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.

From 20 to 23 November 1989, Franco Fortini gave four lectures on translation at the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies in Naples. A poet, Franco Fortini had also been a translator since World War II, when, forced to take refuge in Switzerland on account of his Jewish origins and political beliefs, he devoted himself to the translation of poetry. Returning to Italy after the fall of the Fascist regime, he took an active role in the country’s cultural life. These were years of great effervescence, which saw the birth of important literary magazines such as Il Politecnico, to which Fortini contributed not only as editor, but also as translator and translation reviser.

An atypical Italian writer

The first edition of the Festival du livre de Paris was a real success.

There are numerous historical and cultural ties linking Montenegro and Italy. These ties originate from various periods of the history of Montenegro. A few facts can help to highlight the diversity of these ties. For four centuries a considerable part of the Montenegrin coastline was controlled by the Republic of Venice (La Serenissima), which resulted in Italian being the official language of the administration until 1918; the Montenegrin Princess Jelena Petrović married Vittorio Emanuele III of Savoia towards the end of the nineteenth century; and then there was the Italian presence in Montenegro during the Second World War. These historical events have also left their traces in the cultural life of Montenegro, which helps explain the publication of a large number of Italian texts translated into Montenegrin.