Fausta Cialente in other languages

“I think I only have the language in which I express myself, and this is also by chance.” A stateless author, far from Italy for most of her life, Fausta Cialente (1898-1994) has long been considered an exotic and secluded writer, belatedly valued by publishers and recognized by the public. Unjustly distancing her from the Italian tradition is also reflected in the limited diffusion at an international level. Her works have been translated in a highly discontinuous and incomplete way.

The debut in Italy and France
In 1932 the debut novel Natalia (1930) was published in France and written in Egypt, where the author lived from 1921 to 1947. The translation was done by Henri Marchand, whom Cialente knew, thanks to their mutual friend, Sibylla Alamo. Despite the immediate French circulation of the volume (which also caught Gide’s attention: “I have a postcard in which he tells me beautiful things about Natalia”, “Panorama”, 25/10/1982), the work remained mostly unknown for decades (if not altogether forgotten). A new edition was only relaunched in 1982, for Mondadori and, to date, has yet to be translated. The collaboration with Henri Marchand seemed to continue, at least until 1933: in a letter to Alamo (24/7/1933), Cialente mentioned an already completed French version of Cortile a Cleopatra. The translation, which wasn’t published, preceded the first Italian publication of the work. Only a few copies by Corticelli (1936) were distributed and taken up later by Sansoni (1953).

Feltrinelli and the turning point of the sixties
In 1961, after twenty-five years of narrative silence, spent on anti-fascist commitment and militant journalism, Cialente published Levata Ballata for Feltrinelli. It was the first publishing house to invest in the author (who, at the time, was sixty years old) through an editorial project that also aimed at the foreign market. Cortile’s rights to Cleopatra were sold in Sweden (1961), Holland (1968) and France (1963) to the publisher Julliard who. Whilst celebrating the literary value of the protagonist on the back of the cover («the extraordinaire figure de Marco, [ …], que l’on n’est pas prêt d’oublier “), he also reported incorrectly the biographical data of Cialente (” née à Fiume en 1900 “). At the same time, between 1963 and 1968, the Ballata levantina was diffused in Austria, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, Romania and the United States. The German edition (Volk und Welt, 1964), translated by Caesar Rymarowicz, was enriched with an afterword by Manfred Starke, who punctually reconstructed the life of Cialente and the political history of Egypt, background to the novel, recognizing its great lyrical qualities and the exotic charm at work (“Vermeidet die Schriftstellerin mit ihrer schmiegsamen, oft lyrischen Schreibweise zu harte Konturen und gibt ihrem Buch einen exotischen Reiz”). The English translation, by Isabel Quigly, was anticipated in the United States by a review on “Kirkus Reviews” (11/02/1962). It celebrated the multiple nature of the text (“part novel, part report […], it is told with an objectivity that does not preclude warmth “), while the strip of the volume (Houghton Mifflin, 1963) suggests a correspondence with the works of Durrell, the same author who Cialente had just translated into Italian for Feltrinelli (Clea, Feltrinelli 1962). In this context, the stories of Pamela o la bella estate (“Pamela or the beautiful summer”) (1962) and the novel Un inverno fredissimo, 1966 (“A very cold winter”) were excluded from international circulation.

Mondadori and the latest translations
In the first half of the sixties, just two foreign editions were released: in 1973, in the German translation of Cortile a Cleopatra by the Swiss publisher Manesse-Verlag, there was an accurate afterword by Federico Hindermann, who reconstructed the history of the novel citing the decisive preface by Emilio Cecchi (Sansoni, 1953); in 1975 the only translation, in Romanian, of the Vento sulla sabbia ( “Wind on the sand”, 1972) was published, a novel through which Cialente entered the Mondadori catalogue. The publisher from Milan was responsible for the dissemination of Quattro ragazze Wieselberger (“The Four Wieselberger girls”), the author’s latest novel and winner of the Strega Prize in 1976. It was translated into German (1977), Slovene (1978) and French (1986). The German volume, which contains an extract from an interview with Cialente (“la Repubblica”, 22/05/1976), offers its readers a book of profound poetic and historical value («einer geschickten und gelungenen Mischung von Dichtung und Wahrheit »). The French edition, accompanied by an interview and a review on “Le Monde” (11/29/1986), introduced Cialente as “une des plus grandes romancières italiennes” and brought her prose closer the prose of Marguerite Yourcenar.
It was only until the new millenium that the interrupted thread of the translations was to resume, starting with the short narrative. With the story La ballerina (1937) “Rialta”, a Cuban magazine based in Mexico, in December 2017 published the first Spanish translation, signed by Iledys González Gutiérrez. In 2019 Malpasso (1937) was included in the collection The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, edited by Jhumpa Lahiri.