The Great Gatsby In Translation: An Italian Perspective

"Hardly anyone knows him in Italy. In America, his name is very well known in all cities where literature matters the most." These are the first two lines of an interview F. Scott Fitzgerald gave in December 1924 to an Italian magazine. "Mr. Gerald"—as the journalist called him, corroborating the thesis that the American writer was unknown to Italians—was in Rome "to give the last touches to a new novel, which is fruit of his deep psychological study of the sensitivity and liveliness of our Latin character" (Bruccoli and Baughman 72).¹ As Anna Kérchy observes, "the changing meaning of a literary work certainly depends on the socio-historical context in which the interpretation takes place" (142). In this case, the meaning of The Great Gatsby, which came out two months after the publication of this interview, depended on the socio-historical context of Fascist Italy in the 1920s, during which James Gatz was read as a personification of the Italian national type. The brief quotation above suggests how investigating Fitzgerald's international reception can open up new layers of meaning in his fiction, while serving as an example of Gatsby's "universal appeal," recently evoked by Jesmyn Ward in her introduction to the latest Scribner paperback edition of the novel (see also Curnutt).

The greatest achievement of Gianfranca Balestra's Riflessi del Grande Gatsby: Traduzioni, cinema, teatro, musica (The Resonances of The Great Gatsby: translations, film, theater, music) is that it demonstrates the importance and necessity of a transnational perspective on Fitzgerald's masterpiece. This critical study situates itself in the relatively recent line of research that concentrates on foreign readings of Fitzgerald, focusing on the intercultural encounters between the writer's work and its international reception (i.e., Bouzonviller; Kérchy; Viel; Salmose; and Wardle). As Balestra points out, with The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald managed to cross national boundaries (52), but this would never have been possible without the work of translators and filmmakers that brought international fame to the book and attracted new fans to the author—in Italy as well as around the world.

If Fitzgerald, unlike many of his American colleagues who lived there, did not fall under Italy's spell (to put it mildly), Italy has gradually fallen under Fitzgerald's spell, from Fernanda Pivano's 1950 translation of Gatsby to Baz Luhrmann's 2013 popular film adaptation of the book. "The 'Gatsby effect' in Italy," notes Balestra in the introduction, "constitutes an example of the universal value of the book and of its transcultural dimension" (8).² Prompted by the fact that literary translations and cinematic adaptations contributed heavily to the growing frenzy surrounding Gatsby, she concentrates upon the interlinguistic and intersemiotic transpositions of Fitzgerald's novel. The editor of Roberto Serrai's 2011 Italian translation of The Great Gatsby, Balestra presents her argument in elegant prose, showing the many ways in which the book evolved through multiple intercultural and intermedial transformations. Riflessi is divided into three dense and well-researched sections: the first one is dedicated to an analysis of the novel's most famous themes; the second part explores the transnational perspective of Gatsby, with a detailed investigation of its many Italian translations starting from Cesare Giardini's in 1936, one mostly unnoticed by Italian readers; and the third part deals with the book's intersemiotic translations (for film, theater, and music, as suggested by the title).

Balestra begins her study by offering general critical insights into the book's composition, narrative discourse, and impact on future writers, and continues by delving more deeply into Fitzgerald's text, extending the conversation to the varied efforts to translate it into Italian. In a recent essay that takes a similar approach in investigating the way in which culture-specific references in Gatsby have been handled in Italian, Mary Wardle observes that "while anyone proficient in English can read Fitzgerald's texts as he wrote them, for millions of non-English speakers the only option is to rely on translations" (213...