ITALIAN COUNTER-CULTURES and TRANSLATION DURING the ECONOMIC MIRACLE by JAMIE LYNN RICHARDS a DISSERTATION P
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LA VITA AGRA-DOLCE: ITALIAN COUNTER-CULTURES AND TRANSLATION DURING THE ECONOMIC MIRACLE by JAMIE LYNN RICHARDS A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of Comparative Literature and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2014 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Jamie Lynn Richards Title: La vita agra-dolce: Italian Counter-Cultures and Translation during the Economic Miracle This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of Comparative Literature by: Massimo Lollini Chairperson Kenneth Calhoon Core Member Regina Psaki Core Member Lawrence Venuti Core Member Nathalie Hester Institutional Representative and Kimberly Andrews Espy Vice President for Research and Innovation; Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded June 2014 ii © 2014 Jamie Lynn Richards iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Jamie Lynn Richards Doctor of Philosophy Department of Comparative Literature June 2014 Title: La vita agra-dolce: Italian Counter-Cultures and Translation during the Economic Miracle My dissertation research focuses on Italian literature of the 1960s, specifically translations from the American counterculture and poetry of the neo-avantgarde. Through a detailed study of three specific translational moments—Fernanda Pivano’s translations of Allen Ginsberg’s counterculture poetry, Luciano Bianciardi’s translation of Henry Miller’s controversial Tropic of Cancer, and the neo-avantgarde poets Edoardo Sanguineti and Alfredo Giuliani’s translations of British high modernist writers like James Joyce and T.S. Eliot—I explore the literary-historical period of the post-World War II economic boom in Italy. While recent translation studies scholarship focusing on Italy has addressed the Fascist period and the upsurge of translations under censorship, my aim is to build upon a similar idea of translation as cultural resistance in order to examine the relationship between translated and original texts during a period where the explosion of industry and prosperity led intellectuals to reconsider the ideological function and purpose of art. My study will be framed within polysystems theory as developed by Itamar Even-Zohar, which reconfigures the organization of literatures to include all the literary works produced in a given language (i.e., to include translations). My notion of translation is informed by the position continually theorized by Lawrence iv Venuti, that is of translation not as an equivalent reproduction of a source text but a type of interpretative writing that radically transforms a text, placing it within an entirely new literary, linguistic, social, and historical context. While the polysystems approach is well- established within translation studies, I hope to contribute to Italian literary scholarship by combining pivotal author-based and translator-based case studies. Against the view of closed national literatures and the exclusion of translation, my revisionary approach will illuminate the role of translation in the formation of cultural and literary identity. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Jamie Lynn Richards GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene University of Iowa, Iowa City Scripps College, Claremont, CA DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, Comparative Literature, 2014, University of Oregon Master of Fine Arts, Literary Translation, 2004, University of Iowa Bachelor of Arts, English, 2002, Scripps College AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Italian literature Translation studies World literature Modernism Avant-Garde Marxism PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Teaching Fellow, University of Oregon, 2005-2014. GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Global Oregon Translation Studies Graduate Research Award, 2013 University of Oregon Doctoral Research Fellowship, 2011-12 Looren Translation Subsidy (Pro Helvetia, Switzerland), 2011 Dalkey Archive Press Translation Fellowship, 2009-2010 Beall Educational Opportunity Award, University of Oregon, 2006 vi ALTA (American Literary Translators Association) Travel Fellowship, 2004 PUBLICATIONS: Richards, Jamie. “A Review of Textbooks in Translation Studies.” Teaching Translation, ed. Lawrence Venuti (Modern Language Association Options for Teaching series, forthcoming). Richards, Jamie. “The Legal and Economic Conditions of Translators in the 20th Century,” with Susan Bernofsky. The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. Volume 5, ed. Lawrence Venuti (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Richards, Jamie. “Gianni Celati and ‘Plain’ Storytelling in Contemporary Italy.” World Literature Today (July 2011). Richards, Jamie. “Fra ideali umanistici e realtà postumanistiche: l’immagine dell’umano in Meduse [Between Humanist Ideals and Post-Human Realities: The Image of the Human in Giancarlo Pastore’s Meduse].” Annali d’Italianistica (2008). vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We all have our giants, whether we stand on their shoulders, or call out to them through desolate intervals of time. In addition to the support of all the faculty and staff of the Department of Comparative Literature, I want to give special thanks to Massimo Lollini for guiding this project to completion, and for his flexibility and availability. I also want to thank Gina Psaki for her exacting attention, Nathalie Hester for her keen awareness of blind spots, Ken Calhoon for his intellectual magnanimity, and Lawrence Venuti for his remarkable availability and for being so simpatico. I also want to recognize the invaluable institutional support awarded me by the University of Oregon Doctoral Research Fellowship from the Graduate School, as well as the assistance of the Biblioteca Riccardo e Fernanda Pivano in Milan. Thanks go to the present and past colleagues have read and commented on this work, especially Chet Lisiecki and Emily McGinn. I’d like to thank my mother, who researched down to the last detail before doing anything, and my father, my original giant, and my sisters for being such an amazing support team. And to Χαράλαµπος, for balance: παν µέτρον άριστον. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION: ITALIAN COUNTER-CULTURES AND TRANSLATION DURING THE ECONOMIC MIRACLE .................................................................... 1 Chapters ................................................................................................................. 19 II. “MAGARI AL DI LÀ DELLE LORO PAROLE”: FERNANDA PIVANO AND THE TRANSLATION OF AMERICA ....................................................................... 23 III. LUCIANO BIANCIARDI AND TRANSLATION AS LABOR .......................... 68 IV. MODERNISM TRANSLATED: A GENEALOGY OF THE NEO-AVANTGARDE ................................................................................................ 106 V. CONCLUSION: THE NEW AMERICANISM ..................................................... 139 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 148 ix CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: ITALIAN COUNTER-CULTURES AND TRANSLATION DURING THE ECONOMIC MIRACLE You may recall the iconic sequence in Federico Fellini’s film La dolce vita, in which the buxom American actress Sylvia wades childlike through the Trevi Fountain. Marcello, the Italian tabloid journalist and sometime ladies’ man, gazes at her with manifest desire as she revels in the water oblivious to his attentions. The moment she notices him, she trickles water on his forehead, the sound drops out, and night turns to dawn. This baptismal scene inaugurates the Italian awakening to the future. While the film exposes cosmopolitan decadence in a Rome suddenly plunged into modernity, the encounter between the world-weary Marcello and the giddy Sylvia mirrors Italy’s encounter with the United States, an encounter whose impact, as the fountain scene suggests, is by no means reciprocal. La dolce vita caricatures the Italy of the economic miracle—or post-war boom— whose scope has been likened to the Industrial Revolution in Victorian England. These dramatic changes also set the stage for a major shift in Italy’s relationship with the Anglophone world and the United States in particular. While Italian film came to dominate canons of world cinema, the relationship of influence was mostly the reverse where literature was concerned—the influx of translation from foreign languages (and increasingly from English) during Fascism only accelerated after the war to reach the high levels of today. Thus, while the United States translates a notoriously small amount of foreign texts—around 3%, not only of fiction, but also non-fiction and scientific 1 material—Italy is more characteristic of many countries in the world, where translations account for about 25% of its textual production and of those, 50-60% are from English (Lottman 1991:S5). This reflects the literary prestige of English as well as its prominence and ubiquity as the world’s lingua franca. These numbers serve as concrete reminders not only of globalism, especially in the form of Anglo-American cultural dominance, but also as ciphers for the sort of influence that English ultimately wields. For Italy, French was the literary language to contend with and draw on at the beginning of the twentieth century. During the subsequent Fascist era (1922-1943), English began to take over as the primary language of influence.