Elio Vittorini - Translation American Literature Under Fascism

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Although Vittorini and Bompiani had to be careful in their choice of texts to avoid the disapproval of the state censor, they traduced an impressive amount of American novels. All manuscripts had to be submitted to the Ministero di Cultura Popolare (ministry of popular culture, also known by its abbreviation Minculpop) for ideological vetting before publication.

Vittorini had to deal with Minculpop also when he was to finish his greatest antifascist literary project, an anthology of North America Literature: Americana.

- Americana

Vittorini’s anthology is by now legendary for its emblematic value. It’s the best-known episode of literary censorship under Fascism and the climax of this highly productive period of translations.

- the anthology was assembled in 1941

- all the short stories and novellas have been translated by famous Italian writers like Pavese, Moravia and Montale.

- Vittorini divided the material into 9 chronological sections

- And wrote introducing notes for each section

Minculpop considered Vittorini’s editorial commentary provocative and seized immediately the first edition of Americana. Nevertheless, one year later in 1942, after negotiation with Minculpop, Valentino Bompiani secured a compromise and Americana was reissued without Vittorini’s “political” commentary.

It’s interesting to notice how Minculpop did not object to the translations as much as to their ideological content: in fact those commentaries were (quite) culturally subversive, for the first time in a more explicit way. Anyway, also without his commentaries, Vittorini achieved to communicate with the readers through the myth of America, the land of the free, amplifying the horizons of the restrictive and racial cultural ideology of the regime. Collectively, those texts created support for models of modernity, borrowing the voice of foreign writers and bringing up themes from another point of view. Americana is therefore emblematic for how the translation’s subversive force worked: indirectly, covert and subtly. Moreover (“But above all”?), the anthology represents Vittorini’s fervent and resolute ideological opposition to Fascism: it showed Italian readers that literature was not necessarily restricted to what Fascism wanted it to be.

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