No abstract

This article investigates the first two Italian translations of Dracula as significant cases of manipulation of a classic of popular literature. It provides a brief survey of the malleable status of the text in its interlinguistic and intermedial translations in order to introduce the specificity of the Italian case. These two Italian translations represent two different, somewhat antithetical approaches to introducing gothic literature to early-twentieth century Italy. They show different strategies to overcome the deep-seated resistance of the Italian literary field by presenting the novel in very distinct ways. The Sonzogno edition highlights the novel's popular character and shocking features, and domesticates its most unsettling aspects by focusing on the ghastlier elements and through a systematic removal of all the novel's political and socio-anthropological references. In the Bocca edition, Fedi adopted a reframing strategy that linked the novel with occultist beliefs, thus turning it into a sort of fictional treatise on vampirism and emphasising its philosophical and mystical import. In order to make sense of these two cases, this article considers the interconnections between censorship and translation as a metonymic process, which can stimulate unorthodox readings that can ultimately be productive and grant books a more varied readership.

Irish drama underwent an extraordinary rediscovery in Italy during the Second World War, primarily because of its political convenience (Ireland was a neutral nation) but also because of its aesthetic significance. Through an analysis of the role of key mediators I employ Irish literature as a lens to investigate a crucial moment of renewal within both Italian politics and theatre, emphasising strands of continuity between Fascist and post-Fascist practices. First, I show how a wartime ban on English and American plays prompted an interest in Irish drama and the fluid status of the Irish canon enabled authors of Irish origin (e.g. Eugene O’Neill), to be affiliated with Irish literature. I then move on to considering how this very fluidity facilitated the daring rebranding of Irish theatre as anti-fascist in Paolo Grassi’s ‘Collezione Teatro’, a key step in his position-taking at the centre of Italy’s theatrical field. Ireland was a substitute for England and appeared on Italian (political and literary) maps mainly thanks to its anti-English function. However, despite the politically inflected motivation of the various, often contrasting uses of the category ‘Irish drama’ in wartime Italy, this was the first time Irish literature had been widely acknowledged as a specific tradition within the Anglosphere in Italy.