Germanica. Storia e analisi critica di un'antologia di narratori tedeschi nell'Italia degli anni quaranta

Abstract

The principal subject of my dissertation is the anthology called Germanica (edited by Leone Traverso), which was published in 1942 by Bompiani, an eminent Italian publishing house. It is an awesome volume which gathers the translations of thirty-two representative texts of German literature. The idea of translation as a cultural phenomenon, developed by the so-called Translation Studies and their inter-disciplinary approach, has provided the theoretical framework. For this reason, in the first chapter there is an overview on the most important contemporary theories of translation. If schools like the Übersetzungswissenschaft, which was born in Germany in the ‘50s, showed several limits when they had to cope with the translation of a literary text, in the ‘70s there was a big change because of the emergence of the Translation Studies. The second chapter deals with the reception of German literature in Italy in the first half of the 20th century. The spread of German literature in Italy seemed to receive an incomparable stimulus from the publication of Germanica, because of its size and the quality of texts, authors and translators, some of whom were the best in Italy at that time. This chapter is also dedicated to the translation theories that were spread in Italy in those years. Particularly, I analyzed in detail the theories of intellectuals who met up in the famous Florentine coffee bar “Le Giubbe Rosse”. Among those intellectuals, there were also Leone Traverso, Elio Vittorini and Tommaso Landolfi, who played a relevant role for the birth of Germanica. The first part of the third chapter is dedicated to the story of Germanica’s birth. Although Traverso was not selected as first editor, he was well-known especially as translator in the Italian cultural world. The anthology was born thanks to the large contribution of Elio Vittorini, who was Germanica’s customer as well as Americana’s editor. He played an essential role for the birth of Traverso’s anthology as regards the authors’ choice, the figures and the general organization of the book. Moreover, there are various similarities between Americana and Germanica. The last part of this dissertation is centered on the translations contained in Traverso’s anthology. Some of these translations are analyzed and compared with the original texts, in order to find out the features of every translation method. In this case, the concept of “reversibilità”, theorized by the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco, has provided the theoretical framework. [edited by author]