Domesticating Ibsen for Italy: Enrico and Icilio Polese’s Ibsen Campaign by Giuliano D’Amico (review)

Giuliano D’Amico’s Domesticating Ibsen for Italy: Enrico and Icilio Polese’s Ibsen Campaign is a detailed study of Henrik Ibsen’s reception during the late nineteenth century (primarily 1891–1894), centered on the Milanbased theater agency L’arte drammatica. It is an important addition to a collection of studies focusing on Ibsen’s reception and staging outside of Scandinavia. In the specific case of Italian scholarship, D’Amico’s book builds upon and exceeds Roberto Alonge’s Ibsen—L’opera e la fortuna scenica (Ibsen—His Oeuvre and Reception) by considering a broader “theatrical, cultural and institutional context” (p. 6). It is also the kind of book—involving both an impressive feat of archival research and (thereby) some corrections to or confirmations of assumptions made in prior scholarship—that can serve as foundational reading for anyone wanting to work in a comparative mode on early Ibsen and theater studies in the European context. To say that D’Amico’s book is not for dilettantes is an understatement, given that it demands from the reader (in very correct prose) a strong interest in the politics of reception, translation, and adaptation, as well as patience for the meticulous findings of archival excavation. Its particular strengths lie in its neutral attitude toward textuality—it does not hierarchize or moralize—in its thorough consideration of the translations in a broader context of promotion and performance, and in its comparative awareness and erudition.

D’Amico’s approach to narrating this Italian reception history involves insisting, following Jerome McGann, that “all variants of text are of interest”: “a successful, historically informed study of Ibsen’s works (and of literature in general) must take into account, first, the different individuals that participate in the social process of creation of the literary work … and, second, the various shapes and forms a text acquires after it has been produced, marketed and read” (p. 7; emphasis in original). The result of this approach is “a partial rejection of the idea of a ‘principal’ version or form of a text” and that “categories of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ or ‘good’ and ‘bad’ regarding the critical approach to it are often dismissed” (p. 7). Happily, D’Amico largely succeeds in eschewing evaluative speculation, or in avoiding application of the rejected terms. Although this resistance to rigid textual hierarchies is familiar and has been established in theory, such an approach is nonetheless refreshing in the context of Ibsen studies. In other words, D’Amico’s approach, while not radical, thwarts certain persistent expectations for work on Ibsen-the-canonical-dramatist. Of course, and as he amply illustrates, canonization itself is a complex process, involving promotional campaigns and the “violence” of translation (à la Lawrence Venuti), or domestication and/as exoticization—not really a contradiction, as D’Amico shows by gesturing to the creation of a particularly Italian or southern European notion of Nordicness (p. 13). Most importantly for D’Amico, the canonization of Ibsen in Italy, as elsewhere, involved middlemen. He writes:

Domesticating Ibsen for Italy focuses on the “Ibsen campaign” that the Poleses lead between 1891, when Enrico [fils] translated and Icilio [père] marketed The Wild Duck, and 1894, when they did the same with An Enemy of the People. I have chosen the word “campaign” to highlight that the introduction of the works of Ibsen in Italy did not happen peacefully or by mere chance, but often resulted in struggles, polemics and battles between Ibsen’s supporters and detractors. … In one important sense, this book is also a study of a “marketing operation.” In part, domestication took place because the Poleses had a personal interest in making the plays more suitable for the market.

(pp. 3–4)

As this focus on middlemen and their “marketing operation” suggests, the key players in D’Amico’s book are the Poleses rather than Ibsen, and the key texts are not only Ibsen “tradotti and adatatti per la...