Italian Translations of Scandinavian Literature in the Interwar Period: A Bibliographic Overview

Various scholars have claimed that Danish literature enjoyed a translation “boom” in Italy in the interwar period, a timespan which largely coincides with the years of Fascist rule. In some respects at least, a significant rise in the number of Italian translations of Danish literature would fit well with Italy’s widely documented interest in foreign literature in the 1930s, a period Cesare Pavese famously dubbed “the decade of translations.” The author puts the translation boom claim to the test by compiling a bibliography of book-form Italian translations of Scandinavian literature – defined as literature originally written in Danish, Norwegian or Swedish – from 1886 to 1955. In order to effectively assess whether the number of Italian translations was particularly high in the interwar years, the chronological boundaries of the bibliography are deliberately set beyond 1918-1940. The bibliography does show that the 1930s was indeed a period of intense translative activity, but it also shows that there had been a previous boom in the transmission of Scandinavian literature to Italy, namely in the 1890s when Henrik Ibsen’s dramas were launched on the Italian market, and that the number of Italian translations of Scandinavian literature actually peaked during the last two years of the Second World War.