LA VITA AGRA-DOLCE: ITALIAN COUNTER-CULTURES AND TRANSLATION DURING THE ...

170 Pages·2014·0.78 MB·English

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

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© 2014 Jamie Lynn Richards
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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
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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.

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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

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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).

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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.

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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

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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
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