Translation in Fascist Italy: ‘The Invasion of Translations’

Abstract

If there is one thing that to my mind characterizes the history of translation in Fascist Italy, it is that this was dominated by an idea of translation rather than the activity itself. The discussion on the subject of translations developed from an aesthetic question in the 1920s, centring on the contribution that literary exchange could potentially make to the modernization and popularization of Italian literature, with the fear expressed in some more culturally conservative quarters that this process, if left uncontrolled, could lead to its impoverishment, to a characteristically Fascist ideological debate in the 1930s which was dominated by the symbolic value attributed to translation as a phenomenon and by the concern that Italy was the weak partner in an international struggle for cultural expansion and that its cultural prestige was being threatened by translation. In this chapter, I intend to focus on the debate that arose around the question of translation in the 1930s and on the way in which the attitude of the regime towards translation evolved from a silent tolerance to an active hostility — an evolution that is, in my opinion, directly related to the regime’s increasingly imperialist political agenda.¹