Gianni Rodari in other languages

In the Italian literary landscape, the case of Gianni Rodari is peculiar, in that it constitutes a rare case of an author who became famous at home only after having been translated abroad. Biographer Marco Argilli speaks of a “rebound effect” due to the enormous success achieved by Rodari in the Soviet Union. Over the years, his success has grown rapidly and today his works have been translated into fifty-three languages and in fifty-five countries.

From Moscow to Shanghai
Rodari’s first translations dates back to 1953, when Il romanzo di Cipollina (The Adventures of little onion) and Il libro delle filastrocche (The Book of Childrens’ Poems), his first two books – released in Italy in 1951 – were published in Bulgaria and the Soviet Union and lead to his great and rapid success in the socialist countries. The first translations were undertaken by the poet Samuil Marshak, defined by Gor’kij as the “founder of children’s Soviet literature”. Rodari’s works were first translated in the Soviet Union – in 1954 – then in China and Mongolia and, between the seventies and eighties, in the numerous languages of the Soviet republics: Uzbek, Altai, Kazakh, Jakuto, Georgian, Azerbaijani, Tajik, Armenian and Tatar. In addition to these, the Lithuanian, the Ukrainian, the Estonian and the Latvian translations, testified to a huge success that pushed the Soviet publishers to do print runs that amounted to hundreds of thousands of copies of each reprint. Il romanzo di cipollina (The Adventures of Little Onion), in which the protagonist leads a peaceful revolt against the oppressors, was his most popular work: in 1954 it came out in Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia and subsequently in Hungary, Albania and finally in Yugoslavia , where it was translated into the different languages of the federation. Later works were also very popular, especially Gelsomino nel paese dei bugiardi (Gelsomino in the country of Liars) – published for the first time in 1963 in the USSR – and Il viaggio della freccia azzurra (The Journey of the Blue Arrow), the first translation of which came out in Poland in 1955.

Beyond the Iron Curtain
In the West, Rodari’s diffusion was affirmed much later than in the states beyond and there were just two editions of Avventure di Cipollino (The Adventures of Little Onion) in France and Japan in 1956. The situation gradually changed in the sixties when the Favole al telefono (Fairy tales Over the Phone) inaugurated the publication of Rodari’s works in federal Germany and the United Kingdom. An acceleration then took place in the eighties, thanks to the numerous Greek, Japanese, French translations, edited in large part by Roger Salomon – one of the most faithful translators – and above all Spanish translations, alongside those in Catalan, Basque, Galician and Asturian. It is no coincidence that the first translation of Grammatica della fantasia (The Grammar of fantasy) – Rodari’s only theoretical work – was published in 1977 by a Barcelonian publisher, before it was published in the USSR.
In 1970, Rodari won the Hans Christian Andersen international award and, in the eighties, his works reached new countries: the Netherlands (Fairy tales Over the Phone, 1983), Portugal (The Adventures of Little Onion, 1984), Iran (The Cake in the Sky, 1985), Denmark and Norway (The Grammar of Fantasy, 1987), Sweden (The Grammar of fantasy, 1988) and Syria (The Cake in the Sky, 1989) the first Arabic translation).

From the nineties onwards
The collapse of the Soviet political system and Eastern Europe lead to a profound geo-political re-arrangement, however Rodari’s publiations did not receive any setbacks in the Russian Federation and have in fact multiplied since the early nineties, from Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea to Irkutsk in Siberia. The diffusion of Rodari’s books in other former socialist countries such as the Baltic republics, Belarus, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia and the Czech Republic has been slower but nonetheless, steady. Although the political condition had changed, it did not extinguish interest in Rodari, who was firmly established in the international panorama of children’s fiction. The Grammar of Fantasy was the first book to be published in Brazil in 1982 and then in the United States in 1995; In America – where perhaps his fame as an ideologically connoted author was taken for granted – publications begin after the year 2000. Over the last few decades his works have reached new publishing markets, such as Thailand (Fairy tales Over the Phone, 1992), South Korea (1998) and Vietnam (The Adventures of Little Onion, 2009). During the same period, Rodari’s books re-circulated in China: after the first Russian translation in the 1950s and the subsequent Sino-Soviet split, they began to be published again at the start of the new millennium. In 2014 they were made into a series, dedicated entirely to him by the children’s editor of the Chinese Communist Youth League.