Translating Scandinavia

TRANSLATING SCANDINAVIA SCANDINAVIAN LITERATURE IN ITALIAN AND GERMAN TRANSLATION 1918-1945 ABSTRACTS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ROME 20-21 OCTOBER 2016 Ingrid Basso, Catholic University of Milan Søren Kierkegaard in the Italian anti-Fascist Propaganda of the 1930s The paper I would like to present focuses on the first Italian translation (from the German edition by Christoph Schrempf, 1909) of Søren Kierkegaard’s polemical newspaper Øjeblikket (1855) by the Italian rationalist philosopher and politician from Milan, Antonio Banfi (1886-1957). The choice of translating the still controversial writing Øjeblikket – L’ora Atti d’accusa al cristianesimo del Regno di Danimarca (Editrice Doxa, Milano-Roma 1931) is pretty strange, since in Italy until 1914 Kierkegaard was considered more as a writer, a man of letters, than a philosopher. Namely, as Nicola Abbagnano wrote in 1950, «in Italy the first manifestations of interest for Kierkegaard had a literary character and they arose from the desire to understand the work of some foreign artists, particularly Ibsen» (Kierkegaard in Italy, in «Meddelelser fra Søren Kierkegaard Selskabet», 1950, 2, nn. 3-4, p. 49). The very first Kierkegaard’s work translated into Italian was indeed a fragmentary version of Enten-Eller in 1907 – the short writing Den Ulykkeligste, in the Florentine review «Leonardo», translated by the Danish Knud Ferlov (1881-1977), a friend of Giovanni Papini, director of «Leonardo»: this produced a misunderstanding in the interpretation of the Dane’s thought. This work was considered only from a literary point of view that gave shape to the origin of Kierkegaard’s studies in Italy. Immediately after Den Ulykkeligste, appeared actually writings like Forførerens Dagbog, In vino veritas, Diapsalmata in 1910, Ægteskabets æsthetiske Gyldighed in 1912 and in 1913 De umiddelbare erotiske Stadier eller det Musicalsk-Erotiske, all “aesthetical” writings. Then, from 1914 to the beginning of the 1930s there is in Italy a kind of stagnation in Kierkegaardian studies and suddenly, in 1931, the philosopher Antonio Banfi translates Øjeblikket. There are various interpretations about the Italian interest in Kierkegaard’s polemics in these years, but almost all of them trace this interest back to the Italian philosophical and political situation of the 1930s. The philosopher Eugenio Garin (Kierkegaard in Italia, «Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia», 1973, 28, pp. 454-455) speaks openly about the translation of Kierkegaard’s newspaper as a kind of comment on the agreement between Mussolini and the pope Pio XI ratified by the Patti Lateranensi in 1929, and he mentions the name of the journalist, theologian and philosopher Giuseppe Gangale (1898-1978), who had recently converted to Protestantism. He wrote indeed the first preface to Banfi’s translation and collaborated with him on several publishing initiatives. Gangale, member of the Baptist Church and since 1922 the leading force of the weekly «Conscientia», had assumed a more and more anti-Fascist position and during his collaboration with «Conscientia», Banfi also wrote about Kierkegaard in some articles of 1926. Øjeblikket will be in Italy the only work of Kierkegaard that has been translated in full and that will have a second and a third edition. The image of Kierkegaard derived from this work was that of a revolutionary and individualist spirit, who attacks the institution of the Church. Ingrid Basso is fixed term research assistant in Theoretical Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy of the Catholic University of Milano, Italy. She also teaches Philosophy of Communication for the Master degree program in Digital Asset and Media Management (G.E.C.O.) at the Catholic University of Brescia, Italy. Her main research interests lie in the thought of Søren Kierkegaard connected with the decline of the German Idealism. She has been PhD research fellow at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen and at the Howard V. and Edna H. Hong Kierkegaard Library of the St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota - USA. Besides several articles in English and Italian, she is the author of the monographs: Kierkegaard uditore di Schelling (Mimesis, Milano 2008), Søren Kierkegaard e la metafisica di Aristotele (AlboVersorio, Milano 2013) and published the Italian critical edition of Kierkegaard’s notes from F.W.J. Schelling’s course on Philosophy of Revelation in Berlin 1841-1842 (Bompiani, Milano 2008). She also collaborates with several Italian publishing houses as translator from Danish and Norwegian literature. Bruno Berni, Italian Institute of Germanic Studies «Really an Ultima Thule»: Giuseppe Gabetti and Scandinavian Studies in Italy In April 1932, the Italian Institute of Germanic Studies was opened with Giuseppe Gabetti (1886-1948) as its director. Gabetti was a professor of German literature in Rome and the choice seemed almost inevitable, but unique was the strategy to expand the activities beyond Germany: in his short speech Gabetti makes specific references to northern cultures and in the first issue of the magazine «Studi Germanici», in 1935, the program is justified by the fact that «the interest in German culture has already a long tradition in Italy», but «of course things are worse with regard to the other peoples of the North, made even more distant by the limited knowledge we have of their languages [...] If we exclude, [...] Ibsen’s and Björnson’s plays and – a little of − Strindberg, and some works of fiction − Jacobsen and Lagerlöf − all the rest is really an Ultima Thule». Gabetti’s awareness from the beginning − the task of working with Nordic literature − is unique among professors in German literature of his generation and also in the later ones. But taking a look at his production, we can see that in the mid-twenties he began working with Jens Peter Jacobsen and other Northern authors in essays and translations. For more than a decade, he stopped in fact writing on German authors and quickly translated all Jacobsen’s works and published two essays on Gustaf Fröding. Indeed throughout Gabetti’s life the only translations he made were those of Jacobsen. From 1926 until his death in 1948, we find few contributions on German literature, many projects on the Nordic literatures. Gabetti had the intention to mediate the little known and very fascinating Nordic literatures. His work with Nordic literatures, even before they became an academic subject in Italy, was a long and intense mediation activity. Bruno Berni (1959) is a research manager at Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici, has published essays on Danish literature and translated a large number of classic and modern writers, fiction as well as poetry, such as Ludvig Holberg, Hans Christian Andersen, Karen Blixen, Peter Høeg, Inger Christensen, Henrik Nordbrandt, Morten Søndergaard. For his translations he was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2004, the Danish Translation Award in 2009 and the Italian Translation Award in 2013. Massimo Ciaravolo, University of Florence The First Edition of August Strindberg’s Chamber Plays in Italian (1944): Relay Translation and Cultural Reconstruction after Fascism The first Italian edition of the major Swedish playwright August Strindberg’s chamber plays (1907) came out in 1944, thanks to the efforts of the new and short-lived publishing house Rosa e Ballo, which operated in Milan while the city was still devastated by World War II. The translator and introducer of this fundamental contribution to Modernism was the Germanist Alessandro Pellegrini. He translated Strindberg from Emil Schering’s German standard edition of Strindberg’s Werke. Deutsche gesamte Ausgabe. In addition, the introductions Pellegrini wrote in each of the five booklets (the four chamber plays and the play Easter) were rewritten to become, always in 1944, the first Italian monograph about Strindberg: Il poeta del nichilismo. In my paper I would like first of all to highlight the importance of Strindberg’s and Schering’s collaboration with reference to the Swedish writer’s clearly transnational agenda. When Strindberg became, through Schering, part of the German literary and dramatic canon at the beginning of the twentieth century, more of his works, especially his late and more experimental plays, could reach Italy. Furthermore, I would like to give evidence that Pellegrini’s translation is based on Schering’s German translation, using Strindberg’s first chamber play, Storm (Oväder, Wetterleuchten, Lampi) as an example. Finally, I would like to focus on Pellegrini’s relevant work of interpretation in the paratext, by which Strindberg’s radical bourgeois pessimism can explain the present condition of mankind. Massimo Ciaravolo is associate professor of Scandinavian Languages and Literature at the University of Florence. He has published books on Hjalmar Söderberg as a literary critic (1994) and on the reception of the flâneur among the Finland-Swedish writers at the beginning of the 20th century (2000); he has also written on this generation of writers in Finlands svenska litteratur (2000, new edition 2014). He has co-edited the anthologies L’uso della storia nelle letterature nordiche. Le lingue nordiche fra storia e attualità (2011), Forms of Autobiographical Narrations in Scandinavian Literature (2015), and edited Strindberg across Borders (2016). He has published several scholarly articles on major Scandinavian writers such as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Herman Bang, Hjalmar Söderberg, Knut Hamsun, Sigbjørn Obstfelder, Edith Södergran and Runar Schild, and on their representation of the experience of modernity at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. He has also written on the Swedish literature of the Holocaust (Cordelia Edvardson and Annika Thor). He translates Scandinavian literature into Italian. Sara Culeddu, University of Florence Giacomo Prampolini, Translator of Scandinavian Literature and his Storia Universale della Letteratura My proposal for the International Conference «Translating Scandinavia» concerns the writer and intellectual Giacomo Prampolini, who, starting in the Twenties, was a multi-faceted figure in the Italian publishing milieu, both as a translator and a mediator.

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