  Something similar was about to happen with the famous case of the Americana anthology of contemporary American authors Bompiani planned to publish toward the end of 1940 and that was initially stopped because “the United States are a potentially enemy of ours” as stated by Alessandro Pavolini in a 7 January 1941 letter to Bompiani (quoted in Rundle 2010: 198). For Americana see also Dunnett (2002), Billiani (2007: 218–19); Bonsaver (2007: 226–30) and Esposito (2018: 119–130). The case of Americana shows how while “authorization of authors from ‘enemy’ countries probably became more difficult during the war, there does not appear to have been a firm policy of rejection.” (Rundle 2010: 198). Matters were slightly different in the theater, although exceptions were common, due to either the classic status of plays or their being critical toward enemy countries.

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origin (SIAE 1939: 46, 1940b: 41–42, 1941: 35–36, 1942: 31). Despite being effectively independent since the early 1920s, Ireland was still not included in these statistics as a separate country until 1940: Table 5.1 details the number of shows of Irish and English plays (“teatro di prosa,” that is, excluding opera and revue) staged in Italy in the period 1939–1942. The figures relating to plays written by English authors remain high because classic writers such as Shakespeare were not banned and some works were tolerated by the censor, because they were either innocuous or showed the enemy in a bad light (Scarpellini 1989: 299–300). The presence of Irish literature, however, is remarkable. In 1939, there is no entry for Irish plays and Ireland is only considered relevant for statistical purposes from 1940 onward. Moreover, the number of productions of Irish plays continues to grow, while that of English plays decreases. As alluded to above, this can be seen as representing a belated acknowledgment on the part of the SIAE of Irish independence, but one which is strongly linked to the country’s neutrality in the Second World War rather than any actual appreciation of its cultural or political status. It is nonetheless an official recognition of sorts, the first in the field of literature: the Italian literary system had never been more widely aware of the existence of Irish literature as a specific tradition within the Anglosphere. As discussed, such awareness had until then mainly remained within the remit of middle- and highbrow publications, though now it was part of a successful magazine’s campaign and even, as we will see, a topic of discussion in the popular press. The figures also reveal another interesting fact: the Irish Table 5.1  Data based on SIAE, Lo spettacolo in Italia (1939–42)

1939 Ireland England 1940 Ireland England 1941 Ireland England 1942 Ireland England

Primary companies

Other companies

Total of shows

N/A N/A

N/A N/A

N/A 963

98% 33%

2% 66%

51 881

100% 11%

0% 89%

117 582

100% 13%

0% 87%

202 537

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plays were almost exclusively staged by the so-called “compagnie primarie” (Pedullà 2009: 132–136). These were prominent companies that received a larger proportion of state funds in accordance with the recent Italian theater reform, which had given rise to the birth of the Ispettorato del teatro (Theater Inspectorate), the first centralized body to govern key aspects of theater life in the country, including overseeing censorship, “the modernization of antiquated theater buildings” and the “formation of new companies” (Thompson 1996, 103). As of 1935, then, companies that had valore nazionale (nationally recognized companies) and privileged national playwrights were officially considered compagnie primarie. The initiative was perfectly in line with the autarchic policy of the Fascist regime. The small group of primary companies (only 22 in the 1936/1937 season) was therefore subject to tighter control than the so-called “secondary companies” (approximately 150 in the same year) and was granted access to more prestigious venues, such as the ones where Irish plays were more often produced. This relatively new system of funding had crucial consequences for the development of Italian theater, but one of its side-effects was that it contributed to the recognition of Ireland as one of the main centers of theater activity in Europe. This Ireland was, once again, a substitute for England and appeared on Italian (political and literary) maps mostly, thanks to its anti-English function. The reception of Irish drama in Italy maintained its traditional link with Irish politics, although with a subtle difference: the political character of Irish plays that had been remarked upon, though downplayed, by Borsa and Linati at the start of the century, and foregrounded by the likes of Pellizzi and Simoni, was now almost exclusively attached to Irish playwrights because of the politics of their country of origin rather than to their works. Many writers were considered Irish that had not been regarded as such over the previous decades, in particular Shaw and Wilde. Around the same time, theater magazines, such as Il Dramma and Scenario, regularly ran features on Irish drama. The elasticity of the Anglo-Irish canon was a constitutive aspect of the revival presented in these articles, which was mainly the product of a political ruse, but that effectively challenged the borders of Anglo-Irish literature itself. Ireland’s neutrality in the war proved to be a difficult legacy for the country, but as far as Italy was concerned, it brought about a wider recognition of Irish cultural specificity. This, however, gives rise to a number of questions. Which Ireland was now being presented to Italian theatergoers? How did the canon of Irish literature evolve in Italy during the war and

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what were the consequences for the Italian scene? An examination of both the translations and discourses surrounding Irish theater in magazines will therefore be particularly instructive. 5.1.2  The Oriundi and O’Bragaglia’s New Irish Repertoire In 1940 and 1941, Il Dramma published plays by Synge, Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce. If we consider them in relation to other foreign plays, the numbers are overwhelming, with almost one in two being Irish. The source of the translations is also quite telling: they are almost invariably attributed to Carlo Linati, and are those published by him between 1914 and 1920. I will return to that “almost” soon, but in the meantime, it is worth emphasizing that this choice, while probably influenced by the ready availability of these translations, was also associated with a strong, and by then traditional, idea of Irish drama as particularly linked to nationalist themes. As discussed, this element had been downplayed by Linati and other irlandesisti, but had progressively grown in importance in the 1930s. After the first issues of the summer of 1940, the magazine stopped publishing overtly anti-British propaganda and focused on extolling Irish literature rather than criticizing England. By 1943, even Linati’s articles acquired more obvious political tones: It could be argued that the inexhaustible inventiveness and the generous idealism of the Irish have always somewhat served as the rich reservoir from which English literature has drawn the strength to renew itself in its moments of tiredness or decadence; from Sterne to Wilde, from Swift to Shaw, countless writers, born in Ireland and inebriated with its coarse and tenacious sap, enrichened the old trunk of Anglo-Saxon Literature with new branches.12

While consistent with a received idea of Ireland as rural, the naturalistic metaphor is quite surprising as it introduces a relatively rare image in Linati’s works of Ireland as masculine and strong, a new force ready to revive the wilted British civilization. Linati’s rhetoric recalls Fascist 12  “Si potrebbe anzi affermare che l’inesauribile inventiva e il generoso idealismo irlandese siano stati un po’ sempre il ricco serbatoio a cui la letteratura inglese ha attinto le forze per rinnovarsi, nei suoi momenti di stanchezza o di decadenza: e da Sterne a Wìlde, da Swift a Show innumerevoli sono gli artisti che, nati in Irlanda, ebbri della sua linfa rude e tenace, arricchirono di nuove fronde il vecchio tronco della letteratura anglosassone.” (Linati 1943: 50)

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propaganda and stresses an implicit link between the regime’s self-image and Irish culture. The image of Ireland that one gathers from Il Dramma in the years of the war is that of a rural, Catholic, masculine, and antiBritish country. Arguably, the main goal in exalting Irish culture was to undermine Britain’s cultural relevance. In this sense, Ridenti’s magazine was perfectly aligned with the general tendency of Fascist cultural propaganda, as can be perceived in other publications such as Civiltà fascista, Scenario, and Meridiano di Roma13 to name but a few. This rapidly gave rise to an extensive translation project. With the help of new mediators, Ridenti and Bragaglia set out to expand the repertoire of Irish literature in Italy and move beyond Linati’s repertoire. They did so in a way that simultaneously provided them with a wealth of new, legitimate plays and complied with the Fascist policy of undermining the enemies’ cultural status, in a convergence of aims that put both Bragaglia and Ridenti at the forefront of theatrical innovation while maintaining the favor of the regime. Ridenti, in particular, began by exploring as-yet untranslated texts by known Irish playwrights and then, more timidly, shifted his attention to lesser-known writers. This also entailed widening their circle of translators (e.g. Agar Pampanini, Michaela De Pastrovich, and the experienced Alessandra Scalero), and involving new mediators. The main newcomer was Vinicio Marinucci (b. 1916), a future protagonist of Italian cinema and president of the Italian Film Critics Union (Sindacato nazionale giornalisti cinematografici italiani), but at this stage a young and bold theater and film critic. Marinucci tried to expand the canon of Irish drama in Italy by introducing the public to Lord Dunsany—whose works had initially been proposed to Bragaglia by Linati but were eventually translated by Marinucci—, Lennox Robinson, and Paul Vincent Carroll—but tellingly, shying away from the latter’s very successful 1942 play on the Glasgow blitz, The Strings Are False.14 His initiative was only partially successful. Of the numerous contemporary Irish playwrights he discussed in his 1942 13  Particularly interesting is an article in Meridiano di Roma, penned by Giuseppe Santaniello, in which Irish literature, whose canon of course included also Wilde and Shaw, was considered to represent “a condemnation of the Anglo-Saxon World” [“una condanna del mondo anglo-sassone” (Santaniello 1941)] 14  Marinucci used to borrow the works of both Irish and Irish-American playwrights from the Irish Minister in Rome, Michael MacWhite. MacWhite also remembers his amusement at seeing Lord Dunsany’s plays being safely staged in Italy thanks to the nationality of their author, while “[Dunsany] was head of the British school at Athens—in other words, director

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articles (Marinucci 1942a, b), very few except the ones just mentioned made it to the stage or even to the pages of Il Dramma. A reason for this can be found in Bragaglia’s growing dislike for Marinucci, whose desire to gain a more central position in the system of Italian theater (and in Il Dramma) he strongly opposed,15 a sentiment that was shared by Ridenti too, despite the fact that Marinucci was still a frequent contributor to his magazine16 Moreover, most of the Irish plays Bragaglia showed some interest in were for different reasons inadequate for the Italian stage, being either deemed anti-German (e.g. Denis Johnston’s The Moon in the Yellow River) or too focused on Irish political issues (e.g. Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island). It was in those years that Bragaglia started to show his growing uneasiness with the political elements of Irish drama.17 Marinucci’s articles also confirm one significant aspect of the reception of Irish theater in Italy in the first half of the twentieth century: despite its recent relative success, the Italian public was not yet conversant with Irish literature. Critics and scholars never presumed a familiarity with it on the part of their readers, something that is apparent from the relatively lengthy introductory sections preceding most contributions: Irish literature had to be summed up, so to speak, at every occurrence, partly in order to reframe it, and partly in order to account for the relative novelty of the subject. Nonetheless, such rediscovery eventually had a positive outcome for the dissemination of Irish theater. It was during this period that most Irish plays were produced for the first time and achieved some popular success. While Linati could complain to Facchi that Italian audiences seemed blind to the charm of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World in 1919,18 the one-act play Riders to the Sea had become a staple of Bragaglia’s repertoire and was frequently staged by amateur companies; some Irish plays were also being aired on of British Military Intelligence in Greece.” (IE UCD Archives, Papers of Michael MacWhite, P194/648, MacWhite to MacLiammóir, c. 1955, handwritten). 15  Archivio Ridenti, Centro Studi del Teatro Stabile, Turin, Correspondence Bragaglia, Anton Giulio, Bragaglia to Ridenti, without date but early March 1943, item 104. 16   Fondo A.G.  Bragaglia, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Correspondence: 1943, sub-folder 1943, I semester, Ridenti to Bragaglia, 17 March 1943, Turin, typewritten. 17  In a 1943 letter to Gian Dàuli, Bragaglia explicitly stated that he could not stand Irish political plays anymore. (Fondo Gian Dàuli, Carte Gian Dàuli, Biblioteca Civica Bertoliana, Vicenza, Correspondence, Bragaglia, Anton Giulio, Bragaglia to Dàuli, 3 May 1943, Rome, typewritten.) 18  Carte Carlo Linati, Biblioteca comunale di Como, Fondo Manoscritti, Correspondence, Linati to Facchi, 3 March 1919, handwritten.

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national radio by Enzo Ferrieri.19 The success of these plays was also demonstrated by the effect they had on a future protagonist of Italian literature: the poet, playwright, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Pasolini’s encounter with Synge was to have a strong impact on the 19-year-old poet and, arguably, on his views on rural dialects.20 According to Roberto Roversi, Pasolini was so impressed by Synge’s work (read in Il Dramma in 1940) that he staged it with his friends in his parents’ home (Casi 2005: 28). Any further exploration of such fascinating relationships is beyond the chronological scope of this study, but such occurrences are nonetheless worth noting as the fruits of what had certainly been a new discovery for the Italian public. This rediscovery was also accompanied by an unusual development, which made the identity of Irish drama, and its national character, a matter of both popular and critical debate. This emerged when the progress of the war made it clear that the regime also regarded American playwrights as enemies. Though, the Teatro delle Arti and Il Dramma were ready to counterattack. Due to the combined efforts of Ridenti, Bragaglia, and Marinucci, English language authors who had hitherto had little or no association with Ireland suddenly began to be presented as Irish. This entailed an even greater expansion of the Irish canon and was again facilitated by the convergence of interests between these mediators and the regime. For propaganda reasons, American theater was then often presented as a poorer, exclusively commercial version of European theater; claiming prominent playwrights such as Eugene O’Neill (who had been awarded the Nobel prize in 1936) as Europeans thus responded to an old-­ world logic whereby Europe stood as a symbol of culture, and the “new world” as the site of mechanization and ignorance (Alessio 1941). This attitude, of course, became even more pervasive when the United States joined the war on the side of the Allied forces. There were two main routes through which contemporary playwrights from enemy countries could be staged in wartime Italy: the first was to be critical of their own country, and therefore potentially instrumental to 19  Irish plays had been broadcast by the Italian public service radio broadcaster EIAR (Ente Italiano per le Audizioni Radiofoniche). They included La forca fienaia (Spreading the News) by Lady Gregory, which had been aired “several times” [“parecchie volte” (Pellegrini 1936: 332)], according to an editor’s note to the article on O’Casey by Pellegrini discussed in Chap. 4. The editor of Il Convegno was of course Enzo Ferrieri who, at the time, was also involved in the EIAR program of radio plays. 20  On Pasolini and his use of the dialect of Friuli, see McCrea (2015: 47–73).

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Fascist propaganda, while the second was to have safe ancestors. The former group was very popular, and Bragaglia devoted almost the entire fifth season of his Teatro delle Arti to American proletarian theater. The latter was more controversial: from the beginning of 1942, after the United States officially joined the war, several American playwrights, whose works were officially banned, became Irish, allegedly on account of being born to Irish parents. The foreign-born Irish writers (oriundi) included some Irish-Americans such as Eugene O’Neill, George Kelly, and Philip Barry, but also writers whose Irishness was rather more questionable, such as Allan Langdon Martin (pseudonym of the North-American Jane Cowl and Jane Murfin) and even Emily Brontë and Edward Gordon Craig (Alessio 1941). In these cases too, however, the authors were presented as Irish, while some of their plays were even allegedly “translated from the Irish” (Kelly 1943: 39). The ruse also allowed Bragaglia to dodge payment of staging fees, as the Minister of Popular Culture, Alessandro Pavolini, had passed a law allowing such fees to be waived when enemy countries were concerned (Scarpellini 1989: 297). The scarcity of evidence makes it difficult to state with certainty whether the ruse originated in Bragaglia’s theater, or whether it can in fact be traced back to the Minculpop. We can, however, maintain with a certain confidence that the ruse was at least approved by Pavolini, who allegedly told Bragaglia on 20 September 1940 that Americans born to Irish parents should be considered Irish.21 Some of Bragaglia’s letters to Ridenti also show his efforts to reassure the latter of the legality of publishing O’Neill and the other oriundi and seem to suggest that the idea for the strategy may have come directly from the government itself. On 25 December 1942, Bragaglia wrote: “I saw with my own eyes a memo from the Minister to the Duce, in which it is stated that O’Neill is Irish. When the time comes, we will 21  This is what Bragaglia told an unnamed “Eccellenza”, probably identifiable as the censor Leopoldo Zurlo. Given the prominence of the letter’s correspondent, who could have easily verified the claim, it is unlikely that Bragaglia should have lied (Fondo A.G.  Bragaglia, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Corrispondenza: 1940, sub-folder 1940: II semester, Bragaglia to “Eccellenza” (unidentified but prob. Zurlo), 20 September 1940, copy letter, typewritten.) In a 1950 letter to an unnamed government minister, Michael MacWhite stated that Bragaglia had devised the plan with Giuseppe Bottai, then Minister of National Education. While it is possible that Bragaglia had discussed the issue with more than one minister, it is arguable that almost ten years later some details of MacWhite’s account might not be entirely accurate. (IE UCD Archives, Papers of Michael MacWhite, P194/644, MacWhite to a government minister, 1950, handwritten).

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have to inform the General Director for the Press that the latest version is that he is Irish.”22 However, no clear proof of this can be found at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato (Central Archives of the State), where most of the memos and notes are concerned with either clarifying the Irishness of playwrights or their political and/or aesthetic value (Alberti 1974: 295–311; Vigna 2008: 321–363) and the memoirs of the theater censor Leopoldo Zurlo (Zurlo 1952: 328–333) are quite vague in this regard. What is perhaps most striking is that the frequent articles published on O’Neill up until the end of 1941 (both in Il Dramma and elsewhere) make no secret of his being an American playwright and, most importantly, barely mention his Irishness. This is even more surprising given that Bragaglia and Ridenti had been aware of the special status of Irish Americans at least since the summer of 1941, months before the United States joined the war, as is evident from their correspondence. A letter from Bragaglia to Gian Dàuli (24 July 1941), for instance, shows that American playwrights were already frowned upon before Pearl Harbour, but that the ban did not apply to Irish-Americans.23 Since Italy’s declaration of war on the United States, however, O’Neill’s father, the Irish actor Joseph, became a stable presence in his biographies, as proof of his son’s Irishness. While Bragaglia had little trouble with the censor, Leopoldo Zurlo, the ruse was not unanimously accepted, and he received criticism from orthodox Fascist periodicals, which gently mocked him for his loose notion of Irishness. Bertoldo, a satirical magazine, produced a cartoon on the subject in which two theatergoers facetiously argue over O’Neill’s nationality (quoted in Quargnolo 1982: 98–99), and the director of the Teatro delle Arti was even dubbed O’Bragaglia by the press (Alberti 1974: xxi). While Bragaglia could count on the support of the Minculpop, his actions were still frowned upon by more conformist Fascists, who viewed them as a way to sidestep the ban on enemy writers. It is not surprising,

22  “Ho visto con i miei occhi un appunto del Ministro diretto al Duce nel quale il Ministro afferma che O’Neill è irlandese. A suo tempo bisognerà far presente al Direttore Generale della Stampa che l’ultima versione è irlandese.” (Archivio Ridenti, Centro Studi del Teatro Stabile, Turin, Correspondence Bragaglia, Anton Giulio, Bragaglia to Ridenti, 25 December 1942, Rome, typewritten, item 81). The minister in question could of course also be the Irish Minister to Italy, Michael MacWhite, who was involved in certifying the nationality of Irish and Irish-American playwrights. 23   Fondo Gian Dàuli, Carte Gian Dàuli, Biblioteca Civica Bertoliana, Vicenza, Correspondence, Bragaglia, Anton Giulio, Bragaglia to Dàuli, 24 July 1941, typewritten.

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then, that toward the end of the war, even producing relatively safe Irish-­ American playwrights such as O’Neill, became increasingly complicated. Nonetheless, through publications, paratextual elements and relentless advertising, Bragaglia, Ridenti and the new voices of Il Dramma managed to construct a common narrative in which both they and their intended audience were embedded. Since 1940, Il Dramma had insisted on the Irishness of Synge and Yeats in particular, showing a tendency to remind their readers of this “new” phenomenon of Irish theater in various guises. The magazine was laced with short notes on Irish theater, reminders of the issues that had included Irish plays, ads directly addressed to amateur theater companies with details of where they could find the scripts, as well as short reviews. This was common for the magazine, but the extent of the campaign was more pervasive than ever before, as was the zeal with which the nationality of the playwrights was constantly referenced. Indeed, following the publication of a number of plays by O’Neill (including Mourning Becomes Electra and Beyond the Horizon), and the ensuing debates, Il Dramma announced an article by Marinucci, tellingly entitled: “Quanti sono questi oriundi irlandesi?” (How many of these foreign-born Irish are there?) for its 380th issue (15 June 1942). Marinucci had not previously been associated with Irish theater, but it may be argued that selecting him to deliver the first direct attack was a strategic decision: as a young expert on Irish theater with no previous strong links to either Bragaglia or Il Dramma, Marinucci could be perceived as a fresh voice contributing to the debate. While the planned provocative title for the article was ultimately dispensed with in favor of the purely denotative “Panorama degli oriundi irlandesi” [Survey of foreign-born Irish], his claims were no less daring. Marinucci’s survey of Irish-American playwrights emphasized that they were not simply Americans with Irish origins, but “children of Celtic parents who have either emigrated to America or just happened to live there.”24 He showed a certain awareness of the ongoing debate and stressed that this was a discovery not an invention. These authors were Irish because their parents were Irish, and their Catholic background was still perceptible in their works and the ways in which they opposed American capitalism. Marinucci’s take on Irish theater was essentially spiritualistic and based on an alleged set of shared values between Irish and Irish-American Catholics: the same set of values that 24  “figli di genitori celti emigrati o anche soltanto casualmente residenti in America” (Marinucci 1942a: 30).

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would, in his view, appeal to Italian audiences. His words were a much-­ needed addition to Bragaglia’s campaign, a strong contribution to the narrative that he and Ridenti were constructing, as we have seen, through various channels and “repeated exposure”25. Moreover, the construction of an Irish identity for Irish-American playwrights mirrored Fascist reflections on race and nationality. One of the last paragraphs of Marinucci’s article stated: Those who still hesitate to regard the above-mentioned authors as being of genuine Irish stock, should remember that Italy always considers herself the Mother of her foreign-born children. Remember how she ascribes their works among those of her people, and how the characteristics of the country of origin are never extinct in the above-mentioned writers; in America, on the other hand, these same conspicuous characteristics cause authentic Americans to consider such writers almost as foreigners.26

In this excerpt, the notion of nationality itself is called into question. The oriundi stratagem, while interesting for the history of Irish and Italian theater, is equally noteworthy as a reflection of Fascist theories of race and nationality, and Marinucci showed political shrewdness in selectively appropriating and employing such compelling arguments in a moment in which they were becoming even more dominant in the cultural sphere, especially in reference to translations (Rundle 2010: 165–205). Such inclusivity was obviously problematic and controversial, as both the protests and the jokes quoted above demonstrate, but it did tackle a thorny subject: the loose conception of nationality and the essential difficulty in establishing national borders when talking about artistic creations. This issue related not only to playwrights’ nationalities, but also to the theatrical tradition to which they belonged. For instance, while O’Neill was 25  According to Mona Baker, we can redefine Bruner’s notion of “narrative accrual more broadly as the outcome of repeated exposure to a set of related narratives, ultimately leading to the shaping of a culture, tradition, or history. This history may be personal, as in the case of ontological narratives. It may also be public, including institutional and corporate narratives […].” (Baker 2006: 101) 26  “Per quanti poi avessero scrupoli residui a considerare di genuina stirpe irlandese gli autori sopraelencati, ricorderemo come l’Italia si consideri sempre la Madre dei suoi figli nati all’estero, ascrivendo le loro opere tra quelle del suo popolo, e come i caratteri della patria di origine non siano affatto spenti nei sunnominati scrittori, ma anzi inducano gli americani autentici, per la loro piena evidenza, a considerare questi autori press’a poco come stranieri.” (Marinucci 1942a: 31)

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undoubtedly an American playwright and never even visited Ireland, “he adopted the Abbey style in one-act form and realistic dialogue” and “had been inspired to become a playwright by the Irish Players from the Abbey in their first [American] tour in 1911” (Harrington 2016: 598). His European fame was also bolstered by the successful productions of his works at the Abbey where, in 1927 his The Emperor Jones (1920) was one of the first and most influential American plays “without obvious Irish context exported from American theater to the National Theatre of Ireland” (Harrington 2016: 599). Moreover, in 1932 he had been invited to join the Irish Academy of Letters, which made it possible for Il Dramma to invariably refer to his plays as being penned by an “accademico d’Irlanda” [Member of the Irish Academy] and to stress his Irishness as frequently as possible. As hinted at earlier, this phenomenon was the theatrical equivalent of the anti-English and anti-American books published during the same period, as it went hand-in-hand with the production of foreign plays whose “degenerate morals” were supposed to strengthen stereotypes concerning their country of origin (Scarpellini 1989: 298–299). Both of these discursive strategies were ultimately meant to undermine British and American cultural status. Unsurprisingly, it was also part of Bragaglia’s rhetoric to present such acts as part of a cultural war, as he made clear in a letter to Ridenti: “I put on plays as acts of war authorized by the Italian State, at war with America.”27 The dissemination of Irish and Irish-American drama in Italy during the Second World War can therefore shed some light on both the politics of cultural transfer in wartime Italy and the fluidity of the Irish canon itself. It is also, thanks to the international discourse on the Irish diaspora, which seeped into the Italian literary system, that Italian theatergoers could accept such a number of allegedly Irish playwrights, albeit suspiciously. While all national literatures have essentially porous borders, the Irish canon was, and to some extent still is, a very controversial case, involving not just linguistic and biographical elements, but also thematic issues, political allegiances, and conflicting national narratives (Cairns and Richards 1988; Gibbons 1991). Bragaglia and Ridenti’s activity certainly helped the case of Irish literature in Italy and prompted a conversation about the specificity of Irish literature within the Anglosphere; however, as 27  “Io le recite le faccio come atto di guerra autorizzato dallo Stato Italiano che è in guerra con l’America.” (RA Correspondence Bragaglia, Anton Giulio, Bragaglia to Ridenti, 2 February 1942, Rome, typewritten, item 63)

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we will see in the final paragraph, their uncompromising strategy, along with the simplification which accompanied it, led to some confusion in the literary system. Paolo Grassi’s theater collection would prove how the status of Irish literature in Italy was still unclear and left significant room for both political and aesthetic manipulation.

5.2   Paolo Grassi and Rosa e Ballo: Publishing Anti-Fascist Ireland In the spring of 1941, Paolo Grassi (b. 1919), a young actor and director, put together a program of 19 titles with Palcoscenico, an ensemble he had co-founded with fellow-students of the Accademia dei Filodrammatici in Milan and future protagonists of Italian theater: Giorgio Strelher, Franco Parenti, Mario Feliciani, Aegle Sironi, and others. As Oliviero Ponte di Pino reminds us, Palcoscenico was one of the filiations of Corrente di vita giovanile (1938–1940), the short-lived, but influential anti-Fascist literary magazine that had been shut down in 1940.28 With headquarters at the Sala Sammartini in Milan, Palcoscenico was “the only experimental theater ensemble outside the GUF” (Ponte di Pino 2006: 44; the GUF [Gruppi Universitari Fascisti] being the Fascist university student association) and had quite an eclectic repertoire, including some Italian plays but mainly consisting of the works of some of the few foreign playwrights permitted by wartime censorship: Yeats, Synge, O’Neill, Chekhov, Evreinov, and Shakespeare. Several factors lay behind such choices. While the group of young intellectuals drawn to Corrente was actively engaged in fighting Fascist rhetoric and aesthetic impositions, their room for maneuver was nonetheless limited by the regulations explored above. Despite the relatively small corpus of plays of which performances were permitted during the war, the choices made by Grassi and his acolytes are remarkable: Synge, Yeats, and the oriundo O’Neill play a prominent role, and Grassi’s future career proved that this was not accidental, nor merely the result of the political circumstances affecting theater at the time. The two Irish plays staged by the Palcoscenico ensemble (Synge’s Riders to the Sea and Yeats’s Cathleen ni

28  During its brief life, Corrente di vita giovanile had also published a few contributions on Ireland, including two by Gilberto Altichieri (1938, 1939) and two translations by Leone Traverso of poems by Yeats (1939) and Joyce (1940).

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Houlihan) had a certain political significance.29 Cathleen ni Houlihan, on the one hand, focused on the story of a country occupied by a despotic regime, and its attempts to rally its sons to subvert it: not only did it have anti-British connotations, it also gave voice to more general rebellious impulses that could easily be interpreted as anti-Fascist. Riders to the Sea, on the other hand, did not seem to convey any direct political meaning, but its international production and adaptation history could result in it being regarded as shorthand for anti-Fascist theater: not only was its rhetoric antithetical to the triumphal regime’s mantra, it had also been adapted by the exile Bertolt Brecht as Die Gewehre der Frau Carrar, in 1937 (O’Neill 1985: 274–5; Parker 2014: 366). The prominence of Synge, Yeats, and O’Neill in the Palcoscenico’s repertoire is evidence of the need to constantly negotiate a space for anti-Fascist initiatives within the scant room for maneuver afforded by wartime Italy. Although histories of Italian theater have a tendency to privilege rupture over continuity when discussing Fascist and post-Fascist practices (Pedullà 2009: 9–46), demonstrating existing links can help us better understand the dynamics of cultural change. It can also facilitate an examination on how well-crafted framing and branding strategies can significantly rearticulate the discourses surrounding a homogeneous, and rather limited, corpus of plays such as that under examination here. The link between Grassi and contemporary initiatives such as Il Dramma and the Teatro delle Arti was indeed quite strong. Grassi himself acknowledged this link in a letter to Ridenti: “I must confess, Il Dramma as it was for many years, up until three years ago, was not the magazine for us young people, but recently it has been the only lively organ in Italy.”30 Grassi’s reference to three years before here seems unlikely to be an accident. Up until three years earlier, or rather before 1940, Il Dramma was, in effect, quite a different magazine and held no real appeal for the younger generation; things had changed radically, however, with the start of the 29  Corrado Pavolini also mentioned in a letter to Bragaglia that Duilio Morosini and Paolo Grassi meant to stage either Synge’s Deirdre or Joyce’s Exiles as part of the activities of the Corrente group. (Fondo A.G.  Bragaglia, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Correspondence: 1941, sub-folder 1941: II semester, Pavolini to Bragaglia, 9 August 1941, Castiglioncello (Lucca), handwritten.) 30  “Se IL DRAMMA di molti anni, fino a tre anni fa, non è, debbo confessarlo, la rivista di noi giovani, negli ultimi tempi, però esso è stato l’unico organo VIVO in Italia” (Rosa e Ballo Archive, Fondazione Alberto e Arnoldo Mondadori, Milan, Correspondence, Grassi to Ridenti, 24 August 1944, typewritten, folder 5, file 5, item 13).

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war and the attention given to Irish and American playwrights. With the help of Bragaglia and Marinucci in particular, Ridenti had profitably managed to occupy a strategic position at the crossroads between outward compliance with the rules of Fascist censorship and daring innovation. The approval of his endeavor by the young generation of anti-Fascist intellectuals was testimony to its success. Grassi’s career was also rapidly changing. Two years after the Palcoscenico experience, he had made a name for himself as a theater critic in Milan. He was then hired by Ferdinando Ballo to be in charge of the drama series of his fledgling publishing house, Rosa e Ballo. The importance of the “Collezione Teatro” edited by Grassi cannot be overstated: its influence was deep and even outlived the publisher that first hosted it, since it was later bought by La Fiaccola, another Milanese publisher. “Teatro” was Grassi’s first attempt at reaching a national audience. As Michele Sisto recently argued (Sisto 2016), it was a way for Grassi to acquire a prominent position in the literary field, by combining anti-Fascist stances and breathing life into a theatrical revolution in Italy. In a letter to d’Amico, Grassi states that his aim was to put together scripts that were “tangible signs of modern theater” and in order to accomplish that, the line-up for the first issues of the series was mainly composed of two separate strands: “we will publish the Irish and the German expressionists.”31 Of the first twenty issues, eight of the elegant Rosa e Ballo booklets were dedicated to Irish drama, including the likes of Synge (with his entire oeuvre in four volumes), Yeats (two volumes) O’Casey (one), and Joyce (one), which Grassi published in the traditional translations by Carlo Linati, with the exception of The Tinker’s Wedding and The Well of the Saints by Synge, translated here for the first time. As with the selections for the Palcoscenico program, political convenience was certainly on Grassi’s mind,32 but this alone could not justify a similar number of Irish works. Moreover, Rosa e Ballo’s catalogue also included Synge’s The Aran Islands (translated in its entirety for the first time) and 31  “segni tangibili di un teatro moderno”; “pubblicheremo gli irlandesi e gli espressionisti tedeschi” (Fondo Silvio d’Amico, Museo dell’Attore, Genoa, Correspondence, Grassi to d’Amico, Christmas 1943, Milano, typewritten, folder 5). 32  In a letter to Alessandra Scalero of 16 March 1944, Ferdinando Ballo responds to some of her proposals and writes: ‘Sherwood—The Petrified Forest—interesting, but when for? He’s not Irish by any chance? Perhaps a grand-uncle even?’ [“Sherwood—The Petrified forest—Interessa, ma a quando? Non è possibilmente irlandese? almeno da parte di qualche prozio?” (Fondo Scalero, Biblioteca Civica di Mazzè (Turin), Correspondence, Ballo to Scalero, 16 March 1944, Milan, typewritten, folder 105, item 03)]

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other Irish translations were planned. The Rosa e Ballo archive, held at the Fondazione Mondadori in Milan, for instance, contains an unpublished translation of The Importance of Being Earnest,33 as well as evidence of the strong interest shown by Grassi in publishing Eugene O’Neill34 and Geneva by G.B. Shaw,35 an obviously anti-Fascist play and therefore one of the very few Shavian works not published by Mondadori during the regime. Moreover, a look at the contracts shows that Linati had also committed to writing 30/40 page-long essays on Synge and Yeats.36 It is not clear whether the introductions were to constitute separate volumes, but the contracts suggest that this might have been the case, as they are listed as separate entries following the planned volumes. While these introductions were never written (the longest preface is barely four pages long), this shows a definite commitment to Irish literature, on the part of Grassi.37 Focusing on Irish literature sheds light on Grassi’s complex position-­ taking in a way that problematizes the conclusions of earlier scholars who have devoted their attention to the Rosa and Ballo enterprise. Grassi’s aim to include “all the best foreign drama produced in the last 50 years” (Sisto 2016: 74) and to revive Italian theater does not involve a choice of writers unknown to the Italian public; rather it entails a rebranding of texts with which the public was already at least partly familiar. “His main aim was, in fact, not to ‘discover’ new texts and authors, but rather to put together a repertoire of recognized works that would, in turn, ensure him recognition” (Sisto 2016: 76). Even seen in this light, his choices regarding Irish literature are quite significant. Although several other Irish playwrights were available for publication either through Il Dramma or through their 33  Rosa e Ballo Archive, Fondazione Alberto e Arnoldo Mondadori, Milan, Editorial office: folder 14, file 1. 34  Rosa e Ballo Archive, Fondazione Alberto e Arnoldo Mondadori, Milan, Correspondence: Rosa e Ballo to Eugenio Montale, 14 December, 1943, Milan, typewritten, folder 4, file 8. 35  Letter to the Press Office of to the British Embassy, 2 June 1945, typescript. It is a list of titles and beside Geneva it says “neg”. (Rosa e Ballo Archive, Fondazione Alberto e Arnoldo Mondadori, Milan, Foreign Rights: England, folder 17, file 4, item 45). 36  Rosa e Ballo Archive, Fondazione Alberto e Arnoldo Mondadori, Milan, Contracts: folder 19, file 10. 37  Grassi’s commitment was not entirely shared by Linati himself, whose short introductions to both the plays and the writers are surprising in their sparseness and clearly show that the writer’s interest in Irish literature had essentially dissipated, to the point that very few primary or secondary works published after 1927 are present in the bibliographical sections. Moreover, his introduction to O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman is dependent on Pellizzi’s book on English Theater (1934), a source that is not acknowledged by Linati.

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translators, Grassi decided against it. He did not promote Lennox Robinson and Denis Johnston’s Pirandellian drama, nor did he show much interest in Irish mysticism and Orientalism, by dismissing Lord Dunsany. Even with Yeats’s plays, he favored those in which the political allegory was quite blatant, such as Cathleen ni Houlihan. He also privileged the expressionist tones of Synge and the bleak political realism of the socialist O’Casey. As it had been often the case, in the Italian reception of Irish literature, the mediator’s aim was less to explore new ground than to rebrand what was already part of the domestic repertoire. The choice of contributors was also telling. Along with newcomers such as Guerrieri and others, some of the main exponents of Fascist theater were asked to contribute (e.g. d’Amico and Bragaglia), testifying to the continuity Grassi aimed to establish with the recent past: without underestimating the importance of his revolution, we can safely say that it was achieved through shrewd reform rather than a clean-cut rupture with the past. This apparently safe choice of texts, however, was ingeniously reframed as subversive and anti-Fascist by Grassi. For instance, despite the fact that all these plays had freely circulated during the Fascist period, O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), translated as Il falso repubblicano [The False Republican], was published with a surprising and factually inaccurate blurb, stating that it belonged to “books banned by the fascists” and that the play was “the parody of a revolution .... Topical” (Fig. 5.1). The book was printed in September 1944, but it is safe to assume that the blurb was added after the end of the war. The blurb was a severe denunciation of Fascist censorship and could be interpreted as a reference to the regime’s claimed revolution, thus supporting Grassi’s anti-fascism, but could also refer to more “topical” events, such as the Resistance, at the end of which left-wing revolutionary forces were being gradually sidelined by the more moderate Christian Democrats, led by the Minister of Foreign Affairs Alcide De Gasperi.38 It was Grassi’s subtle masterstroke. His carefully reformist canon was being reframed as a subversive one and, “[a]fter April 1945” his position in favor of the socialist O’Casey and Irish theater, though it entailed the adoption of plays that had been safely produced 38  According to the Roman satirical weekly Cantachiaro, the “false republican” of the Italian title could refer to De Gasperi himself: in November 1945, a humorous anecdote appeared in Cantachiaro about De Gasperi allegedly protesting against Rosa e Ballo for publishing Il falso repubblicano and asserting that “such veiled allusions were no longer tolerable in a democratic regime” (Rosa e Ballo Archive, Fondazione Alberto e Arnoldo Mondadori, Milan, Press cuttings: folder 24, file 6).

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Fig. 5.1  Seán O’Casey, Il falso repubblicano, trans. C.  Linati, Milan: Rosa e Ballo, 1944

during Fascism, could be perceived as anti-Fascist and “could be symbolically associated with a position-taking in favor of a social revolution in liberated Italy” (Sisto 2016: 77). Grassi’s editorial decisions had a positive impact on the immediate future of Irish theater in Italy. While Grassi himself did not produce Irish plays in the first seasons of his Piccolo Teatro in Milan (from 1947), thus indirectly suggesting that Irish theater was instrumental in his reform,

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other Italian theaters saw a good number of productions of Irish plays arising from the slightly outdated canon proposed by Linati and Grassi, primarily in small independent venues. In Genova, Ivo Chiesa mounted Synge’s Riders to the Sea and Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire, at the Teatro Sperimentale Pirandello, and Aldo Trabucco Carroll’s The White Steed, while in Florence, at the Teatro d’Arte “Luigi Cherubini” dell’Università, Sergio Surchi mounted The Well of the Saints and Giancarlo Giannozzi Yeats’s The Hour-glass, with a new title (La clessidra) though it is unclear if it was also a new translation. While still classifying them as theatre “Gods” [“Dei”], even Ridenti betrayed a slight change of heart following the war years, claiming that putting such consecrated plays on stage no longer had any relevance to avant-garde theatre (Ridenti 1946). These years also saw a rediscovery of Yeats’s plays and poetry in Italy, involving the likes of Leone Traverso, Eugenio Montale and in particular the young critic Giorgio Manganelli, who would go on to become one of Italy’s most acclaimed and original writers. Manganelli was commissioned to produce a translation of Yeats’s plays and poetry by Guanda, which triggered his lifelong interest in Yeats and Ireland (Manganelli 2002). Irish literature was able to play such a unique role in Italy mainly due its ambiguous and uncertain status. The Italian public’s relative unfamiliarity with its repertoire, as well as the latter’s liminal political status, made it an ideal object of both political and aesthetic manipulation. After the early discovery by Linati and others at the start of the century, prompted by a genuine appreciation of Irish literature, the 1940s renaissance of Irish drama was primarily a result of political convenience. While mediators like Marinucci seemed invested in acquiring prestige through their association with the rapidly expanding repertoire of Irish drama and struggled to make the Italian public more familiar with it, Bragaglia’s interest seemed rather spurred by a lack of legitimate alternatives and was soon sidelined by his longstanding commitment to disseminating O’Neill’s works, as well as other successful Anglo-American plays, in Italy. The later use of “Irish drama” by Grassi clarifies how adaptable the category was then, as is also shown by Grassi’s dismissal of it in subsequent years. It is certainly interesting to investigate the dissemination of Irish literature in Italy, but what this chapter suggests is that despite the fluctuating elements constituting Irish literature in 1940s Italy, the history of the category—one is almost tempted to call it a “label”—and its uses show how such a repertoire could be easily appropriated by both Fascist and anti-Fascist intellectuals, despite their profound ideological differences. If Ireland was simultaneously in

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and out of the war, the Irish canon in Italy also conveyed a comparable ambivalence; it was at once narrow and broad, Fascist and anti-Fascist, employed for political purposes and appreciated for aesthetic reasons, essentialized, rather than explored. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that while the interest in certain playwrights (e.g. Joyce, Yeats, and Synge) remained strong in postwar Italy, the discourse on Irish drama rapidly left the center-stage of the post-Fascist and left-wing theatrical scene once its political value had faded.

References Alberti, Alberto Cesare. 1974. Il teatro nel fascismo: Pirandello e Bragaglia, documenti inediti negli archivi italiani. Rome: Bulzoni. Alberti, Alberto Cesare, Sandra Bevere, and Paola Di Giulio. 1984. Il teatro sperimentale degli indipendenti: (1923–1936). Rome: Bulzoni. Alessio, Luigi. 1941. Il teatro in America. Il Dramma 17 (345): 31–33. Altichieri, Gilberto. 1938. Didascalie irlandesi. Corrente di vita giovanile 1: 2. ———. 1939. Notizia di Yeats. Corrente di vita giovanile 2: 6. Baker, Mona. 2006. Translation and Conflict. London: Routledge. Bibbò, Antonio. 2019. Irish Theatre in Italy During the Second World War: Translation and Politics. Modern Italy 24: 45–61. Bigazzi, Carlo. 2004. Introduzione. In Studi irlandesi, ed. Carlo Bigazzi, 7–12. Rome: Yorick. Billiani, Francesca. 2007. Culture nazionali e narrazioni straniere. Italia, 1903–1943. Florence: Le Lettere. Bonsaver, Guido. 2007. Censorship and Literature in Fascist Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cairns, David, and Shaun Richards. 1988. Writing Ireland. Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Casi, Stefano. 2005. I teatri di Pasolini. Milan: Ubulibri. Dunnett, Jane. 2002. Foreign Literature in Fascist Italy: Circulation and Censorship. TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 15: 97–123. Esposito, Edoardo. 2018. Con altra voce. La traduzione letteraria tra le due guerre. Rome: Donzelli. Gibbons, Luke. 1991. Constructing the Canon: Versions of National Identity. In The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ed. Seamus Deane, Andrew Carpenter, and Jonathan Williams, 2: 950–955. Derry: Field Day Publications. Grassi, Paolo. 1962. Il teatro e il fascismo. In Fascismo e antifascismo (1918–1936). Lezioni e testimonianze, 339–346. Milan: Feltrinelli. ———. (1945) 2009. Si sveglia il teatro italiano?. In Il lavoro teatrale. Scritti, documenti, immagini 1936–1980, 83–84. Milan: Silvana Editoriale.

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Griffiths, Clive. 2005. Theatrical Censorship in Italy During the Fascist Period. In Culture, Censorship and the State in Twentieth-century Italy, ed. Guido Bonsaver and Robert Gordon, 76–85. Oxford: Legenda. Harrington, John P. 2016. Irish Theatre and the United States. In The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre, ed. Nicholas Grene and Chris Morash, 593–606. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Joyce, James. 1940. Ora dormi. Trans. by Leone Traverso. Corrente di vita giovanile 3: 2. Kelly, George. 1943. La moglie di Craig. Trans. Beatrice Chiappelli. Il Dramma 19 (406–407): 39–69. Linati, Carlo. 1932. Voci della nuova Irlanda. In Scrittori anglo-americani, Carlo Linati, 41–48. Milan: Corticelli. ———. 1943. Scrittori d’Irlanda. Il Dramma 19 (408–409): 50–52. Manganelli, Giorgio. 2002. Incorporei felini II.  Recensioni e conversazioni radiofoniche su poeti in lingua inglese (1949–1987), ed. Viola Papetti. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Marinucci, Vinicio. 1942a. Panorama degli oriundi irlandesi. Il Dramma 18 (380): 30–31. ———. 1942b. Il teatro irlandese d’oggi. Il Dramma 18 (381): 24–25. McCrea, Barry. 2015. Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press. O’Casey, Seán. 1943. La spia. Trans. Alessandra Scalero. Il Dramma 19: 40–62. O’Neill, Patrick. 1985. Ireland and Germany: A Study in Literary Relations. New York: Peter Lang. Parker, Stephen. 2014. Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life. London: Bloomsbury. Pedullà, Gianfranco. 2009. Il teatro italiano nel tempo del fascismo. Bologna: Il mulino. Pellegrini, Alessandro. 1936. Della tragedia irlandese e Sean O’Casey. Il Convegno 17: 329–342. Pellizzi, Camillo. 1934. Il teatro inglese. Milan: Treves. Perrelli, Franco. 2018. Tre carteggi con Lucio Ridenti. Anton Giulio Bracaglia, Guglielmo Giannini, Tatiana Pavolova. Bari: Edizioni di Pagina. Piccolo, Laura. 2009. “Novità agli Indipendenti”: russi reali e immaginari in scena. Europa Orientalis. Archivio russoitaliano—Russi in Italia 5: 219–236. Ponte di Pino, Oliviero. 2006. Le collezioni teatrali di Rosa e Ballo. In Un sogno editoriale: Rosa e Ballo nella Milano degli anni ’40, ed. S.  Casiraghi, 34–62. Milan: Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori. Quargnolo, Mario. 1982. La censura ieri e oggi nel cinema e nel teatro. Milan: Pan. Ridenti, Lucio (Unsigned). 1946. Taccuino. Il Dramma 22 (12-13): 9. Rundle, Chris. 2010. Publishing Translations in Fascist Italy. Oxford: Peter Lang.

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Santaniello, Giuseppe. 1941. Letteratura irlandese. Meridiano di Roma (23 February): 9. Scarpellini, Emanuela. 1989. Organizzazione teatrale e politica del teatro nell’Italia fascista. Florence: La Nuova Italia. Shaw, George Bernard. 1940. Untitled. Il Dramma 16 (333): 5. ———. 1975. Plays Pleasant. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sisto, Michele. 2016. Rosa e Ballo and German literature in Italy. Journal of Modern Italian Studies 21 (1): 65–80. Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori. 1939. Lo spettacolo in Italia. Rome. ———. 1940a (6 June). Circolare n. 74. ———. 1940b. Lo spettacolo in Italia.. Rome. ———. 1941. Lo spettacolo in Italia. Rome. ———. 1942. Lo spettacolo in Italia. Rome. Thompson, Doug. 1996. The Organisation, Fascistisation and Management of Theatre in Italy, 1925–1943. In Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925–1945, ed. Gunter Berghaus, 94–112. Providence; Oxford: Berghahn Books. Unsigned Article. 1945 (5 November). Sean O’Casey. Cantachiaro. Rome. Vigna, Francesca. 2008. Il “corago sublime”: Anton Giulio Bragaglia e il “Teatro delle Arti”. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino. Wills, Clair. 2008. That Neutral Island. London: Faber & Faber. Yeats, William Butler. 1939. Le parole sui vetri della finestra (dramma in un atto di W.B. Yeats). Trans. Luigi Berti. Letteratura 3 (October): 108–122. ———. 1940. Il gatto e la luna. Trans. Luigi Berti. Incontro 1 (8): 5. Zanotti, Serenella. 2013. Italian Joyce. A Journey Through Language and Translation. Bologna: Bononia University Press. Zurlo, Leopoldo. 1952. Memorie inutili: la censura teatrale nel ventennio. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion

It is a commonly held belief that Carlo Linati almost single-handedly paved the way for Irish literature in Italy at the start of the twentieth century. While his role as a mediator was certainly crucial, this book has argued that a much more complex network of irlandesisti was involved in importing Irish literature and culture into Italy, both laying the groundwork for, and complementing, Carlo Linati’s discoverta. Mediators such as Borsa, Buonaiuti, OʼRiordan, Hagan, Joyce, Dàuli, Valera, Fienga, Pellizzi, Rossi, Pascazio, Bragaglia, and Ridenti belonged to very diverse milieus (Catholic modernism, journalism, politics, literature, theater) and had different statuses and often conflicting aims in mind, as well as different concepts of Ireland (Catholic, Gaelic, Anglo-Irish, colonial, socialist, proto-Fascist, and so forth), which they therefore depicted in various, often incompatible, ways. This book has investigated the discourses on Irishness in early twentieth-century Italy. This exploration has primarily compared the political, cultural, and literary discourses in order to make sense of the dynamics governing their interactions. Some key differences have emerged, which translated into different roles for Irishness in Italy during the timeframe under consideration. While political discourses were more prone to foregrounding the antagonism between England and Ireland, literary mediators were more at pains to distinguish two traditions that had been, were, and still partially are so tightly bound. Despite a few exceptions, one of the most apparent developments was the growing © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Bibbò, Irish Literature in Italy in the Era of the World Wars, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83586-6_6

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reliance of Italian irlandesisti on the image of the vigorous and masculine Gael slowly replacing the melancholy and feminine Celt. Perhaps more importantly, most mediators were reliant on essentialistic and monologic notions of national character. We have seen the effect of this on the reception of literature, when traits typically associated with Ireland were indisputably transmitted, and informed the construction of the literary canon of Irish writing for domestic audiences. The link between Irish literature and the nationalist sentiment of Irish people, for instance, was so commonplace in early 1940s Italy that Anton Giulio Bragaglia replied to Gian Dàuli’s offer of a stage adaptation of Donn Byrne’s Blind Raftery and his wife, Hilaria in these terms: if the novel Raftely [sic] is about Irish insurrections, I would have no interest in it. O’Casey and the others have already bored us enough with Irish patriotism. Imagine if we had annoyed the rest of the world with the stories of Garibaldi, which are of interest only to ourselves. Very few people would have paid attention.1

Such a strong link meant that often Irish writers who were not ostensibly political or Catholic, or who did not at least dabble in national themes, were rarely perceived as Irish even when they managed to make it to the other side of the Alps. Unsurprisingly, the perception of the specificity of Irish literature gained momentum during those times that saw Italy either at war or simply at odds with England: while the translation of Irish writers did not always follow paths linked to the political history of either Italy or Ireland, the general acceptance of their being Irish was often directly affected by such diplomatic changes. This has led to the examination of one of the key aspects of the reception of Irish literature in Italy: the distinction between cosmopolitan writers such as Wilde, Shaw, Moore, and Joyce, who were more likely to be aligned with aesthetic principles and movements than a specific national literature, and writers such as Yeats, Synge, Gregory, and O’Casey whose main feature in Italy was that they belonged to the Irish tradition, and whose reception more closely follows 1  “se il romanzo Raftely [sic] riguarda i moti insurrezionali dell’Irlanda non m’interessa, perché ci hanno pensato già O’Casey e gli altri a stancarci col patriottismo irlandese. Se noi avessimo scocciato il mondo con le nostre storie di Garibaldi, che interessano soltanto noi, ben poca gente ci avrebbe dato attenzione” (Fondo Gian Dàuli, Carte Gian Dàuli, Biblioteca Civica Bertoliana, Vicenza, correspondence, Bragaglia Anton Giulio, Bragaglia to Dàuli, 3 May 1943, Rome, typewritten).

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the entanglement of aesthetics and national character outlined earlier. At times, though, writers of the former group in particular were catalysts for debates on nationality, and their liminal position suggested possible alternative notions of Irishness casting doubt on the homogeneity of national character. It is particularly for this reason that Gian Dàuli’ss role as a mediator of Irish literature has been deemed worthy of note. Joyce and Moore were, as discussed, two interesting case studies in this regard. While his Irishness was often left in the background, Joyce was important both as a mediator of things Irish and as a translated writer. The affiliation of Joyce with Irish literature is one of the most elusive aspects of his reception in Italy. From its hesitant inception, in 1920 with Exiles in Il Convegno, Joyce seemed to defy the romantic principle that writers belong to a national tradition. He is then progressively erased from the discourses concerning Irish literature, before once again being included in that tradition in the years leading up to the Second World War. It was then that an anonymous reader for Mondadori claimed that the time had probably come to translate Ulysses given that the author was Irish and in the book there was anti-­ British sentiment. These inconsistencies were the norm in the timeframe considered, but it was still surprising to see George Moore, an author who had been considered quintessentially Irish, being hailed as an English writer in a 1945 preface to the first translation of his 1906 Memoirs of My Dead Life (Moore 1945: 5). This aspect of the reception of Irish writers remains very common even to this day, however, especially where classic authors such as Sterne or Swift are concerned. Irish literature and culture remained an elusive subject in early twentieth-­century Italy, perhaps also due to the constant rebranding and contradictory notions of mediators who, unsurprisingly, seemed to feel the need to repeatedly introduce it to Italian readers, as if from scratch. This is probably attributable to the fact that mediators did not consider their readers to be sufficiently conversant with Irish literature and could not rely on much shared contextual knowledge. Less confidently, though, one might also detect an awareness among them of the malleability of the material that constituted Irish literature and a tendency to apply this highly adaptable label to content of their choosing, as each sought to create their own version of Irishness in a way that was most convenient to their aesthetic or political needs. This was arguably also a factor in the drastic reduction of the space for Irish literature in Italy after the end of the Second World War. While authors such as Joyce and Yeats were still being translated, and the former in particular was at the center of editorial

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projects embarked on by both Cederna and Mondadori (Sullam 2013), discourse on Irishness and Irish writing progressively waned. It is perhaps no wonder that this should happen at a time when nationalist ideals were rapidly being sidelined in most European quarters after the horrors of the war, but it nevertheless represents quite an abrupt change after the intense debates of the war years. This book is not a comprehensive survey of the reception of Irish writers in Italy, but instead investigates how various images of Ireland might have influenced the construction of an Irish tradition abroad and how the reception of a new literary tradition can illuminate the politics of mediation as well as the ways in which mediators articulate their version of modernity. A study such as this will inevitably leave several questions unanswered, which will hopefully be addressed by future work in the field. Some, in particular, concerning other media and individual writers could not be explored in due detail as they had little to do with more general discourses on Irishness, but I would like to provide a few possible avenues for further research: 1. What was the extent of dissemination of Irish plays in the program of the Italian public broadcaster EIAR? We know that Ferrieri promoted them (especially Synge and Gregory) when he was at the helm of radio theater productions, and we also know that he had a few unkind exchanges with Linati concerning the latter’s royalties for some of these broadcasts. A more detailed study of the subject, however, perhaps going beyond the sphere of Irish literature, could shed light on this underexplored topic, as well as on the key role of radio broadcasts in the dissemination of theater in Italy. Moreover, Linati’s translations, though revised for Rosa e Ballo, had not improved with time and were still too “literary,” according to their author. This problem was greatly felt by Ferrieri, when he tried to adapt them for radio. An analysis of the Ferrieri-Linati correspondence, together with the original scripts used for the former’s radio productions of Synge’s work, held at the Archive of the Fondazione Mondadori, might enable an exploration of the ways in which Ferrieri attempted (and partly failed) to relaunch Irish theater on Italy’s national radio in the mid-1940s and to rework Linati’s translations to make them more suited to staging. 2. The reception of Wilde’s works, though much explored in Italy, still presents aspects worthy of more thorough investigation, such as the surprising publication of seven different translations of The Soul of

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Man under Socialism that flooded the Italian market in the aftermath of the Second World War, between 1945 and 1947. This is perhaps testimony to the underground circulation of the pamphlet, which had become an important text for Italian socialists prior to the Fascist regime and may have continued to be during the dictatorship. 3. Yeats’s poetry, though rediscovered by Italian mediators from the mid-­1930s, did not factor significantly in the revival of Irish works during the Second World War. After the war, however, interest in publishing Yeats’s poems greatly increased. Archival documents show how a first collection, eventually published in 1949 by the aggressive Cederna, was a long time in the making. First Denti, a small publishing house from Como, leased the rights to Cederna, and then Guanda, in Modena, assigned the translation task to the young Giorgio Manganelli. Cederna, however, which had held the rights to Yeats’s English texts written after 1921, prevented Guanda from publishing the translated poems alongside the original text, resulting in Manganelli’s translations going unpublished, even when Cederna was forced to close the publishing house a few years later. The translations remain unpublished to this day and are kept in the Manganelli archive. Eventually, Cederna published a substantial collection translated by the hermeticist poet Traverso and prefaced by Margherita Guidacci. This endeavor, which was initially linked with the wartime propagation of Irish plays, was key to the rediscovery of Yeats’s poetry after years of neglect and to repositioning the poet within the Italian literary scene. While Manganelli was setting out on his journey of discovery of Yeats—he would also translate some of his plays—Beppe Fenoglio and Pier Paolo Pasolini had a brief encounter with Synge’s works, with the former even translating The Playboy of the Western World (Brozzi 2007). The interest in Irish writers shown by these three protagonists of Italian literature of the second half of the twentieth century goes beyond the chronological span of this book; their first encounter with them, though, was shaped by the circumstances reconstructed here, which could therefore illuminate further investigation. Perhaps the most pressing question, however, is one that has accompanied me throughout my research. While exploring the dissemination of conflicting images of Irishness and realizing that such a wealth of scholarship, as well as popular literature, on Ireland was produced in Italy in the early twentieth century, I have been struck by the seemingly

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sharp contrast this presents with the general neglect for Ireland in the decades following the war. Why is the notion of Irish literature virtually set aside in Italy in the postwar years, despite the continued study (and translations) of individual writers? Is it because of its complex and inconvenient links with the Fascist regime? Does it have to do with a wariness of nationalism that emerged in postwar Europe, together with the lack of interest in such questions demonstrated by New Criticism and structuralism? Does it simply have to do with Italian mediators’ insistence on focusing on a relatively small range of household names, something that was confirmed by Paolo Grassi’s publication of Synge, Yeats, Joyce, and O’Casey in his “Collezione Teatro,” thus offering an image of a repetitive and unchanging repertoire, despite the changing nature of the interpretation and function of that very repertoire? Perhaps the events of the Second World War concerning Irish plays provoked even more confusion regarding the specificity of Irish theater and literature within the broader Anglophone context. Combined with the contemporary virtual erasure of Ireland from the international political stage, this would continue through the 1950s and 1960s, and at least until the Troubles, when Italian audiences would once again become familiar with Irish affairs and literature. Investigating that set of circumstance would be significant in relation both to more general and timely debates on the definition of a transnational canon of Irish literature and to an exploration of the role of foreign literatures as aesthetic and political tokens in the Italy of the time.

References Brozzi, Elisabetta. 2007. The Playboy of the Western World di J.  M. Synge: una traduzione inedita di Beppe Fenoglio. L’ ellisse: studi storici di letteratura italiana 2: 315–367. Moore, George. 1945. Ricordi della mia morta vita. Trans. Fluffy Mella Mazzuccato. Milano: Bietti. Sullam, Sara. 2013. Le peripezie di Ulisse nell’Italia del secondo dopoguerra. Letteratura e Letterature 7: 69–86.

Index of Names1

A aan de Wiel, Jerome, 31, 42, 42n23, 42n24, 43, 51, 52 Abbey Theatre, 17, 68n56, 83, 105, 124, 152, 155n101, 186, 195, 205 Alberti, Alberto Cesare, 254, 255, 261, 269 Albini, Ettore, 113 Albonetti, Pietro, 239, 243, 244n116 Angeli, Diego, 149, 150 Angelini, Cesare, 85, 126, 137, 138, 138n79 Aretino, Pietro, 255 Argira, Paolo (Pseudonym of Fiorina Centi), 86, 86n7, 87 Arnold, Mathew, 12, 33, 37, 37n16, 40, 41, 46, 159, 226 Arrington, Lauren, 20n16, 208 Aurora (publisher), 231n86

1

B Baker, Mona, 271n25 Baldini, Anna, 3, 4, 15, 86, 97, 147, 223 Barry, Kevin, 67 Barry, Philip, 268 Bassnett, Susan, 205 Battisti, Cesare, 59, 59n45, 192 Beckett, Samuel, 18, 20, 149, 230 Beller, Manfred, 10, 11, 11n8 Benco, Silvio, 69, 218 Bendelli, Giuliana, 218 Benedict XV, 40, 42n24, 43 Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, 223, 243 Benjamin, Walter, 6 Berardis, Vincenzo, 196 Berkeley, George, 61n48, 141, 142, 180, 184, 186, 188, 188n13 Bernardy, Amy, 199 Bernasconi, Ugo, 137

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Bibbò, Irish Literature in Italy in the Era of the World Wars, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83586-6

289

290 

INDEX OF NAMES

Bernheimer, Charles, 3 Biagi, Daria, 3, 237 Bibbò, Antonio, 76, 165, 253n1 Biblioteca Romantica (book series by Mondadori), 232, 236–238 Bickley, Francis, 102, 102n37 Bietti (publisher), 223 Bigazzi, Carlo, 257 Billiani, Francesca, 215, 223, 242n109 Binelli, Andrea, 70n60 Biondo, Eugenio, 235n93 Bizzotto, Elisa, 18, 94, 94n22 Blake, William, 99, 99n33, 100, 155, 158, 160, 162, 163 Bocca (Publisher), 71 Bollettieri Bosinelli, Rosa Maria, 2, 7 Bonelli, Luigi, 254, 255 Boni, Giacomo, 32 Bonsaver, Guido, 191, 215, 255 Borelli, Alda, 108, 111, 117, 118, 119n61 Borgatta, Gino, 53, 179 Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio, 222, 232, 236–238 Borsa, Mario, 14, 32, 50, 55, 59n45, 85, 85n5, 99, 101, 101n35, 120, 120n63, 153–155, 154n100, 155n101, 159–161, 160n108, 180, 184, 190–194, 204, 227n79, 263, 283 Bourgeois, Maurice, 18, 156, 156n103 Boyd, Ernest, 148, 149, 149n95 Bragaglia, Anton Giulio, 253–273, 274n29, 275, 277, 279, 283, 284 Brancati, Vitaliano, 245 Brecht, Bertolt, 254, 274 Brems, Elke, 16n10 Britain, 12, 29, 30, 40, 42n24, 43, 45, 47–49, 52, 55–57, 60, 61, 68, 85, 101, 181, 183, 195, 196, 198n29, 199, 231n86, 234, 244, 257, 259, 265

Brondi, Tullio, 227 Brown, Meg, 16n10 Buffoni, Franco, 163 Bullen, Arthur Henry, 83, 109 Bulson, Eric, 68, 72, 125, 127, 140, 146, 148, 207 Buonaiuti, Ernesto, 13, 28, 29, 31–36, 38–42, 39n18, 42n25, 44, 44n26, 45, 45n27, 47, 61, 61n48, 66, 67, 71, 72, 76, 85, 130, 155n101, 187, 217, 232, 283 Burdett, Charles, 4n3 Byron, Lord, 195, 259 C Caccia, Patrizia, 87 Cadioli, Alberto, 92 Cairns, David, 12, 46, 46n31, 67, 105, 152, 272 Carroll, Paul Vincent, 257, 260, 265 Carter, Nick, 27 Casalino, Mario, 235 Casanova, Pascale, 16n11, 66n55, 149, 150, 150n96 Casati, Alessandro, 98 Casement, Roger, 14, 50, 53, 54, 59n45, 101, 180, 190–193, 227n79, 231n86 Casey, W. F., 213 Cattaneo, Arturo, 202 Cattaneo, Carlo, 97, 123, 138 Ceannt, Éamonn, 48 Cecchi, Emilio, 48n34, 58, 87, 89, 91, 93n21, 95, 96, 98, 99, 126, 143, 144, 145n90, 158 Cederna (publisher), 163, 286, 287 Cella, Sergio, 84n2 Centi, Fiorina, see Argira, Paolo Chapman, Wayne K., 75 Chewski, C. (Pseudonym of Franco Leoni), 109

  INDEX OF NAMES 

Chini, Chiara, 49, 55, 57–60, 61n48, 61n49, 103n38, 181–184, 181n2, 194–196 Ciarlantini, Franco, 198n31 Cippico, Antonio, 83, 83–84n2 Circolo del Convegno, 146, 147 Civil War, 55, 57, 152, 181, 219 Clare, David, 17, 160n109 Clarke, Thomas, 48 Cleary, Joe, 5, 149 Coakley, Davis, 17 Collezione Teatro (book series by Rosa e Ballo), 275, 288 Collins, Michael, 61n48 Collum, Padraic, 153 Connolly, James, 48, 59 Conti, Angelo, 94 Copeau, Jacques, 127 Corkery, Daniel, 186, 188, 199, 208, 217 Corrias, Francesca, 98 Cowl, Jane, see Martin, Langdon Allan Cozzani, Ettore, 101 Craig, Gordon Edward, 84, 108, 109, 109n45, 117, 120, 209, 268 Croce, Benedetto, 188n13, 255 Cronin, Michael, 7n5, 18 Cuala Press (publisher), 187, 188 Cullen, Paul, 42 Curran, Michael J., 32, 55, 195 D d’Amico, Silvio, 104, 105, 112–115, 117–119, 202, 205, 208, 210, 211, 275, 277 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 52, 60, 60n46, 86, 92–96, 94n22, 96n28, 108, 121, 122, 259 Dal Lago, Enrico, 27 Damrosch, David, 3, 133

291

Dàuli, Gian, 31, 139, 161, 190n17, 201, 207–208n44, 208, 218–235, 269, 283–285 Dauliana (publisher), 223, 235 Davies, Thomas, 153 de Caprariis, Luca, 181 De Logu, Pietro, 160 De Lucia, Stefania, 3, 91, 133 De Paoli, Domenico, 235 De Pastrovich, Michaela, 265 De Petris, Carla, 140 De Robertis, Giuseppe, 85n4, 96n27, 126n67 De Valera, Eamon, 59, 181, 183, 195, 196, 257 De Vere, Aubrey, 20 Debenedetti, Giacomo, 147, 222 Del Greco Lobner, Corinna, 64, 70 Del Vivo, Caterina, 70 Deledda, Grazia, 118 Della Torre, Arturo, 85, 91, 92, 130 Delta (publisher), 223, 235 Deming, Robert H., 8 Donn Byrne, Brian Oswald, 2, 201, 219, 221, 225, 227–232, 230n84, 231n86, 239, 284 Doxa (publisher), 185 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 14, 191 Dunnett, Jane, 15, 215 Dunsany, Lord Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 73n62, 165, 201–206, 254, 257, 265, 265n14, 277 Duse, Eleonora, 74, 111–113, 116–123 Dyserinck, Hugo, 10 E Easter Rising, 14, 28, 29, 31, 48–50, 48n34, 52, 54, 59n45, 69, 101, 102, 105, 190, 191, 192n20, 230, 231n86

292 

INDEX OF NAMES

Edgeworth, Maria, 37 Ellmann, Richard, 63, 65, 70n59, 71, 76n67, 107, 107n41 Evangelista, Stefano, 17 Even-Zohar, Itamar, 2 F Facchi, Gaetano, 87–89, 92, 92n18, 97, 98, 108, 109, 266 Fanning, Bryan, 217, 217n67 Fantaccini, Fiorenzo, 87, 162–164, 184n5, 241n106 Fantappiè, Carlo, 32, 40 Fantappiè, Irene, 3, 96n27 Farmar, Tony, 34, 34n5 Fascist regime, 53, 168, 183, 189, 195, 196, 200, 202, 203, 207, 214–216, 235, 263, 287, 288 Feliciani, Mario, 273 Fenoglio, Beppe, 287 Ferguson, Samuel, 20, 153 Ferme, Valerio, 215 Ferrieri, Enzo, 85, 86n6, 107–108n42, 111, 123–151, 166–168, 257, 267, 267n19, 286 Fienga, Dino, 29, 37, 52–54, 54n38, 56, 57, 57n42, 60, 61, 179, 283 Filodrammatici (Theater company), 109, 110, 273 FitzGerald, Joan, 75 Formiggini, Angelo, 64, 69–72 Foster, Roy, 89, 109, 153, 153n99, 162n112, 188 Francini Bruni, Alessandro, 2 Frank, Nino, 2, 73n62, 206 Fraser, James Alexander, 68, 68n57, 70 G Gaelic League, 33, 34, 46n31 Gallarati Scotti, Tommaso, 118

Gallimard, Gaston, 126 Gargano, Giuseppe Saverio, 94, 94n22 Gargaro, Francesco, 161–163, 212, 227, 227n79 Genette, Gérard, 135, 135n76 Gentile, Giovanni, 188, 188n13 Gentzler, Edwin, 3, 15 Gerbi, Antonello, 62, 63, 129, 145, 146n91, 151 Gibbons, Luke, 99, 152, 154, 272 Gill, Richard, 34 Gogarty, Oliver St. John, 184 Goldoni, Carlo, 83, 204 Goldsmith, Oliver, 18, 37, 37n13, 102n37, 155, 156n103, 160, 186, 245 Gomez Homen, Pier Filippo, 183, 194, 195 Gouanvic, Jean-Marc, 4, 4n1 Gounard, E. (Pseudonym of Franco Leoni), 84n3, 88, 89, 108n43, 109, 110, 110n46, 117 Gramatica, Emma, 104, 106, 108, 111–117, 206, 207, 254, 257 Gramsci, Antonio, 54 Grand Guignol (Theater company), 74, 75n65 Grandi, Dino, 183 Grassi, Paolo, 254, 255, 273–280, 288 Great War, 29, 30, 32, 42, 43, 45, 47, 56, 58, 62, 69, 72, 75, 76n67, 92, 97, 101, 107, 137, 151, 179, 190 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 2, 9, 31, 84, 87–91, 89n12, 98, 100, 102, 108n43, 109, 110, 110n46, 112, 130, 140n82, 141, 152, 154, 155, 155n101, 164, 165, 165n116, 168, 184, 186–188, 203, 203n36, 204, 207n43, 209, 213, 226n77, 267n19, 284, 286

  INDEX OF NAMES 

Griffith, Arthur, 33, 45n28, 46, 46n31, 52, 67, 153 Griffiths, Clive, 255 Guerrieri, Gerardo, 277 H Hagan, John, 13, 29, 31, 32, 34, 41–48, 42n23, 42n25, 44n26, 45n28, 45n29, 46n30, 47n32, 47n33, 50, 51, 55, 58, 61, 61n49, 67, 72, 194, 283 Hales, Donal, 183 Harrington, John P., 19, 272 Havely, Nick, 4n3 Heffernan, Brian, 42 Hemingway, Ernest, 138 Hight, Beryl, 111 Holfter, Gisela, 18 Home Rule, 28–49, 66, 71, 153, 185 Hone, Joseph, 180, 184, 185, 185n6, 187, 188, 188n13, 189n14 Huxley, Aldous, 259 Hyde, Douglas, 33, 164 I Ibsen, Henrik, 74, 117, 121, 122, 141 Il genio anglosassone (book series by Stock), 220n70, 223, 231, 232, 235 Irish Free State, 179, 181, 239, 241n106 Irish Parliamentary Party, 29, 56 Irish Revival, 14, 64n53, 67, 85, 152, 191, 221, 227, 228, 232, 237, 240 Irish War of Independence, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58, 61, 219 Iser, Wolfgang, 5 Italian Communist Party, 52 Italian Popular Party, 44n26, 164

293

J James, Henry, 144 Jauss, Hans Robert, 5 Johnson, Lionel, 99, 153 Johnston, Denis, 266, 277 Joyce, James, 1, 2, 5, 13, 17, 18, 20, 30, 30n2, 31, 46, 47, 62–77, 77n68, 84n2, 86, 90n14, 100, 106–108, 107n41, 111, 114n55, 118, 122–124, 126–130, 137–151, 140n82, 141n84, 142n85, 144n87, 144n88, 144n89, 145n90, 148n94, 149n95, 151n97, 154, 161, 164, 166, 168, 191, 202, 206–209, 209n45, 216, 218, 223, 226, 230, 234, 239, 241, 243, 245, 256n3, 264, 273n28, 275, 280, 283–285, 288 Joyce, Stanislaus, 64, 69n58, 76, 151 K Keane, Barry, 19 Kelly, George, 268 Kenny, Colum, 51 Keogh, Dermot, 30, 42 Keohane, Patrick T., 34 Kershaw, Angela, 3 Kiberd, Declan, 10, 209, 242 Kipling, Joseph Rudyard, 84n2 Kuran-Burçoğlu, Nedret, 11 Kurdi, Mária, 19, 84 L Lady Morgan, 37 Lami, Annie, 223 Landi, Stefano, 204 Lane, Hugh, 31 Larbaud, Valéry, 8, 148, 149 Lawrence, D.H., 131, 138

294 

INDEX OF NAMES

Leerssen, Joep, 10, 10n7, 156–158, 164, 229, 230, 234 Lefevere, André, 16, 16n12, 99n33, 133 Leoni, Franco, 84n3, 88, 89, 108n43, 109, 110, 110n46, 117, 210 Lernout, Geert, 148, 149 Levi, Eugenio, 85, 126, 137 Linati, Carlo, 31, 37, 47–49, 48n34, 75, 76, 181, 190, 198, 201–204, 207, 207n43, 210, 213, 215, 216, 219–221, 224, 225, 226n77, 229, 231n85, 233, 234, 239–242, 241n106, 243n111, 254, 256n3, 257, 260, 263–266, 264n12, 275, 276, 276n37, 278, 279, 283, 286 Lodi Fè, Romano, 196 Lonergan, Patrick, 19, 20 Lucerna (publisher), 220n70, 223 Lucini, Gian Pietro, 97 Ludwig, Emil, 202 Lunari, Luigi, 113 Lussu, Emilio, 60n47, 179n1 M M.H. Gill & Son (publisher), 28, 33 MacDermott, Seán, 48 MacDonagh, Thomas, 48, 99, 155n101 MacSwiney, Terence, 54, 58, 58n43, 105, 155n101 MacWhite, Michael, 196, 260n7, 265n14, 268n21, 269n22 Maguire, Bernard, 33 Maher, Brigid, 6n4 Malaparte, Curzio, 77, 144n88 Manganelli, Giorgio, 279, 287 Manzoni, Alessandro, 85, 257 Marchetti, Mario, 224, 225n75

Mariani, Alessandro, 183, 196 Marinucci, Vinicio, 265–267, 265n14, 270, 270n24, 271, 271n26, 275, 279 Markey, Anne, 131, 132 Martin, Langdon Allan (Pseudonym of Jane Cowl and Jane Murfin), 268 Martyn, Edward, 84, 213 Mathews, P.J., 10, 138 Mc Cormack, W.J., 183, 188n13 McCourt, John, 2, 63n51, 64–68, 64n53, 65–66n55, 70, 70n60, 74–76, 148, 151 McGarry, Fearghal, 196 McIntosh, Gillian, 33 McNamara, Audrey, 17 Medusa (book series by Mondadori), 232, 237–239, 241, 243 Meek, Donald E., 40 Melchiori, Giorgio, 63, 70–72 Migge, Bettina, 18 Mitchel, John, 33 Modena, Anna, 87, 144n88, 287 Modernissima (publisher), 223, 230, 231n86, 232, 235, 239 Molière, 83, 256 Molinari, Cesare, 118 Mondadori (publisher), 17n13, 113, 139, 191, 201, 202, 202n35, 208, 218, 220, 222, 229, 231n86, 232, 235–245, 256n3, 276, 285, 286 Mondadori, Arnoldo, 191, 242n109 Montale, Eugenio, 126, 127, 279 Moore, George, 12, 17, 18, 201, 218–221, 226, 231n86, 232–239, 232n87, 284, 285 Moore, Thomas, 37, 69, 100 Moran, D.P., 46, 46n31, 67 Moran, James, 49 Morash, Chris, 20, 104

  INDEX OF NAMES 

295

Moretti, Franco, 2 Munday, Jeremy, 7 Murfin, Jane, see Martin, Langdon Allan Mušek, Karel, 107 Mussolini, Benito, 55n39, 56, 58–60, 58n43, 191, 202, 204, 229, 253–280

O’Riordan, Michael, 13, 29, 31, 41–45, 42n25, 44n26, 48, 50–52, 51n37, 72, 283 Ojetti, Ugo, 94, 94n22 Oliviero, Federico, 101n34, 157, 161, 163, 167 Oriani, Alfredo, 259 Ortensi, Ulisse, 161

N Nelson, Brian, 6n4 Nerbini (publisher), 244 Nergaard, Siri, 16 Nolan, Emer, 67 Nutt, Alfred, 37, 37n16

P Padraic Colum, 105 Pageaux, Daniel-Henri, 10 Paladini Volterra, Angela, 208 Palazzolo, Maria Iolanda, 235 Palumbo, Pier Fausto, 13, 198, 217 Pampanini, Agar, 265 Pancrazi, Pietro, 91, 91n16, 104 Papini, Giovanni, 86, 87, 87n8, 92, 188n13 Parente, Fausto, 40 Parenti, Franco, 244n113, 273 Parini, Giuseppe, 85 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 56, 103, 141, 142, 216 Pascazio, Nicola, 13, 180, 183, 184, 194, 195, 199, 283 Pascoli, Giovanni, 94n22 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 267, 287 Pasquero, Maurizio, 87, 106n40, 114n55, 140n82, 141n83 Pavolini, Alessandro, 261n11, 268 Pavolini, Paolo Emilio, 37n16, 90n14 Pearse, Pádraic, 46, 48, 66, 131 Pelaschiar, Laura, 76, 77 Pellegrini, Alessandro, 207, 215, 267n19 Pellizzi, Camillo, 162, 181, 182, 182n3, 182n4, 185, 197, 200, 202, 205–207, 205n41, 210–214, 210n49, 211n51, 212n57, 216, 260, 263, 283

O O’Casey, Seán, 124, 129, 191, 201–204, 207–217, 221, 225, 240, 241, 257, 260, 260n7, 267n19, 275, 276n37, 277, 278, 284, 288 O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Nelson, 17 O’Conaire, Padraic, 155n102, 168 O’Connell, Daniel, 153, 228 O’Connor, Anne, 27 Ó Donghaile, Deaglán, 17 O’Duffy, Eoin, 183, 194 O’Dwyer, Edward, 43, 51 O’Flaherty, Liam, 12, 135n75, 139, 150, 201, 209, 214, 215, 220, 221, 238–244, 241n106, 241n108, 243n110, 243n111, 244n112 O’Flaherty, Robert, 135 O’Grady, Standish, 153, 164 O’Kelly, Seán T., 44n26, 190, 195 O’Neill, Eugene, 186, 202, 207–217, 245, 254, 256, 267–271, 273, 274, 276

296 

INDEX OF NAMES

Pellizzi, Carlo Maria, 19 Perrelli, Franco, 258 Piccolo, Lucio, 161, 162n112 Pilkington, Lionel, 153 Pilný, Ondřej, 19, 20, 20n18, 107 Pirandello, Luigi, 118, 129, 165, 201–206, 208, 254, 279 Pitoëff, Georges, 205 Pius XII, 196 Plunkett, Horace, 32, 41 Plunkett, Joseph Mary, 48, 53 Polezzi, Loredana, 4n3, 28n1, 35n7 Ponte di Pino, Oliviero, 273 Ponti, Paola, 126n67, 139, 143, 147 Pontifical Irish College, 28–30, 42, 43, 66 Porcelly, Nina, 207 Potts, Willard, 2 Pound, Ezra, 73n61, 75, 90n14, 127, 129, 148–150, 218, 256n3 Power, Gerald, 19 Praga, Marco, 112, 114, 118 Prampolini, Giacomo, 85, 126 Prendergast, Christopher, 2 Prezioso, Roberto, 63 Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 86, 92, 96, 108n43, 126, 133 Proust, Marcel, 127, 144, 223, 231n86 Puccini, Mario, 66n55, 92, 97, 98, 223 Q Quargnolo, Mario, 269 Quinn, John, 149n95 R Ragone, Giovanni, 97, 239 Re, Lucia, 116, 118, 121, 122

Rebora, Piero, 137 Redmond, John, 29, 43, 52 Reggiani, Enrico, 44n26, 161n110, 164 Renan, Ernest, 31–33, 40, 41 Réthelyi, Orsolya, 16n10 Richards, Grant, 70, 72 Richards, Shaun, 12 Ridenti, Lucio, 253n1, 254, 258, 259, 259n6, 265–272, 272n27, 274, 274n30, 275, 279, 283 Risorgimento, 27, 57, 183, 192, 215 Riva, Serafino, 31, 198, 199, 207, 216, 217, 232 Rizzini, Oreste, 214 Rizzoli (publisher), 139, 208, 218, 232, 235 Robinson, Lennox, 124, 129, 155n101, 166, 168, 257, 265, 277 Rocco, Giuseppe Garibaldi, 116 Rodker, John, 129, 218 Rodoani, Antonio, 181 Romanzi della Palma (book series by Mondadori), 237 Rosa e Ballo (publisher), 17n14, 135, 136, 207n43, 273–280, 286 Rossetti, Dante Gabriele, 162 Rossi, Alberto, 143, 144, 147 Rossi, Cesare, 116 Rossi, Mario Manlio, 13, 18, 28, 180, 184–189, 192n20, 209, 220, 221, 241n106, 283 Ruane, Aileen, 19 Ruberti, Guido, 162, 163, 200, 201, 203, 203n36, 203n37, 204 Rubino, Mario, 15, 237, 238 Ruffini, Nina, 143 Ruggieri, Franca, 2, 66 Rundle, Chris, 215, 229, 239, 255, 256n2, 261n11, 271

  INDEX OF NAMES 

Rusca, Luigi, 239 Russell, George, 162, 211, 212 S Sainati, Alfredo, 74 Sainati, Bella, 75n65, 254 Scalero, Alessandra, 17n14, 207n44, 223, 235, 236, 241n108, 244, 260n7, 261n10, 265, 275n32 Scarfoglio, Carlo, 196 Scarpellini, Emanuela, 254, 262, 268, 272 Scheiwiller, Vanni, 163, 226n76 Schenoni, Luigi, 64 Scrittori di tutto il mondo (book series by Modernissima), 223, 239 Second World War, 10, 13, 17, 47, 107, 110, 119, 125n66, 146, 151, 165, 167, 180, 195, 197, 207–217, 231n86, 244, 245, 253, 254, 257, 261, 262, 272, 285, 287, 288 Sengupta, Mahasweta, 11 Serra, Renato, 137, 138 Severi, Rita, 18, 94, 117 Shaffer, Elinor, 18, 19 Shakespeare, William, 121, 122, 256, 262, 273 Shaw, George Bernard, 2, 17, 17n13, 18, 65, 68n56, 94, 99, 107, 113, 115, 154, 155, 157, 160, 190, 200, 202, 202n35, 206–208, 211, 216, 219, 221, 225, 228, 230, 234, 235, 254, 257, 259, 259n5, 263, 264, 265n13, 276, 284 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 37, 37n13, 155, 156n103, 160 Shiels, George, 213 Simonetti, Carlo Maria, 96

297

Simoni, Renato, 115n56, 197–199, 208, 216, 263 Sinn Féin, 29, 33, 42, 45, 45n28, 49, 50, 51n37, 60, 103n38, 105, 153, 181 Sironi, Aegle, 273 Sisto, Michele, 3, 18n15, 275, 276, 278 Skies, Claud W., 107 Slataper, Scipio, 87 Società editrice della Voce (publisher), 86 Società Lyrica Nova (Publisher), 109 Solmi, Sergio, 147 Sorani, Aldo, 94 Spaini, Alberto, 223 Spenser, Edmund, 99, 100, 155 Starkie, Walter, 245 Stephens, James, 12, 101n34, 124, 130, 139, 162, 163, 165, 186, 201, 218, 219, 221, 227, 227n79, 228, 239, 240 Sterne, Laurence, 18, 37, 37n13, 141, 142, 216, 264, 264n12, 285 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 138 Stock (publisher), 223, 235 Stoker, Bram, 165 Stopford Green, Alice, 32, 33 Strauss, Richard, 74, 117, 156 Strelher, Giorgio, 273 Studio Editoriale Lombardo (publisher), 87, 89, 92, 93, 97, 98, 143, 235 Sturzo, Luigi, 44n26, 164 Subialka, Michael, 118 Sullam, Sara, 239, 286 Svevo, Italo, 63n51, 65, 65n54, 66n55, 69, 127, 129, 146, 146n92, 147, 148n94, 222 Swift, Jonathan, 18, 37, 141, 142, 144, 158, 161, 180, 186, 188, 189, 200, 216, 228, 234, 245, 285

298 

INDEX OF NAMES

Synge, John Millington, 2, 37n16, 49, 68n56, 69, 72–76, 75n65, 76n67, 77n68, 84, 86, 86n6, 88–90, 91n16, 92, 96n27, 98, 100, 102–108, 108n43, 112, 112n50, 114, 114n55, 116–120, 121n64, 122, 124, 127, 129–131, 133–136, 134n72, 135n74, 138, 140n82, 141, 153, 154, 165, 166, 197, 198, 202–205, 203n36, 203n37, 207, 209, 213, 214, 216, 217, 221, 226n77, 240, 243n111, 254, 257, 259–261, 264, 266, 267, 270, 273–277, 274n29, 279, 280, 284, 286–288 T Taine, Hyppolite, 37 Talbot, George, 87, 134n73, 215 Tamaro, Attilio, 69 Teatro d’Arte, 165, 201–206, 279 Teatro delle Arti, 255, 258, 259, 267–269, 274 Terrinoni, Enrico, 57n42 Thompson, Doug, 263 Tilgher, Adriano, 112, 204–206 Tinterri, Alessandro, 206 Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe, 120n63, 161, 201n34, 226 Torresi, Ira, 146 Townshend, Charles, 48 Traverso, Leone, 163, 212, 273n28, 279, 287 Treves (publisher), 70n60, 71, 201, 210, 210n50 Tumiati, Gualtiero, 111 Turchi, Nicola, 29, 31–33, 35–39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 45n27, 47, 61, 66, 67, 71, 76, 155n101, 198, 217

Tymoczko, Maria, 3, 7, 15, 18, 149 Tyrrell, George, 31 U United States (US), 55, 84, 104, 150, 158n106, 199, 237, 256, 261n11, 267–269 V Valera, Paolo, 29, 52, 55–58, 56n40, 56n41, 60, 61, 194, 257, 283 van Kalmthout, Ton, 16n10 Vaughan, Bernard, 233 Venuti, Lawrence, 3, 6, 14, 156, 158n106, 166 Verga, Giovanni, 131, 131n70, 214, 236, 243n111, 260 Vergani, Orio, 204 Vidacovich, Nicolò, 72, 74–76, 75n66, 77n68, 84n2, 207 Villari, Luigi, 13, 199 Vinciguerra, Mario, 167, 168n118, 200, 201, 232–234, 236, 240 Vivanti, Annie, 29, 52, 58, 59, 59n44, 61, 61n49 Volta Conference, 180, 208–210, 216 W Wade, Allen, 110 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 4, 5, 67, 148 War of Independence, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58, 61, 219 Wawrzycka, Jolanta, 73 Wellek, René, 10 Whelehan, Niall, 18 Wilde, Oscar, 2, 17, 18, 56n40, 63n52, 65, 68n56, 69, 70n59, 70n60, 74, 93–95, 93n21,

  INDEX OF NAMES 

94n22, 99, 107, 116, 117, 154, 156–158, 156n103, 158n105, 160, 198n29, 216, 221, 228, 234, 235, 254, 257, 259, 259n6, 263, 264, 264n12, 265n13, 284, 286 Wilder, Thornton, 224, 256 Wilson, Rita, 16, 16n9 Wilson, Woodrow, 55 Woolf, Virginia, 138, 243 Y Yeats, Elizabeth, 188 Yeats, Lily, 188 Yeats, William Butler, 2, 19, 20, 20n16, 37n16, 66, 69, 73–75, 83–85, 83–84n2, 84n3, 87–90, 88n10, 89n12, 89n13, 90n14, 92n18, 94–96, 95n23, 95n26, 96n27, 98–102, 99n33, 102n37,

299

105, 106, 108–112, 108n43, 110n46, 117, 119–122, 120n62, 120n63, 130, 140n82, 141, 151–157, 158n105, 159–166, 159n107, 161n110, 162n112, 165n116, 168, 180, 184, 186–189, 188n13, 189n14, 197, 201n34, 202, 203, 203n36, 203n37, 206, 207n43, 208, 209, 209n45, 212, 216, 219, 221, 225–229, 226n77, 227n79, 231n86, 236, 241n106, 257, 264, 270, 273–277, 273n28, 279, 280, 284, 285, 287, 288 Z Zanotti, Serenella, 7, 63, 65, 69n58, 144, 144n89, 148n93, 256n3 Zurlo, Leopoldo, 255, 268n21, 269

Index of Works and Periodicals1

A Almanacco della Medusa, 238, 242 An Phoblacht, 195 Antidannunziana, 92 The Aran Islands, 103, 129, 130, 134, 135, 137, 139, 143, 275 B Barbogeria, 88, 93 The Betrothed, 133 The Black Soul, 242 Blind Raftery and His Wife, Hilaria, 228, 284 C Cabala bianca, 227 Candida, 115, 116 Cathleen Ni Houlihan, 89, 89n13, 120, 152, 274, 277

1

Catholic Bulletin, 34, 34n5 Catholicity and Progress in Ireland, 41 Celibates, 69 The Celtic Twilight, 164, 227 Commedie irlandesi, 89n12, 90, 91, 102 Confessions of a Young Man, 220, 226, 232 Corrente di vita giovanile, 273, 273n28 Corriere della sera, 49, 211, 214, 216, 231 Corriere d’Italia, 45 Cose d’Inghilterra, 182 The Countess Cathleen, 89, 89n13, 109 The Crock of Gold, 165, 227 D Deirdre of the Sorrows, 90, 117, 119 De Profundis, 94

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Bibbò, Irish Literature in Italy in the Era of the World Wars, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83586-6

301

302 

INDEX OF WORKS AND PERIODICALS

The Dial, 127, 131 Diana, 86, 86n7 Die Gewehre der Frau Carrar, 274 Dubliners, 62, 65, 69, 70, 72, 77 Duccio da Bontà, 86–88, 92 E Emporium, 161 Esther Waters, 167, 232, 235, 236 Exiles, 68n56, 106, 107n42, 111, 129, 130, 140, 140n81, 141, 143, 144n88, 149, 218, 274n29, 285 F Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, 164 Finnegans Wake, 2, 65, 73n62, 77 G Geneva, 202n35, 276, 276n35 Giacomo Joyce, 65n55 The Glittering Gate, 205 The Gods of the Mountain, 165, 201, 203–205, 254 H The Heather Field, 107 Histoire de la littérature anglaise, 37 Hollywood Cemetery, 135n75, 244 Home Rule. L’autonomia irlandese, 44 The Hour-Glass, 130, 279 The House of Gold, 241, 241n106, 244, 244n116 Hyacinth Halvey, 90

I I doni della terra, 86, 87, 92, 95, 133 I giganti della montagna, 205 Il Convegno, 86, 111, 123–151, 144n87, 144n88, 145n90, 154, 207, 215, 218, 223, 258, 267n19, 285 Il Dramma, 257, 258, 260n7, 263–267, 269, 270, 272, 274, 276 Il Frontespizio, 163 Il Marzocco, 70, 93, 94, 94n22 Il mio Carso, 87 Il Mondo, 61, 61n48, 205 Il Piccolo della sera, 63, 68, 74 Il teatro inglese, 162, 212, 214 The Importance of Being Earnest, 107, 276 Impressions of Ireland, 33 The Informer, 243 Ireland in the New Century, 41, 53 Ireland. The Rock from whence I was Hewn, 230 Irlanda e Roma, 199 “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,”, 72 I Went to Russia, 243 J Jail Journal, 33 John Bull’s Other Island, 17, 200, 202n35, 266 Juno and the Paycock, 260, 260n7 L Lacerba, 92 La Fiera Letteraria, 146n92 The Lake, 232, 235, 236 The Land of Heart’s Desire, 89, 89n13, 95, 95n26, 96, 96n28, 279

  INDEX OF WORKS AND PERIODICALS 

L’anima nera, 242 La recente insurrezione in Irlanda, 50 La Rivoluzione d’Irlanda e l’Impero Britannico, 194 La Ronda, 126, 127, 129, 130, 147, 222 La Rua, 226 La tragica impresa di sir Roger Casement, 184 La Tribuna, 49, 50, 58, 93n21 La vita che ti diedi, 118 La Voce, 86, 92, 96–98, 96n27, 126, 126n67, 127, 129, 130, 222 Lavoro Fascista, 242n109 Leonardo, 92, 187 Le opere e i giorni, 161 L’Eroica, 101, 161 L’Inghilterra contro l’Irlanda, 53, 54 L’Inghilterra e il continente, 196 L’insurrezione irlandese, 53 L’Irlanda e la Gran Bretagna, 199 L’isola di smeraldo, 32, 33, 35, 38–40, 44, 71, 198 The Little Review, 127, 129 Lo spettacolo in Italia, 261, 262

303

O Occidente, 146, 223, 237n99, 243 The Old Irish World, 33 P The Picture of Dorian Gray, 70, 94 Pilgrimage in the West, 180, 184, 187, 188 The Playboy of the Western World, 90, 102, 106, 108, 111, 112, 115, 116, 266, 287 The Plough and the Star, 207n44, 214, 215 Poesia, 160 Popolo Romano, 45 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 62, 63, 65, 69, 70, 77, 140, 140n82, 141, 149, 164, 218 Prospettive, 77

M Memorie di un redivivo, 120 The Moon in the Yellow River, 266 Mrs Warren’s Profession, 107, 113, 115

R Religio, 232 Riders to the Sea, 73, 74, 75n65, 76, 76n67, 77n68, 89n12, 90, 107, 112, 117–119, 121, 134n73, 207, 260, 261, 266, 273, 274, 279 The Rising of the Moon, 90, 102 Rivista internazionale di scienze sociali, 44

N 900. Cahiers d’Italie et d’Europe, 144, 151, 206, 223 Nuova Antologia, 32–34, 72, 155, 198

S Salome, 74, 116, 117, 156 Scissors and Paste, 50, 51 Scrittori anglo-americani d’oggi, 239

304 

INDEX OF WORKS AND PERIODICALS

The Shadow of a Gunman, 129, 215, 276n37, 277 The Shadow of the Glen, 90 The Shadowy Waters, 89, 89n13 Solaria, 77n68, 146, 147, 148n93, 151, 207, 223 The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 70, 70n59, 286–287 Spreading the News, 90, 267n19 Sulle orme di Renzo, 86

U Ulysses, 2, 17, 62, 63, 128, 143, 144, 144n87, 144n88, 146, 148, 151, 218, 226, 234, 239, 241, 256n3, 285 The Untilled Field, 167

T “Three Women who Wept,”, 130 The Times, 83, 83n1, 190, 237n99 The Tinker’s Wedding, 275 Tragedie irlandesi, 89, 92n18, 94, 99, 161, 165 The Travelling Man, 90

W The Wandering of Oisin, 163 The White Steed, 260 The Winding Stair, 163

V Viaggio in Irlanda, 180, 184, 185, 187–189, 241n106

Z Zio Floflò, 227