Ethnicity, Gender, and the Making of a Transnational Decadent Canon: Georges Hérelle’s Translations of Matilde Serao and Grazia Deledda

Abstract

This article considers the role of the French translator Georges Hérelle in the circulation of Italian works associated with decadence across languages and borders, exploring his intervention as cultural agent and gatekeeper. It examines in particular Hérelle’s relationship with Matilde Serao and Grazia Deledda, two women writers from the southern Italy, and discusses the key role this relationship played in shaping international understandings of their affiliations with decadence. A focus on translation reveals how Hérelle and other male French intellectuals encouraged Italian female writers to minimize their cosmopolitan ambitions and stick to local inspiration in their work. Hérelle felt entitled to select and adapt Serao’s and Deledda’s work for French readerships, promoting features that reinforced their association with territories (Naples and Sardinia) that French readers perceived as exotic and “savage,” rather than coeval with modern Western societies. He also relentlessly discouraged Deledda and Serao from experimenting with foreign languages and assimilating European (and especially French) literary influences. In doing so, he and his collaborators effectively treated them, to use Gayatri Spivak’s terminology, as “native informants,” whose task was to recount and interpret their native traditions for the enjoyment and consumption of nonnative readerships.