Fernanda Pivano: A New Yorker reporter (perhaps Jay
McInerney) described the “Bob Dylan crowd” from “as far away as Sicily,” with
copies of On the Road and Il Grande Gatsby in their backpacks,
gathered in Conegliano, north of Venice, to honor Fernanda Pivano. At an
event organized by that town’s American Folk Song Society, they shouted
“Nanda! Nanda! Nanda!” Allen Ginsberg, on stage, wore in his lapel a rosette
of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (“Grazie, Fernanda” 30). Long
labors of love were rewarded with love in a tribute published also in
America. Translator, critic,
biographer, and journalist, Fernanda Pivano has for a half century influenced
Italian perception of American culture. Her survey of American history and
analyses of American religion, politics, popular culture, and literature are
founded on deep and comprehensive researches, sojourns in the United States
from the mid-1950s on, and long-term friendships with American writers whom
she has visited at their homes and where they toured or lived abroad. She
reports reliably and incisively. The bulk of her work is unavailable to
readers of English. (In the United States she is recognized mainly at
reunions of the Beats, as a sort of godmother. When the twenty-fifth anniversary
of On the Road was celebrated in
Colorado, Pivano was there.) While we do not need her translations of Edgar
Lee Masters, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or William Faulkner, her
introductions to those translations could reveal us to ourselves in new ways.
Her two fine novels of the latter 1980s should be accessible as well, but in
the United States she is unknown as a novelist. Happily, in 1970 she
used English to state her motives, theories, and procedures as a translator.
She is one of those “who write and re-write a sentence over and over again to
reach whatever dream they have about that sentence” (Pivano, “Modern
Translations into Italian” 322).[1] The result is a creation; and, she
affirms, “translation can only be a creation.” She retains the original’s
sense, texture, flavor, rhythm, style: the author’s consciousness protected
and conveyed in another language. She learned to do this from her mentor
Cesare Pavese; Elio Vittorini had done it too. For them, American writing
shook up complacencies of Italian academic refinement, for literary style as
distinct from the spoken language had become genteel, convoluted, even
sanitized and euphemized—Hemingway had been a revelation![2] Thereafter, even while Hemingway was
banned in Italy, a literature of vast spaces and conquest of wilderness, of
forging a new nation and celebrating individual freedom, could be translated
as resistance to fascism and fascist censorship, when original work of that
kind would have been banned. Liberation came through translating works by
naturalists of the 1930s (Erskine Caldwell, James T. Farrell, John Steinbeck,
William Saroyan), Herman Melville (about whose Moby-Dick Pivano wrote her thesis), and Walt Whitman (whom Pavese
translated). By “creating” American literature for Italians, translators
“created a new generation of writers and a new consciousness” (322). During
the Nazi occupation, Pivano’s first translation, Spoon River Anthology, “was a kind of underground safe-conduct or
pass” and one who carried a copy was “something between a conspirator and a
new-style-of-life adept” (324). Even before their arrival in uniform as
liberators of Italy, Americans were liberating Italians. Pivano describes the
painstaking procedures she used for translating before the advent of
“numberless dictionaries and vocabularies and varieties of specific slang
glossaries,” before “numberless English-speaking tourists in Italy” (325).
Dialects, then, helped solve the problem of slang. During the 1930s and
1940s, “publishers were most unwilling to publish American authors for fear
of having the books seized by political anti-foreign censorship, even though
their reputation as literary publishers was actually helped a great deal
through such publications” (326). Americanisti
were expected to translate the books they loved practically for free; they
would then get to translate acceptable books at normal rates. Postwar “rivers of
Coca-Cola and economic imperialism” (327) replaced dreams of American
freedom, but Pivano kept translating because to do so had become her
profession. Zeal for fidelity led to correspondences with authors. In Paris
she met Alice Toklas and Richard Wright. Hemingway came to Italy and was
helpful; “[l]istening to him telling [a] story at the dining-table was more
useful to understanding his writing than reading thousands of words of
criticism on his technique of writing” (329). Then Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, as she says, “blew my mind out”
(330). She saw in his lines a proposal of “full-time frankness or
truthfulness . . ., of searching into one’s own consciousness as a
first step to try to find the core of anyone else’s consciousness and start a
new, unmanipulated communication”—and here she found “a way out of the
intellectual sclerotization that was stifling Italy during the sixties”
(331): she became his translator. Pivano was well
prepared for her work.[3] Born in Genoa in 1917, she studied in
Turin, where Pavese taught her at the Liceo D’Azeglio. She took a degree in
piano at the Conservatory in 1940 and in literature in 1941; two years later
she took a degree in philosophy. In 1949, the same year in which her
translation of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe issued in Italy, she married
photographer-architect-designer Ettore Sottsass, Jr. She taught at the
university in Turin until 1960 and afterwards at the conservatory in Milan.
Since literary translation does not pay well, she continued to teach English
in Milan until retiring on a modest pension; but increasingly her career
evolved outside academe. She wrote and continues to write for Corriere della Sera, whose editorial
staff she joined in 1977. She had worked as an
Americanist for thirteen years before a fellowship first took her to the
United States in 1956. Italy was already Americanizing then, but the American
dream had changed. The shift from hot war to cold war turned the United
States consumerist and repressive, shadowed by McCarthyism. To enter the
country she had to be cleared by the FBI and respond to a questionnaire that
asked, “Do you intend to assassinate the President?” (Pivano, Mostri degli anni venti 11; my
translation). With the advent of
the nuclear age, new collective threats were emerging and Italy, caught
between hostile superpowers, was also internally divided. Italy had the
largest Communist Party in the West and the United States was promoting corporate
capitalism. While American writers debunked myths of the New Deal, other
myths were emanating from Washington and Hollywood. In Cold War competition,
cultural exports flowed from the country that had won the war with a strong
moral posture and the strongest currency in the world, and they were adopted,
grasped at along with jeans and chewing gum. But Ginsberg’s Howl would reverberate in Italy too. Ideals dear to Pivano
are shared on both sides of the Atlantic. She spelled them out most recently
in an essay of 25 August 1996 that discusses an exhibition of fifty years of
counterculture, “The Beat goes on” (I
Beat continuano, vanno avanti). The “decalogue” formulated by Allen
Ginsberg, which she cites, assumes the politicization of culture and is an
alternative to Washington and Hollywood: Spiritual
liberation, sexual revolution, freedom from censorship; demystification of
any laws against marijuana; spreading of ecological awareness; opposition to
the military-industrial complex; respect for the Earth and native peoples;
less consumerism; Eastern thought; universal antifascism. (Pivano,
“Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs” cultural page; my translation) These
words are worth meditating on, Pivano suggests, for those who have considered
the Beats just a style. Aligned with new voices of resistance, Pivano not
only translated and anthologized the Beats, but also promoted them, invited
them to Italy, got their work published and included in school curricula,
welcomed them into her home. She did not, herself, live like the Beats—no
more than, when translating and writing about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, she
jumped into fountains or danced on restaurant tables. Yet she seems
untroubled by the Beats’ history of blatant sexism toward other women, or
their confraternity as essentially a “boys’ club.” The larger question was, Which ones are to govern? She and the Beats
crossed many borders, taking their national identities into international
contexts in an increasingly transnational world—which at the same time
remains quite tribal. Americans had long been coming from their own country
to what later became Italy—one need think only of Thomas Jefferson. Italians
had long found their way to the Americas—an expedition commanded by a
Genovese is celebrated each October, and Mozart’s librettist da Ponte was at
Columbia University well before the mass migrations. Italians had emigrated
to other countries too, other continents; and likewise for United States citizens,
“abroad” was vaster, though more accessible. The Beats made their own foreign
policy. Thus in 1960, Allen Ginsberg was in Chile when Gregory Corso
“reported from Milan that translator Nanda Pivano was trying hard to get
everyone published in Italy” (Miles 267). Ginsberg moved from San Francisco
in January 1967, to the Spoleto Festival that spring, to a poetry festival in
London, to vacation with a publisher in Wales, and, after touring Europe with
his parents, “to stay with his translator Fernanda Pivano and her husband,
designer Ettore Sottsass, in their beautiful Milan
apartment. . . . Nanda knew Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound, and she
arranged a drive down to have lunch with them . . .” (Miles 400).
These occasions were at once familial, professional, and political. Brought up to
understand courtship as prelude to marriage and marriage as lifetime bonding
in an Italy that had not yet legislated divorce, by preference and on
principle Pivano for as long as possible maintained the stance of a mobile
and accomplishing but “taken” woman. She was skeptical about American
feminism. In a five-part essay
about American women, based on interviews and observations at a time when
she accompanied her husband to a California hospital, Pivano admires
capability and independence but doubts whether real “liberation” could be
achieved by forfeiting support and protection of the parental home before
marriage, or by marrying into comfort that brought no security or
tranquility.[4] Women, she found, rarely discuss the
sexual freedom that is a main motive for emancipation. Pivano accompanied
several women: a head nurse; a young doctor’s wife with three children, a
no-longer-young painter married to a writer, and two impecunious laboratory
technicians. Her article of 1962–63 showed women still wanting a man of their
own and at the same time struggling under new requirements for making their
separate way. Hectic rhythms of early rising to get through a nonstop day and
nighttime socializing kept one woman slim but losing sleep, and needing her
day off for catching up—“del fare
tutto, tutto, tutto da sé.” Amid abundance, the woman looks tired and
seems unfulfilled. Pivano was not attracted by the implied tradeoffs. She did write about
other women writers: Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Alice Toklas.[5] She introduced volumes by Jane Austen,
Gertrude Stein (whose Everybody’s Autobiography
she translated), Flannery O’Connor, Jan Kerouac (Jack’s daughter; the book is
Baby Driver), Susan Minot, and
Grace Paley (Later the Same Day as Più tardi nel pomeriggio, from La Tartaruga in 1987). She
anthologized Diane di Prima’s “More or Less Love Poems” (Poesie più o meno d’amore), three poems by Denise Levertov, and
one by Lois Sorrells, all translated by Giulio Saponaro, in Poesia degli ultimi americani (54–59).[6] The other included poets were male; but
then, American anthologies were like that too, in quei tempi. Of Zelda Fitzgerald
Pivano wrote eloquently. Her essay titled “Francis Scott Fitzgerald”[7] begins with the fire that destroyed the
sanitarium where Zelda Sayre was confined; she died in that fire at age 47.
(Her husband had died eight years earlier in Hollywood.) Pivano comments that
her life was more tragic than her death; recapitulatiing that life leads to
the same conclusion that Nancy Milford later expressed in Zelda: “She was the American girl
living the American dream, and she became mad within it” (xiv). Pivano
chronicles Scott and Zelda’s Jazz Age hedonism, debaucheries on both sides of
the Atlantic, Fitzgerald’s decline, Zelda’s defense of him and his increasing
jealousy of her personality, her taking refuge in the dance studio, their
travels. Pivano registers the waste and pity as well as the myth of glamor
that made their excesses acceptable. The essay concludes, as it began, with
Zelda, considered insane, sure that her husband would be remembered well.
Pivano’s essay, like her preface to Nancy Milford’s Zelda e la sua colpa di essere nata donna,[8] helps Zelda too to be remembered well. Pivano opened her
introduction to the Bompiani reprint of Dorothy Parker’s stories with the
brief obituary from Corriere della Sera
and a previously unpublished anecdote; placed Parker in context of
contemporary writers and the Algonquin’s Round Table; noted her participation
in the demonstration for Sacco and Vanzetti and the vicissitudes of her
liaisons and divorces, her 1930 O. Henry Award for the story “Big Blonde,”
her experience with Hollywood, her declaring herself a Communist to smiles of
both Communists and non-Communists (it was her mode of dissent against movie
moguls and against totalitarianism), her support of the Lincoln Brigade in Spain,
her condemnation in 1954 by the House Un-American Activities Committee and
the ongoing “punishment.” Quoting in Italian her famous poem on suicide,
Pivano pointed out the recurring theme in her stories that suicide is the
only way out of the dark tunnel. (She did in fact attempt suicide in 1923 and
1925.) In 1944 the Viking Press edition of The Portable Dorothy Parker became a best-seller; but it
contained nothing about Sacco and Vanzetti, or the Spanish Civil War, or
Communism. Parker died of a heart attack in June 1967. In 1971 the Parker
volume in Italian was a great success (Silvera 57).[9] “A book is a patient
message.”[10] Thanks to the successful 1994 film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, Penguin Classics has issued a new edition
of the Complete Stories with an
introduction by Regina Barreca, author of books about women’s humor. A publicity
flyer says Parker “revealed the truth about the struggles between the classes
and between the sexes,” “explored chemical and emotional addiction,” and
“wrote about abortion when no one uttered the word publicly.” The anonymous
copywriter for Penguin USA adds that she “turns a wry and knowing eye on the
gap between society’s vision of a woman’s life and the way real women live.”[11] The best-known woman among the men at
the Algonquin Round Table was, appropriately enough, introduced to Italians
by a woman who wrote on the same topics, commented on the same gap, and is
best known for her place among talented men. Probably, for both Pivano and
Parker, Hemingway and Fitzgerald became models for writing; probably each
considered that thinking of herself only as a woman would ruin her. “Intellectuals,”
wrote Malcolm Cowley, “can be defined as the part of the population that
tries to think independently and to value ideas without regard to personal
interests or popular prejudice” (Cowley 219). This class, in the United
States, during the first dopoguerra,
“was terrified and rendered politically sterile by the postwar reaction”
(219). The Sacco-Vanzetti case both aroused and threatened this class, which
responsibly “raised funds, issued statements, suggested new appeals to new
courts” (220)—while sympathizers rioted and went out on strike in cities of
Europe and South America. Pivano’s clear political commitment enabled her to
celebrate Parker’s heroism a quarter-century before an American reading
public was allowed to appreciate it. In an article of
early 1961, Pivano describes how she was left breathless on hearing that
Alice B. Toklas, whose cookbook-memoir had been confiscated in the States in
accordance with anti-drug laws, had converted and gone to live in a convent.
“I didn’t understand to what she had converted, given that she had always
been Catholic; and I couldn’t imagine her in a convent.” Pivano sought her
out. Since the Paris studio shared by Stein and Toklas proved too cold for
Alice’s late years, she had in fact come to winter in Rome. At age 84 she
still earned money by writing. She paid for publishing Gertrude’s posthumous
works and, in the refuge of a pensione
for female students run by French-Canadian nuns, was writing her contracted
memoirs. Pivano describes fondly her appearance and ways, admiring her
devotion and her willingness to be thought a scandal.[12] Having now published her own memoirs, in
her eighth decade, Pivano seems a writer of the same stamp, survivor of a
domestic partnership coming into her own, sought out by devoted friends and
young admirers, risking scandal to write honestly about artists of the
counterculture. Elsewhere Pivano
discusses Claudia Dreifus, a young journalist from the New York underground,
active in the Civil Rights movement, who as a student at the University of
Michigan joined the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). She took her New
Left ideas into organizing white-collar workers. When she was not allowed to
write for a newspaper “because she was a woman” she went to East Village Other, where from writing
pro-feminist articles she became a leader
and founded Women of the Media. She organized housewives and women from every
walk of life who met for weekly consciousness-raising sessions “more or less
like Alcoholics Anonymous,” as Pivano says (Beat Hippie Yippie 242). In her first book, Radical Lifestyles (1971), Dreifus had said she believed that
women’s liberation was The Revolution. To Italian readers Pivano explains
that the reference is not to the suffrage movement of half a century earlier
but to what began with the founding of NOW (National Organization of Women)
in 1966 by Betty Friedan. Pivano describes the ire aroused among men and some
women too, when, that same year, Juliet Mitchell promulgated the manifesto
that began the Women’s Liberation Movement. She goes on to discuss events of
1968–69, SCUM, WITCH, BITCH, the Pussycat League. For Pivano the
women’s liberation movement was not The
Revolution (though she reported on it along with so much else), and her
rejoinder comes from a speech that Gertrude Stein assigns to Susan B. Anthony
in The Mother of Us All (80).
Instead she supported an underground movement in both the United States and
Europe; saw theater as “dalla Contestazione alla Strumentalizzazione”;
reported on the Old and New Left; and having studied slavery and its legacy
of racism, followed the civil rights struggle and joined the drive for
nonviolence and peace. In 1972 she found Broadway, Off-Broadway, and
Off-Off-Broadway bored with nudity, homosexual films like Fred Halsted’s LA considered no more scandalous than Clockwork Orange, and bookstores
alloting shelves to classifications until recently too hot to handle (Beat Hippie Yippie 120–22). The
“sexual revolution” was incidental. Her personal sexual
code remained old-fashioned with a tenacity appropriate to monogamous
marriage—a tenacity she later came to question. Miro Silvera has described how
during the 1960s, at the Feltrinelli bookstore on via Manzoni all crowded
with young people, the talented couple, she admired for her beauty and he
very handsome, made a joint debut, she with her anthology of American poetry
and he with his photographs of American streets. Two stars, they lived in
grand quarters, with furniture designed by him; she welcomed the “flower
children” and autographed books with a flower. A procession of visiting
writers passed through and greeted Pivano’s mother too like visiting nieces
and nephews. Miro Silvera describes Pivano’s anguish when she suspected, then
knew, she was betrayed. The man she married in 1949 deserted her in 1978. She
remained for a long time in voluntary seclusion (Silvera 57).[13] Of Pivano’s two
novels, the first, about disintegration of a marriage very like her own, won
two literary awards. Cos’è più la
virtu; romanzo quasi d’amore (Rusconi, 1986) explores the relation of
love to virtue, in all that latter term’s fading implications of power,
merit, value. The second novel, La mia
kasbah (Rusconi, 1988), set in and around a palazzone in Trastevere where a hundred families live,[14] brings out cooperation and reciprocal
supportiveness among women. An interlocking theme is the burdens and rewards
of friendship. In the country that now has the lowest birth rate in the
world, and in whose capital center housing has become too expensive for
ordinary families, this novel reflects a responsive quasi-familial
adaptation. Pivano emerges as a
feminist “tra virgolette”[15]—in a manner of speaking. In her view,
advancements for women happen at a profound cost. Since every discourse is
constructed with the words of others, she must qualify a label as it is to
apply to her, in order to preserve her privacy and right to self-definition.
The Italian women’s movement has effected great social changes, including
entry of women massively into the workplace, access to family planning, the
right to divorce (the law passed in 1970 was upheld by referendum in 1974),
equal rights for both parents (1975), and legalized abortion (1978). Pivano’s
writing notes effects of these developments but has a separate agenda of
resistance to totalizing pressures and avoidance of wars and other human
disasters. A translator, as
Sharon Wood points out (and Pivano has also noted), is an intermediary: “not
only between two cultures and two languages but between reader and writer,
between the living and the dead.” The female literary translator in global
culture is still exploited. Pietro Citati, writing about Virginia Woolf in la Repubblica, was quoted next day in Corriere della Sera[16] for his suggestion that translation may
be a female art, requiring concentration, love, patience, and an
intellectual precision that in other times were defined as manly. Translation
has reached very high quality in Italy, and, as Virginia Woolf’s translator
Nadia Fusini notes, “Almost all these extraordinary translators are women.”
Critic Carlo Bo summed it succinctly: “Women translate better because they
marry the text.” Fernanda Pivano
had another explanation: “Only women can afford to accept the almost
insulting rates offered by publishers, rates by which it is impossible to
earn a living from translations. Men would not be able to support a family.”[17] Her frame of reference, that men support a family, seems retrograde
years after Caroline Bird’s 1979 The
Two-Paycheck Marriage. Yet
surely literary translators like Pivano are creative artists contributing to
international culture, whose work should be fairly compensated regardless of
gender. As William S.
Burroughs once told Regina Weinreich, “society comes around to recognizing
its artists, if they live long enough—or if they die young enough as in
Kerouac’s case” (Weinreich 252).[18] Still prolific in her seventy-ninth year,
Pivano is a doyenne of letters, with about forty translations to her credit,
two anthologies that remain in print, four collections of essays, two novels,
many medals, and the memoir Amici scrittori:
quarant’ anni di incontri e scoperte con gli autori americani (Mondadori,
1995), at the debut of which she was acclaimed at the Piccolo Teatro in
Milan.[19] Her influence is both popular and
institutional. Bocconi University invited her to open a series of monthly
public meetings, encounters with outstanding figures from various
disciplines,[20] and she appears on programs of major
national and international events like the 1995 Venice Biennale (its
centennial). She was on the program of the May 1996 Salone del Libro Torino,
whose theme was “Il Secolo delle Donne?”—but again, declining to be
pigeon-holed, she spoke not about women, but about the science fiction of
Philip K. Dick, whom she linked with Orwell and Vonnegut for imaginatively
anticipating problems that would soon convulse whole populations and
terrorize the world.[21] The Beat movement
goes on internationally as fact and myth. On 1 April 1996, Pivano was
pictured on the cultural page of la
Repubblica together with Allen Ginsberg (see Bevilacqua) when he
introduced his latest book of poems in Milan and opened a show of photographs
of his friends. In May 1996 Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s paintings were on
exhibition at a major museum in Rome. New York University hosted “The Beat
Generation: Legacy and Celebration” from May 17–22, 1994; RAI is set to do a
docufiction series about it, Francis Ford Coppola is making a film version of
On the Road, and the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington will follow up the recent Whitney Museum celebration
in New York with a show dedicated to the Beats. The Beat version of counterculture
has been assimilated into the dominant culture with competition for control
of the myth.[22] Fernanda Pivano’s
view of American history may still be too stark for American media: how
during the nineteenth century, when Europe was convulsed by independence
movements, America was out for conquest, destroying the Indians, exploiting
the land and its creatures, extending railroads West and South wherever money
was to made, using the Bible to support every kind of moral hypocrisy. The
longterm view—“The American Civil War did not last only three years: it began
the day the first slaves were unloaded and will end the day when no one any
longer cares whether a man is white or black” (America rossa e nera
27; my translation)—is one this country may need outside help to see. Pivano’s career calls
attention to another kind of Italian American, the citizen of one or both
nations easy with both languages and at home in both lands, who helps
peoples to know each other better: the cultural ambassador. Each operates in
a particular way, according to elements that make up identity. John Ciardi,
for instance, born to immigrants, was raised by his mother after his father’s
premature death; Ciardi also studied at Harvard. He translated Dante, on
fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, wearing his Air Corps silk
gloves during winter months while he typed in a cold studio. In a later year
when he visited his mother’s town, the band played and TV cameras rolled; as
local-boy-made-good, he responded by contributing money for a plaque. His
greatest ambassadorship, though, was to the American people, as promoter of
American poetry at mid-century (see Kirschenbaum, “John Ciardi”). Arturo
Vivante, Italian-born, had an American grandmother and has an American wife
and children; he had to leave Italy as a boy because of Mussolini’s 1938
racial laws since he is Jewish on his father’s side. Autobiographical fiction
and his teaching in American universities make him, too, ambassadorial (see
Kirschenbaum, “Poet’s Voice”). Diane di Prima in her poems celebrated an
anarchist grandfather and the recalcitrant astronomer Giordano Bruno, and
she rediscovers her Italian heritage further in prose; she is known in Italy
as one of the Beats, and some of her work is translated into Italian (see
Kirschenbaum, “Poet Diane di Prima”). Helen Barolini, granddaughter of
Southern Italian immigrants, raised Italian American in upstate New York,
first traveled to Europe as an exchange student. A journalist she met in
Milan invited her to spend Christmas with his family in Vicenza; later she
married Antonio Barolini. Her Festa
is a cookbook-and-love-story, in the same category with Alice B. Toklas’s
cookbook. (Memory is gastronomic.) Two countries are reconciled by a writer
who has known both Syracuse in New York and Siracusa in Sicilia, both
Croton-on-Hudson and Cortone. She and her husband also published a bilingual
book with translations of each other’s poems. Their eldest daughter chairs
the Italian Department of Columbia University (see Kirschenbaum, Rev. of Festa). In a global culture,
self-identity is not achieved simply through coming to terms with antecedents
and adapting to surroundings; adoption and choice are also factors. Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, for instance, was the posthumous son of an immigrant who had
already shortened the family name to “Ferling.” The boy was raised first by
an aunt who took him to France, then by affluent foster-parents not at all
Italian. Ferlinghetti reclaimed the name when he began to publish. He named
his son Lorenzo. His partner in the United States’ first all-paperback
bookstore was the son of Italian anarchist Carlo Tresca. “Italian” is very
much a preference, and a mode of separation or dissent from mainstream
American. Ferlinghetti travels widely, ambassadorially (see Kirschenbaum,
“Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Italianità”).
William Murray, whose Roman mother worked in the United States for Italian
publishers (and her mother edited
an Italian feminist journal), for decades wrote the Letters from Rome for The New Yorker. Two volumes collect
many of them, and three of his novels are set in Italy of the second dopoguerra. He is both Italian and
American, with a house in California and another in Sperlunga. In person and
through his writing he represents the nations to each other (see
Kirschenbaum, “Entrepreneurs”). This essay points to
an evolving definition of “Italian American” that does not exclusively imply
waves of mass migration of earlier decades and pressure to give up old ways
to be eligible for rewards in the new land.[23] We are now back-and-forthing,
intermarrying, raising bilingual children, ocean-crossing for purposes of
study, business, and visiting. Italy after il Boom is not what it was and its demography has been changing;
Rome has a mosque, Vietnamese boat people acculturate, nationals of different
African states fight over drug deals in Turin, and the new Miss Italy
immigrated from the Caribbean only four years ago. The United States too is
in accelerated flux. Identity may come to be defined more and more in terms
of overlapping memberships, with significant differences between locals and
cosmopolitans. Critics may have to give operational definitions of what they
mean by “Italy,” “America,” and “Italian American.” Meanwhile, Fernanda
Pivano represents most illustriously the cosmopolitan Italian Americanist in
politicized world culture. She interprets the United States to Italians with
a voice of global conscience. Other such women, literary figures like Nadine
Gordimer, also serve ambassadorial functions, though without the portfolio of
a Shirley Temple Black. If we as Americans feel not adequately represented
by our televised images or our presidential appointees, we may thank
Americanists like Fernanda Pivano who interpret us as we know ourselves to be
and as we wish in our rich variety and complexity to be seen. Attempted global
domination implies domination of culture, and culture wars rage furiously.
While I wrote this essay, on July 29, 1996, the front page of The New York Times reported that
Australian “media mogul” Rupert Murdoch “is willing to act quickly and spend
heavily to enhance his strategy of having a finger in every major form of
programming, in every corner of the world.” He is only one contender. The
same day’s Boston Globe reported
that “The four children of late rock star Frank Zappa will star in the
low-budget independent movie ‘Anarchy TV,’ . . . about a group of
anarchists who use their public-access TV show to satirize US institutions
until the right-wing owner of a televangelist network tries to shut them
down.” (It may be recalled that Vaclav Havel had at one time wanted Frank
Zappa for his minister of culture.) Juxtaposition of the two items highlights
current terms of the struggle. In Italy while media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi
has won a reprieve for his Mediaset empire, Bolognese writer Stefano Benni’s
La compagnia dei celestini (Feltrinelli,
1992) and Elianto (Feltrinelli, 1996) satirize attempted monopolistic
control of the media. All along, Pivano’s resistance to authoritarianism
through five decades has not wavered. In person, in print, and via Internet,
Pivano carries on. Brown University Works Cited Bevilacqua,
Emanuele. “Provaci ancora Ginsberg.” la
Repubblica 1 aprile 1996: cultural page. Borgese, Giulia.
“Dibattiti: Pietro Citati sostiene che si tratta di un’arte congeniale alle
signore. Ma la Pivano ribatte: ‘Solo noi ci adattiamo a tariffe insolenti.’
Bo: ‘Le donne traducono meglio perché sponsano il testo.’” Corriere della Sera 25 maggio 1995
(Terza Pagina), 33:1–4. Cowley, Malcolm. Exile’s Return; A Literary Odyssey of the
1920s. 1951. New York: Viking, 1956. “Dorothy Parker at
Her Best.” Classics Chronicle 4:2
(Fall 1995): front page (published by Penguin USA). Dreifus, Claudia. Radical Lifestyles. New York: Lancer
Books, 1971. “Grazie, Fernanda.”
The New Yorker 24 July 1995: 30. Kirschenbaum,
Blossom S. “John Ciardi: The Poet as Cultural Ambassador.” Paper presented at
the conference of the American Italian Historical Association, Providence,
Rhode Island, November 1985. Adapted as a two-part article, Fra Noi (Chicago), December 1986 and
January 1987. ___.
“Entrepreneurs: The Italian Fiction and Essays of William Murray.”
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Mario Aste) of the conference of the American Italian Historical Association,
Lowell, Massachusetts, November 1995. ___. “Lawrence
Ferlinghetti’s Italianità.” VIA 3.1 (Spring 1992): 1–18. ___. “Poet Diane di
Prima: Extending La Famiglia.” MELUS 14.3–4 (Fall-Winter 1987):
53–67. ___. “The Poet’s
Voice.” Unpublished paper about Arturo Vivante, presented at the conference
of the American Italian Historical Association, New York City, October 1988. ___. Rev. of Festa: Recipes and Recollections of
Italian Holidays, by Helen Barolini. VIA
1.1 (1990): 167–70. “L’incontro con
Fernanda Pivano ha aperto il ciclo ‘Oltre la norma.’” Bocconi Notizie 93. One-page bulletin received via Internet; see
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“The Only People for Him.” Rev. of The
Portable Jack Kerouac and Jack
Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940–1956. The
Atlantic Monthly (Aug. 1996): 88–93. Miles, Barry. Ginsberg: A Biography. New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1989. Milford, Nancy. Zelda. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Mizzau, Marina.
“Parentesi.” Aut-Aut 269 (settembre-ottobre
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“Children of the Beats.” The New York
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Dizionario Bompiani degli autori. Vol.
3: L-P. Milan: Bompiani, 1987. 1789. Pivano, Fernanda
Sottsass. “Modern Translations into Italian.” The World of Translation. Papers delivered at the Conference on
Literary Translation held in New York City in May 1970, under the auspices of
PEN American Center. New York: PEN American Center, 1971; reprinted 1987 with
a new introduction by Gregory Rabassa 321–33. Pivano, Fernanda. America rossa e nera. Firenze:
Vallecchi, 1964. ___. Amici scrittori; quarant’anni d’incontri e
scoperte con gli autori americani. Milano: Mondadori, 1995. ___. Beat Hippie Yippie. Milano:
Arcana/Bompiani, 1972; Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri, Bompiani, Sonsogno, Etas,
1977; “Tascabili Bompiani,” febbraio 1990. ___. Cos’è più la virtù; romanzo quasi d’amore.
Milano: Rusconi, 1986. ___. La mia kasbah. Milano: Rusconi, 1988. ___. Mostri degli anni venti. 2nd ed. Milano:
Il Formichiere, 1977. ___, ed. Poesia degli ultimi americani. Milano:
“Le Comete,” 1964; Feltrinelli, 1973; quarta edizione, giugno 1980. ___. “Ginsberg,
Kerouac, Burroughs e gli altri/ Revive sullo schermo il folle sogno ‘beat.’” Corriere della Sera 25 Agosto 1996:
cultural page. ___. “Le donne e
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d’informazione 12–18–23 ottobre 1962; 17–31 gennaio 1963. Silvera, Miro.
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“Fernanda Pivano: Oltre il confine.” Interview with Fernanda Pivano. Mucchio Selvaggio, received via Internet. Weinreich, Regina.
“And the Beat Goes On.” Hamptons
Labor Day 1995 issue: 252–53. Wood, Sharon. Italian Women’s Writing, 1860–1994.
London: Athlone, 1995. |
*Acknowlegment: I wish to thank Jennifer Gage, translator of French texts, who read this essay before its publication and made some useful suggestions.
[1]Subsequent page numbers in parentheses in this and the next two paragraphs refer to this essay.
[2]Fernanda Pivano’s biography of Ernest Hemingway came out in 1985. A grandson of his is currently writing in Milan.
[3]See Dizionario Bompiani degli autori, vol. terzo: L-P (Milano: Bompiani, 1987) 1789, col. 1. Pivano’s parents are not mentioned here and I have not probed her familial background.
[4]“Le donne e l’indipendenza,” reprinted in Pivano, America rossa e nera 251–62. Page numbers in parentheses in this paragraph refer to this text.
[5]See “Zelda e la sua colpa di essere nata donna,” 1971, reprinted in Fernanda Pivano, Mostri degli anni venti 153–59; “Dorothy Parker: Dai boa di struzzo a Sacco e Vanzetti,” reprinted in the same volume, 161–80; “Alice B. Toklas a Roma,” L’Europa letteraria, febbraio 1961, reprinted in America rossa e nera, 103–08.
[6]In both Italy and the United States, exclusion of women from anthologies necessitated publication of separate anthologies of women’s works and rediscovery of literary “foremothers.” In both countries exclusion of women necessitated the founding of separate presses; the Feminist Press in New York celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1995, La Tartaruga in Milan its twentieth. Also, women’s book stores operate in cities of both countries.
[7]First published in Successo, Jan. 1961, this essay is reprinted in Mostri degli anni venti, 101–06 and also in America Rossa e Nera, 109–19.
[8]Nancy Milford’s bestseller Zelda was published in Italian under this title (Milan: Bompiani, 1971). Pivano’s preface is reprinted in Mostri degli anni venti, 153–59.
[9]I am indebted for this reference to architect Chiara Romano van Erp. Pivano’s 1971 preface is reprinted in Mostri degli anni venti, 161–80.
[10]I owe this consoling insight to Andrej Ferko, Slovak mathematician and fiction writer.
[11]“Dorothy Parker at Her Best,” Classics Chronicle 4.2 (Fall 1995): front page; published by Penguin USA.
[12]L’Europa letteraria, February 1961. Reprinted in America rossa e nera, 103–08.
[13]I am indebted for this reference to architect Chiara Romano van Erp.
[14]The address of the actual residence is via Lungara 3. On the occasion of the novel’s debut, Pivano spoke at the Club delle donne about her life there, as reported in La Repubblica of 23 Feb. 1989.
[15]I owe this use of “tra virgolette” to Marina Mizzau; see her “Parentesi,” especially 67–70.
[16]Giulia Borgese, “Dibattiti: Pietro Citati sostiene che si tratta di un’arte congeniale alle signore. Ma la Pivano ribatte: ‘Solo noi ci adattiamo a tariffe insolenti.’ Bo: ‘Le donne traducono meglio perché sponsano il testo’” (33:1–4).
[17]Fusini: “Quasi tutti questi straordinari traduttori sono donne.” Pivano: “Solo le donne si adattano alle tariffe quasi insolenti applicate dagli editori, tariffe che impediscono di vivere con le traduzioni. Gli uomini non potrebbero mantenerci una famiglia.”
[18]Hamptons is published by Randy Schindler at 5 Main Street, Southampton 11968. Weinreich produced and directed the documentary The Complete Outsider, about Paul Bowles, and is author of The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac. I am indebted for this reference to Joan Tyor Carlson.
[19]Luca Testoni in his Internet interview “Fernanda Pivano: Oltre il confine,” Mucchio Selvaggio, counts “40 traduzioni, 150 introduzioni, 1500 tra saggi e articoli, 3 antologie, 2 romanzi” besides Amici scrittori.
[20]“L’incontro con Fernanda Pivano ha aperto il ciclo ‘Oltre la norma,’“ Bocconi Notizie n. 93, one-page announcement received on Internet (see: webmaster). The meeting took place on 21 September 1995.
[21]Pivano had been scheduled, along with Inge Feltrinelli and Dacia Maraini, for the panel “100 anni di scrittrici, 100 libri di donne,” “100 years of writers, 100 books by women”; but in fact she spoke on another panel, with Goffredo Fofi and Marino Sinibaldi. Her most recent contributions for Corriere della Sera, summer 1996, are about Jay McInerney, Timothy Leary, John Fante, E. L. Doctorow, Philip K. Dick, Jim Harrison—and the Beats.
[22]Though On the Road has become a political document, Kerouac himself according to Ralph Lombreglia “was a thoroughly apolitical person.” Along with some reviewers, I am repelled by Kerouac’s easy acceptance of his characters’ drug use, casual sex, and general outlaw attitude. Lombreglia says “many commentators thought it encouraged corrupt, depraved behavior among the restless young” (92). Daniel Pinchbeck, whose mother Joyce Johnson was involved with Kerouac in the late 1950s (before he was born), writes in “Children of the Beats,” The New York Times Magazine, 5 November 1995, 38–43, that the Beats’ exaltation of personal freedom had mixed effects on their children; Jan Kerouac, only child of Jack, who met her father only twice before he died, at age 43 was on dialysis as a consequence of alcoholism, and she was litigating against her father’s estate. It will be interesting to see how the Beat myth evolves.
[23]The concept of ethnicity is also being theorized anew. See for instance Werner Sollors, Theories of Ethnicity.