199 51 49MB
English Pages 635 Year 1999
TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALIAN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
This page intentionally left blank
ROBIN HEALEY
Twentieth-Century Italian Literature in English Translation AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY 1929-1997
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1998 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-0800-3
Printed on acid-free paper
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Healey, Robin Patrick, 1942Twentieth-century Italian literature in English translation : An annotated bibliography, 1929-1997 Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-0800-3 1. Italian literature - 20th century - Translations into English - Bibliography. I. Title. Z2354.T7H44 1998
016.8508'0091
C98-932356-0
University of Toronto Press gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Toronto.
for my family Toni, Elspeth, Emma
and in memory of Ernest John Richard Chown 1917-1998
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
ix
List of illustrations
xi
Preface
xiii
Introduction
xx
Structure of the Bibliographical Entries
xxv
Bibliography: Sources of Information Consulted
xxix
Abbreviations: Sources of Bibliographical Information Translations from Italian, 1929-1997
31
33 49 109 207 273 367
929-1939 1940-1949 1950-1959 1960-1969 1970-1979 1980-1989 1990-1997
461
Appendix, 1929-1998
515
Author Index
549
Title Index
580
Translator Index
592
Editor Index
595
Publisher Index
605
Periodical Index
This page intentionally left blank
Illustrations
2
Cover for Ignazio Silone, Fontamara (Modern Age Books, 1938; first published in English in 1934 by Smith and Haas)
32
Cover for Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt (Avon Books, 1966; first published in English in 1946 by Dutton)
48
Book jacket for Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard (Pantheon, 1960)
108
Cover for Alberto Moravia, Two Women (Penguin Books, 1961; first published in English in 1958 by Seeker and Warburg)
204
Book jacket for Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Atheneum, 1965)
206
Cover for Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics (Collier Books, 1970; first published in English in 1968 by Harcourt, Brace & World)
270
Cover for Italian Short Stories II (Penguin Books, 1972)
272
Book jacket for Primo Levi, The Monkey's Wrench (Summit Books, 1986)
364
Cover for Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roman Poems (City Lights Books, 1986)
366
Book jacket for Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before (Harcourt Brace, 1995)
458
Book jacket for Cesare Pavese, Dialogues with Leucò (University of Michigan Press, 1965)
460
Cover for Giovanni Guareschi, Comrade Don Camillo (Pocket Books, 1965; First published in English by Farrar, Straus, 1964)
This page intentionally left blank
Preface
One Thursday, just a few months before this bibliography was completed—it was the ninth of October, 1997—there came the wonderful news that Dario Fo, the Italian dramatist, actor, teacher, and social activist, had won the 1997 Nobel prize for literature. Thus he joins his fellow Italian Nobel laureates, poet Giosuè Carducci, novelist Grazia Deledda, dramatist Luigi Pirandello, and poets Salvatore Quasimodo and Eugenio Montale. The choice of Fo was entirely appropriate: his plays have been seen by millions in Italy and throughout the world, and the constant moral strength expressed in his dramas has, in the past forty years, had a tangible effect on Italian social and political life. In the words of the Swedish Academy: "With a blend of laughter and gravity he opens our eyes to abuses and injustices in society and also to the wider historical perspective in which they can be placed." Fo, as he has done throughout their more than four decades together, acknowledged the important part played by Franca Rame, his wife, partner, principal actress, and most important collaborator in the development of his plays. The award underlines the importance of contemporary Italian literature in English-speaking countries and throughout the world. Fo's name will, I know, be unfamiliar to many, but other names—Moravia, Eco, Fallaci, Primo Levi, Calvino—are recognized and celebrated wherever literature is valued and discussed. Yet these few authors represent a very small selection from the range of Italian literature in the late twentieth century, and a small part, even, of what has been translated into English in this century. This bibliography sets out to bring together information about all of the translated writers, about their works and the reception of their works, and about their translators. The origin of this bibliography was serendipitous. In the autumn of 1993 I had reached the mid-point of a year of partial research leave from my position as selector for fine arts, Italian studies, and anthropology in the Collection Development Department at the University of Toronto Library. I was completing the first draft of a bibliography of Italian translations of Canadian literature, and was looking around for sim-
ilar published bibliographies to see how they were arranged, annotated and indexed. Naturally, I soon came across Nancy C. Shields's Italian Translations in America, published in 1931, a formidable compilation which covered the period from the beginnings of printing in America to the end of 1928. My interest piqued, I looked for, but was not able to find, a comparable bibliography for the years since then, though lightly annotated lists for fiction and for poetry had been published in periodicals, and a more comprehensive literature list in volume three of The Literatures of the World in English Translation: A Bibliography, which appeared in 1970. At this point I recognized the need for an up-to-date bibliography of English translations from Italian, and began to plan my book. My first decision was to restrict coverage to the field of literature, because a quick assessment showed that a bibliography of all translations from Italian since 1928 would be an unmanageably huge work. My second decision was to concentrate on the literature of the twentieth century, both because a bibliography of, say, editions of Dante alone would fill (and has filled) a substantial book, and because relatively little attention has been paid to recent Italian literature in English translation, at least from the point of view of bibliography. A third decision was to exclude literary criticism, philosophy, social criticism, and political writings in order to concentrate on the traditional literary genres. This has meant, unfortunately, that great modern writers such as Croce and Gramsci have been neglected, at least for this volume. Thus the task I finally set myself was to compile a bibliography of English-language (rather than simply American) translations of twentieth-century Italian literature published after 1928. I began work in October 1993, and a completed first draft, innocent of introduction, annotation and indexes, was ready in April 1994. At this point, serendipity again played a part. I was encouraged to submit my draft to the University of Toronto Press, and the draft went out to readers. I was particularly fortunate in my specialist readers for the Press, who enthusiastically supported the concept of the work while discreetly pointing out some of the
Preface
Xll
weaknesses in execution. Making the additions that I had planned, and addressing their suggestions and criticisms, filled my available study time for the best part of the next three years. I am greatly indebted to them for their guidance. Most bibliographers note somewhere in their text that absolute definitiveness and complete accuracy are unattainable ideals. I am no exception. Even as I worked on this preface I came across a translation of a play by Fo that I had previously missed. No doubt more additions will need to be made. The advantage that bibliographers working at the end of the twentieth century enjoy over their predecessors is that their work is saved as computer files which can be added to and corrected at any time. I look forward to receiving advice on any errors and omissions at my e-mail address, healey@library. utoronto. ca. My interest in Italian culture and Italian literature had developed as a consequence of my graduate work in the University of Toronto's Department of Anthropology. For fifteen months, from April 1972 to June 1973, my research took me to Pisticci, in the southern province of Matera, a hill town just a few miles from the setting of Carlo Levi's classic Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli). I learned much about post-war Italian culture, and much of my spoken Italian, from the Pisticcesi (and still retain, I am told, something of a southern intonation). It was also at about this time that I began to read postwar Italian fiction, beginning with Calvino, Pavese, and Tomasi di Lampedusa. My tendency to resort to translations when puzzled (as I frequently was) may also have predisposed me to the idea of a work such as this. My ongoing relationship with the Department of Italian Studies at Toronto also goes back to that time, and since then I have been fortunate to have the advice and help of modernists Rocco Capozzi and Anthony Verna (then very junior, now senior professors and scholars in the department). In recent years Massimo Ciavolella, in his two terms as chair of the department, has provided help and encouragement. In the past ten years I have been the curator for three exhibitions on Italian subjects at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. This happy work has been a source of invaluable experience, and I acknowledge with thanks the contributions of Richard Landon and his expert and dedicated staff, and of the sponsoring Istituto Italiano di Cultura of Toronto and its director (and notable translator of Frye, McLuhan, and others), Francesca
Valente. I was fortunate to learn something of descriptive bibliography in 1985-86 under the guidance of the pre-eminent bibliographer of Canadiana, Patricia Lockhart Fleming, and I hope that she will not mind that this book displays little of the rigour of true descriptive bibliography. My colleague Sandra Alston, the second distinguished Canadian bibliographer with whom I have been lucky enough to work, has provided constant support, encouragement, and an unfailing fund of technical expertise. Among the many librarians and staff who have helped me in Toronto and elsewhere, Jane Lynch and her colleagues of the Interlibrary Loan office at the Roberts Research Library deserve special mention, as the list of sources for books obtained on interlibrary loan, from Newfoundland to British Columbia, and nineteen American states from New Hampshire to California, attests. Thanks also to Davis Zvejnieks of the library's design office, who scanned book jackets and covers, and printed the illustrations. This book had its beginnings as a research leave project, and I am grateful to Carole Moore, Chief Librarian, and to David Cook, then Vice-Provost, Staff Functions, for granting me a ground-breaking local work/leave arrangement. To Carole and to Michael Rosenstock, Head of Collection Development, I am grateful for permission to make use of the bibliographical databases available in the library, and also printing and photocopying facilities, in the course of my research. Ron Schoeffel, Editor-in-Chief at the University of Toronto Press, has been a constant source of encouragement and sound advice throughout the last four years: his consistent cheerfulness and optimism helped me through some difficult times. I would not have been able to bring this work to completion without the love and support of my family: my wife Toni, Chief Editor of the Dictionary of Old English project, to whom this single volume, the work of one compiler, must seem a short-term project indeed; and our daughters Elspeth and Emma, who have only infrequently been able to gain access to the family computer during normal working hours (or any other time). I hope they will think the result is worthwhile.
Robin Healey Toronto, Ontario February 17, 1998
Introduction
It is the aim of this book to present a listing, an enumerative bibliography, of all English-language translations of Italian twentieth-century literature published in book form between 1929 and 1997. It includes as complete a record as possible of the distinct editions of published translations of Italian fiction, poetry, plays, screenplays, librettos, journals or diaries, correspondence, and some personal narratives, belles-lettres, and associated works, wherever these translations might have appeared. While the great majority of these works have been published in Great Britain or the United States, other countries such as Australia, Canada, Ireland, Italy, South Africa, and Switzerland are also represented, and France, India, Japan, Luxembourg, and Sweden make an appearance. Licensed editions, for example, of British or American books issued in Australia or in Canada, have not been listed separately. While this bibliography is concerned primarily with translations published in book form, whether the book is a pamphlet of sixteen pages or a multi-volume work, certain other significant types of publication are also included. Periodical issues which are principally or entirely devoted to the presentation of twentieth-century Italian literature in English translation will be found in the main bibliographical sequence (see, for example, Contemporary Italian Literature, an issue of Briarcliff Quarterly, entry 4704), as will translations from Italian which form a substantial part of broader anthologies (for example, the Italian section in Modern European Poetry, entry 6629), or of periodical issues (for example, An Anthology of Post-war Italian Poets in Italian Quarterly, entry 6401). In the case of drama, all identified translations of complete plays longer than sketches have been included: in many cases a periodical publication marks the first and only appearance of an Italian play in translation. Plays printed in general play collections are also included when this publication represents the first appearance of the translation (for example, Corrado Alvaro's The Long Night of Medea, in Plays for a New Theater, entry 6601). When the translation of a play already listed is reprinted as part of a general collection (as with, for example, the many anthologizations of Storer's translation of Pirandello's Sei personaggi in
cerca d'autore, first published by Dutton in 1922), the republication is not listed. In the case of fiction, individual stories or extracts from novels are included if they are of substantial length (roughly, twenty pages or more; for example, Alberto Moravia's "Sunny honeymoon," in Partisan Review, entry 5223) or if they are otherwise significant (as, for example, the only translation of an important story, such as Michele Prisco's "Mia sorella gialla," the first story in his first book, which was translated for Italian Quarterly, entry 8853). For poetry, a similar rule has been applied, which allows for the inclusion of the appearance in a periodical or an anthology of substantial or significant groups of poems by individual poets (for example, Jonathan Galassi's translation of Montale's Xenia poems in Ploughshares, entry 7526). What has not been attempted is a listing of all published translations of twentieth-century Italian poems or stories: such a listing, while feasible, would constitute a considerable work in its own right. Other forms of publication excluded from the bibliography are large print books, broadsheets, translations of Italian writers who write exclusively for children, and libretto translations published with scores or in multilingual word-for-word versions. For the purpose of this bibliography, "twentiethcentury writers" means writers writing and publishing in Italian in the twentieth century. Therefore, many writers who must be regarded as belonging to the nineteenth century, such as Carducci, Fogazzaro, Giacosa, and Verga, are included for the editions of translations of their works published in 1929 and later. No works by writers who died before 1900 are included, with the exception of works also including contributions from writers still active in the twentieth century (for example, Arrigo Boito's revised version of the original libretto for Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, written by Francesco Maria Piave (1810-1876), entry 6464). Where an Italian writer has also written works in other languages, such as Carlo Coccioli in French, Antonio Tabucchi in Portuguese, or Daniele Vare in English, only the translations of works written originally in Italian are included. In cases of uncertainty,
XIV
as, for instance, with some of the minor publications of the poet Franco Beltrametti, the bibliography errs on the side of inclusion. When an author sometimes makes his own translations or English adaptations, as does the playwright Mario Fratti, the novelist P. M. Pasinetti, or the poet and novelist Alessandro Carrera, these are included. The works of Italian emigrant or foreign-born writers, wherever they might live and write—Luigi Meneghello for many years in England, Nino Randazzo in Australia, or Giose Rimanelli in Canada and the United States—are included when they can be identified as translations from an existing Italian edition or version. Many translations, particularly those of poems and short stories, are published in collections or anthologies. In such cases, wherever possible, the writers and translators represented are listed in a contents note and in the author and translator indexes. The titles of short stories, though not of individual short poems, are listed in the notes to the entry. The titles of stories and poems in collections are not indexed. In the case of collections by single authors where the English book corresponds to an original Italian edition, the individual pieces are not indexed. Where the collection draws on several of the writer's Italian publications, the Italian titles are indexed, together with the English collective title and, where appropriate, the individual titles (see, for example, Moravia's Five Novels, entry 5514). Where the collection draws on the whole of the writer's works, individual plays and novels are noted and indexed, individual stories are noted but not indexed, and individual short poems are neither noted by title nor indexed. With regard to the sources of information for the entries, where copies of the translations were available in Toronto libraries or in the other libraries visited, those copies were examined, and constitute the major part of the editions seen. As will be evident from the list of sources for the bibliographical records, the interlibrary loan service provided access to many other books. Other than this, reliance has been placed on the bibliographical information available in a wide variety of print and microform sources (for example, the National Union Catalog, the British Library General Catalogue of Printed Books, and the Index Translationuni) and databases (for example, the RLIN database, or the Index Translationum on CD-ROM). While such records, however accurate, are no substitute for having the book, or several copies of the book, in hand, they have made it possible to include information for several hundred editions that it was not possible to
Introduction examine at first hand. Toronto is fortunate in having at least three good collections of Italian literature in translation. The majority of the books seen were found in the various libraries of the University of Toronto system (principally the Robarts Research Library, which houses the main humanities and social science collections, but also in the undergraduate collection formerly in the Sigmund Samuel Library—housed in the Robarts Research Library since the summer of 1997—and in several of the college collections), at the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library (now the Toronto Reference Library), and at the main library of York University. The advantage of Canadian collections for the purpose of this bibliography is that they draw on both British and American publishers for their acquisitions, and thus collect British editions that would not be found in many American libraries and American editions that would be found in few British libraries. Some time was also spent in public libraries in the Brighton area in England, and at the University of Sussex Library, and, in the United States, at the Brown University Library in Providence, Rhode Island. At the same time, a careful search was made of available bibliographic databases and print and microform sources. Each facet of this research suggested new possibilities for authors and books known to be translated, or which might possibly have been translated. The print Index Translationum (with its recent CD-ROM update), for example, because it sets out to record all translations, organized by country of publication, indicated authors who might otherwise have been missed, and whose names could then be searched in the large bibliographical databases. The databases, in turn, were useful in identifying subsequent editions and reprints of known translations. The Global Books in Print CD-ROM was similarly useful for tracking down editions and reprints, and had the added advantage of listing new translations, frequently before they were listed in the national bibliographies. For some of the older material issued in cheap paperback editions, which seldom survive long in public library collections, and are seldom bought for university library collections, American and British inprint sources for paperbacks provided at least basic information. The search process was more or less tedious, depending on the arrangement of the bibliographical information (simple author or title lists, as opposed to lists arranged by Dewey classification), but all sources, from library collections to publishers' lists, contributed items to the bibliography. In 1931, Nancy C. Shields published her Italian Translations in America, which provides an annotated
Introduction chronological listing of translations, in almost all subject areas, from authors of all periods writing in Italian, published in the United States up to the end of 1928. Shields did not cover certain classes of material which she felt were already adequately treated elsewhere (for example, the works of Dante), or which might better be handled as a special project (for example, librettos). The present bibliography takes the end of Shields's chronological sequence as its starting point, and retains her chronological presentation of the entries, but is otherwise different in scope and in intent. Most obviously, its focus is restricted to literary works, produced by Italian writers active in the twentieth century, translated into English, and published anywhere in the world. This concentration on the literature of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries greatly reduces the number of possible entries, while the expansion of the geographical coverage greatly increases the number of editions of individual works. A majority of the titles translated were eventually published both in Great Britain and in the United States, whether in essentially identical form, or with spelling and vocabulary changes appropriate to their British and American audiences. Thus Shields, with her broad coverage of the first comparatively sparse two centuries of Italian translations in America, presents almost fourteen hundred entries, while this bibliography, confined to literary works, includes almost fourteen hundred titles published in some two thousand five hundred editions. The proliferation of paperback editions of popular writers such as Moravia, with a total of over 170 editions of 32 titles, has had an obvious impact here, but the absolute increase in the rate of production of modern literary translations has also had a marked effect. For the five years 1924-28 Shields lists 24 new translations of works by twentieth-century literary authors; but 48 such translations were published in the five years to 1934, 78 in the years 1951-55, 99 in the years 1971-75, and 188 in the years 1991-95. We must remember that in the 1920s Shields had fewer established twentiethcentury writers to draw on, but the increase since that time is still impressive. In her often extensive notes Shields places emphasis on the publishing history of the Italian editions and the translations, lists the contents of collections or anthologies, and includes quite detailed information on the translators, when such information was available. The present work makes use of a uniform title to identify the original Italian edition, and uses the notes area to list contents, to provide some information about texts, to present some contemporary critical judgments, and to give brief biographical sketches of the authors and some details, where available, on the careers of the
xv
translators. The biographical notes will be useful to readers unfamiliar with Italian literature and Italian literary culture; the review extracts will be useful to readers interested in questions of the reception of literature; the notes on translators and the translator index make it possible to follow the careers of individual translators, whether the fabulously productive William Weaver, concentrating on contemporary fiction, or the very many individual translators of the poems of the Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale. There have been several contributions to the bibliography of Italian literature in translation since 1931, though none as comprehensive as that of Shields. The Italian section, by Joseph G. Fucilla, in part one of The Romance Literatures (volume three of The Literatures of the World in English Translation), published in 1970, gives an alphabetical list by author of translations in the areas of fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism for the modern period (that is, 1600-1900) and for the contemporary period. Collections are listed separately. All published editions of a title are noted in one entry, occasionally with very brief notes. There exists an earlier article by Vincent Luciani in the 1956 volume of the Bulletin of the New York Public Library entitled "Modern Italian fiction in America 1929-1954," and in 1968 Julius A. Molinaro published in the same journal his "American studies and translations of contemporary Italian poetry, 1945-1965." In 1973 the journal Italica published a special number on Italian literature in English translation, which included Christopher Kleinhenz's article "Italian literature in translation: a bibliography of currently available texts," an alphabetical author list covering all periods and based on entries in Books in Print for 1971 and 1972, British Books in Print for 1972, and the British National Bibliography for 1970, 1971 and 1972. In 1987 David Robey published his bibliography of English translations of modern Italian fiction in the Bulletin of the Society for Italian Studies. His bibliographical information is taken from the British National Bibliography for 1950 to 1987, and while the listings are very brief and are not annotated in any way, Robey provides some useful statistical information about authors, titles, editions, translators, and publishers. Finally, in 1995, Ray Keenoy and Fiorenza Conte published their Babel Guide to Italian Fiction (in English Translation), which provides a brief critical introduction and a few sentences of text from 129 titles by over 70 authors, together with an appendix consisting of a more complete author list of translations and editions. All these works have provided useful information for this bibliography. The relative concentration on translations of fiction confirms that it is this genre which is of greatest interest to
XVI
both scholar and general reader, as well as to publishers. Almost half of the fourteen hundred titles which appear in this bibliography are novels or short story collections by individual authors. Commercial publishers, at least, need to show a profit; and if there is a profit to be made in publishing literary translations it is most likely to come from the large sales achieved by popular works of fiction, though few novels in translation ever appear on the best-seller lists. In the early postwar period the best-selling Italian novel in translation in the United States was Moravia's The Woman of Rome, published in 1949, which eventually sold well over a million copies, mostly in paperback. Almost all of Moravia's fiction has been translated, together with some of his travel books, essays, and a couple of plays, thirty-two titles in all. Of these, the great majority were translated by Angus Davidson, Moravia's regular translator from the late 1940s until the early 1980s (though Davidson did not, in fact, translate La romand). Moravia is followed closely by Italo Calvino, most of whose works have been translated in some twenty-nine titles, with William Weaver taking pride of place as the translator. Prior to the success of Calvino, the strongest competition for Moravia came from the humorous Don Camillo books of Giovanni Guareschi, the political novels of Ignazio Silone, Carlo Levi's classic Christ Stopped at Eboli, and, at the beginning of the 1960s, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard. In the eighties and nineties the champion in sales has been Umberto Eco, with some competition from Oriana Fallaci, Primo Levi, and, in the past couple of years, Susanna Tamaro. While much of the work of respected writers such as Giorgio Bassani, Natalia Ginzburg, Dacia Maraini, Elsa Morante, Cesare Pavese, and Leonardo Sciascia has been translated and published in both Britain and the United States, the print runs have been relatively small, and the sales figures slight compared to the success of The Name of the Rose. Best-selling and steady selling writers like Eco, Calvino, and Moravia are normally published by large houses with strong distribution systems—Eco and Calvino with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Moravia with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Smaller specialized publishers like Carcanet in England and the Marlboro Press in the United States handle such critically acclaimed but less commercially viable writers as Ginzburg, Sciascia and Ferdinando Camon. Included with the conventional fiction are original graphic novels by Italian artists and writers. These Italian versions of full-length comics can have lengthy texts and sophisticated and complex plots. The leading
Introduction practitioners of the genre—Guide Crepax, Milo Manara, and Hugo Pratt, say—are published all over the world, and have attracted considerable critical interest. More than 250 of the titles published are plays. In the field of drama, Pirandello far outstrips the rest, with 96 translations of 41 of his plays, including 9 distinct translations of Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore, and 7 of Enrico IV. Pirandello is followed, distantly, by Mario Fratti, with 21 plays translated, by Dario Fo (winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize for literature) and Franca Rame with 19 plays, and by Ugo Betti with 10. These few writers among them account for almost onethird of the plays translated. The greater part of drama translations appear only once, and many plays are published only in magazines or journals. Specialist commercial publishers such as French, Methuen, and Pluto publish a considerable number of plays, chiefly from established and popular playwrights, and predominantly in paperback. Other paperback publishers, for example Penguin, find room for classic modern play texts on their lists. It is, of course, much cheaper to republish an existing translation than to pay for the preparation of a new one. The art of poetry has furnished a few less than 200 titles for this bibliography, with the Nobel laureates Montale (with 26 book-length publications and 37 appearances in collections) and Quasimodo (9 titles and 33 appearances in collections), and their older near contemporary Ungaretti (6 titles and 38 appearances in collections) well in the lead. Italy's other poetry Nobel laureate, Carducci, tallied 9 titles in translation and 18 appearances in collections. Other poets who have received considerable attention from translators include D'Annunzio, Gozzano, Guidacci, Primo Levi, Luzi, Maraini, Pascoli, Pasolini, Penna, Porta, Saba, Sanesi, Scotellaro, Sereni, Spatola, Spaziani, and Zanzotto. University presses and small presses are most prominent in the field of poetry in translation, as are literary journals, though large commercial publishers who have maintained one or more poetry series, such as Penguin, also publish translations. The remaining titles, something over 250, are divided among screenplays and librettos—the former largely and the latter almost exclusively the province of specialized publishers—and collections and miscellaneous works, divided evenly among large and small commercial publishers and university presses. The publication of a screenplay, particularly in translation, depends on a combination of initial box office success and later scholarly interest, while libretto editions are frequently linked to productions of the operas concerned. Collections of short fiction and poetry antholo-
Introduction gies are seldom best sellers, though some may become steady sellers if they are used as university texts or are issued in widely distributed series. While it is not the purpose of this introduction to discuss the economic aspects of publishing literature in translation, economic factors frequently determine whether a book will be translated or not, the size of the edition, and how it will be marketed when it is published. The success of The Name of the Rose has been characterized as unexpected, but while the Italian success of the book, beginning in 1980, was based, at least in part, on Eco's visibility as a cultural commentator, in the manner of Italian intellectuals, the book's strong showing in France and Germany in 1982 was the result of a marketing strategy based on the Italian success, as was the sales triumph of the American and British editions in 1983. A less flamboyant writer, one who does not trouble to spice a novel with sexual activity or graphic violence, and who does not see the book turned into a hit film, with massive related paperback sales, might well achieve critical success after critical success without ever selling more than a few thousand copies of each book. Few critics would claim that The Name of the Rose is a better novel than, say, Invisible Cities (to stay, for the sake of comparison, with the same publisher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and the same translator, William Weaver); the difference is in the marketing strategy based on the publisher's perception of the book's potential audience. The marketing of a novel by Eco by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich will have little in common with the marketing of a novel by Sciascia by Carcanet, either in expenditure or in results. A different problem is posed by the ongoing acquisition of publishing houses in Great Britain and in the United States by very large companies. Random House, for instance, already owns Cape, Chatto, and Bodley Head in England, and in 1997 took over Reed, which gives it control of Seeker and Warburg, Heinemann, Methuen, and Sinclair-Stevenson. Among them these publishers have been responsible for most of the hardcover translations of Italian fiction and drama published in England since the Second World War. Towards the end of March 1998, the purchase of Random House itself—now the world's largest Englishlanguage trade book publisher—by the German conglomerate Bertelsmann AG was announced. Bertelsmann's publishing holdings also include the Bantam Doubleday Dell group. The effects of such a takeover on the breadth and quality of the lists of these publishers will bear watching. The situation with literary fiction, poetry, and, to some extent, drama is quite different. While William
xvn
Weaver or Frances Frenaye would probably agree with Samuel Johnson's comment "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money," translators of poetry, in particular, tend to be university-based scholars who treat their work as translators as an integral part of their scholarly work, the reward coming not so much from direct payment or royalties as from the positive effect of the publications on their university careers. Even translators as prolific as Weaver find it necessary to have one or two other careers, as journalists, say, or as teachers. The full-time, professional translator of poetry is a rare bird, indeed. Governments, the Italian government included, make some money available for the translation and publication of their national literatures, as can be seen from the acknowledgments in many of the books in this bibliography. Many literary translations are subsidized both in the translation and in the publication. At this point it would be appropriate to comment on that greater part of Italian twentieth-century literature which has not been translated into English at all, lest the reader think that all of the best Italian fiction, poetry, and drama has by now been translated. In 1996 a book titled Cento romanzi italiani (1901-1995) was published in Italy. It provides brief essays by a group of 27 critics on each of what they consider to be the hundred best or most important Italian novels of the twentieth century. Of these, 57 have been published in English translation, while 43 have not. Of the 32 novels published since 1970, 13 have been translated, 19 have not. The list of novels not translated includes works by Capuana, D'Annunzio, Bernari, Soldati, Comisso, Arbasino, Meneghello, and many of the most prominent contemporary writers. Another way to look at the spectrum of novels not translated into English is to check on the books awarded the major Italian literary prizes, like the Viareggio, the Strega, and the Campiello. Of the 47 books honoured in the Viareggio narrativa category between 1946 and 1986, 15 have been translated. Of the 40 novels awarded the Strega prize between 1947 and 1986, 18 have been translated. Of the 24 novels awarded the Campiello prize between 1963 and 1986, 9 have been translated. Again, early in 1997 the publisher, bookseller, and agent Casalini libri released a bibliography titled Italian Novelists of the Twentieth Century. The book lists the works of 183 authors born in the twentieth century. Of these, 74 had no novels translated, and another 40 one work only. A 1996 list of Italian best sellers noted 65 works of fiction. Of these only one, Alessandro Baricco's Seta, has so far been translated into English. The field of poetry is more difficult to assess, be-
XV111
cause complete individual poetry collections are less likely to be translated as volumes; the typical publication of poetry in translation by a single author would be a selection from the poet's output. Thirty-six collections of poetry received the Viareggio poetry award between 1946 and 1986. None of these has been translated into English and published as a volume, but 16 of the poets honoured have had at least one collection of poems published in English. Modern Italian drama is, if anything, less well represented. With the exception of Pirandello, Betti, Fo, and Fratti, modern Italian playwrights are scarcely present in translation. The list would be very slim indeed without the contribution of the Italian periodical Italian Theatre Review, which for the 16 years up to 1968 published a complete play in English (and French) translation in each of its quarterly issues. The problem of getting Italian literature translated and published was a major interest at the 1982 Italian Book and American Publishing conference, held at the American Academy in Rome. In his introductory address Frank McShane, then editor of the journal Translation, said: Awareness of the art and literature of another country is not a luxury, something that it may be nice to have. Nor is it a matter of charity on our part to take an interest in the culture of other places. On the contrary, it is to our own advantage to do so. As the world changes, so must we. It is essential to know what is happening, down deep, among ordinary people, because such knowledge makes us understand our common humanity and our common responsibility to people everywhere, and not just to those within the English-speaking world. In literature, translation is what makes that realization possible. It is the link that binds us. It makes it possible for us to know how other people think and feel.
From a slightly different point of view, the poet Richard Wilbur said: "Translation from contemporary writing supplies us with books we should be sorry not to read, and corrects our provinciality." One of the dangers of such provinciality was commented on by the next speaker, the writer and journalist Furio Colombo, one of whose American students asked him, concerning The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, "Why would an Italian author decide to use Jewish characters in his story?" In this case, as Colombo notes, "Bassani's literary product had made it to America, but the terrain and social fiber, the Italy he was writing about, had been left behind." The novelist Mario Soldati later commented that no British reader of The Garden of the
Introduction Finzi-Continis would have asked the American student's question: a Briton might think Soldati's confidence misplaced. In his presentation later in the conference the American translator William Weaver said: In the case of translating Bassani, for instance, it is not the words that are a problem, it is the world that is a problem. In Italy or in Italian if you say the word—the name of a town —Said, or if you use the word "repubblichino" to an Italian there is immediately a whole drama of meanings, emotions; no matter how you translate the word "repubblichino" it will never have that impact in English or in any other language. These are the things a translator learns to bear with. You plug on anyway.
He also said: "When I was very young I translated poetry, I quickly gave that up as impossible." The next speaker, Italo Calvino, known in the English-speaking world chiefly through Weaver's translations, said "the literary translator ... is a person who puts his whole being into translating the untranslatable." A constant theme of the speakers and discussants at the conference, American or Italian, was the difficulty of negotiations for the sale or purchase of literary rights, of securing funding for the translations, and of actually getting the resulting translations published. Marco Polillo, then editorial director of Mondadori, spoke of the difficulty of funding translations for the American market: A few months ago I was selling the foreign rights for one of our books. I did find an American publisher willing to buy the rights and publish the book, but we ran into the problem of financing the translation. The American publisher told me, "I'll look for an English publisher who's interested in the book, so we can split the costs of the translation." It was clear to me that he considered the whole project a true luxury. ... Why is the problem of the translation so much more important in America? First, because translating a book from the English is no problem in Italy; if anything, we have too many good translators. But it is very complicated indeed to translate a book from the Italian into English. Few native Americans know Italian, and even fewer can handle the onerous task of translating. At this point, the rules of the marketplace take over: when the supply is limited the reward naturally increases, whereas the price goes down when the supply is unlimited, as in our case.
Polillo went on to mention the case of Stefano D'Arrigo's Horcynus Orca (1975), a modernist classic, but a thousand pages long and stylistically and linguistically complex. He did manage to sell the book
Introduction to an American publisher (who nonetheless wanted Mondadori to finance the translation); but despite that agreement, signed in 1982, and a subsequent grant for a work-in-progress to the translator, Horcynus Orca has yet to appear in English. Other works of fiction translated but not yet published include Pontiggia's La grande sera (see entry A914), and two collections of stories described in The Babel Guide to Italian Fiction (in English Translation), Ginevra Bompiani's Vecchio cielo, nuova terra, and Valeria Vigano's // tennis nel bos co. William Weaver, the most successful of contemporary translators from Italian, was interviewed for the Denver Quarterly by fellow translator and writer on translating Lawrence Venuti in summer 1982. Weaver commented: I think in general—and I say this somewhat sadly because it shows the situation of American publishing—it's the publisher who decides what is translated and who shall translate it, especially large, commercial publishers. This is sad simply because publishers are translating less and less fiction. The general situation in publishing apparently is not so florid and so they are reluctant to risk a lot of money on a book that either isn't going to sell or isn't going to have any prestige. Certain Italian books have made money for American publishers, but most have not. If you as a translator find a book you're dying to translate, the only thing you can do is approach publishers, if you know them. You can translate all of it, or some of it with a synopsis, send it around, and you may or may not have some luck. I should think more likely not than otherwise.
The following year, of course, Weaver, and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and the British partner Seeker & Warburg, hit the jackpot with Weaver's translation of The Name of the Rose. In Italy, many of the most popular or highly critically regarded writers also prepare and publish translations, and the work of the translation of literature in English is spread among a pool of translators who are also accomplished writers. In the English-speaking world, in contrast, a few prolific translators from Italian have between them translated hundreds of books, while the remaining hundreds of translators have only one or a few volumes each to their credit. Among the translators who work chiefly with Italian prose fiction, for example, the top ten of the past seventy years—Archibald Colquhoun, Patrick Creagh, Angus Davidson, Frances Frenaye, Stuart Hood, Eric Mosbacher, Isabel Quigly, Raymond Rosenthal, Bernard Wall, and William Weaver—have been responsible for more than 850 editions of almost 340 titles (including a few
xix
shorter pieces and occasional forays into poetry and other genres); that is, close to half of all twentiethcentury Italian fiction translated into English since 1929. Davidson has translated the major part of Moravia's work, from La mascherata in 1947, to La vita interiore in 1980. Frenaye's career spans her translation of Silone's // seme sotto la neve, published in 1942, and of Fabio Delia Seta's L 'incendio del Tevere, published in 1991, and includes the popular translations of most of Guareschi's Don Camillo books. Perhaps the most remarkable of contemporary translators from Italian is William Weaver, born in Washington, D.C. in 1923 and still, in 1998, professor at Bard College, music and opera critic in Italy for the International Herald Tribune, Italian correspondent for the London Financial Times, speaker on the regular Saturday afternoon broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera House, freelance writer and music critic, and, of course, translator. His first book-length effort was for Marguerite Caetani's anthology of translations from her celebrated review Botteghe oscure, a translation of Vasco Pratolini's Le ragazze di San Frediano (see entry 5001); his most recent, his third translation of an Umberto Eco novel, L 'isola del giorno prima (see entry 9522). In the intervening forty-five years he has averaged close to two book-length translations a year. Were this book a novel in need of a hero, rather than a bibliography, the hero would be William Weaver. The market for all but a very few of the some 1400 titles from the broad spectrum of twentieth-century Italian literature published in English since 1929 has been a small one. For every massive best seller there have been a few satisfying successes, a few dozen minor successes, and scores of failures. That the failures have been more in terms of weak sales than of poor critical reception is small consolation. From Eco to Calvino, to Ginzburg to Bufalino, and to Camon, who at least has the satisfaction of seeing many of his novels translated into English, we pass to respected writers, even distinguished writers, like Carlo Bernari and Lalla Romano, who have yet to see a single book of theirs translated and published in Britain or the United States. It is as if Timothy Findley or Alice Munro, say, had been ignored by Italian publishers (they have not). The poets have perhaps fared better, but the publication of poetry in translation is often directed towards the small but consistent academic market of libraries, scholars, students, and fellow poets who look to the small editions published, with subsidy, by university presses and small presses. Few outside the academic environment read modern plays. Nevertheless, the reader who browses through this
Introduction
XX
bibliography may often be pleasantly surprised to find that this novelist or that poet has been translated, and may learn something new about the writers and about their reception. A good annotated bibliography should encourage the readers who consult it to look for the
books that, on the basis of the information provided, will likely appeal to them. It is to be hoped that this bibliography will contribute to the growth of the Englishspeaking readership for modern Italian literature.
Structure of the Bibliographical Entries Sample record '8850
2
PONTIGGIA, Giuseppe [// giocatore invisibile (1978)] 4 The invisible player. Giuseppe Pontiggia; translated by Annapaola Cancogni. 5Hygiene, Colo.: Eridanos Press, c!988.6(Eridanos library; 10) 7 [8], 3-259, [3] pp.: port. 3
8
The novelist, essayist and literary critic Giuseppe Pontiggia was born in Como in 1934. As a young man he worked in a bank while attending university, and his first novel, La morte in banca, was published in 1959, the same year that he presented his thesis on narrative technique in Italo Svevo's works. It was followed in 1968 by L 'arte dellafuga, a magical realist suspense novel in which Pontiggia plays tricks of his own with narrative structure. His next novel, // giocatore invisibile, won the Premio selezione Campiello in 1979. Translation Review notes: "Set in an Italian academic community, this satirical narrative is set into motion by an anonymous letter attacking a university professor. The hypocrisy of intellectuals is debunked as the professor obsessively searches for the 'invisible player,' a duplicitous threat from without no less than from within." Pontiggia went on to win the Premio Strega with his novel La grande sera (1989), which was translated by Sacha Rabinovitch for Halban in 1991. That translation, however, was never published (see entry A914). Annapaola Cancogni has also translated Stefano Benni's satirical science fiction novel Terra!, and Umberto Eco's Open Work, and Other Essays. Also issued in paper. 9 MTRL,UTL,YRK
1. Each entry in the main body of the bibliography has been assigned a four-digit reference number. The first two digits refer to the year of publication. Within each year the entries are numbered consecutively, and are ordered alphabetically by the main entry; that is, the author (or the first or principal author of a work by up to three authors), or, for collections and other multiauthor works, the title. Where an author has more than one translated work published in a year, those entries are ordered alphabetically by the title of the translation. In the sample record, Pontiggia's The Invisible Player is the fiftieth entry for 1988. Entries in the Appendix
are prefaced by "A," followed by two digits for the year of publication and one or two digits for the order within the year. The indexes refer to an entry number rather than to a page number. 2. Main entry. All books, and all separately listed sections of books and extracts from periodical publications, are listed under the author's name as the main entry. Where there are two or three authors for a single entry, the one mentioned first or given prominence on the title page is given the main entry. For collections, and for works with more than three authors, the English title becomes the main entry. 3. Uniform title. Where a translation corresponds directly to an Italian book, the Italian title becomes the uniform title for the entry. The Italian title, in italic type, is followed by the date of the original Italian edition. Where only part of the Italian work has been translated, the conventional term "Selections" is added to the uniform title. When the translation does not correspond to an individual Italian title, conventional terms such as "Poems. Selections" or "Fiction. Selections" are used. It is assumed that the translation is published in English only; therefore the term "English" does not appear in each uniform title, as it might in a more general bibliography. When the published translation is printed with the original Italian text, as is often the case with poetry and with librettos, the term "English and Italian" is appended to the uniform title. A uniform title is not assigned when the original publication is bilingual, or when it has not been possible to identify an Italian edition (e.g., when the translation has been made from an Italian manuscript). Anthologies or collections originally edited for the English-language publisher have not been assigned uniform titles. 4. Title. The title is transcribed as it appears on the title page (or, in a few cases, the title opening), with adjustments to punctuation and capitalization only. A colon is used to separate a title proper and other title information. No attempt has been made to note line endings or record typographical changes. Multiple titles on one title page are separated by semicolons. Parallel
Introduction titles are separated by a period. The title and the statement of responsibility are separated by a periods. The title is followed by the name of the author or authors, as these appear on the title page, including terms such as "by," and honorifics or other details when present. In the case of collections or anthologies, the name of the editor or editors is recorded. The name of the translator or translators, with any associated phrases, follows the author statement, and is separated from it by a semicolon. If the name of the translator is not found on the title page, but is present elsewhere in the book, it is recorded enclosed in square brackets. In the case of collections, the names of the authors and the translators are normally recorded in a note. Mottoes on the title page are transcribed, and recorded in small type. Stories, plays, and poems or groups of poems which are listed separately in the bibliography, but which have been published as sections of books, or in issues of periodicals, are recorded using the wording of the section title page, if present, or of the section caption title, or, failing this, of the wording in the contents entry. For the editions which the compiler has not seen, the form of the descriptive entry follows that of the bibliographic records which have provided the data, with only such adjustments (for example, to punctuation, or to allow for the inclusion of the author's name) as are necessary to bring the form of the record into line with the guidelines for title page transcription noted above. If there is an edition statement on the title page or the reverse of the title page, it is transcribed, normally in abbreviated form, and placed after the title and statement of responsibility. 5. Imprint. The place of publication, the publisher, and the date of publication are recorded in the standard abbreviated form. Up to three places of publication can be recorded, separated by semicolons. The names of publishers are given as they appear on the title page, with the exception that terms such as "Inc." or "Ltd." are not transcribed. If no place of publication is given, the standard abbreviation "S.I." (for sine loco, "without place") is used, within square brackets; if no publisher is named, the standard abbreviation "s.n." (for sine nomine, "without name") is supplied, also within square brackets. If no imprint or copyright date is given in the book, a date or an approximate date is supplied from whatever other data may be available. 6. Series. When a book is part of a series, numbered or unnumbered, that information is recorded after the imprint information. Title page statements of the type "A John Doe book" have generally not been recorded. 7. Pagination. The pagination statement for the
xxi
editions for which a copy or copies have been examined is more detailed than that recorded in, for example, a Library of Congress bibliographic record, though considerably less detailed than that required in a descriptive bibliography. In modern books, for example, sheets which have passed through the press may provide leaves used as paste-down endpapers; these are not noted. What has been recorded are the free unnumbered pages at the beginning of a book (in arabic numerals within square brackets), numbered sequences (recorded in roman or arabic numerals, as they appear, but ignoring unnumbered pages within each numbered sequence), unnumbered pages between sequences, and unnumbered pages at the end of a book (both also recorded in arabic numerals within square brackets). Blank pages and leaves, and pages of announcements or advertisements, are counted. Leaves of plates not numbered in a main sequence are recorded separately. The presence of illustrations is noted, and portraits, maps, facsimiles, fold-out leaves, etc. are also recorded in the standard abbreviated form. 8 Notes. Most entries are accompanied by notes, which can range from the very brief to the relatively extensive. Brief notes usually record such information as the existence of previous editions of the translated texts, and whether the present edition was issued as a paperback or was also issued in paper. For editions seen, cloth binding only may be assumed unless otherwise stated. For editions not seen, notes on the form of binding have only been added when the information has been obtained from a source bibliographical record, a publisher's catalogue, an in-print source, or the like. More extensive notes will include details of the contents of collections, alternative titles, biographical information about the author and, if available, the translator, some brief information about the text, extracts from contemporary reviews, details of literary prizes awarded, and information about stage or screen adaptations. Biographical information about an author or translator will generally be provided with the first book by the author or the translator to appear in the chronological sequence. The compiler of this bibliography is not an expert on twentieth-century Italian literature (though he does, like any reader, have his opinions and prejudices). Therefore, the critical opinions expressed in the notes, where no individual scholar or reviewer is named, are taken chiefly from the articles, books, dictionaries, and encyclopaedias listed in the bibliography of works consulted. 9 Sources of data. Abbreviations for the locations of copies examined (in roman type), or the sources for bibliographical information for editions not seen (in italic type), appear at the end of each record, after the
Introduction
XX11
notes, at the right margin. When an edition has not been seen an attempt has been made to find at least two independent print or on-line sources for bibliographical information for the entry. In many cases it has only been possible to examine one copy of an edition, and that information is supplemented by information from other sources. In many other cases it has been possible to examine three copies of an edition (or more, while recording only three). The level of bibliographic information is, therefore, not uniform throughout the bibliography. Appendix. The Appendix contains information on editions identified after the main chronological sequence was closed and indexed. A large number of these entries were found in the OCLC bibliographic database, to which the compiler gained access late in 1997. It also includes editions not issued commercially, or not issued at all (though prepared and recorded in bibliographical sources), or not yet issued when this bibliography was completed (chiefly, several announced 1998 editions and some editions with bibliographic records listing an earlier date). Indexes Author index. All authors of the Italian texts translated into English and listed in this bibliography appear in the index of authors. The few exceptions are for collections or anthologies not seen, and for which no contents listing has been found in a bibliographic source (e.g., Australia's Italian Poets, entry A761). Brief contributions to anthologies or collections are recorded beginning on the line following the author's name, by entry number only. Then follow translations of complete books, of plays, whether published separately or as part of a collection or a periodical publication, and in relatively few cases, of short stories or other extracts published separately in English or appearing in collections or periodical issues not specifically dedicated to Italian literature in translation. These are ordered alphabetically by their Italian titles, in italic type. Collections of fiction, poems, or other writings by individual authors which do not correspond to separately published Italian originals are listed in the alphabetical arrangement under conventional headings such as [Poems. Selections], or [Works. Selections], followed, where necessary to distinguish between translations, by the name of the translator or the date of English-language publication. The exception to this practice is in the case of Pirandello, whose many translated works are divided into novels, plays, short stories and story collections, and other works. Opera librettos are listed with the composer, by entry number
only, and with the librettist or librettists, by title. The many translations of popular librettos such as that for La Boheme are further differentiated by recording the name of the translator in the index entry. Similarly, where a novel, play, or collection of poems has been translated more than once, distinction is made by appending the names of the translators to separate index listings. References are made from the real name of an author who writes under a pseudonym to the pseudonym by which the author is known; for example, from "Pincherle, Alberto" to "Moravia, Alberto," and the writer's works are indexed under the pseudonym. In a few cases (e.g., Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi) authors, while generally writing under their own names, have also published pseudonymous works; in these cases, references are made from the pseudonym to the real name, and the pseudonymous works are indexed under the real name. Title index. The title index brings together in one alphabetical sequence the Italian and English titles of all the separately published novels, short story collections, poetry collections, essay collections, plays, librettos, collections of correspondence, and volumes of memoirs which make up the bibliography, together with the English titles of collections or anthologies which do not correspond to separately published Italian works. Where only part of an Italian work has been published in translation the conventional heading "Selections" follows the Italian title (e.g., L 'amore coniugale e altri racconti. Selections). In addition, the English and Italian titles of plays, stories or novellas, and long poems or poem sequences appearing in collections or in periodicals have been indexed. The conventional forms such as "Plays. Selections" or "Short stories. Selections" used in the entries and in the author index are not indexed as titles. For emphasis, and following the practice used in the uniform title field and the author index, the Italian titles are printed in italic type. Translator index. All identified translators from Italian, or from an Italian dialect, of the works listed in this bibliography appear in the translator index, no matter how brief the contribution. In some cases, no translator is credited in the publication (e.g., the plays translated in the Italian Theatre Review). Where an author is the translator of his or her own work, the author is indexed in both the author index and the translator index. Where new editions or reprints of a particular translation are issued, they are distinguished in the translator index by printing the entry numbers for those editions in italic type. Editor index. When an editor is named on the title
Introduction page of a collection or anthology, that name is entered in the editor index. In most cases the editor will be the editor of the English-language book; in some cases the editor of an Italian-language collection later translated into English is still named as editor in the translation, and is included in the index. In a few cases the translator or one of the translators of a work has also selected the pieces included in the translation, and is therefore listed in the editor index (e.g., Angus Davidson for Roman Tales, entry 5615). Publisher index. The index of publishers includes all companies, organizations, or individuals named as the publisher on the title page or other front matter of the books and pamphlets listed in the bibliography. In the case of co-publications, each of the publishers is indexed. In the index, terms such as "and Company," "Ltd.," "Inc.," etc. are omitted. Initial articles, as in "The Marlboro Press," are omitted. Index entries are made under the brief form of the publisher's name (e.g., Joseph, Knopf) and reference is made from the fuller forms (Michael Joseph, A. A. Knopf, Alfred A.
xxin Knopf). Reference is made from paperback series-like imprints (e.g., Four Square Books, Signet) to the publisher's name (New English Library, New American Library). Paperback imprints of general publishers (e.g., the Collier Books imprint of Macmillan) are indexed separately. The index is arranged alphabetically, in one sequence; that is, it is not divided by country of publication. Periodical index. A large number of entries in the bibliography, from individual stories, plays, or longer poems to anthologies from one or several genres, have been published in periodicals. In some cases, an entire issue of a periodical has been devoted to Italian literature in translation. The titles of these magazines, journals, or annuals have been brought together to make up a separate periodical index. In a few cases translations published in periodicals have also been published as separate books; in such cases the publication is recorded both in the publisher index and in the periodical index.
This page intentionally left blank
BIBLIOGRAPHY of the information sources consulted A. Printed sources for bibliographical information on translations from Italian Australian National Bibliography. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1961-1996. Bondanella, Julia M, and Bondanella, Peter E. "American Criticism of Italo Svevo: A Checklist of Recent Translations and Critical Articles." Bulletin of Bibliography 28 (April-June 1971): 49-50, 59. British Library. Dept. of Printed Books. The British Library General Catalogue of Printed Books to 1975. London: C. Bingley, 1978-87. British Library. Dept. of Printed Books. The British Library General Catalogue of Printed Books 1976 to 1982. London: K. G. Saur, 1983. British Library. Dept. of Printed Books. The British Library General Catalogue of Printed Books 1986-1987. London: K. G. Saur, 1988. British Library. Dept. of Printed Books. The British Library General Catalogue of Printed Books 1990 to 1992. London: K. G. Saur, 1993. The British National Bibliography. London: Council of the British National Bibliography, 1950Canadiana. Ottawa: Canadian Bibliographic Centre; National Library of Canada, 1950-1988. Giffuni, Cathe. "A Bibliography of the Writings of Natalia Ginzburg." Bulletin of Bibliography 50 (1993): 139-44. . "An English Bibliography of the Writings of Primo Levi." Bulletin of Bibliography 50 (1993): 213-21. Index Translationum. Repertoire international des traducions. International Bibliography of Translations. Paris: Institut international de cooperation intellectuelle, 19321940. Index Translationum. Repertoire international des traductions.International Bibliography of Translations. Paris: UNESCO, 1948Keenoy, Ray, and Conte, Fiorenza. The Babel Guide to Italian Fiction (in English Translation). London: Boulevard, 1995. Kleinhenz, Christopher. "Italian Literature in Translation: A Bibliography of Currently Available Texts." Italica 50 (Autumn 1973): 349-74. Lent, John A. Comic Art of Europe: An International Comrehensive Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. (Bibliographies and indexes in popular culture; no. 5) The Literatures of the World in English Translation: A Bibliography. Editors: George B. Parks and Ruth Z.
Temple. 3 vols. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1970. Vol. 3: The Romance Literatures, Part 1. Luciani, Vincent. "Modern Italian Fiction in America, 1929-1954: An Annotated Bibliography of Translations." Bulletin of the New York Public Library 60 (January 1956): 12-34. McCarty, Clifford. Published Screenplays: A Checklist. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1971. (The Serif series: bibliographies and checklists; 18) Molinaro, Julius A. "American Studies and Translations of Contemporary Italian Poetry, 1945-1965: An Historical Survey and a Bibliography." Bulletin of the New York Public Library 72 (October 1968): 522-558. The National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints: A Cumulative Author List Representing Library of Congress Printed Cards and Titles Reported by Other American Libraries. London: Mansell, 1968-1981. The National Union Catalog, 1956 through 1967: A Cumulative Author List Representing Library of Congress Printed Cards and Titles Reported by Other American Libraries. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, c!972. The National Union Catalog: A Cumulative Author List Representing Library of Congress Printed Cards and Titles Reported by Other American Libraries. Washington: Library of Congress, 1957Poteet, G. Howard. Published Radio, Television, and Film Scripts: A Bibliography. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing Co., 1975. RSANB, 1926-1958: Retrospective South African National Bibliography for the Period, 1926-1958; Retrospektiewe Suid-Afrikaanse Nasionale Bibliografie vir die Tydperk, 1926-1958. Pretoria: State Library, 1985. Robey, David. "English Translations of Modern Italian Fiction." Bulletin of the Society for Italian Studies 20 (1987): 58-71. Rothschild, D. Aviva. Graphic Novels: A Bibliographic Guide to Book-length Comics. Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1995. Samples, Gordon. The Drama Scholar's Index to Plays and Filmscripts: A Guide to Plays and Filmscripts in Selected Anthologies, Series, and Periodicals. Metuchen, NJ.: Scarecrow Press, 1974-80. SANB. Suid-Afrikaanse Nasionale Bibliografie. South African National Bibliography. Pretoria: State Library, 1959-
Bibliography
XXVI
Wright, R. Glenn. Title Bibliography of English Language Fiction in the Library of Congress Through 1950. 8 vols.
Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1976. Vol. 8: Indexes: Index of Translations.
B. Sources for other bibliographical, biographical, and critical information American Book Publishing Record. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1960Amoia, Alba della Fazia. Women on the Italian Literary Scene: A Panorama. Troy, NY: Whitston, 1992. Amos, William. The Originals: An A-Z of Fiction's RealLife Characters. 1 st American ed. Boston; Toronto: Little, Brown, c 1985. Australian Books in Print. Melbourne: D. W. Thorpe, 1962Autodizionario degli scrittori italiani. A cura di Felice Piemontese. l.aed. Milano: Leonardo, 1990. Autori e drammaturgie: prima enciclopedia del teatro italiano del dopoguerra. A cura di Enrico Bernard. Roma: E & A, c 1988. Barariski, Zygmunt G. "La diffusione della letteratura italiana contemporanea in Gran Bretagna." The Italianist 13 (1993): 255-65. Benet, William Rose. The Reader's Encyclopedia. 2nd ed. New York: Crowell, c!965. Bibliografia nazionale italiana. Firenze: Biblioteca nazionale centrale, 1958Bibliografia nazionale italiana: catalogo alfabetico annuale. Firenze: Biblioteca nazionale centrale, 1958Bibliotheque nationale. Departement des imprimes. Catalogue general des livres imprimes de la Bibliotheque nationale. Auteurs. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1897Borrelli, Franco. "1979-1989: dieci anni di traduzioni dall'italiano negli Stati Uniti." // Veltro 34 (SettembreDicembre 1990): 515-28. Book Review Digest. New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1906Book Review Index. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1965British Books in Print: The Reference Catalogue of Current Literature. London: J. Whitaker, 1965-1987. British Paperbacks in Print. London: J. Whitaker, 1982Bull, Martin J. Contemporary Italy: A Research Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. (Bibliographies and indexes in world history; no. 43) Buss, Robin. Italian Films. London: B. T. Batsford, 1989. Calvino, Italo. "The Art of Fiction CXXX." The Paris Review, no. 124 (Fall 1992), pp. 56-81. Catalogo Bolaffi del cinema italiano. Torino: Bolaffi, 1967Catalogo cumulativo 1886-1957 del Bollettino delle pubblicazioni italiane ricevute per diritto di stampa dalla Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze. Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1968-69. Catalogo del libri in commercio. Milano: Bibliografica, 1975Catalogo deipremi letterari italiani. Coordinamento redazionale, Elena Banfi; redazione, Carla Deiosso
Gronchi. Milano: Editrice Bibliografica, 1995. Catalogo dei premi letterari: Viareggio, Strega, Campiello, Penna d'oro, e Premi Nobel italiani per la letteratura. Associazione italiana editori, Fondazione Maria e Goffredo Bellonci. Milano: Editrice Bibliografica, 1987. Cento romanzi italiani (1901-1995). Presentazione di Giovanni Raboni; letture di Antonella Anedda, et al. Roma: Fazi Editore, 1996. (Le terre; 2) Cinema di qualita: vent'anni difilm, di cronache, di premi; repertorio dei film italiani con attestati di qualita, segnalazioni, premi e commenti della critica cinematografica, 1968-1988. A cura di Fabrizio Gabella. [Roma]: Presidenza del Consiglio dei ministri. Dipartimento per I'informazione e 1'editoria, [1989?]. (Collana II tempo e le immagini) CLIO: catalogo dei libri italiani dell'Ottocento (18011900). Milano: Editrice Bibliografica, 1991. Combined Retrospective Index to Book Reviews in Humanities Journals, 1802-1974. Woodbridge, Ct.: Research Publications, 1982-84. Combined Retrospective Index to Book Reviews in Scholarly Journals, 1886-1974. Arlington, Va.: Carrollton Press, 1979-82. Congrat-Butlar, Stefan. Translation & Translators: An International Directory and Guide. New York; London: R. R. Bowker Company, 1979. Contemporary Authors. First Revision. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1967-79. Contemporary Authors. New Revision Series. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1981Contemporary Dramatists. 5th ed. Editor: K. A. Berney. London; Washington, DC; Detroit: St James Press, c!993. Cumulative Book Index: A World List of Books in the English Language. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1928Dictionary of Italian Literature. Edited by Peter Bondanella and Julia Conway Bondanella. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979. Dictionary of Italian Literature. Rev., expanded ed. Peter Bondanella and Julia Conway Bondanella, editors-inchief; Jody Robin Shiftman, associate editor. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1978Dizionario autori italiani contemporanei. l.a ed. Milano: Guido Miano editore, 1991. Dizionario autori italiani contemporanei. 2.a ed. ampliata e aggiornata. Milano: Guido Miano editore, 1996. (Contributi bibliografici) Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana. Edited by
Bibliography Vittore Branca. 2.a ed. Torino: UTET, 1989. Dizionario del cinema italiano. I film. Edited by Roberto Poppi and Mario Pecorari. Roma: Gremese editore, 1993(Dizionari Gremese) Dizionario della letteratura italiana contemporanea. Firenze: Vallecchi, 1973. (Tascabili Vallecchi; 34-35) Dizionario della letteratura italiana del Novecento. Diretto da Alberto Asor Rosa. Torino: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1992. (Piccoli dizionari Einaudi; 1) Dizionario generate degli autori italiani contemporanei. Firenze: Vallecchi, 1974. Enciclopedia dello spettacolo. Roma: Le Maschere, 195468. Enciclopedia Garzanti dello spettacolo. Nuova ed. Milano: Garzanti, 1977. Farrell, Joseph. Leonardo Sciascia. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, c!995. (Writers of Italy) Fiction 1876-1983: A Bibliography of United States Editions. New York; London: R. R. Bowker Company, 1983. Flegon, A. Who's Who in Translating and Interpreting. London: Flegon Press, 1967. Foreign Literary Prizes: Romance and Germanic languages. Edited by E. C. Bufkin. New York; London: R. R. Bowker Company, 1980. Frattarolo, Renzo. Dizionario degli scrittori italiani contemporanei pseudonimi, 1900-1975. Ravenna: Longo, 1975. (Bibliografia e storia della critica; 1) Gambetti, Lucio, and Vezzosi, Franco. La letteratura italiana del Novecento: repertorio delle prime edizioni. Geneva: Graphos, 1997. Gaumer, Patrick, and Moliterni, Claude. Dictionnaire mondial de la bande dessinee. Paris: Larousse, 1994. Ghidetti, Enrico, and Luti, Giorgio. Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana del Novecento. la ed. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1997. Gilmour, David. The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe di Lampedusa. London: Quartet Books, 1988. Giocondi, Michele. Best seller italiani 1860-1990. Firenze: Editoriale Paradigma, 1990. "The Hundred Most Influential Books since the War." Times Literary Supplement, 6 October 1995, p. 39. The Indian national bibliography. Calcutta: Central Reference Library, 1957International Dictionary of the Theatre. Editor, Mark Hawkins-Dady; picture editor, Leanda Shrimpton. Chicago: St James Press, c 1992-96. International Guide to Literature on Film. Edited by Tom Costello. London [etc.]: Bowker-Sauer, 1994. The Italian Book and American Publishing: Translation and Market (1982 : Rome). The Italian Book in America: Proceedings. New York: The Translation Center, 1986.
xxvn (Translation; special issue) Italian Novelists of the Twentieth Century. Fiesole: Casalini libri, 1997. (Bibliographies; 3) Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Edited by Rinaldina Russell. Westport, CT; London: Greenwood Press, 1994. Italian Women Writing. Edited by Sharon Wood. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993. Katainen, V. Louise. "The Translator's Voice: An Interview with Martha King." Translation Review, nos. 44-45 (1994), pp. 24-30. Keenoy, Ray, and Conte, Fiorenza. The Babel Guide to Italian Fiction (in English Translation). London: Boulevard, 1995. King, Martha. "The Translator's Voice: An Interview with William Weaver." Translation Review, no. 14 (1984), pp. 4-9. Kienzle, Siegfried. Modern World Theater: A Guide to Productions in Europe and the Unted States since 1945. Translated by Alexander and Elizabeth Henderson. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., c!970. Lepschy, Anna Laura, and Lepschy, Giulio. "Gran Bretagna, Irlanda e alcuni altri paesi di lingua inglese." Associazione internazionale per gli studi di lingua e letteratura italiana. Congresso. (13th : 1988 : Perugia, Italy). Lingua e letteratura italiana nel mondo oggi. Edited by Ignazio Baldelli and Bianca Maria Da Rif. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki editore, 1991. Vol. 1, pp. 25-67. Letteratura italiana, gli autori: Dizionario biobibliografico e indici. Direzione: Albert Asor Rosa; redazione: Giorgio Inglese, Luigi Trenta e Paolo Procaccioli. Torino: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1990. Library of Congress. Main Catalog of the Library of Congress: Titles Catalogued through December 1980 [microform]. New York: K. G. Saur, 1984Literary and Library Prizes. 10th ed. Revised and edited by Olga S. Weber and Stephen J. Calvert. New York: R. R. Bowker Company, 1980. Literary Translators' Association. Directory 1989. Montreal: Association des traducteurs litteraires, 1989. Luigi Pirandello in the Theatre: A Documentary Record. Edited by Susan Bassnett and Jennifer Lorch. Switzerland [etc.]: Harwood Academic Publishers, c!993. (Contemporary theatre studies; 3)
Marcus, Millicent. Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation. Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. The Metropolitan Opera Encyclopedia: A Comprehensive Guide to the World of Opera. Edited by David Hamilton. New York [etc.]: Simon and Schuster; Metropolitan Opera Guild, c 1987.
XXV111
New York Public Library. Research Libraries. Dictionary Catalogue of the Research Libraries of the New York Public Library, 1911-1971. New York: New York Public Library Astor Lenox and Tilden Foundations, 1979. New Zealand National Bibliography. Wellington: National Library of New Zealand, 1966- [in microfiche only from 1984] Nichols, Nina DaVinci, and Bazzoni, Jana O'Keefe. Pirandello & Film. Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. Companion to Italian Cinema. London: Cassell; British Film Institute, 1996. Pacifici, Sergio. A Guide to Contemporary Italian Literature: From Futurism to Neorealism. Cleveland; New York: Meridian Books, 1962. Pagliaini, Attilio. Catalogo generale della libreria italiana dall'anno 1847- a tutto il 1899. Roma: S.I.A.E., 1964. . Catalogo generale della libreria italiana dall'anno 1847- a tutto il 1899. Supplement 1-3, 19001930. Roma: S.I.A.E., 1964. Paperbacks in Print. London: J. Whitaker, 1961-1981. Paperbound Books in Print. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1956Perry, Larry Stephen. "Lost in the Translation: A Guide to Finding Literary Translation." Translation Review, no. 28 (1988),pp7-9. Poeti italiani del Novecento: La vita, le opere, la critica. A cura di Giorgio Luti. la ed. Urbino: Nuova Italia scientifica, 1985. (Studi superiori NIS; 7. Lettere) Reginald, R., and Burgess, M. R. Cumulative Paperback Index 1939-1959: A Comprehensive Bibliographic Guide to 14,000 Mass-Market Paperback Books of 33 Publishers Issued under 69 Imprints. Detroit: Gale Research Company, c!973. Rosenthal, Harold, and Warrack, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera. London: Oxford University Press, 1964. Schonberg, Harold C. The Lives of the Great Composers. New York: W. W. Norton, c!970. Shields, Nancy C. Italian Translations in America. New York: Institute of French Studies, 1931. (Comparative literature series) Shipley, Joseph T. Guide to Great Plays. Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, c!956. Small Press Record of Books. Paradise, Calif: L. Fulton, 1968-74. Small Press Record of Books in Print. Paradise, Calif: Dustbooks, 1975Sponza, Lucio, and Zancani, Diego. Italy. Oxford; Santa Barbara; Denver: Clio Press, 1955. (World biblio-
Bibliography graphical series; 30) Svensk Bokforteckning. The Swedish National Bibliography. Stockholm: Svensk Bokhandel, 1953// teatro repertorio dalle origini a oggi. A cura di Cesare Molinari. la ed. Milano: Arnaldo Mondadori editore, 1982. Traldi, Alberto. Fascism and Fiction: A Survey of Italian Fiction on Fascism (and Its Reception in Britain and the United States). Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1987. Triggiani, Domenico. Per la storia della letteratura italiana contemporanea. Bari: Grafiche Levante, 1967. Turn, Vittorio. Dizionario storico della letteratura italiana. Nuova [4.] ed., riv. e aggiornata sul testo originale di Vittorio Turri [di] Umberto Renda [e] Piero Operti. Torino: G. B. Paravia, 1959. Twentieth-Century Italian Drama: An Anthology, the First Fifty Years. Edited by Jane House and Antonio Attisani. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry: An Anthology. Edited by John Picchione and Lawrence R. Smith. Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press; published in association with Librital, 1993. Venuti, Lawrence. "The Art of Literary Translation: An Interview with William Weaver." Denver Quarterly 17 (Summer 1982): 16-26. . The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. London; New York: Routledge, 1995. Vermilye, Jerry. The Great Italian Films. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1994. Weaver, William. "The Start." Translation 12 (Spring 1984): 17-18. . "Pendulum Diary." Southwest Review 75 (Spring 1990): 150-178 Whitaker's Books in Print. London: J. Whitaker, 1988Who 's Who in Italy. Milano: Who's Who in Italy, 1957Wolff, Helen. "Translation Then and Now." Translation 12 (Spring 1984): 14-16. Wood, Sharon. Italian Women's Writing 1860-J994. London; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Athlone, 1995. (Women in context) World of Winners: A Current and Historical Perspective on Awards and Their Winners. Gita Siegman, editor. 2nd ed. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992. Wulff, Hans Jiirgen. Bibliography of Film Bibliographies. Munchen [etc.]: K. G.Saur, 1987. Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press; Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1952-
ABBREVIATIONS for the sources of bibliographical records 1. For books examined in the listed library, or received on mterlibrary loan ALB Albany Arlington Athabasca Auburn Berkeley Bishop's BPL Bradford Brandeis Brock Brown Carleton College Carleton University CNC Cornell DAL Dartmouth De Paul ERI Florida Georgia GLX Hayward Hofstra HPL INNC Iowa Irvington KSM KVU Lam an Lancing LPL MAS Memorial Michigan Michigan State Minnesota MTRL New Paltz New York NLC OJFR OTT Penn. State Queens Redeemer RMC Rochester ROM Rutgers
University of Alberta Library, Edmonton, Alberta State University of New York at Albany Library, Albany, New York University of Texas at Arlington Library, Arlington, Texas Athabasca University Library, Athabasca, Alberta Auburn University Library, Auburn, Alabama University of California at Berkeley Library, Berkeley, California Bishop's University Library, Lennoxville, Quebec Brighton Public Library, Brighton, Sussex, England Bradford Junior College Library, Bradford, Massachusetts Brandeis University Library, Waltham, Massachusetts Brock University Library, St Catharines, Ontario Brown University Library, Providence, Rhode Island Carleton College Library, Northfield, Minnesota Carleton University Library, Ottawa, Ontario Concordia University Library, Montreal, Quebec Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York Dalhousie University Library, Halifax, Nova Scotia Dartmouth College Library, Hanover, New Hampshire De Paul University Library, Chicago, Illinois Erindale College Library, University of Toronto, Mississauga, Ontario University of Florida Library, Gainesville, Florida University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, Georgia McGill University Library, Montreal, Quebec California State University at Hayward Library, Hayward, California Hofstra University Library, Hempstead, New York Hove Public Library, Hove, Sussex, England Innis College Library, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa Irvington Public Library, Irvington, New Jersey University of St. Michael's College Library, Toronto, Ontario Victoria University Library, Toronto, Ontario William F. Laman Public Library, North Little Rock, Arkansas Lancing Public Library, Lancing, Sussex, England Lewes Public Library, Lewes, Sussex, England McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Ontario Memorial University of Newfoundland Library, St John's, Newfoundland University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan Michigan State University Library, East Lansing, Michigan University of Minnesota Library, Minneapolis, Minnesota Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library, Toronto, Ontario [now the Toronto Reference Library] New York State University College at New Paltz Library, New Paltz, New York New York University Library, New York, New York National Library of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario Ontario Joint Fiction Reserve Library, Barrie, Ontario [now closed] University of Ottawa Library, Ottawa, Ontario Pennsylvania State University Library, College Park, Pennsylvania Queens College Library, City University of New York, Flushing, New York Redeemer College Library, Ancaster, Ontario Royal Military College of Canada Library, Kingston, Ontario Rochester University Library, Rochester, New York Royal Ontario Museum Library, Toronto, Ontario Rutgers University Library, New Brunswick, New Jersey
xxx
Abbreviations
SCC Simon Fraser South Carolina South Florida St Thomas Stony Brook Tallahassee Tennessee TPLO TRIN UBC USL Utah UTL UWL Virginia William and Mary Wycliffe YRK
Scarborough College Library, University of Toronto, Scarborough, Ontario Simon Fraser University Library, Burnaby, British Columbia University of South Carolina Library, Columbia, South Carolina University of South Florida Library, Tampa, Florida University of St Thomas Library, St Paul, Minnesota State University of New York at Stony Brook Library, Stony Brook, New York Florida State University Library, Tallahassee, Florida University of Tennessee at Knoxville Library, Knoxville, Tennessee Osborne Collection, Toronto Public Library, Toronto, Ontario University of Trinity College Library, Toronto, Ontario University of British Columbia Library, Vancouver, British Columbia University of Sussex Library, Brighton, Sussex, England University of Utah Library, Salt Lake City, Utah University of Toronto Library, Toronto, Ontario University of Waterloo Library, Waterloo, Ontario University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Virginia College of William and Mary in Virginia Library, Williamsburg, Virginia Wycliffe College Library, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario York University Library, North York, Ontario
*
indicates a non-library copy, seen
2. For printed or microform sources of bibliographical information ANB Bassnett BL BN BNB CPI IT LC Lent NBM NUC NYPL PBIP ROMLIT Rothschild Svensk TBELF
see Australian National Bibliography (in "Bibliography," above) see Luigi Pirandello in the Theatre see The British Library General Catalogue of Printed Books see Bibliotheque nationale. Departement des imprimes, Catalogue general... see British National Bibliography see Reginald, Cumulative Paperback Index 1939-1959 see Index Translationum see Library of Congress, Main Catalog of the Library of Congress [microform] see also "machine-readable sources" see Lent, Comic Art of Europe NBM—Spring '97: Graphic Novels, Reprints [publisher's catalogue] see The National Union Catalog see Luciani, "Modern Italian Fiction in America, 1929-1954" see Paperbacks in Print see The Literatures of the World in English Translation see Rothschild, Graphic Novels see Svensk Bokforteckning see Wright, Title Bibliography of English Language Fiction
3. For machine-readable sources of bibliographical information CAN GBIP ISM LC MSU OCLC RAP RLIN UKM
Canadian MARC Bibliographic File, National Library of Canada Global Books in Print ISM Bibliographic File, Information Systems Management Corporation [formerly UTLAS, now owned by A-G Canada Ltd.] Library of Congress see also "printed or microform sources" Michigan State University Library Reading Room Index to the Comic Art Collection OCLC Bibliographic File, Online Computer Library Center Recent Australian Publications, National Library of Australia RLIN Bibliographic File, Research Libraries Group United Kingdom MARC Bibliographic File, British Library
TRANSLATIONS FROM ITALIAN, 1929-1997
FontaMARA
A Novel By
Ignazio Silone
3
Bibliography 1929
1929
2901 BACCHELLI, Riccardo [// diavolo al Pontelungo (1927)] The devil at the Long Bridge: a historical novel ("II diavolo al Pontelungo"). By Riccardo Bacchelli; translated, with an introduction, by Orlo Williams, M.C. New York; London; Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929. [4], vii-xvi, 1-346 pp. The Times Literary Supplement found this novel, which portrays historical characters such as Bakunin, Cafiero, and Andrea Costa plotting in Locarno in 1873, and staging an abortive revolution at Bologna (Bacchelli's native town), to be "a clever and uncommonly sensitive study of the revolutionary mind and temper." The English translation is slightly abridged, and expurgated. Bacchelli (1891-1985) was, in his very long career, an immensely prolific writer of historical fiction (// diavolo al Pontelungo (1927), // mulino del Po (1938-40)), of fiction with a contemporary setting (Ilfiglio di Stalin (1953), L 'incendio di Milan (1952)), of fable (Lo sa il tonno (1923)), and even of science fiction (Rapporto segreto (1967)). He also had much to say about relations between the sexes (La citta degli amanti (1929), Unapassione coniugale (1930), L'"Afrodite" (1969)). He was also active as a poet, playwright, essayist and critic (he was a founder of the review La Ronda), and as a historical scholar (La congiura di Don Giulio D 'Este (1931)). // diavolo al Pontelungo (Milan, Ceschina) was the first of his novels to be published in English, though Orlo Williams, in his Introduction, writes that a British publisher, at his urging, bought the rights to Lo sa il tonno, and had it translated, but did not publish it. Bacchelli is also important as a founder of the Premio Bagutta, created in 1927 by a group of young writers and artists who met in a small restaurant at Via Bagutta 14 in Milan. It is one of the oldest and most important of Italian literary prizes. M/C#yPL,Rochester 2902
BRACCO, Roberto [Ifantasmi (1906)] Phantasms (I fantasmi). By Roberto Bracco; translated from the Italian by Dirce St. Cyr, in Modern continental plays. [Edited] by S. Marion Tucker. New York; London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1929, pp. [99J-130. Roberto Bracco (1861-1943) was born in Naples. For many years he was a journalist, columnist, and the shrewd and respected drama critic for the Corriere di Napoli. He published many collections of short stories. As a prolific playwright (his collected plays fill eleven of the twenty-five volumes of his Opere) he paid close attention to the social and moral problems of his time. The introduction to Phantasms in the present volume states: "His thirty-two plays include light comedies, social problem plays, psychological plays, and tragedies, of which the best are
the psychological plays. In these the problems are personal, and especially those of women—women laboring under inhibitions, struggling for a happiness that is forever denied them, largely by forces within themselves." I fantasmi is representative of the "psychological" plays. As a writer of realist prose dramas, Bracco was working counter to the Italian trend towards the poetic tragedy or romance exemplified in the work of D'Annunzio, Sem Benelli, or Dario Niccodemi. His plays are closer to those of Ibsen, or of the French realistic dramatists. Several of his plays were produced in America and England in the early decades of this century, but not, it seems, Phantasms. This translation was first published in Poet Lore in 1908. UTL 2903
BRUNELLI, Bruno [Un 'arnica del Casanova (1923)] Casanova loved her. By Bruno Brunelli; [translated by Alexander McKechnie]; with a preface by Arthur Machen. London: Peter Davies, 1929. [7],vi-xiv, [1], 2-288 pp. This historical narrative is based on the letters of Justine (or Giustiniana) Wynne (1732-1791), an Anglo-Italian beauty of modest family who married an aging diplomat, the Austrian ambassador at Venice, and became Gra'fin von RosenbergOrsini. She instituted salons in Venice and Padua, and wrote books on philosophy and the arts. The letters were chiefly written, before her marriage, to her great love Andrea Memmo, scion of a noble Venetian family, and reveal her relationship with Casanova; and so, as the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement commented: "the grande dame and bluestocking of Padua is identified at last with the notorious Mile. X. C. V. of Casanova's Memoires." The translation is somewhat abridged. YRK 2904
BRUNELLI, Bruno [Un 'arnica del Casanova (1923)] Casanova loved her. By Bruno Brunelli; with a preface by Arthur Machen; translated by Alexander McKechnie. New York: H. Liveright, 1929. xvi, 299 pp. NYPL
2905 CAPUANA, Luigi [C'era una volta (1882)] Italian fairy tales. By Capuana; translated by Dorothy Emmrich; and with drawings by Margaret Freeman. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1929. [6], v, [3], 3-209, [3] pp.: ill. Like his colleague and contemporary Verga, Luigi Capuana (1839-1915) was born into a comfortable landowning family in the Sicilian province of Catania. In 1860 he gave up his studies
4
Twentieth-Century Italian Literature in English Translation
in law at Catania, took part in the uprisings associated with Garibaldi's expedition, and served briefly as town clerk in his native Mineo. In 1864 he moved to Florence, with the intention of becoming a writer, and soon began to publish stories and essays. Family and financial circumstances forced him to spend the years from 1868 to 1875 in Sicily, where he continued to study and write while he worked as a school inspector, and served as a town councillor and, later, mayor of Mineo. Capuana settled in Milan in 1875, where he was the literary and drama critic for the Corriere della Sera, and became the leader of the Italian verismo school, influenced by Zola. His novel Giacinta, published in 1879, together with Verga's Vita dei campi (1880), established the naturalistic style in Italy. Capuana was active in many areas of literature, including stories for children and explorations into folklore, and his collection of fairy tales C'era una volta was published by Treves in 1882. It was first translated into English, and published by Macmillan, in London in 1892, and was also issued in New York in 1894. This Dutton edition had three printings in 1929, and was reprinted in 1933. Capuana spent his later years in Rome, where he formed a friendship with D'Annunzio, and taught at the women's teachers college (where his fellow-Sicilian Pirandello was a colleague), and in Catania, where he taught at the University. Irvington,/?/,//^
2906 CARDUCCI, Giosue [Poems. Selections] From the poems of Giosue Carducci, 1835-1907. Translated by Romilda Rendel. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1929. [4],v-xii,[l],2-131,[l]pp. Carducci (1835-1907) was one of the most important poets of the late 19th century. He has not received much attention from English-speaking translators since the late 1930s and the 1940s, though a new translation of selections from his poetry appeared late in 1994. Carducci had a rather difficult and politically fraught career as professor of Italian literature at the University of Bologna from the beginnings of the newly united kingdom in 1860 until, in 1878, he gained the friendship and patronage of Queen Margherita di Savoia, consort of Umberto I. He recast his large body of verse, with its mixture of traditional and innovative characteristics, into its final form at the turn of the century. Considered the national poet of modern Italy, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1906. He died in Bologna the following year, "somewhat disappointed" as Rendel writes "at the turn of political events, but honoured and famous, and surrounded by enthusiastic admirers." With respect to these translations, the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement commented: "Miss Rendel has in some cases been tempted to reproduce the accent of Carducci's own generation. That is to say, she has written the kind of verse he himself might have composed had he written in English; and ears attuned to the free and natural cadences of modern verse are assaulted by the strained phraseology of a worn-out poetic convention ... but on the whole Miss Rendel has accomplished the task very creditably." M/C,New Paltz
2907 CERIO, Edwin [Aria di Capri (1921)} That Capri air. Edwin Cerio; with a Foreword by Francis Brett Young. London: Wm. Heinemann; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929. [8],I-v,[l],l-201,[l]pp. Cerio was born on Capri to an English mother and an Italian father in 1875, and died there in 1960. He enjoyed a varied career. Francis Brett Young writes: "He was born an artist, and for that reason ... became a doctor of science and, later, a naval architect. Because [Capri], the very soil of it, was the deepest rooted and most permanent love in all his life, he spent the greater part of his early years in Germany. Because he was an engineer of genius, a bad sailor, and knew nothing whatever of commerce, Krupp ... chose him as his sole South American representative. And, since his own particular branch of study was submarines—he was always happier under the water than on its surface—his earliest published work, a technical engineering paper of which he is far prouder than of Aria di Capri, is concerned with the design of fishing-boats." After war service, and work as a publicist for Fiat, he returned to Capri, where he served as mayor, built magnificent houses, and prepared and paid for the publication of expensive illustrated monographs on the plants, insects, archaeology, gardens and architecture of the island. Aria di Capri, a volume of sketches mixing legend, history, autobiography and invention, was a success in Italy, and was widely translated. This English translation is by novelist and travel writer Norman Douglas, novelist Louis Golding, R. W. Reynolds, and the physician, novelist and poet Young himself, who comments: "Native critics have said that [Cerio "s] Italian is a little foreign in flavour; and that is, perhaps, why this book (and more particularly its humour) seem so easily translatable into our language." Extracts from this translation were later used in Cerio's English book on Capri, The Masque of Capri (1957). *, UTL 2908
CHIARELLI, Luigi [La maschera e il volto (1917)] The mask and the face: a satire in three acts. By C. B. Fernald; based on La maschera e il volto, by Luigi Chiarelli. New York; London: Samuel French, [1929], c!927. [4], 5-78, [2] pp., [1] leaf of plates: ill. La maschera e il volto, first produced in Milan in 1913, and published by Treves in 1917, was Chiarelli's only great success as a playwright, though he continued to write for the theatre until his death (he lived from 1880 to 1947). The story of a deceived husband who must claim to have killed his wife, in accordance with his principles (though for love of her he just sends her away), and who is then skilfully defended by her lawyer lover, the play was produced all over the world in the years following World War I. Fernald's version was first produced in London in 1924, with Franklin Dyall as the cuckolded Count Mario Grazia, and Athene Seyler as his wife Savina. The
Bibliography 1929 Sunday Times called it: "An intellectual farce of the nimblest, wittiest, most delightfully outrageous description." The adaptation was originally privately printed by French in 1927. The play was filmed at Cinecitta in Italy in 1942, directed by Camillo Mastrocinque. Chiarelli worked as a journalist in Rome, and as a special correspondent for // Secolo of Milan. He was one of the first Italian playwrights to write a play for radio, L 'anello di Teodisio (1929). Ohio State^OML/T1
2909 D'ANNUNZIO, Gabriele [Lafiglia di Jorio (1904)] The daughter of Jorio: a pastoral tragedy. By Gabriele D'Annunzio; translated from the Italian by Charlotte Porter, Pietro Isola and Alice Henry, in Representative continental dramas, revolutionary and transitional. Edited, with introductions by Montrose J. Moses. Students' ed. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1929, pp. [271J-317. This translation was first published in 1907 by Poet Lore, and by Little, Brown. Representative Continental Dramas, Revolutionary and Transitional was first published in 1924. D'Annunzio's verse drama is set in a primitive and superstitious rural community. It was the last play that he wrote with Eleonora Duse in mind, as the actress to play the title character, before the end of their relationship. Lafiglia di Jorio (Treves) was produced successfully in Milan in 1903, and has remained in the Italian repertory. UTL
2910
D'ANNUNZIO, Gabriele [Francesca da Rimini (1902)] Francesca da Rimini. By Gabriele D'Annunzio; translated from the Italian by Arthur Symons, in Modern continental plays. [Edited] by S. Marion Tucker. New York; London: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1929, pp. [257]-323. This translation was first published in 1902 by Heinemann, and by Frederick A. Stokes. The story of Dante's guilty lovers, Paolo and Francesca, is one of the most famous episodes in the Inferno, and is based on an actual event of about 1289. Francesca, married for political reasons to the unattractive Gianciotto Malatesta, fell in love with his handsome brother Paolo. Malatesta discovered the affair, and had the lovers put to death. D'Annunzio wrote his great lyric verse tragedy for his lover, the actress Eleonora Duse, who took the part of Francesca in the original production of 1901. Arthur Symons (1865-1945), the English poet and critic, wrote the influential The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), and was associated, like D'Annunzio, with the decadent movement in European literature. Symons's much-praised translation was also published in Tucker's Twenty-five Modern Plays (1931), in E. B. Watson and Benefield Pressey's Contemporary Drama: European Plays, III, and in Thomas H. Dickinson's Continental Plays (1935).
5
D'Annunzio's play, first published by Treves, was the basis for an opera with the same title by Riccardo Zandonai, with a libretto by Tito Ricordi (1914, see entry 8771). UTL
2911
DA VERONA, Guido [Mimi Bluette, fiore del mio giardino (1916)] Mimi Bluette. By Guido Da Verona, author of "Life Begins Tomorrow," "The Woman Who Invented Love," etc.; translated from the Italian by Izabel Grazebrook. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., c!929. [4], 3-317, [1] pp. The reviewer for the New York Times Book Review found the American edition of this story, to be "a most convincing picture of very Italian passion and despair," despite its trite and melodramatic plot. The translation is judged to be good, and must have found its readership, because it ran through three printings in April, 1929. Mimi Bluette was first published in Milan by Baldini & Castoldi, who published eight Da Verona novels between 1908 and 1919. A lavish joint French/Italian film adaptation of Mimi Bluette, directed by Carlo Di Palma, with a screenplay by Barbara Alberti (see entry 8001) and Amedeo Pagani, and with the actors Monica Vitti, Shelley Winters, and Tommy Tune, appeared as recently as 1976. It was not well received by the critics. Guido Da Verona (1881-1939) was a very successful popular writer in the early part of the century. He owed his success to his ability to recast the decadent and erotically charged style of D'Annunzio into a form acceptable to a wider public. Dutton was also the publisher for the two earlier translations mentioned on the title page. GLX,NYPL
2912 FERRERO, Guglielmo [La terza Roma (1926-27)] The seven vices: a novel of Italy in our own times. By Guglielmo Ferrero; authorized translation by Arthur Livingston and Elisabeth Abbott. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, c!929. 2v.([4], 1-352; [4], 1-311, [1] pp.) The volumes are separately titled The Two Truths (Ledue verita), and The Son's Rebellion (La rivolta delfiglio).
D. F. Oilman, writing for the Boston Transcript, found The Seven Vices "an extremely important historical novel, ably translated." The reviewers for the New York Times and the New York Evening Post were equally impressed. The translation is slightly abridged. Ferrero (1871-1942), a criminologist, sociologist and historian, was a pupil of the prominent criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909) best known for his proposal of a physically distinguishable criminal 'type'. Ferrero married a daughter of Lombroso. He was also an active political journalist who supported Italy's intervention in World War I. An antiFascist, he went into exile in Switzerland in 1929, and remained
6
Twentieth-Century Italian Literature in English Translation
in Geneva, as a university teacher, until his death. His most important work as a historian was his five-volume Grandezza e decadenza di Roma (1902-1907), which was widely translated in Europe, and was well received in North America. MTRL,AOT£
2913
GIACOSA, Giuseppe [Come lefoglie (1900)] Like falling leaves (Come le foglie): a play in four acts. By Giuseppe Giacosa; translated from the Italian by Edith and Allan Updegraff; edited by Edwin Bjorkman, in Representative continental dramas, revolutionary and transitional. Edited, with introductions by Montrose J. Moses. Students' ed. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1929, pp. [322]-359. Giacosa (1847-1906) studied law at Turin, and when he graduated in 1868 he joined his father's law practice. He soon made contact with the literary group of the local chapter of the Dante Alighieri Society, and began to write dramatic sketches and verse dramas. In 1880 he wrote the historical drama // conte Rosso. In 1888 he moved to Milan as Director of the Scuola di recitazkme filodrammatica at the Conservatory. His first major success came in 1891 with Signora di Challant, played in Italy by Eleonora Duse, and in New York by Sarah Bernhardt. Come le foglie, first produced in 1894, and published by Treves in 1900, is the drama of an upper middle class family disrupted by moral and economic crises. It is probably Giacosa's best-known play, but his fame in English-speaking countries rests on the libretti he wrote (with Luigi Illica) for Puccini: Manon Lescaut (1893), La Boheme (1896), Tosca (1900), andMadama Butterfly (1904). This translation was first published in 1913 by Little, Brown. UTL
2914 MUSSOLINI, Benito [Claudia Particella, I'amante del cardinale (1910)] The cardinal's mistress. By Benito Mussolini; translated by Hiram Motherwell. London [etc.]: Cassell & Co., 1929. [6],vii-xvii,[l], 1-229, [1] pp. This translation was first published in New York by Albert & Charles Boni in 1928. In 1909-10 Mussolini was writing for the socialist newspaper Ilpopolo, published in Trento. This historical romance has some basis in real events of the 16th century, and was published in parts in a supplement to the newspaper with, as was later reported, great success. The reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement noted: "Claudia's life is threatened several times, and Signer Mussolini's biographer tells us that her escapes were chiefly due to the intervention of the author's chief, who saw their subscriptions mounting." The reviewer also wrote: "The indignation with which [Mussolini]
describes the guzzlings of the prelates and draws his almost too vivid portrait of Don Benizio's lust for Claudia, which neither fasting nor flagellation could conquer, is something more than a novelist's emotion." Mussolini's early bodice-ripper, however, was only published in book form in Italy (as L 'amante del cardinale) in 1987. USL
2915 PERRI, Francesco [Emigranti (1928)] Enough of dreams. By Francesco Perri; translated with an introduction by Charles and Marjorie Tutt. New York: Brentano's, 1929. [6], vii-ix, [3], 3-284 pp. Also translated in 1930 for Geoffrey Bles by J. Lewis May as The Other Land. The law graduate Perri (1885-1975) worked for the Italian postal service until 1926, when he was forced into early retirement because of his anti-Fascist activities. After the war he became a newspaper editor, and continued publishing novels well into his seventies. Emigranti, first published under the pseudonym Paolo Albatrelli, won the Premio dell'Accademia Mondadori in 1927. Emigranti describes the efforts of poor peasants in Pern's native Calabria to occupy unfilled lands in pre-Fascist Italy, the failure of their movement, and the peasants' emigration to the United States. UTL
2916 PIRANDELLO, Luigi [Plays. Selections] Three plays: Six characters in search of an author; Henry IV; Right you are! (If you think so). By Luigi Pirandello; [translated by Edward Storer and Arthur Livingston]. New York: E. P. Button & Co.; London: J. M. Dent, 1929. [4],v-ix,[7],3-233,[l]pp. This translation of three of Pirandello's most important plays, Seipersonaggi in cerca d'autore (1921), Enrico IV (1922), and Cosl e (se vipare) (1918), was first published in 1922 by Dutton. It was reprinted frequently, being in its eighth printing by 1929. The original prefatory note by Livingston says of Sei personaggi: "In less than a year's time, Six Characters in Search of an Author has won a distinguished place in the dramatic literature of the Western world, attracting audiences and engaging intellects far removed from the particular influences which made of it a season's sensation in Italy. Yet the word 'original' is not enough, unless we embrace under that characterization qualities far richer than those normally credited to the 'trick' play. The Six Characters is something more than an unusually ingenious variation of the 'play within a play.' It is something more than a new twist given to the 'dream character' made familiar by the contemporary Italian grotesques. It is a dramatization of the artistic process itself, in relation to the problem of reality and unreality which has engaged Pirandello in one way or another for more than twenty years." In fact,
7
Bibliography 1929 when the first version of Sei personaggi was produced in Rome, by Dario Niccodemi, it was criticized by public and critics alike. Cosi e (se vipare) is based on Pirandello's story "La signora Frola e il signor Ponza, suo genero." Frola and Ponza tell their bewildered neighbours quite different stories to explain why Ponza's wife and mother-in-law never visit each other, even though the three seem on the best of terms. Ponza tells them that his first wife died four years ago, and that when he remarried, Signora Frola found comfort in the delusion that the new wife was still her daughter, Lina. Signora Frola says that Ponza was so disturbed when Lina went to a sanitarium that on her return he thought she was another woman, whom he called Giulia. Each is concerned to keep the other happy, and so accepts the other's "delusion." The wife, when the neighbours call on her for the truth, tells them that she is Ponza's second wife, and Signora Frola's daughter, and, to herself, no one. Her personality has been submerged in her compassionate attempt to humour them both. A New York production of 1927 featured Edward G. Robinson. Enrico IV remains one of Pirandello's most popular plays. Henry believes himself to be the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV (1050-1106), and has been maintained in this luxurious delusion for twenty years by his wealthy sister and a retinue of servants. A psychologist sets up a scenario to shock Henry from his delusion. As it turns out, he has been sane for the past eight years, but has preferred to continue to live the masquerade. At the end of the drama Henry, perhaps simply enraged, perhaps falling back into madness, kills Belcredi, the man he blames for precipitating his original delusion, and recognizes that now he must wear his mask of madness for the rest of his life. In 1924 Pirandello caused a sensation when he wrote an open letter to Mussolini, asking to join the Fascist Party, shortly after the murder of the opposition leader Giacomo Matteotti on Mussolini's orders. The following year he became artistic director of the Teatro d'arte established in Rome with his son Stefano Landi, Orio Vergani, Massimo Bontempelli, and others. The company was not successful, and was dissolved in 1928, at some financial cost to Pirandello. Several of his later plays were first performed outside Italy. In 1927, however, the young Marta Abba had made her debut with the company. She became Pirandello's favourite actress (he wrote Diana e la Tuda and L 'arnica delle mogli for her) and the object of his infatuation. A generous selection from his love letters to her were published in English in 1994, and a full Italian edition in 1995. Abba later married and lived in the United States, becoming Pirandello's chief proponent and translator there. Pirandello died in Rome in 1936. In his will he directed that there should be no ceremonial funeral, and that he should be cremated and his ashes scattered in the countryside near Agrigento, where he was born in 1867. Edward Storer made the translations of Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore and Enrico IV. In the late 1920s Storer, born in 1882, was the Rome correspondent for the English Review and the Nation. Arthur Livingston, born in 1883, translated Cosi e (se vipare). He held the position of Associate Professor of Romance Languages at Columbia University. The first film version of Enrico /Fwas made in Germany and Italy by Amleto Palermi in 1926, the last silent film from a Pirandello work. It starred Conrad Veidt. A sound version was directed by Giorgio Pastina in 1934, the year that Pirandello won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and was remade by the same director at Cinecitta in 1943. In 1984 Marco Bellocchio directed
an adaptation starring Senta Berger and Marcello Mastroianni. Despite much work by Pirandello, and many proposals and options taken by film companies in several countries, no version of Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore was filmed in the author's lifetime, nor indeed until the 1960s, when it and the other major plays were filmed for television by the Italian national broadcasting company RAI-TV. A television version for the United States in the 1970s starred John Houseman, Andy Griffith, and the director, Stacy Keach. In 1992 BBC 2 televised an adaptation starring John Hurt, Brian Cox, and Tara Fitzgerald. M7C,Virginia
2917
PIZZETTI, Ildebrando [Fra Gherardo (1928). Libretto. English and Italian] Fra Gherardo: drama in 3 acts. Written and composed by Ildebrando Pizzetti; English version by K. H. B. de Jaffa. New York: G. Ricordi & Co.,cl929. [9], 10-107, [5] pp. Pizzetti (1880-1968) was born near Parma and studied at the Parma Conservatory. Early in his career he worked with D'Annunzio, and they collaborated on the opera Fedra (1915). Pizzetti wrote his own librettos for many of his later operas, as he did for Fra Gherardo, set in 13th-century Parma. Gherardo, a weaver bent on devoting his life to religion, leaves the town to join the confraternity of Flagellants, after having compromised Mariola, an orphan girl. Nine years later he returns as a friar of the Apostolic Brethren, and pledges to lead the people in their struggle against the corrupt authorities, but he is arrested, condemned to the stake, and executed for heresy. Fra Gherardo was produced at the Metropolitan Opera in 1929, with Tullio Serafin as musical director; the cover of this edition states that it is a "Metropolitan Opera House grand opera libretto," published by Fred. Rullman. The Metropolitan Opera Encyclopedia comments on Pizzetti: "Little known outside of Italy, his work after 1930 became dogmatic and repetitive." Issued in paper. Brandeis,Brown,AWZ
2918
SANTANGELO, Paolo Ettore [Attila adAquileia (1928)] Attila: a romance of old Aquileia. By Paolo Ettore Santangelo; translated by Nathan Haskell Dole. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, Publishers, c!929. [4], v, [3], 3-336, [2] pp. A historical page-turner set in the days of Attila the Hun. The New York Times Book Review commented: "Once the fact is accepted that the book is not important it is easy to succumb to the lure of its decidedly vivacious theme." Santangelo, born in 1895, was a historian, biographer, linguist, and literary critic. His works include // giornalismo e la satira nel Risorgimento (1948), biographies of the pope and saint Gregory VII, and of
8
Twentieth-Century Italian Literature in English Translation
Massimo D'Azeglio, and a volume on Homer and IndoEuropean philology, Pagine di linguistica e di critica letteraria (1950). Dole (1852-1935), an American editor and critic, wrote on Italian literature, and also translated works by Victor Hugo and Tolstoi. Carleton College,AT/>Z
2919 SVEVO, Italo [Una burla riuscita (1928)] The hoax. By Italo Svevo; translated from the Italian, with an introduction, by Beryl de Zoete. London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1929. [4], 5-150, [2] pp. Una burla riuscita was first published in Solaria, no. 2, 1928. The story of Ettore Schmitz's friendship with his sometime English teacher James Joyce is well known, as is Joyce's recognition of his friend's literary gifts and his efforts to persuade 'Italo Svevo' to start writing again. The Hoax, the first of Svevo's works to be published in English, appeared to mixed but generally favourable reviews. Several reviewers were looking forward to the appearance of La coscienza di Zeno (1923) in English. Beryl de Zoete's translation was praised. Readers familiar with the author's life will agree with New York Herald Tribune Books' reviewer Angel Flores that "there is something tormentingly autobiographical underlying this pleasant narrative" about a duped businessman with a passion for writing. The reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement noted: "Yet it is not the discovery of the hoax and the disappointment, but rather the imaginary success which disturbed the writer.... Everything in [Marco's] life seemed to depend on the precise balance and relation of his life to his writings, and everything is disturbed when this is disturbed. He cannot even read to his sick brother, Marco's relation with whom is one of the most touching parts of the book." The reviewer compares Svevo to Gide, and points out that "Svevo is precise rather than speculative, and modestly analytic rather than elusive." KVU
1930 3001 BACCHELLI, Riccardo [La citta degli amanti (1929)] Love town. Riccardo Bacchelli; translated by Orlo Williams. London: Duckworth, 1930. 296 pp. The town of the title is a Utopian community established, by an American businessman, on the coast at the border between Texas and Mexico. In La citta degli amanti (Ceschina) Bacchelli satirizes the social attitudes of the 1920s which have brought people to see love as something sophisticated, arid and, ultimately, sad. His Italian protagonists are the only genuine lovers in the community, and are, therefore, misfits. The reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement notes: "The trans-
lation is excellently done by Mr. Orlo Williams, who in a cautious prefatory note warns the English reader not to attach any significance to the location of this Freudian Utopia, since Bacchelli 'has chosen America as the scene of his satirical fantasy as Swift chose Lilliput and Laputa.'" J. E. S. Arrowsmith, for the London Mercury, comments that the translation: "transposes rather than transmutes. Every Italian word is rendered into an adequate English word, but nevertheless the book remains a book composed by a foreigner in a foreign language." Nor does he place Bacchelli very high in his literary pantheon, judging him capable of: "producing, some day, a novel of the dimensions and scope of The Good Companions'" (J. B. Priestley's best seller of the previous year). OCLC,ROMLIT 3002 BENELLI, Sem [L 'amore del tre re (1910)] The love of the three kings: tragic poem in three acts. By Sem Benelli; translated into English blank verse by Howard Mumford Jones, in Chief contemporary dramatists. Third series. Selected and edited by Thomas H Dickinson. Boston [etc.]: Houghton Mifflin Company, c!930, pp. 383-411. The playwright Benelli's uneasy relationship with Italian political society is apparent in his personal history. After service in World War I (though he would have been forty in 1917) he took part in the Fiume adventure, but withdrew when his colleague in literature D'Annunzio took command. He became a Fascist deputy, but went into opposition after the murder of the Socialist leader Matteotti in 1924. He volunteered for the war in Ethiopia, but chose to become an exile in Switzerland when Italy entered World War II. As a writer, Benelli achieved his greatest stage success with La cena delle bejfe (Treves, 1909), a revenge drama (for an English translation see entry 3902). He lived from 1877 to 1949. UTL 3003
CAPUANA, Luigi [// raccontafiabe (1894)] Golden-feather. By Capuana; translated by Dorothy Emmrich; with drawings by Margaret Freeman. 1st ed. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1930. vii, 265 pp., [1] leaf of col. plates: ill. // raccontafiabewas first published by Bemporad. Capuana's four book-length publications in English have all been fairy tales, folk tales, or stories for children. Capuana's best literary works have yet to be translated. OCLC,ROMLIT 3004
CINELLI, Delfmo [La trappola (1928)]
Bibliography 1930 The trap: a novel. Delfino Cinelli; translated into English by the author; [introduction by Carl Van Doren]. New York: The John Day Company, c!930. [4], v-x, [2], 3-247, [3] pp. Cinelli (1889-1942) came from a wealthy manufacturing family. In 1925 he took over a farm property near Siena, and decided to become a full-time writer. La trappola (Milan, L'Eroica) was his first and most successful novel. Like most of his fiction, it is set in 19th-century Tuscany. This story of jealousy, old grudges and vengeance did not receive good reviews, and remains his only novel to have appeared in English. A07>L,YRK 3005
FOGAZZARO, Antonio [Fedele edaltri racconti (1887). "Eden anto"] Eden anto. Antonio Fogazzaro; translated by Theodore Wesley Koch. San Francisco: The Roxburghe Club of San Francisco, 1930. viii, 29 pp.: ill.; port., facsims. This short story was issued in a limited edition of 250 copies, printed by Roxburghe Club members Edwin and Robert Grabhorn, and illustrated by Rene Gockings. The half-title reads: Eden anto, or, The fate of a copy of a rare edition of Ariosto's Orlando furioso. Fogazzaro was born in Vicenza in 1842. His family was well-to-do and cultivated, and he had for his first tutor the priest and poet Giacomo Zanella. Fogazzaro studied law in Padua and Turin, but only practised the profession for a short time. As a young married man he lived for a few years in Milan, where he met Arrigo Boito and the members of the scapigliatura movement. During this time he worked his way through a profound religious crisis, and was for the rest of his life a liberal Catholic who attempted to reconcile traditional dogma with modem science. Fogazzaro returned to live in Vicenza in the early 1870s, and began to publish his poetry and fiction in 1874. His first novel, Malombra was published in Milan by Brigola in 1881. His fiction is characterized by sentimentalism, by an interest in the mystical and the supernatural, and by an examination of ideological and moral conflict, the imbalance between duty and passionate enthusiasm. Critics see a symbolist influence in his later work. Five of his novels were translated: Daniele Cortis (1885) in 1890, Malombra in 1896, Piccolo mondo antico (1895) in 1906 as The Patriot, II santo (1905) also in 1906 as The Saint, and Piccolo mondo moderno (1901) in 1907 as The Man of the World. Since then, only Piccolo mondo antico, considered his finest novel, has been retranslated, as The Little World of the Past, by W. J. Strachan in 1962, and in an abridged version as A House Divided, by Guido Waldman, also in 1962. Fedele ed altri racconti was first published in Milan by G. Galli. NYPL,OCLC 3006
Great Italian short stories. Edited by Decio Pettoello. London: Ernest Benn, 1930. [4],i-xii, 13-923, [1] pp.
9 This very generous collection contains eighty-five stories, of which fifty-nine are by writers active in the twentieth century. In many cases the translator is not named. The stories are: Adolfo Albertazzi, "The nightingale in the churchyard" and "The Fire Brigade," from Zucchetto rosso (1910), and "The umbrella," from Top (1922); Massimo Bontempelli, "Routine," from Sette savi (1912), translated by Phyllis T. Ward, and "When I was in Africa," from La donna del miei sogni (1925); Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, "The house," from La citta sconosciuta (1924), translated by Alethea Graham; Roberto Bracco, "Ignazio Fuoribona," from La vita e lafavola (1914), translated by Grace Jelf, and "A wall," from Smorfle tristi (1909), translated by E. D'Esterre-Stahl; Virgilio Brocchi, "Poor dear Agnes," from I sentieri della vita (1913), translated by Alethea Graham; Giulio Caprin, "Another man's clothes," from Storie d'uomini e difantasmi (1921), translated by Alethea Graham; Luigi Capuana, "The talisman" and "The Pension Garacci," from Passa I'amore (1908), translated by Nancy Laurier; Francesco Chiesa, "The cherries," from Racconti puerili (1920), translated by Grace Jelf; Gabriele D'Annunzio, "Cincinnatus," from Terra vergine (1882), translated by Alethea Graham; Grazia Deledda, "The open door," from Chiaroscuro (1912), translated by Miss E. M. Baker, "A romantic story," from Cattive compagnie (1921), translated by E. D'Esterre Stahl, and "Easter," from I giuochi della vita (1905); Emilio De Marchi, "Carliseppe from the Coronata," translated by Alethea Graham, and "Bureaucracy," from Storie d'ogni colore (1885); Carlo Dossi, "De Consolatione Philosophic," from his Opere (1910-27); Renato Fucini, "The day off," from Le veglie di Neri (1882), translated by Alethea Graham; Giuseppe Giacosa, "A strange guide," from Novelle epaesi valdostani (1886), translated by E. D'Esterre-Stahl; Cosimo Giorgeri-Contri [that is, Giorgieri Contri], "Nerina's house," from La tavola del cambio (1920), translated by Alethea Graham; Guido Gozzano, "Pamela-Film," from L 'ultima traccia (1919), translated by Alethea Graham; Amalia Guglielminetti, "A man of courage," from Anime allo specchio (1915), translated by Grace Jelf; Antonio [that is, Carlo] Linati, "The man who came from Purgatory," from Storie di bestie e difantasmi (1925), translated by Nancy Laurier; Guido Milanesi, "Eva of the metropolis," from Eva marina (1918); Marino Moretti, "Gala night," from Pescifuor d'acqua (1914), translated by Miss M. G. Forgan, and "The old-fashioned gentleman" and "An evening of lies," from Una settimana in Paradiso (1920), translated by Grace Jelf; Ercole Luigi Morselli, "Wealth" and "Quietism," from Favoleper i re d'oggi (1909); Ada Negri, "The servant" and "The promise," from Le solitarie (1917), translated by Alethea Graham; Ugo Ojetti, "The sin and its penance," from Mimi e la gloria (1908), translated by Miss A. B. Hilleary; Alfredo Panzini, "The sparrow's heart," from Piccole storie del mondo grande (1901), translated by Alethea Graham, "The right of the old and the right of the young," from Lefiabe della virtu (1911), translated by Grace Gill-Mark, and "The library mouse," from Novelle d'ambo i sessi (1918); Giovanni Papini, "The beggar of souls," from // tragico quotidiano (1906), "The man who belonged to me," from Parole e sangue (1912), and "A diabolical genius," from Buffonate (1914), all translated by Alethea Graham; Luigi Pirandello, "The fly," "The nurse," "Faith," and "A little wine, " translated by Miss M. Lankester, "By the bedside," translated by Grace Gill-Mark, and "Close friends," translated by Joan M. Wilson, all from Novelle per un
10
Twentieth-Century Italian Literature in English Translation
anno (1922-1928); Carola Prosper!, "The schoolmistress," from Vocazioni (1916), translated by Alethea Graham, and "Lack of gravity," from Lafelicita in gabbia (1922), translated by E. D'Esterre Stahl; Dino Provenzal, "St. Bartholomew's Night" and "Between two trains," from Uomini, donne e diavoli (1919), translated by Alethea Graham; Matilde Serao, "In an old Neapolitan street" and "A nice profession," from La vita e cosi lunga (1918), translated by Grace Jelf; Federigo Tozzi, "The herdsman of Maccarese," from Giovani (1920); Alessandro Varaldo, "The white fly," from Le awenture (1919); Giovanni Verga, "The mark of love," from Vagabondaggio (1887), translated by Miss E. M. Baker, and "Don Candeloro & Co.," from Don Candeloro e C. (1894), translated by E. D'EsterreStahl; Adriano [that is, Luciano] Zuccoli, "Ada and Fosca," from Donne efanciulli (1911), and "An artist," from Primavera (1913), both translated by Grace Jelf. Brock,Brown,USL 3007
LATTUADA, Felice [Lepreziose ridicole (1929). Libretto. English and Italian] Le preziose ridicole: from Moliere's "Les precieuses ridicules": lyric comedy in one act. Music by Felice Lattuada; book by Arturo Rossato; English version by Kathleen de Jaffa. New York: F. Rullman, 1930. 29pp. In a Paris suburb, in 1650, The women Madelon and Cathos, who value artifice over true feeling, suffer a comical vengeance when their rejected lovers send the servants Mascarille and Jodelet to woo them in an exaggerated style. The opera ran for four performances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1930, and has not been revived. NYPL,OCLC 3008
MANTEGAZZA, Paolo [Le leggende deifiori(1890). Selections] The legends of flowers (Leggende de flori). By Mrs Alexander Kennedy; translated from the Italian of Paolo Mantegazza; with frontispiece in colours and twenty-two decorative headpieces by A. Gatlish. London: T. Werner Laurie, 1930. [6], vii-viii, 1-199, [1] pp., [1] leaf of col. plates: ill. Mantegazza (1831-1910) was a very prolific writer on medicine, life sciences, public health, anthropology, folklore, and various topics of popular interest. His most successful book in the English-speaking world was Gli amori degli uomini (1885), translated as The Sexual Relations of Mankind, or Anthropological Studies in the Sexual Relations of Mankind, which was reprinted as recently as 1980 by Coles in Toronto as Sexual Taboos. Mrs. Kennedy's translation of Le leggende dei Jiori was first published in four parts by Foulis between 1908
and 1910. The original material was rearranged and edited for this one-volume edition. KVU
3009 MANTEGAZZA, Paolo [Le leggende deifiori (1890). Selections] The legends of flowers. By Mrs. Alexander Kennedy; translated from the Italian of Paolo Mantegazza; with frontispiece in colours and twenty-two decorative headpieces by A. Gatlish. New York: W. F. Payson, 1930. viii, 199 pp: ill. (part col.) RLIN,OCLC
3010 MONELLI, Paolo [Le scarpe al sole (1921)] Toes up: a chronicle of gay and doleful adventures, of Alpini and mules and wine. Paolo Monelli; translated by Orlo Williams. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1930. xii, 202 pp. Monelli (1891-1984) saw service in World War I, and his experiences gave him the material for Le scarpe al sole (Bologna, Cappelli), his first book. In the slang of the alpini, the soldiers of the mountain regiments, mettere le scarpe al sole, to go toes up, means to die in battle. The reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement judged it "one of the two or three Italian War books ... which has qualities to commend it to a European public, and Mr. Orlo Williams has given us as good a translation of it as can be made." By profession, Monelli was a journalist who wrote for major newspapers such as La Stampa, the Corriere della sera and // resto del carlino. His most important book as a journalist is judged to be Roma 1943 (1945), an account of the wartime crisis of Italian fascism. He also wrote a portrait of Mussolini, Mussolini piccolo borghese (1956), translated as Mussolini: An Intimate Life (Thames and Hudson, 1953), or Mussolini: The Intimate Life of a Demagogue (Vanguard Press, 1954). NYPL,OCLC 3011
MONELLI, Paolo [Le scarpe al sole (1921)] Toes up: a chronicle of gay and doleful adventures, of Alpini and mules and wine. Paolo Monelli; translated by Orlo Williams; with twenty-one illustrations. London: Duckworth, 1930. 224 pp.: ill. OCLC,RLIN
11
Bibliography 1930
3012 NEGRI, Ada [Stella mattutina (1921)] Morning star. Ada Negri; translated from the Italian by Anne Day. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930. [8], 1-158, [2] pp. The writing career of Ada Negri (1870-1945), the noted poet and novelist from Lodi, falls into two main parts. The young Negri qualified as a teacher, and her first book of verse, the socialist-oriented Fatalita (1892), won her a position at the prestigious Scuola normale Agnese in Milan. She later married a small industrialist, and modified her extreme socialist position, but separated from her husband after the birth of their son. Before World War I, Negri led a wandering life, then settled for a time in Switzerland. She returned to Italy at the outbreak of the war, became a hospital volunteer, and went on to lead a more withdrawn life. Throughout both periods she wrote, published, and kept in contact with the Italian literary world. Stella mattutina (Mondadori) is the autobiographical account of her unhappy childhood. The Saturday Review of Literature notes "the translation is good, but the story lacks humor and sturdiness, and in places verges on the morbid." In 1931 Negri was the recipient of the first "Mussolini" literary prize. 7SM,Florida
3013
NITTI, Francesco Fausto Escape: the personal narrative of a political prisoner who was rescued from Lipari, the Fascist "Devil's Island." By Francesco Fausto Nitti; with a preface by the author's uncle, ex-Premier of Italy [Francesco Nitti]; with nine illustrations. New York; London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, the Knickerbocker Press, 1930. [2], iii-xv, [1], 1-267, [5] pp., [8] leaves of plates: ill.; ports. The other escapees were Emilio Lussu, who wrote about his experiences under Fascism in Marcia su Roma e dintorni (1933), translated as Enter Mussolini (1936), and Carlo Rosselli (1899-1937), who was assassinated in France, together with his brother Nello, by Mussolini's hired killers. The murder of Rosselli—he and his brother were stabbed to death—was later used by Moravia to provide part of the plot for // conformista (1951), translated in the same year as The Conformist, and adapted as a highly successful film by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1970. The poet Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996) was Carlo's daughter. Her life and her fragile mental stability were strongly affected by the circumstances surrounding her father's death. The translator is not named. The first Italian edition was only published after the war and the fall of Fascism as Le nostre prigioni e la nostra evasione (1946), whose title echoes that of Silvio Pellico's classic Le mieprigioni (1832). UTL
3014
NOTARI, Umberto [I tre ladri (1908)] The three thieves. Umberto Notari. London: Gerald Howe, 1930. [11], 12-189, [3] pp. Umberto Notari (1878-1950) first published I tre ladri (Milan, Tipografia Virgilio) in 1908. By the time this anonymous English translation was issued the novel had been dramatized for the stage, and also adapted as a film. The reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement wrote: "It is not in the least a sensational story of crime and detection, but in essence a diverting tract upon the theme of universal thieving as the basis for modern society." The comment on the English version was: "... the translator [has not] been able to conceal the fact that rhetorical Italian almost always makes slightly ridiculous English." Nevertheless, the translation was timely, given that the third "thief is a financier and speculator guilty of defrauding the public. An adaptation was filmed in 1954 by Lionello De Felice, starring the great Neapolitan comic actor Toto. Notari was born in Bologna, and followed a career in journalism, settling in Milan in 1902, where he founded five daily papers and sixteen (chiefly technical) periodicals. He established his own publishing company in 1911. BL,GLX
3015 PAPINI, Giovanni [Gli operai della vigna (1929)] Laborers in the vineyard. By Giovanni Papini; translated by Alice Curtayne. 1st ed. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1930. [2], iii-ix, [1], 1-262 pp. Papini (1881-1956) was one of the most important figures in Italian literature and criticism of the first half of the century. His own poetry and fiction achieved some success, but he was best known for his mordant literary and cultural criticism, and for his immensely popular works on Christian topics. He wrote on Christ, the devil, Saint Augustine, and also on Dante. His relationship with the later phases of Fascism was uneasy, despite the honours—a professorship, nomination to the Italian Academy—it afforded him. He continued working until his death, despite a paralysing ailment which progressively robbed him of the use of his hands and, eventually, his voice. He was the first recipient of the Penna d'oro award for lifetime achievement in literature, but the award came after his death. In Gli operai della vigna (Vallecchi) Papini's "labourers" are leaders, saints and artists, from Cssar to Pius XI, and from Virgil to Manzoni. MTRL,UTL,YRK
3016
PAPINI, Giovanni [// tragico quotidiano (1906). Ilpilota cieco (1907)] Life and myself. By Giovanni Papini; translated
12
Twentieth-Century Italian Literature in English Translation
from the Italian by Dorothy Emmrich. New York: Brentano's, c!930. [10], 3-241, [7] pp. Brown,MTRL,UTL
3017
PERRI, Francesco [Emigrant! (192$)] The other land. By Francesco Perri; translated from the Italian by J. Lewis May. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1930. [4], 5-287, [1] pp. First translated in 1929 for Brentano's by Charles and Marjorie Tutt as Enough of Dreams. UTL
3018 PIRANDELLO, Luigi [Vestiregli ignudi (1923)] Naked (Vestire gl'ignudi): a drama in three acts. By Luigi Pirandello; translated by Arthur Livingston, in Chief contemporary dramatists. Third series. Selected and edited by Thomas H Dickinson. Boston [etc.]: Houghton Mifflin Company, c!930, pp. 337-382. Vestire gli ignudi was first published in Pirandello's Maschere nude, v. 11 (Bemporad). This translation was first published by Button in 1923 in Each in His Own Way, and Two Other Plays. The nursemaid Ersilia Drei, who has attempted suicide, is able to endure life only because she has clothed her existence in lies. She did not try to kill herself because her naval officer fiance had left her, but because her sexual relationship with her employer, the consul Grotti, had led to the death of his baby daughter who was in her care. The writer Nota, who takes her in, is only interested in her story as material for a novel. When her fiance Franco returns, contrite, she rejects him, and we learn that he has only come back because his new fiancee has turned against him on reading Ersilia's story, published by Nota. All three men turn against her to protect their own interests and self-images. What had seemed to be a sadly romantic story has become sordid, and Ersilia, seeing no way open to restore her shattered self-respect, kills herself. The first London production, in 1927, featured Charles Laughton. Vestire gli ignudi (Naked) was filmed in 1953 by Marcello Pagliero, with the actors Eleonora Rossi Drago and Pierre Brasseur (Ennio Flaiano worked on the screenplay), and again in 1977 by Luigi Filippo D'Amico. UTL
3019
SVEVO, Italo [La coscienza di Zeno (1923)] Confessions of Zeno. Italo Svevo; translated by Beryl de Zoete. New York; London: Putnam,
1930. [4], 5-412, [2] pp. Svevo (1861-1928), a lifelong heavy smoker, died unexpectedly, after suffering a broken femur in a car accident, before he could see the success of the English translations of his works, including Confessions of Zeno, his story of a middle-aged Triestine businessman who decides to subject himself to the new and revolutionary treatment, psychoanalysis, out of concern with his addiction to tobacco. Umberto Saba recalled in Prose that when Svevo, refused a cigarette on his death bed, became aware that he had already smoked his very last cigarette, he stopped being afraid of death. "Dying," he said to his family, "is far easier than writing a novel." He is also reported by his daughter to have said, "This one would definitely have been the last cigarette." Shortly thereafter, his heart stopped. La coscienza di Zeno (Cappelli), his psychoanalytic novel, was not an immediate success, but by 1925, with the support of Joyce, Larbaud, and the young Montale, Svevo's position as a major writer was established. The Confessions of Zeno has seldom been out of print since 1930. A contemporary American reviewer commented that it was "by a very long way the most interesting novel that has been published this year, and also by a long way more interesting than any published last year." The self-confident comment of the Times Literary Supplement'?, reviewer is interesting, given Svevo's present stature as a modern novelist: "The original is written in a styleless, incorrect and clumsy Italian, which very much detracts from its success as an Italian novel: the translator has wisely not attempted to reproduce Svevo's style, but has produced an easy, readable version in excellent English. The result is to improve the book considerably and to make it a better novel in English than it is in Italian, particularly since its somewhat inconsequential, whimsical musings are quite in the English tradition.... What redeems the novel is not its psychological penetration, for that is really quite small, but the portrait it builds up of a man who, in spite of an almost incredibly gelatinous moral fibre, was, and is, sympathetic in his benevolence and his humorous capacity for revealing his ridiculous processes of mind in retrospect." In 1972, Richard Oilman, in an article for the New York Times Book Review, wrote: "I've become aware that Svevo, or at least The Confessions of Zeno, is being discovered by young people. I have even turned a few of my own students on to him and am happy to watch the cult beginning to grow, no statistical threat to Vonnegut's or Brautigan's at the moment, but a good deal more tough-minded than those. Like the present revival of interest in Proust and Kafka, something quite noticeable on campuses, the rediscovery of Svevo reflects, I think, a cultural moment when enthusiasm for action is low and revolutionary fervor has trouble finding a basis. At such a time many quick and dissatisfied minds turn towards works that celebrate the imagination and, to put it unabashedly, rely on it instead of on political or sociological possibility." Perhaps, as Svevo's narrator declares, it is true that: "The world would certainly be less disagreeable if there were more people like me in it." LC,USL 3020
SVEVO, Italo [La coscienza di Zeno (1923)] Confessions of Zeno. Italo Svevo; translated from
13
Bibliography 1931 the Italian by Beryl de Zoete. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1930. [6], 3-406, [2] pp. LC,OCLC
3021
SVEVO, Italo [Una burla riuscita (1928)] The hoax. By Italo Svevo; translated from the Italian, with an introduction, by Beryl de Zoete. 1st ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, c!930. [4], 5-166 pp. This translation was first published in 1929 by the Hogarth Press. UTL 3022
SVEVO, Italo [La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla ed altri scritti (1929)] The nice old man and the pretty girl, and other stories. Italo Svevo; translated from the Italian by L. Collison-Morley; [introductory notes by Eugenio Montale]. London: Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1930. [6], vii, [1],9-162, [2] pp. This volume, published by Morreale, was the first collection of Svevo's fiction to appear after his untimely death. He had, since his retirement, and with the encouragement of the warm, if delayed, critical reception of Zeno, returned to writing with renewed energy, and had completed several novellas and short stories. In addition to the title story, the pieces included are "Generous wine" ('Vino generosd"}, "The mother" ('La madre"), and "The old, old man" ("// Vecchione"). An Italian critic has referred to Svevo as "the only great representative that the European grand literary tradition of the beginning of the century has found in Italy." The reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement wrote: "It may well be admitted ... that the importance of Svevo's work lies in what [Eugenio] Montale calls 'the bare and passionate crudity of the experience, in the rigorously home-grown and independent colours in which he was able and determined to clothe it.' In translation, unfortunately, the latter qualities tend to disappear, for not only is Zeno's language different in intonation from Mr. Collison-Morley's impeccable English, but the effect of contrast with tradition—very strong in the original—grows pale for English readers who are far more conversant than are Italians with the literary attitude of whimsical self-exposure." This comment provides a contrasting view to that on The Confessions of Zeno [above]. KVU,UTL
3023
VERGANI, Orio [lo, povero negro (1928)] Poor Nigger. By Orio Vergani; translated from the Italian by W. W. Hobson. 1st ed. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merril Company, c!930. [8], 11-306 pp. Vergani (1899-1960) was a distinguished journalist who was equally comfortable dealing with intellectual matters and reporting on the Tour de France bicycle race. Vergani's literary range was equally impressive, and was based on a thorough literary education and a love of writing, lo, povero negro (Treves) is the story of an orphan Senegalese boy, trained as a prize-fighter, who battles his way to France and the United States, and to a bout with the reigning world champion. He is supposed to throw the fight in the third round but, taunted by his white mistress, fights to win, and thereby becomes an outcast in America, destitute, alcoholic and, in the end, suicidal. It is Vergani's only translated novel, though his 1939 Bassoprofondo won that year's Viareggio prize. GLX,NYPL 3024
VERGANI, Orio [lo, povero negro (1928)] Poor Nigger. By Orio Vergani; translated from the Italian by W. W. Hobson. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1930. 288 pp. OCLCJBELF
1931
3101 Anthology of contemporary Italian prose. Compiled, translated and edited by Francis M. Guercio, B.A. (Hons.). London: Eric Partridge at the Scholartis Press, 1931. [4],v-vi, 1-197, [5] pp. The anthology includes short stories or extracts from the following works: Riccardo Bacchelli, "The two violins" from Bella Italia (1928); Massimo Bontempelli, "Straw and hay" from La donna dei miei sogni (1925); Emilio Cecchi, "Cambridge" from Pesci rossi (1920); Piero Jahier, "Criticism" from Con me e con gli alpini (1920); Ada Negri, "The story of Lady Augusta" from Stella mattutina (1921); Ugo Ojetti, "Einstein's face," "Mussolini speaks," and "Pirandello as an ancient Chinaman" from Cose viste, primo tomo (1927); Alfredo Panzini, "Father and son" from Piccole storie del mondo grande (1901); Giovanni Papini, "A half-portrait" and "The discovery of evil" from Un uomofmito (1925); Luigi Pirandello, "The blessing" and "The starling and the Angel One-hundred-and-one" from Novelleper un anno, v. 8 (1925); Renato Serra, "Selfexamination of a man of letters" from Esame di coscienza di un letterato (1916); Ardengo Soffici, "The log-book," "The two
14
Twentieth-Century Italian Literature in English Translation
artichokes," and "A storm" from Giornale di bordo (1915), and "The tour" from Bif§zf+ 18. Simultaneity. Chimismi Uriel (1915); Manfredo Vanni, "The Rule of St. Francis" from Cast da novelle (1915). This collection seems to have been put together with an eye to its usefulness in teaching. Orlo Williams, himself a translator, notes, for The Criterion, that: "it should be useful to all students of Italian literature at the stage when they have come to read without too much difficulty, but need guidance and assistance in their reading." Guercio was, at that time, a professor at Manchester University, and he provided a useful general introductory survey. The reviewer for Punch did find some fault with the translations, commenting: "I regret the renderings of Italian dialect by English patois which itself requires a footnote. An occasional phrase left in the original makes for raciness; and English dialect... is only acceptable in the mouths of Englishmen." UTL
3102
BORSA, Mario [La cascina sulPo (1920)] The farm on the River Po. By Mario Borsa; translated by L. E. Marshall. London: Ernest Benn, 1931. [6], 7-252 pp. Borsa (1870-1952) was a journalist and all-round man of letters whose writing career covered sixty years. A lifelong Anglophile, the Milanese Borsa served as the Milan correspondent for the Times from 1918 to 1940. In addition to his own more than thirty books (many of them on England and English culture and society), he published translations of works by Shaw, Sinclair Lewis, and Frank Harris. His novels were written in a naturalistic style comparable to that of Zola or Dreiser. MTRL
3103
GRAF, Arturo [7/