From the particular to the universal: Vittorini’s Italian adaptation of ask the dust

Abstract

This essay investigates Vittorini’s translation of Fante’s Ask the Dust into Italian as Il cammino nella polvere and the reasons why Vittorini decided to translate the Italian-American author at a time (1941) when Fascism’s rhetoric was becoming increasingly anti-American. With the help of theories of intercultural translation, Ferme evinces the choices Vittorini made in translating Ask the Dust and his tendency to move away from particular emotions toward abstraction and universal values. Transforming Fante’s original into an Italian version marked by strategic omissions and full rewritings, Vittorini made the work a key part of his ‘grand’ project of using new ethnic American writers like Fante to exemplify the mondo offeso (injured world) of the 1930s and 1940s. Ferme’s analysis illuminates the impact that Fante’s work had on a generation of Italian writers fighting fascist censorship and repression.