From La dolce vita to La vita agra THE IMAGE OF THE ITALIAN LITERARY TRANSLATOR AS AN ILLUSORY, REBELLIOUS AND PRECARIOUS INTELLECTUAL

In a country like Italy, where most people do not speak any foreign language, a particular aura surrounds the figure of the literary translator. For centuries, the translator as a word and world expert has been seen by the cultural society as a full Intellectual, who can deal with anybody and anything in spite of the actual miserable working conditions of his class. Since the Sixties of the last century, a type of anarchic and bohemian “negativity” has affected this aura as a consequence of Luciano Bianciardi’s meta-translational works, who was an écrivain et traducteur maudit. He wrote bitter and ironical pamphlets against the boastful consumer society of the so called “miracolo economico”-era, and the Milanese culture industry as well. He worked as a brilliant and eloquent translator of more than a hundred novels from American English into Italian (among others Faulkner, Steinbeck, Miller, Kerouac) and in 1962 he wrote a great novel himself with the autobiographical La vita agra [The sour life] set in Milan – the title ironically hinting at Fellini’s world famous Rome film La dolce vita (1960). Bianciardi’s novel was very successful with translations into many languages (En. tr. La vita agra – It’s a hard life, 1965; German tr. Das saure Leben, 1967) and in 1964 it also became a film directed by Carlo Lizzani (but co-written by Bianciardi himself), which starred very popular actors. This success reinforced the novelist’s fame and founded the myth of the translator figure as a marginalized Intellectual, who proudly refuses to integrate completely into the “culture machine”. Clearly a fiction; though it still seems to pervade Italy’s socio-economical and cultural reality, as proved again by the recently published novel Aspetta primavera, Lucky (= Luciano) [Wait till spring, Lucky] – a sort of La vita agra 2 – by Flavio Santi, a young writer and translator of best-selling authors like Wilbur Smith. In this novel the everyday life of a typical precarious sub-proletarian “word-worker”, who tries to escape the cultural industry’s diktat of the pervading post-neoliberal and globalized era, is ironically staged. The autobiographical protagonist of Santi’s critical novel encounters, in his attempt to survive as a “thinking” and not only a mere economic human being, the problems and needs of an entire “lost generation” of cognitive unemployed or under-employed proletarians, as shown by the readers’ enthusiastic reactions in different blogs and social networks.