"Un'ordinata bellezza". Le traduzioni della Casa Editrice Laterza durante il regime fascista

Laterza publishing house became one of the leading publishers in Italy between 1920 and 1945. Giovanni Laterza, its founder, in strict cooperation with Benedetto Croce, brought to Italy several foreign novels and philosophical essays. The idea lying behind this policy was to forge in the country a critical mass of ideal European readers, able to break the Italian cultural marginality and create new literary canons (Billani). We focus, in particular, on the policy of Laterza publishing house, and analyse how responses to the fascist ambiguous 'revision' system (Bonsaver, Forgacs, Rundle) changed depending on law, patronage, and material conditions in which the translators worked (Lefevere). After tracing a map of the whole corpus of foreign works (philosophical, historical and scientific) published by the Italian publisher, we focus on the five English literature translations issued during the regime (Milton’s Aereopagitica; Huxley’s The Olive Tree; Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson; Well’s A Short History of the Word More’s Utopia) ,in particular we will focus on Huxley’s The Olive Tree translated in 1939 by Ada Prospero Gobetti, a unique collection of essays which combines ethics and politics. Analyzing the unpublished correspondence among the translators, Laterza and Croce, and through a close reading of Huxley’s book and its translation we are able to identify both the policy of the publisher and the different translation strategies adopted, that reflect respectively submission or resistance to the dominant thinking (Tymoczko). This in turn allows us to discuss more in general the role of ideology as an explicit (censorship) or implicit (self-censorship) component of the translation process (Gramsci).