Translations of Swedish Literature in Italy in the 19th Century: An Outline*

Catia De Marco, Italian Institute for Germanic Studies

CSS Conference 2019, published in July 2020


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*This article is part of the research project “SCAND-LIT: Scandinavian Literatures in Italy. Translation, Publishing, Reception”, managed by Istituto di Studi Germanici in Rome and funded by the Italian Ministry of Research. It is a partly rewritten and expanded version of an article published in Italian: “La letteratura svedese in Italia nell’Ottocento: una ricognizione preliminare”, in Studi Germanici, 2018:14, pp. 353-365.

In recent years several studies have been dedicated to the Italian reception of Nordic literature, in an interdisciplinary perspective that draws on translation studies, the socio-cultural approach of Pierre Bourdieu and Itamar Even-Zohar, and translation and publishing history.1 See for instance Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, New York & London: Routledge 1995; Pierre Bourdieu, Les Règles de l’art. Gènese et structure du champ littéraire, Paris: Seuil, 1992; Itamar Even-Zohar, “Polisystem Studies”, in Poetics Today, 1990:1; Anthony Pym, Method in Translation History, New York & London: Routledge, 1998; Gabriele Turi & Maria Iolanda Palazzolo, Storia dell’editoria nell'Italia contemporanea, Firenze: Giunti, 1997. Translations, as “objects” imported from a literary system to another, are an integral component of the target culture as well as of their source one. They allow “to build not only linguistic and stylistic inventories, but also a corpus of writing models in the ‘national’ languages” (“di costruire non soltanto repertori linguistici e stilistici, ma anche un corpus di modelli di scrittura nelle lingue decretate ‘nazionali’”).2 Gisèle Sapiro, “Addomesticare lo straniero: le traduzioni letterarie in francese (dal XIX al XXI secolo)”, in Irene Fantappié & Michele Sisto (eds.), 1945-1970. Letteratura italiana e tedesca, Roma: Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici, 2013, pp. 13-37, here p. 13. Translation mine. That’s why it is interesting to study the early interactions between two linguistic and literary areas such as Italy and Scandinavia, geographically and culturally far from each other and in a (semi)peripherical position in Heilbron’s core-periphery system.3 Johan Heilbron, “Towards a Sociology of Translation: Book Translation as a Cultural World-System”, in European Journal of Social Theory 1999: 4, pp. 429-444.

Most of the above mentioned studies were focused on single authors, such as Ibsen, Hamsun or Strindberg, or on the interwar period, which for a number of reasons4 The Thirties in Italy have been defined as “the decade of translations” by Italian intellectual, writer and translator Cesare Pavese (Cesare Pavese, Saggi letterari, Torino: Einaudi, 1951, p. 223); in addition, when Fascism’s alliance policies made more and more difficult, when not impossible, to translate books by British or American writers, publishers turned to other markets, Nordic countries included, to look for substitutes. See Anna Wegener, “Mondadori as a Publisher of Scandinavian Literature, 1932-1945”, in Bruno Berni & Anna Wegener (eds.), Translating Scandinavia: Scandinavian literature in Italian and German Translation 1918-1945, Roma: Edizioni Quasar, 2018, pp. 29-58; Christopher Rundle, Publishing Translations in Fascist Italy, Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. is particularly interesting for this subject.5 On single authors, see for instance Massimo Ciaravolo, “Utgivningen av Strindbergs verk i Italien”, in Strindbergiana 2013:28, pp. 16-29; Sara Culeddu, “Hamsun in Italia 1899-1923. La molteplicità di voci e le traiettorie di un precoce tentativo di ricezione: una ricognizione attraverso i paratesti”, in Studi Germanici, 2016: 9, pp. 261-283; Giuliano D’Amico, “Editore-traditore? Knut Hamsun lest, oversatt og publisert av italienske neofascister”, in Edda 2014:1, pp. 33-51; Giuliano D’Amico, Domesticating Ibsen for Italy, Bari: Edizioni di Pagina, 2010; Franco Perrelli, Strindberg l’italiano. 130 anni di storia scenica, Bari: Edizioni di Pagina, 2015; on the interwar period, see Berni & Wegener, Translating Scandinavia, 2018. This article will instead concentrate on translations of Swedish literature produced in Italy in the 19th century. I have chosen this period in order to go back to when it all started: the first Italian translations from Swedish are two poems which appeared in Museo Scientifico, Letterario ed Artistico, an encyclopedic magazine published in Turin from 1839 to 1850: Stagnelius’ Flytt-Fåglarne and Tegnér’s Skaldens morgonpsalm

Figure 1: The first edition of Stagnelius’ Gli uccelli migranti (Flytt-Fåglarne). Museo Scientifico, Letterario ed Artistico was an encyclopedic magazine published in Turin on a weekly basis from 1839 to 1847, and fortnightly from 1847 al 1850. Among its contributors were many leading figures of the Italian culture of the 19th century, with articles on the most disparate subjects: history, geography, arts, travels, botany, zoology, astronomy, literature, theatre, militaria, epigraphy, archeology, mythology, religion, medicine, anatomy, etc. Incidentally, the translator was not Italian, but a British polyglot, major William Edward Frye, who “besides knowing Greek and Latin, understood almost all European languages, and was capable of writing correctly in French, Italian and German”.6 William Edward Frye, After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819, London: William Heinemann, 1908, p. ix. As a testimony of his unusual linguistic talents, he translated three of Edda’s poems into French, Tegnér’s Frithiofs saga into English and Shakespeare’s Macbet [sic] into Italian.

The choice to limit the scope of my research to a single country, although some research shows that in Italy the Nordic countries are often perceived as a unit,7 See D’Amico, Domesticating Ibsen for Italy, 2010, p. 18; Siri Nergaard, La costruzione di una cultura. La letteratura norvegese in traduzione italiana, Rimini: Guaraldi, 2004, pp. 67 and 77. has instead a twofold purpose: first, even if Swedish literature is now and has been for some time the most translated in Italy among its Scandinavian fellow countries,8 UNESCO’s Index Translationum (1977-2007) lists 142 translations from Swedish against 93 from Danish and 72 from Norwegian, cfr. http://www.unesco.org/xtrans, last accessed: 30/09/2019; Iperborea, a prestigious Italian publishing house that gives out exclusively Nordic authors, as of September 2019 proposed 122 titles from Swedish (by 32 authors) against 39 from Danish (19 authors) and 41 from Norwegian (21 authors); cfr. https://iperborea.com/titoli, last accessed: 30/09/2019. no specific bibliographic study has been dedicated to it, in contrast for example with Danish and Norwegian ones.9 For Denmark: Lene Waage Petersen, La letteratura danese tradotta in italiano, Milano: Istituto Danese di Cultura, 1975; Bruno Berni, Letteratura danese in traduzione italiana. Una bibliografia, Pisa-Roma: Istituti editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 1999; Bruno Berni (ed.), Dai Gesta Danorum alla scena del crimine. La letteratura danese in traduzione italiana, Milano: Iperborea, 2012. For Norway: Cecilie Wiborg Bonafede, La Norvegia in Italia: Scritti sulla Norvegia ed i norvegesi, opere originali di autori norvegesi, traduzioni dalla letteratura norvegese pubblicati in Italia, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1981; Massimo Ciaravolo (ed.), Dal mondo delle saghe a quello di Sofia. La letteratura norvegese in traduzione italiana, Milano: Iperborea, 1999. The only bibliographic record published so far about Sweden is a short pamphlet prepared on the occasion of a book exhibition at Sormani Library in Milan: Massimo Ciaravolo (a cura di), Da Linneo a Gustafsson. 250 anni di letteratura svedese in traduzione italiana, Iperborea, Milano 1994. Secondly, by concentrating on a single country I will be able to work on a corpus of manageable dimensions.

The aim of this preliminary survey, to be completed with deeper inquiries in specific subjects that will emerge below, is to highlight the patterns and the dynamics that regulated the selection, translation and publication of early Swedish texts in Italy. When analyzing the period in question, though, we must bear in mind that those were the years when the Italian publishing market gradually shifted from a motley collection of printers and booksellers scattered in unconnected regional markets, to the first examples of publishing entrepreneurship, especially in Milan and Naples. Among the first publishers of Scandinavian literature in Italy, many were still simple printers or typographers (Tipografia Editrice Lombarda or Tipografia Grazioli, for instance), while the first, real publishing houses such as Sonzogno, Treves or Paravia started their activity only in the latest decades of the century. This entrepreneurial evolution, brought about by the attenuation of censorship and the concomitant gradual reduction of analphabetism in Italy, also resulted in a transformation of production, which started to be aimed at satisfying new market requirements.10 Turi & Palazzolo, Storia dell’editoria nell'Italia contemporanea, 1997, p. 46 ff. Especially in Milan, true beacon of the budding Italian publishing industry, a new consumption-oriented model started to emerge, offering the new reading audience both entertainment – with popular novels and serials, together with fashion and society papers and magazines – and education, with the first collections (“Biblioteche”) of Italian and foreign classics, or of contemporary esteemed novelists such as Hugo and Scott.

This is how Scandinavian literature also appeared on the Italian market. However, who chose what to translate, and on what basis, is still an open question, which I will try to address in this and in following papers. In the middle and late 19th century the dynamics at work in the translation process were still rudimentary: while in a developed publishing market the selection of texts is determined by an editorial policy and implemented by a series of professional figures both inside and outside the publishing house,11 Wegener, Mondadori as a Publisher of Scandinavian Literature, 2018, p.31 f. in the period I am analyzing the impulse often came from the authors or translators themselves, as we will see later on.

The corpus

According to Anthony Pym, corpora and lists are the main instrument of the preliminary phase of translation history, the one he calls “archaeological work”, aimed at answering the questions “who translated what, how, where, for whom and with what effect”.12 Pym, Method in Translation History, 1998, p. 38 ff. To build a list of translations of Swedish literature published in Italy during the 19th century, with the purpose of answering at least to some of the above mentioned questions, I drew on two existing bibliographies of Scandinavian translations: the online database Letteraturenordiche and a recent article by Anna Wegener, who, although focusing on the interwar period, collected data starting from 1886, when the Italian national bibliography (Bollettino delle pubblicazioni italiane ricevute per diritto di stampa) was started.13 http://www.letteraturenordiche.it/index.html, last accessed 15/9/2019; Anna Wegener, “Italian Translations of Scandinavian Literature in the Interwar Period. A Bibliographic Overwiev” in Analecta Romana Studi Danici, 2018:43, pp. 1-57. This list will be progressively verified and integrated by cross-checking data with two extensive Italian inventories, Catalogo dei libri italiani dell’Ottocento and Catalogo generale della libreria italiana, on one side and the Swedish databases Äldre svensktryck, Svenskt boklexikon. Åren 1830-1865 and Nationalbibliografin on the other.

So far, I have produced a list of 101 translations of Swedish or Finno-Swedish texts, ranging from single poems to full novels or plays, by 25 different authors, presented in Appendix A. The high text to author ratio is due to the conspicuous presence of lyrics, often several ones by a same author, included in magazines or anthologies, while only 32 of the texts are independent publications, either in book or pamphlet form. There is also a significant presence of reprints (43 out of 101), particularly in the case of poetry, where the same items often appear in more than one collection, and also, although in minor degree, of retranslations (2 certain, 4 dubious). Although in a well-developed market reprints usually testify “to the commercial viability of a given text”,14 Wegener, “Italian Translations of Scandinavian Literature in the Interwar Period”, 2018, p. 13. in this particular case their high frequency is due to the fact that the same translator, Solone Ambrosoli, to whom I will return in a moment, edited four different anthologies of Nordic poetry, “recycling” so to say the same materials several times.

For one third of translations, no indication is given about the language from which the text was translated. However, the then common practice of indirect translation, together with the other works signed by the indicated translator, allow us to assume that at least a handful of texts were translated from German, and as many from English or French. No such educated guess can of course be made in the 15 cases where the name of the translator is not given.

If we take a look at the names of the authors, the first observation we can make is that many of the writers who were deemed worth a translation in the nineteenth century are now all but forgotten. Apart from a few big names, literary history manuals such as, for instance, Bengt Olsson and Ingemar Algulin’s Litteraturens Historia i Sverige do not dedicate more than a few lines to them. As a further confirmation, only a handful of these 25 authors have been reprinted or retranslated in Italy after the first decade of the 20th century,15 Johan Ludvig Runeberg, Canti epici (ed. by Daniela Rosari and Camilla Storskog), Milano: Ariele, 2006; Erik Johan Stagnelius, La lirica di Erik Johan Stagnelius (ed. by Maria Ludovica Koch) Milano: Ariele, 1998; Zacharias Topelius, Sampo il lapponcino ed altre fiabe finlandesi, Torino: Paravia, 1956; Il Tonttu del castello di Turku, Roma: Sinnos, 1999. and Strindberg is the only one who can boast a long and significant publication history. However, since his production has already been analyzed by other scholars, I will not go into it here.16 Namely Perrelli and Ciaravolo, see note 5.

This discrepancy, though, is not so surprising if we bear in mind two considerations: first, that the canon is dynamic and not static, “an evolving creation, not something written in stone”, to quote British poet and critic Sean O’ Brien.17 Sean O’ Brien, “Read poetry: it’s quite hard”, The Guardian, 8/3/2008. The idea of what good literature is varies with time and place, and translations play a not irrelevant part in reshaping it. Secondly, the source culture’s canon which is established in the target culture is not necessarily the same than in the source culture. As Lawrence Venuti stated, “translation wields enormous power in constructing representations of foreign cultures. The selection of foreign texts and the development of translation strategies can establish peculiarly domestic canons for foreign literatures, canons that conform to domestic aesthetic values and therefore reveal exclusions and admissions, centers and peripheries that deviate from those current in the foreign language”.18 Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, Routledge, London-New York, 1998, p. 67. This will prove of use in a moment, when we will look closer at the translation of poetry. However, the question of the establishing of a Swedish canon in Italy is certainly worth further and deeper analysis in the future.

The most interesting observation that can be drawn from our list, however, emerges if we take a look at the genre. The most represented group is poetry, with 72 texts, followed by narrative, where I also include a handful of essayistic writings, most about travels and explorations, such as Nordenskiöld’s books, with a total of 23 texts, while theatre (6 texts) is represented almost exclusively by Strindberg’s works. Since, as already mentioned, I do not intend to address Strindberg’s production here, I will concentrate on the other two categories.

Poetry: An enthusiasts’ work

The 72 Swedish poems translated in the 19th century were often published in miscellanea, together with verse from the whole world, in the “universal” spirit that informed the second half of the century. This is the case of the “lyrical and epical florilegia” attached to the History of universal literature in 21 volumes published by Sanskritist and comparatist Angelo De Gubernatis between 1882 and 1885. The work comprises separated sections dedicated to theatre, lyrical poetry, satire, novel, history and philology, each divided into a historical and an anthological part. In the section for lyrical and epical poetry, De Gubernatis included 10 poems by 9 Swedish authors (2 by Snoilsky). Other mixed anthologies, although much more limited in scope, which comprise Swedish verse, are the collection of ballads and legends Rose e Viole [Roses and pansies] and the selection of love poems Il libro dell’amore. So far I have found no traces of how the editors chose which authors and which texts to include in their compendia, but it is possible that they drew on similar collective works in other languages.

However, the real devotee of Nordic poetry in general and Swedish one in particular is Solone Ambrosoli, editor and translator of four collections of Scandinavian lyrics published between 1879 and 1882.

Figure 2a: Solone Ambrosoli (1851-1906). Figure 2a: Solone Ambrosoli (1851-1906).

Figure 2b: Cover of *Versioni Poetiche dalle Lingue del Nord* (1881). Figure 2b: Cover of Versioni Poetiche dalle Lingue del Nord (1881).

Ambrosoli, a distinguished numismatist, was certainly familiar with Swedish, although his biographical data do not disclose where and when he learnt the language. His only journey to the Nordic countries, in the summer of 1882, is subsequent to the translations, as is his correspondence with Carl Snoilsky, between 1892 and ’95. According to Margherita Giordano Lokrantz, who dedicated an essay to this “Scandinavist in Milan at the turn of the century” (“skandinavist i sekelskiftets Milano”),19 Margherita Giordano Lokrantz, “Solone Ambrosoli: en skandinavist i sekelskiftets Milano”, in Italien och Norden. Kulturförbindelser under ett sekel, Stockholm: Carlsson, 2001, pp. 151-183. Translation mine. Ambrosoli’s interest for the Nordic countries could have originated in Germany, his wife’s home country, which he often visited. His love for poetry and his own verse-writing probably did the rest: in fact, “the group of poets he translated appears as quite homogeneous and maybe he chose them simply because he recognized himself in them and their stylistic ideal coincided with his” (“den grupp av skalder han översatt framstår som ganska homogen och kanske har han valt dem helt enkelt därför att han kände igen sig i dem och därför att deras stilideal motsvarade hans”). 20 Giordano Lokrantz, “Solone Ambrosoli: en skandinavist i sekelskiftets Milano”, p. 171.

This in fact applies in some degree to all Swedish poetry published in Italy in the 19th century: the poets who were chosen for translation were those who corresponded the best to the predominant Romantic mood of the times and have now, with a very few exceptions such as Tegnér o Runeberg, all but sunken into oblivion.

It is worth noting that the image of Swedish (and Scandinavian) poetry which began to take form in those years survived at least until the interwar period. In a recent study dedicated to Massimo Spiritini’s anthology from 1939, Poeti dal mondo, Davide Finco pointed out that the editor’s choice of Nordic verse gave an image of the Nordic countries “somewhat stereotypical, highlighting an attitude of melancholy, meditation, celebration of nature and of childlike or even childish view of the world”.21 Davide Finco, “Scandinavian poetry as ‘World poetry’”, in Berni & Wegener Translating Scandinavia, 2018, pp. 109-129. It might then well be the case that Ambrosoli’s translations contributed to mould an Italian canon of Swedish poetry which survived longer than in the source culture.

However, as already mentioned, further research into this corpus of poetic translations could certainly give more definite insight in the construction of the Swedish and Nordic canon in Italy, in the direction pointed out by Venuti in a worldwide perspective and by Siri Neergaard22 Nergaard, La costruzione di una cultura, 2004, p. 18. in a Nordic one.

Novels: A women’s affair

Interesting food for thought can also be drawn by looking at the list of fictional works translated from Swedish during our target period. If we leave out Nordeskiöld’s four expedition accounts, we make a surprising discovery: almost all narrative works are written by women. I must confess that this was the piece of information that struck me the most at this early stage of my research, and the one on which I certainly intend to investigate further. Why was Fredrika Bremer translated, and not Carl Jonas Love Almqvist? Why Anne Charlotte Leffler, and not the early Strindberg?

A first consideration to be made is that in the second half of the 19th century Italian women, maybe with some delay in comparison with other countries, started to gain a certain literacy and to develop a budding consciousness of their own role in society, be it mainly as wives and mothers.23 Antonia Arslan, Dame, galline e regine. La scrittura femminile italiana fra ’800 e ’900, Milano: Guerini e Associati, 1998, p. 20. This produced two effects that mutually amplified one another: on the one hand, the growing public of women readers, formed by projects such as the “pleasant and instructive library for gentlewomen” (“Biblioteca amena ed istruttiva per le Donne gentili)” launched in 1822 by Milan-based editor Giovanni Pirotta and specialized in translation of fashionable foreign novels for female readers, inevitably produced an increase in demand for publications aimed at satisfying women’s specific needs and tastes; on the other, “the Italian domestic fiction and journalism that addressed a female readership contributed to more liberal thinking concerning women’s ‘proper’ roles as wife and mother in the collective consciousness, and in particular among women”, revealing “the writers’ engagement (conscious or otherwise) with the issues with which the moderate emancipationists were concerned, such as better access to education and the professions”.24 Katharine Mitchell, Italian Women Writers: Gender and Everyday Life in Fiction and Journalism, University of Toronto Press, p. 5 f.

Although the increase in demand also led to an increase in women’s own writings, my starting hypothesis – still to be confirmed by deeper analysis – is that the offer of Italian female authorship grew at a slower pace than demand, urging publishers to look abroad to satisfy the latter. Sweden, together with its fellow Nordic countries, seemed an ideal reservoir of emancipationist issues – and female writers. Even though the 19th century was the period in which “European women of all countries and social classes experienced some of the most dramatic and enduring changes in their familial, working, and political lives”,25 Rachel G. Fuchs & Victoria E. Thompson, Women in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, p. 1. these changes occurred with different timing and scope in the various European countries. In Sweden the women’s right to education and to a role in society started to be discussed in the 1820s, often by male intellectuals such as Lars Johan Hierta or, some years later, Carl Jonas Love Almqvist.26 See for instance Ulla Manns, Upp systrar, väpnen er! Kön och politik i svensk 1800-talsfeminism, Stockholm: Atlantis, 2005, and Christina Florin & Lars Kvarnström (eds.), Kvinnor på gränsen till medborgarskap. Genus, politik och offentlighet 1800–1850, Stockholm: Atlas, 2011. This was not unknown in Italy, as confirmed by an 1866 pamphlet about the advancement of women in Italy, where Italian journalist and feminist activist Anna Maria Mozzoni wrote commending words about the Scandinavian legislation, underlying at the same time the delay of the local regulations:

While in Italy the law about compulsory primary education meets frequent opposition, when it comes to liberal initiatives; while in France this law, submitted several times to the Legislative assembly, repeatedly succumbed to a triumphant reactionary opposition, in Denmark, which has been benefiting from it for more than fifty years, there is not a single peasant woman who is excluded from the exchange of ideas for ignorance of reading or writing. And this is the country that Latin people, still conceited about their now lost ancient threefold primacy, dare sometimes regard as less cultivated and civil, as the republican Romans regarded the Greeks as barbarians.

Mentre in Italia la legge sull’insegnamento primario obligatorio (sic) incontra resistenze troppo frequenti quando trattasi di liberali iniziative; mentre in Francia questa legge più volte proposta al Corpo Legislativo soccombe ripetutamente davanti ad una retriva e sempre vittoriosa opposizione, la Danimarca, che da oltre cinquant’anni ne gode i vantaggi, non si trova avere una contadina che si vegga esclusa dal commercio delle idee per ignoranza di lettura e di scrittura. Ed è questo il paese, che le genti latine, tronfie ancora del triplice antico primato che si sono lasciate sfuggire di mano, hanno talora delle velleità di riguardare siccome meno colto e civile, non altrimenti che i romani della repubblica chiamavan barbari i greci.27 Anna Maria Mozzoni, Un passo avanti nella cultura femminile. Tesi e progetto, Milano: Tipografia internazionale, 1866, p. 49. Translation mine.

With this kind of considerations in mind, it should not be surprising that the Scandinavian countries were taken as a model, together with France and England, also in the field of women’s writing for the advancement of women.

Fredrika Bremer

It is not by chance that the first Swedish woman novelist to be translated in Italy, in 1846, was Fredrika Bremer. Her name was known among Italian erudites: she was in fact mentioned and praised in the very first outline of Swedish literature, which – curiously enough – was published in Italy even before any (known) example of translated work. Jakob Gråberg’s Sunto della letteratura svezzese nei tre ultimi anni 1829-1830 e 1831 dates in fact from 1833, followed in 1841 by the more exhaustive and scientific Storia della letteratura in Danimarca e in Svezia by French traveller and scholar Xavier Marmier.

Figure 3a: Jacob Gråberg of Hemsö (1776-1847). Pencil drawing by C. E. Liverati (1841). Figure 3a: Jacob Gråberg of Hemsö (1776-1847). Pencil drawing by C. E. Liverati (1841).

Xavier Marmier (1808-1892). Xavier Marmier (1808-1892).

Jakob Gråberg from Hemsö was a Swedish diplomat who spent most of his adult years in Italy, where he filled several highly regarded duties, such as vice-consul in Genua and rector of the Palatine Library in Florence. For all of his life he cultivated his interests in the most diverse subjects, from statistics to geography, from history to foreign languages. In 1832, spurred by love for his mother country, he wrote the above mentioned Sunto, only a third of which is actually dedicated to literature – in the chapters “Language and Literature (II)” and “Poetry (III)” (“Lingua, e belle lettere” and “Poesia”) – while the rest draws a broad outline of Swedish society with chapters dedicated to “Periodical Press (I)”, “History and Geography (IV)”, “Sciences (V)”, “Philology (VI)”, “Fine Arts (VII)”, “Scholarly and Literary Institutions (VIII)”, “Public and Private Libraries (IX)” (“Stampa periodica”, “Storia e Geografia”, “Scienze”, “Filologia”, “Belle Arti”, “Instituti Dotti, e Letterari”, “Librerie Pubbliche, e Private”). In the pages devoted to literature, marked by a somewhat outdated taste,28 Fulvio Ferrari, “Jakob Gråberg e la Svezia”, in Medioevo e Rinascimento, 1996: 7, pp. 241-252, here p. 251. he speaks in highly commending terms about Fredrika Bremer:

After these productions of academic and philological eloquence come the novels and short stories, among which the Sketches, that are pictures from everyday life, Teckningar utur hvardags-lifvet, by Miss Federica Bremer, [which] are a favourite reading of the romantic public, and of which three parts have already been published, with almost unbelievable sales, unique so far in the Swedish book market.

Appresso queste produzioni dell’accademica, e filologica eloquenza vengono le novelle, ed i romanzi, fra i quali gli Schizzi, ossiano disegni della vita quotidiana, Teckningar utur hvardags-lifvet, della signorina Federica Bremer, formano sempre una lettura prediletta del pubblico romantico, e dei quali furono già pubblicate tre parti, ch’ebbero uno smercio pressoché incredibile, ed unico finora nella libreria svezzese.29 Jacopo Gråberg da Hemsö, Sunto della letteratura svezzese in questi ultimi anni, Pisa: (n.p.), 1833, p. 19. Translation mine.

A decade later Gråberg’s outline was also included in Marmier’s literary history, with a concise addendum relating the more interesting developments occurred between 1833 and 1841, where Fredrika Bremer is named again:

Among the many original historical novels or short stories published in Sweden from 1832 to 1840, I believe the best can be considered to be: […] Presidentens Döttrar, The President’s Daughters, by the above-mentioned Federica Bremer, one of the prettiest and most pleasant productions of its kind.

Fra i molti romanzi, o racconti storici originali svezzesi degli anni 1832 fino al 1840, pare che si possano citare come i migliori: […] Presidentens Döttrar, le Figlie del presidente, dell’anzidetta Federica Bremer, una delle più gentili, e graziose produzioni del suo genere.30 Saverio Marmier, Storia della letteratura in Danimarca e in Svezia, vol. II, Firenze: Piatti, 1841, p. 72. Translation mine.

No certain information has been found so far as to how the publishing house Borroni & Scotti decided to translate and print Bremer’s Presidentens Döttrar.

Figure 4: Fredrika Bremer (1801-1865). Painting by John Gustaf Sandberg (1843). Figure 4: Fredrika Bremer (1801-1865). Painting by John Gustaf Sandberg (1843).

In her short foreword to the novel, the then 19-year-old translator, Francesca (Fanny) Lutti, seems to claim the initiative for herself: “Since there is not, as far as I know, an Italian version of this book, I decided to offer it to the young readers translated into our language” (“Non essendovi, per quanto io sappia, una versione italiana di questo libro, mi sono determinata a offerirla alla gioventù voltato nella nostra favella”).31 Federica Bremer, Le figlie del presidente, Milano: Borroni e Scotti, 1846, p. 6. Translation mine. Lutti – who was later to become herself an author, albeit of modest success, and the host of a very successful literary salon – goes on by declaring her admiration for the Germans’ (sic) “admirable ability to portray the philosophy of life” (“ammirevole attitudine a ritrarre la filosofia della vita”)32 Bremer, Le figlie del presidente, p. 5. Translation mine. and her intention to offer that “booklet” for the domestic education of the readers. The hint to the “Germans” – albeit contradicted by the adjective “Swedish” added to the subtitle of the book, “Tale of a Swedish Governess” (“Racconto di un’educatrice svedese”) – lets us suspect that she read the book in, and translated it from, German. This suspicion finds further support in a letter to Alessandro Manzoni, where the historian Federico Odorici asks the acclaimed novelist to receive the young lady, whom he presents as the translator of Le figlie del presidente from German.33 Quoted in Ernesto Travi, “La corrispondenza tra Federico Odorici e Manzoni”, in Commentari dell’ateneo di Brescia per l’anno 1996, Brescia: 1999, pp. 45-61. A textual comparison of the Italian text and of its possible German source34 Fredrika Bremer, Die Töchter des Präsidenten: Erzählung einer Gouvernante, Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1841. could hopefully shed light on this question. However, it is interesting that, although so young, the translator felt the need to explain her purpose (an instructive and moral one) and her treatment of the text (a free adaptation), showing a high consideration of her mediator’s role. However, what seems clear at this stage of the research is that in a foreign novel Lutti thought she could find something that was missing in the Italian ones, that is the ability to portray the philosophy of life and to teach young women to follow their natural disposition (in the introduction she does not say what that amounts to, but the novel argues for women’s right to education and to a certain degree of freedom).

The same novel was retranslated 34 years later by another publisher,35 Federica Bremer, Le figlie del presidente, Milano: Brigola, 1880. Brigola, at that time one of the most important in Italy and very active in publishing Italian women writers such as Neèra, Matilde Serao, Marchionéss Colombi, etc.36 Neèra, pseudonym of Anna Radius Zuccari (1846-1918), is the author of several novels where she advocates a deeper spiritual life for women as a reaction to the rampant materialism of the times, while keeping equally distant from the opposed excesses of feminism and sentimentalism; Matilde Serao (1856-1927), journalist and novelist, author of more than 40 among novels and short story collections in the naturalist mood, was the first Italian woman to found and direct a newspaper, Il Giorno; Marchionéss Colombi, pseudonym of Maria Antonietta Torriani (1840-1920), is the author of more than 40 novels, republished in the 1970s be the prestigious Italian publishing house Einaudi, where she portrayed a great number of women from the most diverse social conditions, from peasants to servants, from middle-class to noblewomen. The frontispiece does not show the name of the translator but only, apart from the title and author’s name, that of the collection editor, Salvatore Farina, himself an author of sentimental novels in Dickensian mood. This could possibly suggest that it was him who chose the book for publication, this time “translated from Swedish” (“Tradotto dallo svedese”) if we are to trust the frontispiece. Also the changes that transformed Italian society and publishing industry in the elapsed decades support the hypothesis that this time the impulse to publish came from the publisher, prompted by the increased market demand for women’s writing for female readers. To further corroborate it, a few years later the same publisher also released, with the same scanty cover information, a novel by Emilie Flygare-Carlén, Splendide nozze (Ett lyckligt parti).37 Emilia Carlén, Splendide nozze, Milano: Brigola, 1883.

Emilie Flygare-Carlén

This however was not Carlén’s first book to be published in Italy: before Brigola, also Treves and Tipografia Editrice Lombarda put into prints several of her works. The most interesting one is the first, Un anno di matrimonio (Ett år), published by Treves in 1869,38 Emilia Carlén, Un anno di matrimonio, Milano: Treves, 1869. since the translator Clemente Mapelli, as young Francesca Lutti before him, explains his motives for proposing the book to the Italian reader.

Figure 5: Emilie Flygare-Carlén (1807-1892). Figure 5: Emilie Flygare-Carlén (1807-1892).

After stating that foreign books must be chosen both for their aims and for their style, he announces the theme of the book: family and its reflections on society. After a short digression about “Anglo-Swedish” literature (which incidentally gives us a clue as to which language the book could be translated from), he gives some information about the author, whom he describes as one of the most eminent Swedish writers together with Fredrika Bremer. Finally, he goes on to say that women writers are the most suited to handle womanly themes, as they share the same needs, the same aspirations, and the same goals. Although he does not go as far as to deny the modern woman’s right to a broader and freer education, he is convinced that her role and position in society are those of wife and mother, and he seems to believe that this should also be Carlén’s opinion. I wonder whether she would have approved of this introduction to one of her novels, but these words are nevertheless a proof of the relevance of her authorship to the debates about the woman question, abroad as well as in Sweden. In the next phase of my research, however, it will be interesting to see whether later translations, probably by different, albeit unspecified, translators, do her and her ideas more justice.

Charlotte Leffler

The third Swedish woman writer whose books were translated in Italy in the 19th century is Anne Charlotte Leffler.

Figure 6: Anne Charlotte Leffler (1849-1892). Figure 6: Anne Charlotte Leffler (1849-1892).

The story of her Italian publication, however, is easier to retrace: being married to a Neapolitan nobleman and mathematician, Pasquale Del Pezzo, and having settled in Italy with her husband, Leffler herself actively promoted the translation and publication of her works. In doing so, she had the friendly collaboration of the couple’s intellectual circle, which included among others the poet and playwriter Salvatore Di Giacomo and the eminent critic and philosopher Benedetto Croce. Di Giacomo worked side by side with Leffler on the translation of Hur man gör godt (Come si fa il bene). Leffler translated orally from Swedish to French, while Di Giacomo wrote down the Italian version.39 Margherita Giordano Lokrantz, “Anne Charlotte Leffler i Neapel (1888-1892)”, in Italien och Norden. Kulturförbindelser under ett sekel, Stockholm: Carlsson, 2001, pp. 95-149, here p. 135. Di Giacomo’s testimony is included in his article “Figure nordiche”, published first in «Giornale d’Italia», 3 dicembre 1912, and later as an introduction to Anne Charlotte Leffler, In lotta con la società, Napoli: Alvaro, 1913. Croce, on his part, wrote an introduction to Come si fa il bene, later also published as an independent pamphlet,40 Benedetto Croce, Letteratura moderna scandinava, Trani: Vecchi, 1892. where he in fact offered a short outline of modern Scandinavian literature. Croce analyzed the Nordic literatures as a single whole, which he then labeled as realistic, or “problem-art” (“arte-problema”), that is, an art that asks relevant questions and gives original answers, as opposed to the thesis novels and plays typical of French or Italian literatures, crystallized in examining “the casuistry of adultery or similar questions” (“la casuistica dell’adulterio e quistioni analoghe)”.41 Croce, Letteratura moderna scandinava, p. 8. Translation mine, italics in the original. After introducing to the Italian public writers such as Ibsen and Björnson from the Norwegian “group” (Croce’s definition), Jacobsen and Brandes from the Danish one, Rydberg and above all Strindberg from the Swedish one, he went on presenting Charlotte Leffler’s works, which he praised for “their deep feeling for the problems of modern life, their subtle psychological analysis, their clear and straightforward exposition” (“per il profondo sentimento dei problemi della vita moderna, per la fine analisi psicologica, per la esposizione semplice e schietta”).42 Croce, Letteratura moderna scandinava, p. 16. Translation mine. He also underlined the controversial themes of her works, such as En Sommarsaga (which in his translation becomes “Summer dreams”, “Sogni d’estate”), where she debates whether a woman

really has to leave everything behind, every single thing, to follow her husband; or whether she has the right to live her own life, to claim that this life be totally respected, and even, in some particular cases, the right to bring her husband to renounce his vocation to allow her to follow hers.

debba veramente sempre lasciar ogni cosa, qualunque cosa, per seguire suo marito; o se essa abbia il diritto di vivere la sua propria vita, di esigere che questa sia perfettamente rispettata, e, finanche, in certi dati casi, il diritto di condurre suo marito a rinunziare alla propria vocazione per seguire la sua. E la soluzione è in quest’ultimo senso.43 Croce, Letteratura moderna scandinava, p. 21. Translation mine.

This was certainly a far cry from the Italian view of women’s conditions, if the most famous women writers themselves chose protagonists who were “not marked as transgressive” but “entirely conventional”,44 Mitchell, Italian Women Writers, p. 7. and often were “ideologically opposed to the ideals put forward by the emancipationists”.45 Mitchell, Italian Women Writers, p. 10.

In conclusion, the first information gathered so far seems to corroborate my hypothesis that the striking ratio of women novelists among the early Italian translations of Swedish literature is related to the strong request for novels addressing the woman question, coupled with the belief that these kind of writings could be best dealt with by women, and with the fact that in Italy writing women, although more and more numerous, were still not enough to satisfy this demand. My next steps will therefore be a) to analyze and compare the social and cultural conditions of women in Sweden and in Italy; and b) to verify to what extent and effect the Swedish authoresses listed here really contributed with their books to the progress of the woman question in Italy.


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APPENDIX A: Translations of Swedish or Finno-Swedish texts appeared in Italy in the 19th century


APPENDIX B: Italian translations of Swedish novels or short stories written by women