Translating Travel: Contemporary Italian Travel Writing in English Translation by Loredana Polezzi (review)

Abstract

224 Reviews around it,and between Italians and Slavs, climaxing in the horrifictrauma ofthe mass murder of captives being hurled into thefoibe?deep crevasses in the Karstic plateau. Pizzi picks up the suggestion of viewing the foiba as the Bakhtinian chronotope characterizing the regional literature of this period, but, without saying so, she has in effectapplied Bakhtin's notion more persuasively to the topography of the whole area (and might have interestingly discussed the same in relation to Hillis Miller's notion of the atopical?a literary locality which stands foreverywhere and nowhere). The third chapter focuses on 'The Myth of an Italian Motherland' and the writing of the Fascist era (some of it quite laughable). There are sometimes teasing vaguenesses, allusions left unexplained, ambiguities not defined, and a looseness in the use of the term 'Romanticism' to describe the literary alignment of twentieth-century Triestine writers towards the nineteenth-century Italian tradition, and the psychoanalytical framework is rather lightly sketched in. One ofthe strengthsof Pizzi's book, however, is the sheer range of Triestine writing, high and low, with which she is familiar and into which she here offers tantalizingly brief glimpses, though she makes no claim to completeness and does not discuss Cialente's Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger, Cergoly's// complessodell'imperatore, Lalla Kezich's La preparazione, Tullio Kezich's //campeggio di Duttogliano, or Susanna Tamaro's novels. The great absentee fromthis book, however, is Svevo, though Pizzi accepts Maier's dictumthat Triestine literature really starts with him. On the face of it, this looks strange. Even without counting Senilita as the first novel of the twentieth century, Svevo produced a substantial corpus of writing almost uninterruptedly until his death in 1928, and, for Pizzi's topic, what stands out is his quite distinctive treatment of Trieste and, not unrelated, his substantial and prolonged rejection by the Triestines. Svevo's works appeared at best on a drip-feed basis right up to the 1950s, before establishing themselves at an accelerating rate to the point where by the end of the century La coscienza di Zeno was voted its most important Italian novel. The point is that Trieste's greatest writer bypassed triestinitd (though he was to be selectively used to feed into it) and subscribed to italianitd essentially only by writing in his strongly contested Italian. To include Svevo, however, would have upset the economy and the strategy of Pizzi's book, whose fourth chapter is pointedly entitled 'Quale triestinita?' This focuses on three semi-outsider categories which in ascending order pose challenges to the hegemonic ideology of Triestine irredentism: an imposing array of women writers who were not susceptible to the female symbolism that gripped their male counterparts; Jewish writers,who found themselves rejected by the nation with which they had so enthusiastically identified; and Slovene writers, who, in what are in effect the closing words of Pizzi's book, wrote only in Slovene. La Trobe University John Gatt-Rutter Translating Travel: Contemporary ltalian Travel Writing in English Translation. By Loredana Polezzi. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2001. vii + 246pp. ?45. ISBN o7546 -0273-7. This volume examines the transformations which ltalian travel writing undergoes when it is translated, and offersin the process an innovative means of circumventing 'the constraints of the ltalian critical tradition and the image that it has produced (or failed to produce) of ltalian travel writing' (p. 3). Three chapters of theoreticalcritical discussion are followed by four case studies treating twentieth-century ltalian travellers to Tibet, the works of Oriana Fallaci, and the English-language fortunes of Italo Calvino'slnvisible Cities and Claudio Magris's Danubio respectively. The firstchapter documents from a variety of perspectives the low status of travel writing within the ltalian literary system. In fact, while English-language authors MLR, 99.1, 2004 225 have achieved near cult status in Italy, no successful contemporary Italian author has made his or her name as a travel writer. The Italian critical establishment's resistance to travel writing is further demonstrated by the cool reception (by Croce among others) of De Amicis's internationally successful travel writings and Italian philological and critical ambivalence towards Italy's legacies of travel writing fromthe early modern period, e.g...