NICOLETTA PIREDDU

MODERNISM MISUNDERSTOOD: ANNA BANTI TRANSLATES VIRGINIA WOOLF

To Ester Nicole

IN THE ABUNDANT OUTPUT of Italian translations that have progressively   turned Virginia Woolf into a cultural icon in the land of Dante, the first authorized translation of Jacob’s Room by Anna Banti deserves particular attention. It offers an interesting angle from which to explore the relationship between two writers who, although they share various literary concerns, have never been the objects of a systematic comparative study.  Yet it also invites us to reflect upon the role and effects of translation by exposing the asymmetry in linguistic and cultural exchanges. The problematic connection of languages and cultural identities that takes shape in the interaction between Woolf and Banti acquires further significance since in this case the exploration of translation as cultural communication and transfer also entails the question of gender, making translation issues inseparable from those of female agency and identity politics.

Banti’s 1950 Italian rendition of Jacob’s Room as La camera di Giacobbe, republished in 1980 with only a change in the title (La camera di Jacob) and the addition of an introduction by Banti, occupies a privileged space in the rich sequence of projects aimed at importing Woolf into Italian culture. As the first translation of a work by Woolf accomplished by a renowned Italian literary author, La camera di Jacob can be examined in light of those endorsements, resistances, and betrayals that literary relations generate in their precarious balance between identity and difference, and that in this case delineate a tug of war between Banti’s desire to domesticate Woolf in order to coopt her in the target culture, and the inevitable estrangement thus produced in Woolf’s own literary and linguistic identity. Furthermore, in the portrait of Woolf as the object of Banti’s translation we can discover a great deal of Banti’s own portrait—aspects of Banti’s poetics and personality that not only reinforce but also enrich and problematize her gendered discursive practice. Banti’s still largely neglected role as a literary translator, and in particular as a translator of Woolf, should hence be considered as important as her endeavors in the domain of fiction and essay writing. The translation of Jacob’s Room can help us appreciate the subversive implications of Banti’s choice of Woolf as a model to be transposed into the Italian literary corpus; yet, paradoxically, it also underscores the limits of Banti’s literary and feminist activity in comparison to her English counterpart.

The discontinuities between Woolf’s and Banti’s respective aesthetics turn out to be even more fertile and intriguing than the apparent relation of simple filiation or sisterhood that may tempt us to privilege unilaterally the image of Banti as a feminist innovator following in the footsteps of the author of Jacob’s Room. Indeed, it is precisely in light of those divergences that we can investigate the theoretical problems of translation arising from this peculiar literary case.

1. The strange case of Anna Banti and Virginia Woolf

The relevance of Woolf to Banti’s oeuvre emerges more clearly once we examine La camera di Giacobbe in conjunction with Banti’s various critical interventions regarding Woolf’s works. I propose to treat those interventions as an “epitext” of Banti’s translation of Woolf’s novel that is essential to our appreciation of the premises and effects of that apparently isolated operation of linguistic and cultural recoding. Within this framework, I will articulate my discussion of the Woolf-Banti connection around three main points: what does Banti translate of Woolf? (not only which text, but also, more specifically, what elements of Woolf’s aesthetics and social vision are privileged, retained, and transposed in Banti’s rendition, and what is left out); why does Banti translate Woolf? (whether those reasons are explicitly stated or only retrospectively understandable through circumstantial evidence and a comparative analysis of the two authors); and how does Banti translate Woolf? (what are the modalities that regulate Banti’s approach to linguistic and cultural boundary-crossing, and what implications do they generate for the specifically female form of discourse that Banti claims to prioritize in her literary production, as well as in Woolf’s).