In the first sixty years of the twentieth century, translations in a variety of verse forms (alexandrine, deca-dodecasyllabic, free), variously rhymed and non-rhymed, were published by translators of different styles.

Viviana Vuscovich, right manager for one of Italy’s largest publishing groups, GeMS, takes stock of the current situation in the rights market after the pandemic.

Cecilia Schwartz is an associate professor of Italian literature at Stockholm University. She has worked on transnational aspects of Italian literature, from the role of the literary mediator to images of Italian-ness. She has published numerous essays on the translation, circulation and reception of Italian works in Sweden, including the volume Traveling books. Italian Classics in Sweden (Stockholm 2013), edited in collaboration with Laura Di Nicola. A few months ago, the publisher Carocci published her book La letteratura italiana in Svezia. Autori, Editori, Lettori (1870-2020) which presents an exhaustive picture, unique in its kind, of the presence of Italian books in Sweden over a period of a hundred and fifty years.

The history of literature in Norway begins relatively recently, and consequently so does the history of translated literature. Norwegian literature, in fact, flourished mainly from the second half of the 19th century onwards, after the four-hundred-year union between Norway and Denmark. Until then, the written language had been Danish, and Copenhagen was not only the political-administrative capital of the state, but also its cultural and literary capital. During the 19th century, Norway began to develop its own literature and language, and in particular a language called ‘Nynorsk’, or Neo-Norwegian, a form of writing that was closer to the spoken version of Danish, the ‘Bokmål – the language of books’. This is why to this day there are two official languages in Norway, in addition to the Sami language, both of which are also used in translations of foreign books. It was also in the 19th century when the first Norwegian publishing houses were first established. This little insight into Norwegian literary and linguistic history explains why the history of Italian books in Norway is rather short. 

A review of translations of Raffaele La Capria’s works into French.

The Museo Casa di Dante in Florence houses and exhibits a collection of translations of the Divine Comedy, the result of the “Dante Poliglotta” project, which includes 284 editions in 49 languages and 22 dialects. The reader can therefore find, in one single place, many of the translations discussed here, as well as essential information on each, on the “Dante Poliglotta” website (https://www.dantepoliglotta.it/lingue-e-dialetti/ )[1]. Further online resources are offered by the Wikipedia page “English Translations of the Divine Comedy” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_translations_of_the_Divine_Comedy).

The publishing success abroad of the work of Grazia Deledda (Nuoro, 1971 – Rome, 1936), the only Italian female writer to have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (1926), has gone through alternating phases. The years before and after the award were marked by the greatest number of foreign editions. While attention subsequently waned, there has recently been a resurgence of interest in several countries. Her most translated titles are: Honest souls (1895), Elias Portolu (1900/1903), Ashes (1904), Reeds in the wind (1913), The Mother (1920) and Cosima (published posthumously in 1937).

Alex Valente is a European currently living on Musqueam, Squamish and Tseleil-Waututh land, also known as Vancouver, BC. He is a literary translator from Italian into English, though he also dabbles with French and RPGs, and is co-editor of The Norwich Radical. His work has been published in NYT Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, The Short Story Project, PEN Transmissions and currently on EuroLitNet as The Italianist. He can be found over at alexvalente.fyi or on Twitter as @DrFumetts.