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John Benjamins Publishing Company This is a contribution from Transfiction. Research into the realities of translation fiction. Edited by Klaus Kaindl and Karlheinz Spitzl. © 2014. John Benjamins Publishing Company This electronic file may not be altered in any way. The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be used by way of offprints, for their personal use only. Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible to members (students and staff) only of the author’s/s’ institute, it is not permitted to post this PDF on the open internet. For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com). Please contact [email protected] or consult our website: www.benjamins.com Tables of Contents, abstracts and guidelines are available at www.benjamins.com From La dolce vita to La vita agra The image of the Italian literary translator as an illusory, rebellious and precarious intellectual Giovanni Nadiani University of Bologna at Forlì Introduction In the late 1990s, Franco Berardi discussed the new jobs that had arisen due to the digitalization of society. Through “fragments” collected in 2001, Berardi (2001a) identified the living standards of millions of “cognitive workers”, “cognitive pro- letarians”, or “bio-workers” of the tertiary sector relating to the imagination and circulation of ideas, languages and symbols: Publishing, media, software, design, real estate and financial services, etc. (cf. Fumagalli 2010: 7). Berardi precisely identified the role of translators as knowledge workers by stating: The space-time globalization of labour is made possible within the Net: global labour is an endless recombination of myriad fragments producing, elaborating, distributing and decoding signs and informational units of all kinds. Labour is broken down into fragments that are recombined into the continuous flux of the Net […] Every semiotic segment produced by the information worker must meet and match every innumerable other semiotic segment in order to form the combinatory frame of the info-commodity, semiocapital, […] the worker can be reached anywhere and anytime from any point in the world, and can be called to reconnect to the labor flux […] The mobile phone is the tool that makes the connection possible between the needs of the productive cycle of the capital and the mobilized living labour, so as to have the worker’s whole day at disposal and yet pay only for the worker’s fragments of labour time.1 (Berardi 2001b: 78f) These workers represent the paradigm shift of non-material labour that literally embodies “bio-work” or “human capital”, in the sense that people’s actual bodies are the “fixed capital”, the vehicle by which wealth is created for the worker. The means of production they put on the market is themselves (cf. Revelli 2010: 97–104). 1. All translations from Italian are my own unless otherwise attributed. © 2014. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 128 Giovanni Nadiani Such a revolution of labour and work has been taking place for the last twenty years and has also affected translation (cf. Cronin 2003). Nowadays, translators are mostly doing piecemeal work within the advanced field of linguistics and engineering. In this context, if on the one hand the language and engineering industry itself is devising more and more sophisticated tools in order to facilitate and speed up, that is to maximize within a given time frame, the work of the literary translator as well (and not just the work of scientific-technical and commercial translators) and not necessarily to the detriment of the translation’s literary quality (cf. Nadiani 2009), on the other hand, the image of the literary translator as derived from a number of significant studies by translation scholars is still too strongly affected by a “generalist and culturalistic” approach that is not supported by rigorous sta- tistical analysis of the professionals’ actual working conditions and of the practical impact of their activity on a given cultural area. The best information on the ways in which the translators’ working conditions are rapidly changing – also in consideration of the under-investigated forms of agency, which include the new modes of production and distribution (see for example Amazon) – seems to be still provided by the newsletters and websites of the various professional associations2 or net- works of associations such as the Conseil Européen des Associations de Traducteurs Littéraires (CEATL).3 We believe that the established importance of translators as agents “responsible for major historical, literary and cultural transitions/changes/ innovations through translation” (Milton & Bandia 2009: 1) – a concept that dates back to T oury’s idea of intellectuals as “agents of change” (Toury 2002: 151), which is certainly valid in principle but still remains to be proven on the basis of robust verifiable data – or of the role that translated literature, for example, plays within a given literary system (cf. Even-Zohar 1978, 1982) are today absolutely exagger- ated, in consideration of other forms of agency whose impact and penetration force can count on much more powerful media. In depth, empirical and statisti- cal studies are especially scarce that can justify the idea of literary translators as unparalleled mediators across languages and cultures. As far as we are concerned, we have attempted to empirically show how difficult it is to practically assess the impact of literary translation objects on a given cultural area and the actual role played in this by the respective agents (cf. Nadiani 2011). This was done taking as a starting point the adaptation to the field of translation of the concept of culture 2. For Italy see the newly founded STRADE (Sindacato Traduttori Editoriali - National Association of Literary Translators), which has already managed to launch a fiscal and legal vademecum which protects translators (http://www.traduttoristrade.it/vademecum/). 3. See for example a comparison of literary translators’ wages across Europe (http://www.ceatl. eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/surveyit.pdf). © 2014. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved From La dolce vita to La vita agra 129 as a set of permeable “shared habitats of meaning” (Hannerz 2001: 28f), which eternally intersect with, contaminate and fertilize each other, and on the basis of theoretical and operative models created by Mudersbach (2002) and subsequently by Floros (2002). Even so, the image of the literary translator – what has just been observed despite this specific mutation – has kept its particular “aura”, which remains unexplained given the working conditions of Italian translators: Very short turnaround times and relatively low remuneration typical of self-employed or freelance workers.4 One reason for this “aura” is explained by how translators are viewed in the collective imagination. They are considered the key to the mystery of all that is foreign, strange and different in a country that still lacks sufficient knowledge of foreign languages even at the important levels of politics, economics and public administration. Another reason is to be found in the prestigious and high-level translation work that has been carried out over the centuries by a number of eminent intellectuals, philosophers, writers and poets, such as Umberto Eco, Claudio Magris, Antonio Tabucchi and Gianni Celati just to mention a few illustrious members of the Italian cultural élite who are well-known on the contemporary international scene. With a hint of rebellious anarchism and bohemian decadence, an important contribution to shaping the collective image of the translator in Italy – translators most often being women – has been conveyed by the work, life and fortunes of a unique and unconventional author: Luciano Bianciardi. The translator-intellectual’s “Hard Life” in the metropolis The novel The character of Moraldo in Fellini’s film I vitelloni (1953) was created, incidentally, by two famous people coming from rural towns. Federico Fellini (1920–1993) and Ennio Flaiano (1910–1972) left the provinces to go to the big city, which was com- mon for many Italian intellectuals of the Fifties. It embodies an aspect of the phe- nomenon of internal migration that had occurred over the two decades following WWII: From South to North, rural to urban areas, and from the mountains to the plains towards highly centralized industrial centres of production. Mostly young graduates, teachers and journalists moved towards the eminent cities of Milan and 4. In this respect, see the information available at the heading “Documenti” on the STRADE website (http://www.traduttoristrade.it/#). © 2014. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 130 Giovanni Nadiani Rome seeking careers in diverse professions ranging from cinema and televison to politics, journalism, advertising and publishing, etc. In their regions and home- towns many of them were socially very active with close ties to the labour move- ment and organisations passionately spreading culture and civic learning in their respective communities (cf. Ferretti 2009: 7ff). The unconventional, Tuscan-born rebel Bianciardi, after years of working as a middle school English teacher and as a high school history and philosophy teacher, as a library director, a contribu- tor to local newspapers and a cultural activist in the small-town areas (which he ironically referred to as “Kansas City”), headed North to Milan where “you really work” (Bianciardi 1957: 107) with a sense of disillusionment and failure relating to his experience with party “intellectuals” and their language5, following the Ribolla mine disaster (1954) in which 43 of those labourers he had fought for died. Bianciardi arrived in Milan in the years of the so-called economic boom or “miracle”. These were years full of remarkable changes which irrevocably established the mass consumption society.

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