Under Arturo's Star: The Cultural Legacies of Elsa Morante

Elsa Morante, Translator of Katherine Mansfield

45 Nicoletta Di Ciolla McGowan Elsa Morante, Translator of Katherine Mansfield The year 1948, with the appearance of Menzogna e sortilegio, marks a significant turning point in Morante’s literary trajectory . It is the year when, after decades of fragmented and often ad hoc collaboration with papers and periodicals, to which she contributed articles and short stories, Morante published her first novel. Menzogna e sortilegio was an ambitious project, one that revealed to the reader Morante’s stylistic maturity and poetic vision, and to Morante herself her own true vocation: indeed, after its publication she effectively disowned all her previous writings. The decades up to 1948 were referred to by Morante, in the afterword appended to the collection Lo scialle andaluso, as “fase preistorica”—hence, a period historically located outside the “officially” recognized boundaries, a kind of laboratory in which the author sharpened and tested her creative tools in preparation for the later display of talent that were the novels. Nevertheless, they contain a number of significant writings that already reveal the author’s inventiveness and narrative abilities. Elsa Morante wrote, in fact, from an extremely young age. Her urge to write, as she significantly stated, “nacque, si può dire, insieme a me” (Garboli and Cecchi, in Morante, Opere 1: xx; “was born, we might say, when I was born”). Le bellissime avventure di Caterì dalla trecciolina, written when the author was 13, was followed by a vast number of short stories, often appearing, feuilleton fashion, in installments in papers and magazines. The first collection, Il gioco segreto, was published by Garzanti in 1941; this was followed in 1963 by a second collection, Lo scialle andaluso, which incorporated a selection of the stories of Il gioco segreto together with more recent 46 Nicoletta Di Ciolla McGowan production. In 1945, long after financial constraints had ceased to have an influence on the direction of her literary efforts, Morante cooperated in the translation of an anthology of the short stories and Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), which were published by Rizzoli and Longanesi respectively, and reappeared together in a single volume in 1957. Although translating foreign authors was not an uncommon practice for Italian writers, I would argue that, in Elsa Morante’s case, the transposition of Mansfield’s writings into Italian was more than a simple editorial operation. It may have been dictated by an artistic affinity, a shared ethics and aesthetics of literature, as well as an analogous sensibility. Working on this assumption, the instance of a “compulsive” writer such as Morante, who has finally and declaredly rid herself of the necessity for commission work and who has acquired the new luxury of being able to dedicate herself completely to her own creativity,1 nevertheless taking on the task of translating into Italian the works of an Anglophone writer, begs further investigation. Curiously, neither the 1945 nor the 1957 edition of Mansfield’s translations included “The Man without a Temperament,” a story that Mansfield wrote in 1920 and which was intriguingly, and explicitly, echoed twenty-one years later by Morante’s own “Un uomo senza carattere.” Yet “Un uomo senza carattere,” which was originally published in Il gioco segreto, survived the ruthless decimation operated by Morante on the fase preistorica materials, and successfully made it to Lo scialle andaluso in 1963. These two short stories will become the focal point of the analysis of the numerous and significant links between Elsa Morante and the writer from New Zealand. Katherine Mansfield’s engagement with the short story form is to a large extent a reflection of the cultural and intellectual climate at the beginning of the twentieth century. The sense of despair and the loss of hope produced by the emerging Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean philosophical currents— Schopenhauer’s pessimistic rejection of the value of life and denial of will, Nietzsche’s theory of the death of God, among others—and by rapid and radical social, political, and technological changes, had shaken the foundations of a cultural praxis based on certainties and logic. In literature, this new attitude manifested itself in the rejection of the realist novel—repre- 47 Translator of Katherine Mansfield sentation of a finite, knowable, and inscribable reality, ruled by the tenets of linearity, logic, and causality—in favor of the short story, epitome of the new fragmented subjectivity.2 The...