Fernanda Pivano:
Italian Americanista, Reluctant Feminist*

 

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.

 

Blossom S. Kirschenbaum

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.” Forthcoming in the Proceedings (ed. 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 webmaster.

Lombreglia, Ralph. “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 1995): 67–76.

Pinchbeck, Daniel. “Children of the Beats.” The New York Times Magazine 5 Nov. 1995: 38–43.

“Pivano, Fernanda.” 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 l’indipendenza.” Il corriere d’informazione 12–18–23 ottobre 1962; 17–31 gennaio 1963.

Silvera, Miro. “Fernanda Pivano. Ricordi di una vita.” Risk: arte oggi 18–19 (Maggio-Agosto 1995): 57.

Sollors, Werner. Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader. New York: New York UP, 1996.

Stein, Gertrude. The Mother of Us All. Last Operas and Plays by Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl van Vechten. Intro. Bonnie Marran­ca. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1949.

Testoni, Luca. “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.