Gabriele d'Annunzio

The arrival of Gabriele d'Annunzio's work on the US publishing market dates as early as the late 19th century. When in 1897, in the midst of the writing of The Flame of Life, the Vate wrote to his Italian publisher about the possibility of releasing the novel at Richmond, the New York house had already published The Triumph of Death (1896), translated by Arthur Hornblow, and certainly had the text of Giovanni Episcopo in its hands. Under a new title, The Flame of Life would later come out in the United States in the same year as the Italian publication (1900) in two different editions, for the types of H. Fertig and for those of L. C. Page & Company. Unmediated and not explicitly regulated by specific copyright legislation in a transoceanic context, publishing contacts with America were often handled by d'Annunzio himself, or due to interest by poets and intellectuals even ideologically close to the gradually more armed decadentism of the Vate: Georges Hérelle in France, Stephan George in Germany, Arthur Symons in Britain and, by this route, in the United States.

After WWI, it is Arthur Livingstone, with his Foreign Press Service, who imparts a decisive institutionalization to such contacts. While d'Annunzio's international fame was increasing, partly as a consequence of the conquest of Fiume, the US market welcomed materials virtually unpublished in Italy: this was the case with Federico Vittore Nardelli's unauthorized biography of d'Annunzio, withdrawn within a month of publication at the behest of the Vate himself (negotiations in Nardelli's defense had also involved Natalia Danesi Murray), but promptly appearing for Harcourt, Brace & Company in 1931 under the title Gabriel the Archangel (Livingstone is cited as co-author). In the same years, a number of d'Annunzio's plays already published at the turn of the century reappear (in 1929 both La figlia di Iorio, for Little, Brown & Company, and Francesca da Rimini, for Harper & Brothers), while Arthur Hornblow's translation of the novel L'innocente is published by Page.

The collapse of the fascist regime involves the fall of interest in d'Annunzio's work, which in the US already dated to the WWII. Only two short anthologies of d'Annunzio's verse appear in the 1960s, one in a volume of European poetry published by Holt, Reinhart & Winston (The Poem Itself, 1960), the other one in a bilingual edition by Harvey House (Selections from Italian Poetry, 1966). Still in a collected anthology, the short story San Pantaleone appeared in 1970 for Books for Libraries Press (Stories by foreign authors). The revival of critical studies on d'Annunzio, which began in Italy in the middle of the decade, did not echo significantly in the United States until the late 1980s, when a conference was organized at Yale on the fiftieth anniversary of his death (March 26-29, 1988).

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