The Italian Vogue

In spite of civil curtailments, and taking advantage of that mixture of illiteracy and carelessness on one side, and connivance on the other, which existed among cultural officialdom, there was in Italy a flourishing of translations from the American since at least the middle ’30s and as late as the beginning of the war, and after; and it was in that period that some writers (most obviously perhaps Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese) took inspiration from Americans who were being translated, or whom they were translating themselves.¹ In this sense the course of new Italian fiction paralleled already many years ago certain trends which existed also in other countries: the attraction, that is, for the American Manner, running all the way from interest to infatuation. It is possible that that development may have reached now its saturation point and the beginning of its decline. Looking back to the pre-war years we realize that in the specific case of Italy it was of some importance that the country should have kept relatively in touch with the rest of the literary world even at a time when the official line would have been the enforcement of what one of the most ludicrous phrases of our century described as “cultural autarchy.” The maintenance of those contacts was almost exclusively the merit of certain writers and of their personal faith and efforts. They kept their own end of the channel as open as they could, with scarce encouragement at the time from the other end, and so they created some of the essential premises for the current “discovery” of Italy on the part of American intellectuals.

Naturally therefore the picture of Italian literature obtainable here has had no time to become in any way complete. There is, for that matter, no reason why it should be so; but acquaintance with some of the missing links would help in understanding and placing the writers who are being translated. The most conspicuous absence is, of course, that of lyric poetry and also that of the so-called prosa d’arte (whose typical expression is somewhere between the essay and the petit poème en prose and whose major exponent is Emilio Cecchi, also, by the way, an expert in American literature). There have been sporadic appearances of poems in the quarterly reviews. A fairly large anthology, perhaps with original texts along with translations, from Montale, Ungaretti, Quasimodo, etc., might have a reasonable chance of meeting with something more than specialized success in America. Lyric poetry, and the most “artistic” varieties of prose, would be handy points of reference to have, because it is there that language appears in its most concentrated and “absolute” examples. There is no point in neglecting the fact that writers, even the most overtly “committed” and neo-realistic, ultimately handle language: what we broadly call style is finally the place where to look for their view of the world, their degree of complexity, their moral involvement. One of the functions of the difficult or “hermetic” poetry and prose in the “dark years” in Italy was that of a defense of language, of style, against the demagogical degradation to which it was officially exposed, a degradation which reflected the corresponding state of moral values. The more exculsive forms of literature, though accused of obscurity and emptiness, created a certain atmosphere of artistic integrity and also trained the literary practitioners in certain directions (restraint, intensity, and some sort of “illuminative imagination”) which proved fruitful: much recent fiction shows signs of that lesson. Whenever a new book appears by one of such diverse writers as Vasco Pratolini (A Tale of Poor Lovers, Viking 1949), Vittorini (In Sicily, New Directions 1949), Giovanni Comisso (untranslated), Corrado Alvaro (practically untranslated), critics do not fail to elaborate, at least in Italy, on the lyrical elements which characterize the mode of their vision and the tone of their narrative. In some of those writers such tendencies were increasingly combined with the influence of certain types of American writing. Vittorini’s prose, perhaps most intensely in some of his short stories, is one of the prominent results of that alliance.