Paolo Volponi

The US reception of Paolo Volponi's work in the central decades of the twentieth century is almost entirely limited to his fiction. Indeed, shortly before the novels, some of his poems of Le porte dell'Appennino (Feltrinelli, 1960) had appeared in the April 1963 issue of a small avant-gard magazine from Boston, Origin. The translator was the director himself, Cid Corman, a former English teacher in Matera. The following October, Italian Quarterly published a new selection of Italian poetry edited by Vittoria Bradshaw, in which Volponi himself was included. Bradshaw would later anthologize Volponi's verse in the volume From Pure Silence to Impure Dialogue: A Suervey of Post-War Italian Poetry, 1945-1965 (Las Americas Publishing Co., 1971), which unfortunately had very little distribution, and remained mostly unsold in the publisher's warehouses.

Paolo Volponi's fame in the United States thus remained mostly linked to the problems of the newborn Italian factories, a theme that dominates his fiction. Within two years of the Italian edition, Belén Sevareid translated Memoriale, changing its title to a nineteenth-century-flavored My Troubles Began (Grossman Publishers, 1964). Three years later, it was Sevareid again who edited the version of the Strega Prize-winning volume The Worldwide Machine for the same publisher. Despite the following editorial silence (only in 1995 Italica Press published a new edition of one of his novels, Last Act in Urbino), in 1988 Volponi participated as guest of honor at the eighth congress of the American Association for Italian Studies, then held at Brigham Young University.

Related Vectors