title: ‘It always started with Nanda’: Fernanda Pivano and the Italian reception of the Beat Generation
Creators: name: Romanzi, Andrea
Publisher: name: University of Reading
Year: 2024

description: Fernanda Pivano (1917-2009) contributed extensively to the diffusion of American literature in Italy. Starting with the publication of her translation of the Spoon River Anthology in 1943, Pivano gradually became a central figure in the mechanisms that shaped the cultural flows between the US and Italy following WWII. After translating major American authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, her cultural activity focussed on the study, the reception and the popularisation of American counterculture literature. Between the 1960s and the 1980s she translated, promoted and disseminated Beat Generation authors such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Despite the wide, mass-media popularity she obtained in Italy, Fernanda Pivano’s intellectual authority is often questioned in academic and editorial milieus, and her professional legitimacy belittled. At the same time, academic research on her work as cultural mediator and on her contribution to the Italian literary field is scarce and patchy. This thesis is the first to offer a thick description of Fernanda Pivano’s literary contribution by conducting a thorough investigation of her professional trajectory from the start of her career as a translator in the 1940s, to the publication of the two main Italian anthologies of Beat poetry, Poesia degli ultimi americani and Jukebox all’idrogeno, in the 1960s. The publication of the two anthologies marked the peak of Pivano’s work as a cultural broker for Beat literature, after which her translation activity slowed down considerably. An in-depth analysis of previously unexplored archive materials and publishing correspondence concerning Pivano’s literary activity brings to the surface the complex authorial and institutional interactions that shaped her habitus and affected the Italian reception of Beat literature. Her promotion of the prose and poetry of the Beat Generation was met with resistance and skepticism by the intellectuals who populated the Italian book market and literary field. In this regard, the history of the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s anthology of poems Jukebox all’idrogeno (Mondadori, 1965) is symptomatic, and will be explored in detail in this work. In this thesis I show that the publication of Jukebox all’idrogeno was the result of intricate power negotiations where the translator skillfully exploited the fruitful collaboration that she had established with the author and key figures in the American literary milieu to address matters of censorship and publication. Pivano’s professional trajectory represents a fascinating case study of the complex nature of translators’ positioning within the book market, and the strategies that translators deploy to negotiate their capital to pursue their ambitions and make themselves visible. This work contributes to the on-going micro-sociological and micro-historical assessment of cultural transfer between the United States and Italy, focussing on a critical evaluation of the various factors shaping (female) translating agency in the post-war Italian publishing market, while also shedding light on a significant yet neglected aspect of the history of counterculture in 1960s Italy.