Reader's file: the fascist archives - Italian publisher's reader's reports on foreign books from fascist period

Literary Review, Spring, 2002 by Minna Proctor

Around 1930, when Fascism was beginning to look like "the hope of the world," some young Italians happened to discover America in their books--a pensive barbaric America, happy and quarrelsome, corrupt, bountiful, heavy with the past of the whole world, and at the same time young and innocent.

--CESARE PAVESE, Ieri e oggi, 1950

A reader s report is a hired opinion, a tool publishers use to determine whether or not a book is worth pursuing. Usually they are written by editors for the benefit of other editors and publishers, but books with a specialized subject matter or those written in a foreign language frequently occasion the use of outside experts who might comment on literary or scholarly value, cultural context, a book's worth compared to other books by the same author or in the same field. In the case of a foreign language, the expert (often a professional translator) might also discuss the prose, trying to give an idea of how it "reads" for someone who can't read it, and give an impression on how well it might or might not translate.

This report is the most practicable aspect of any given work's life in translation. Is a book chosen because of how well it represents its own culture? Or because of what it brings to another culture, be it entertainment or art? Is a book chosen because it's great literature or because it is comprehendible in a foreign country? Implicit in every report is a judgement on the worthiness of translation in general, which works merit translation and why, what constitutes important foreign literature, and what literary ideas will be imported into a new genealogy--and to what effect.

The Italian sentence in the middle of the twentieth century was profoundly affected (stripped down and unraveled) by the American literature flooding the country to enormous popular success. Much of contemporary Italian literature is still populated by Hemingway's bastard grandchildren, as fiction continues to monitor the American culture industry--picking up on Hollywood plots, music-video pacing, and an unaccountable tolerance for sensationalism.

The reports included here make up the first portal of foreign literature into Italian libraries. The interest in books from abroad started in the twenties--and started, predictably, with a war-time demand for French pornography. This trend, combined with a high-society craze for everything foreign, piqued the attention of publishers.

These reports come from the Mondadori publishing house archives. Mondadori, with its Medusa imprint for foreign literature, was largely responsible, along with the publishers Longanesi and Einaudi in particular, for first making available foreign books in Italian translation. Translation remains a critical portion of the Italian publishing industry today, with an estimated sixty percent of all published books coming from abroad.

The particular reports gathered here have a twist: they were all written between the years of 1929 and 1943, during Italian Fascism. In addition to the usual commentary and opinion, readers made recommendations that anticipated potential conflicts with the state censor. In the end, this group of writings reveal perhaps more about Fascism than they do about translation per se, or what Italians thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example. Yet the heightened political atmosphere surrounding these reports reminds us that books, like people (if not even more so), live in the public realm--they can't be divorced from history even if great books often outlive their historical context. In Italy, during the 1930s, books were read in the context of Fascism; today in America they're read with a nod to the particular exigencies of consumer culture, to the publishers' bottom line.

While political ideology was a frequent subject in the Mondadori readers reports, that doesn't mean publishers were ignoring market potential. You'll see here a rather timeless portrait of editors scrambling with each other and with the state censor to secure a publication of Faulkner's best-selling novel Sanctuary, while Light in August languishes seven years in the background. An equally vivid mise en scene has one Mondadori editor, Enrico Piceni, discovering such merit in Francois Mauriac's Catholic novel Dark Angels that he rallies altruistically to publish this "difficult" writer for the benefit of a "self-selecting" and limited reading public. Within fifteen years, Mauriac would win the Nobel Prize.

These are not book reviews or critical essays; they are informal, sloppy even, crude and passionate. Readers say whatever they want, and they're being paid for their opinion. (That's why reports are a gratifying form to write.) A reader's report is a cursory performance. It recounts plot, setting, and offers as clear an opinion as possible (ambivalence is not very useful here). Often composed as a letter, ordered exposition is optional, prose style is negligible and usually telegraphic. In the following pages, you will find many occurrences, for example, of a reader giving away the ending before providing the plot details that lead up to it. Fortunately, we're not reading these reports for plot lines--we all know how Gatsby ends. These reports today give us a vital glimpse into the lives of books that make up our cultural history from that ever-so-precious and rare perspective--from the outside looking in. And, with perfect reversal, through translation, we manage to look back out again.