Willa Cather, Italy, and the visibility of the female translator

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article reassesses Willa Cather’s Italian publication history and critical reception in light of new archival findings. Besides drawing on reviews, letters, and essays by Italian intellectuals, translators, and “Americanisti” (Igino Giordani, Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini, Emilio Cecchi), I will use archival documents held at the Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori in Milan, at the Scalero collection (Fondo Sorelle Scalero) of the city library of Mazzé, Turin, and at the Archivio Giulio Einaudi Editore in Turin. Focusing on Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and My Ántonia (1918), I show that Cather's Italian trajectory is more complex than known to date, and it is intimately connected to the work of two female Italian translators: Alessandra Scalero and Jole J. Pinna Pintor. I also argue that Scalero's translation La morte viene per l’arcivescovo (1936) can be read as featuring some of the characteristics later advocated by Feminist Translation Studies theories around the emergence of a “feminist translator” as actively contributing to the production of meaning in the text.