University of Warwick

Graduate Student, Italian

PhD candidate - Postgraduate teacher

Thesis Title: Translating for Children under the Italian Fascist Regime

About

I am currently in my final year of Ph.D, supervised by Dr. Loredana Polezzi. My research project explores the complex and often problematic relationship between translation and ideology, with particular attention to the place of translated children’s literature in Italy during the Fascist regime. Translated children’s literature offers a notably privileged perspective on this question, given its status as a genre which both reflects dominant values of its time and brings with it an asymmetrical relation of power between children and adults.

The general purpose of my thesis is two-fold: a) to pinpoint and explore the paradox of translation under the Fascist dictatorship, where the readership was passionate about foreign literature but the regime concealed this, blaming translated fiction for corrupting Italian taste; and b) to highlight how the status of a foreign text affects translation strategies, determining the degree of manipulation and adaptation to domestic values.

My analysis will focus on a selection of translations of children’s books and their role in the Italian literary system. At macro-analytical level, the very selection of the texts to be translated will be taken into account, as revealing of the cultural policy of the regime. The approach adopted will consider children’s literature in the light of modern theorizations of childhood as historically and culturally bound. Doing so, I will be able to illustrate how the dominant image of childhood affected both form and content in the case of translated children’s texts and how these phenomena interacted with more general attitudes and policies concerning translation.

Scarce material has been published on the particular issue of translating for children under totalitarian regimes which is, by its nature, extremely revealing of the close connection between translation and dominant ideology. Therefore, my research on how these texts were assimilated during Fascism aims at offering new insights into the cultural policy of the regime, while also revealing the gaps between reality and propaganda.

My Ph.D is funded by the Warwick Postgraduate Research Scholarship WPRS

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