Translating the Enemy in Fascist Italy: The Anthology Americana

Americana was an anthology of contemporary American fiction translated edited by Elio Vittorini, who would become famous after the war as a neo-realist writer and communist intellectual. The anthology is probably the single most famous instance of Fascist literary censorship. This chapter reconstructs the long and complex negotiations that were needed to obtain permission for this politically awkward book; negotiations which provide a fascinating insight into the workings of the Fascist state censor, the Ministry for Popular Culture. Despite being famous as an instance of Fascist censorship and as an example of Fascist anti-American hostility, I argue that, in fact, the reverse is true and that its publication demonstrates a remarkable flexibility on the part of the regime, considering that Italy and the United States were at war when the volume came out.

This case study will also be an opportunity to reflect on two key issues concerning research into the censorship of translation. The first is the importance of distinguishing between policies and decisions that affect both translations and domestic production, and those that actually target translations because they are translations. I argue that there is a difference between a translated novel that was censored in the same way as all other novels, and one that was censored simply because it was a translation. The second key issue is the difficulty of interpreting archival evidence and arriving at a clear picture of the policies that were put in place and the decisions that were made. As I show in reference to Americana, the evidence can lend itself to quite different and contradictory interpretations.