Domesticating Ibsen for Italy: Enrico and Icilio Polese’s Ibsen Campaign by Giuliano D’Amico (review)

Abstract

Giuliano D'Amico. Domesticating Ibsen for Italy: Enrico and Icilio Polese's Ibsen Campaign. Turin, Italy: Universita degli Studi di Torino, 2013. Pp. xiv + 358. 20.00 [euro]. Aspiring to recount hard-won imposition of Ibsens drama upon Italian theatrical audiences and domesticating translation of Norwegian authors texts for this purpose, Giuliano D'Amicos Domesticating Ibsen for Italy: Enrico and Icilio Polese's Ibsen Campaign also achieves other important tasks: it provides a history of Ibsen's fortunes in Italy from mid-1880s through 1910s and highlights, as best theater history does, many ways in which art and business of performance always already intertwine. The story D'Amico tells is a complex and often amusing one, for father-son team behind campaign, Icilio and Enrico Polese Santarnecci, were two of most powerful, hated, and feared individuals in Italian theatre community, whose business ethics, taste, and talent were continuously called into question (3). D'Amico begins with chapters that introduce dastardly duo and orient reader to Italian stage practice of period and then follows with five more that explore Ibsen in Italy. With a focus on translation practices of Enrico (the son) and his co-translator Paolo Rindler, D'Amico provides an extensively researched study that makes a welcome contribution to Ibsen scholarship. Most satisfying about this book's approach is way it considers general sociocultural circumstances, artistic-literary context, and business of theatrical production together as one organic whole. To a certain extent, this was unavoidable, as Polese father and son had their hands in various honey pots: they owned and operated a theatrical agency, Darte drammatica, which marketed Ibsen's plays; produced a journal of same name that publicized and reviewed them; and, of course, Enrico translated texts with Rindler. These men could not have avoided practical considerations while translating any more than D'Amico could have ignored them as he analyzed their work. The book partially concerns itself with marketing operation, then, as the Poleses had a personal interest in making plays more suitable for (4). And, indeed, D'Amico convincingly argues that men viewed texts primarily as market goods from which they could gain returns and accordingly transformed iconoclast Ibsen's plays into average products that would appeal to conventional bourgeois audiences (105). At same time, author is careful to note instances in which modifications were made to make plays producible under Italian companies' role system--making characters conform to generic types in which actors and actresses specialized--and also dedicates attention to how these companies approached new texts, how Poleses positioned them through articles, ads, and reviews, and how Ibsen was finally received. In other words, D'Amico rightly recognizes that texts were commodities at least as much as they are artistic artifacts, with result that his study is not just one of translation practices or of comparative drama but of global theater history. The assessment of Ibsen campaign is meticulously detailed. D'Amico first discusses prehistory of Ibsen in Italy--the period before Poleses strove to launch him, which included surprisingly non-scandalous premier of A Doll's House in 1889--and then moves on to campaign, divided into three phases. The first (1892) saw The Wild Duck essentially fail; in second Ibsen gained ground with Ghosts only to lose some with Hedda Gabler and then finally establish himself as a force to be reckoned with thanks to a perceived greater verisimilitude in The Pillars of Society; and in third and final phase (1893-94), backlash began, in response to The Master Builder, Rosmersholm, and The Lady from Sea, although star actor Ermete Zacconi, who had stunned audiences as Oswald in that triumphant Ghosts, then carried An Enemy of People to success. …