Quo vadis di Henryk Sienkiewicz nell’offerta delle case editrici italiane per l’infanzia e l’adolescenza

Abstract

The paper outlines the publishing history of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis in Italian editions for children and young adults in the 20th century. The research conducted so far has shown that Sienkiewicz’s novel was part of Italian publications for a young readership as early as at the beginning of the 20th century, and that the book was frequently republished and reedited by numerous publishing houses over the following decades. The paper aims to present the strategies applied by Italian publishers as they recast Sienkiewicz’s work into versions specifically targeting young readers. Sienkiewicz’s Roman narrative proved a source of easy revenue for many publishing houses. Discreditable translatory practices were, at least at the beginning of the 20th century, mainly the domain of Milanese publishers whose efforts also focused on reworkings of Quo Vadis for children and young adults after the Second World War. The paper discusses examples that vividly illustrate the commercialisation of literature and publishers’ responses to the changes of the Italian publishing market in the second half of the 20th century. The findings of a study that used quantitative methods to analyse the corpus of 18 Italian editions of Quo Vadis are presented as well.