Politics in Translation: The “Original” Translation of Dux
Abstract: The Life of Benito Mussolini has been translated by Frederic Whyte and published in London in 1925. Offered as a “condensed version” of the Italian original, the book was a great success, with translations in 18 languages. The author of Dux, the Italian version, was Margherita Sarfatti, writer and journalist, colleague of Benito Mussolini at the Avanti and his lover. A successful book has been soon translated in many languages, nothing unusual to that extent. What makes it a case of special interest is that at the time of the English translation, in 1925, there was no Italian original. Apparently Sarfatti wrote it in 1924, but the book was first published in translation and later on in Italian. The fact that Whyte presented his work as a condensed version could be used as evidence of the existence of an Italian original, but the comparison with the published original and its translation seems to question what actually has been taken for granted. The different chapters, the differences in the very narration, the different construction of that narration together with the differences in the pictures and in the presentation of the books testify to the different strategies used by the English and the Italian writers in order to adapt their text to the different social and political background of England and Italy. Both versions have been written and published for propaganda, but the very same end seems to be achieved in a slightly different way, arguably due to the different audiences and assumed expectations.
Introduction
The book The Life of Benito Mussolini was published in London in 1925 in a translation by Frederic Whyte. Presented as a “condensed version” of the Italian original, the book was a great success, and was translated into 18 languages. The author of Dux, the Italian version, was Margherita Sarfatti, writer and journalist, colleague of Benito Mussolini at the newspaper Avanti and his lover. What makes this a case of special interest is that at the time of the English translation, in 1925, there was no published Italian original. Apparently Sarfatti wrote it in 1924, but the book was first published in English translation and only later in Italian. The fact that Whyte presented his work as a condensed version could be used as evidence of the existence of an Italian original, but the comparison of the published ‘translation’ with its ‘original’ seems to put this into question.
The analysis of the two texts performed by means of a manual comparison of the English and Italian versions points out their differences. Changes and differences provide evidence of the different editorship that presided over the publica←123 | 124→tion of the two books. In particular, I want to argue that changes were dictated mostly by the different needs of propaganda in the two countries; furthermore, that they are due to what the writers believed to be the different tastes and also expectations of the English and Italian readers.
To start with, let’s consider the titles. The title is the first thing that catches the eye of the reader and it also offers the first indication of the differences that it is possible to find in the English and Italian versions of the book.
The English title, The Life of Benito Mussolini, is a very ordinary title for a biography. In its reassuring banality, it immediately presents the reader with the main topic of the book. Its singularity and therefore the reason to become interested in this particular biography is due to the name of the protagonist only, Benito Mussolini.
The Italian title is quite different. It is a Latin word, Dux. In line with the emphatic and concise style of the time, the only-one-word title of the Italian sounds quite aggressive. The Latin word links Mussolini directly to the Roman Empire and to the glory of Rome whose restoration fascist propaganda boasted about (Falasca Zamponi 2003, 143–160).
The very first impression communicated by the titles seems to be confirmed by the opening photographs included in the texts. The English book opens in the frontispiece with a smiling photograph of Mussolini with some papers in his hands. The Italian version opens with a photograph of a marble bust of Mussolini by Adolfo Wildt, protégé of Margherita Sarfatti. The marble sculpture and the imperious cast of Mussolini’s features stress again the link with the Roman Empire.
The eleven photographs of the English version are taken from the public and private life of the dictator to present the image of a dynamic Prime Minister who rides a horse or caresses his favorite lioness, whose singularity is balanced by photographs of his children. The last photograph of the English text depicts the reception of George V visiting Rome. Conversely, the 32 photographs of the Italian text are mostly taken from his public life. Additional illustrations include pictures of him as a volunteer soldier in the First World War and many images of public ceremonies and of him in uniform or at work as Prime Minister. The photographs of his children and of the reception of George V are not present. There is only one smiling picture in the Italian text whose uniqueness reinforces the Italian myth of the never smiling dictator (Sarfatti 1926, 306).
The title together with the photographs present a different image of the Duce, a smiling reassuring one for the English public and an intimidating, aggressive one for the Italian public. As the choice of the title and images are usually based on what the editor or the publishing house believes to be the tastes and expectations←124 | 125→ of the readership (Spirk 2014, 144–155), it could be argued that two different goals determined the creation of the English and Italian texts and the different projects obeyed to the different needs of the propaganda at home and abroad.
To clarify this point it is necessary to give a brief account of the political situation that was the backdrop to the publication of this biography.
After the March on Rome in 1922 and Mussolini’s seizure of power, the elections of 6 April 1924 legitimized Mussolini’s government in the eyes of public opinion. On 30 May 1924, Giacomo Matteotti, a member of the opposition in Parliament, denounced the violence of the fascist paramilitary squads and the results of the elections as illegal. On 10 June Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered by a group of fascists who were members of the Ceka, the political police. Mussolini soon asserted his non-involvement in the murder, but from the beginning public opinion accused him of being its instigator. Attacked by public opinion and by members of the opposition, Mussolini faced the most difficult time of his political career.
In the meantime, an aggressive press campaign against Italian fascism was going on in England and the agreements that were to be signed between the Italian government and the American company Sinclair Oil played a significant role in this regard. Just a few days before Matteotti’s assassination, the oil company had been awarded drilling rights in Sicily and Emilia. The English government considered the agreements, signed on the 29 April 1924, as an attack on English interests (Canali 1997, 66) since British Petroleum, the Italian branch of English Apoc, had been cut off from the Italian market. In April 1924, Matteotti travelled to London and met with many members of the Labour party. Documents in the ILP archive (1997, 65) seem to provide evidence that Matteotti pointed out to the labourist leaders that the decrees on granting gambling house licenses and oil drilling rights to Sinclair Oilwere the proof of the “speculator mentality of the regime” (1997, 65) damaging to Italy’s interests.
According to Mauro Canali (1997, 63–81; 263–265), Matteotti came to England to get evidence of the corrupt dealings between the Italian government and Sinclair Oil. In fact, the periodical English Life published a posthumous article (ibid., 73) in which Matteotti declared he had evidence of the corruption that was going on and could name names. Matteotti’s papers, confiscated by his killers, have never been found and Mussolini’s direct involvement in the assassination of Matteotti has never been proven (Canali 1997: 412–443).
The assassination had a great impact on public opinion and cast a shadow over fascism and its leader. In Italy Mussolini could control the press, but nothing could be done to prevent the British press from speaking out against fascism.←125 | 126→ The publication of a carefully written biography could reassure public opinion and give support to the many English fascist supporters against their opponents.
The text analysis
First of all, the Life of Benito Mussolini and Dux are two different books and this is not simply due to the translation process. It could be argued from the very first quick comparison of the two tables of contents: the English translation has got 42 chapters while the Italian one has got 48 chapters. The existence of a different previous Italian original for the English translation has been confirmed by the leaflet included in the Italian version. The Italian publisher says that due to the extraordinary success of the biography of Mussolini in England the author decided to publish it in Italy as well. But he also remarks that “notwithstanding this substantial success, the Author […] wanted to rewrite completely the Italian edition, according to stricter needs of stylistic concision.”
Due to the lack of the original text sent to the translator by the author, I considered as first hypothesis the possibility that the original had been written by the author, Margherita Sarfatti, directly in English. This would have been an answer to the question of why rewriting what should have been ready for publication. In fact, Sarfatti, who by the age of fourteen spoke and wrote German, English and French, was the ghostwriter of Mussolini’s articles in English for the American Thomas B. Morgan of the United Press. Furthermore, the translator, Frederic Whyte, member of the editorial staff for Cassell & Company and literary advisor for Methuen & Company, was also a biographer and writer himself. Was it possible that Sarfatti wrote Dux in English and sent it to Whyte to give it literary form? The answer seems to be no, which is revealed by the letters that Prezzolini wrote to Sarfatti in order to arrange the publication. Prezzolini, literary agent in Paris for a foreign publishing house, was asked for a biography of Mussolini, probably to capitalize on English public interest drummed up by the press campaign regarding the Sinclair Oil affair and the Matteotti murder. He contacted Margherita Sarfatti who had written articles for him in the past. As it is evident from the letters I found in the Sarfatti archive of the Rovereto MART, Sarfatti wanted to write the book directly in English, but it is Prezzolini who advised against doing so. In particular, in a letter of 7 July 1923, he said he would talk with the publisher about it, but he added that he feared the publisher could have concerns regarding her imperfect command of English. Furthermore, he explained that the publisher might have their own translator, probably also a popular writer, who would help spread the book. She eventually agreed with him as in a letter of 13 may 1924 Prezzolini presses Sarfatti to finish the book. As it seems, she sent the chapters←126 | 127→ to him as soon as they were ready, but Prezzolini said that in this way they could not press the translator to finish his work, while on the other hand they wanted it to be finished soon in order to publish the book in Autumn and sell the foreign language rights to other countries.
So, if she had already written the book in Italian, other reasons must have convinced the author of the convenience of rewriting the book for the Italian public.
The remark made by the Italian publisher on the “stylistic concision” is quite interesting if we consider that the English translator, Frederic Whyte, in his translator’s note, had already stated that: “it has been found necessary to condense somewhat freely Signora Sarfatti’s text, partly owing to its great length, partly because many portions of it would be unclear to the English reader unless they were elaborately annotated” (Sarfatti, 1925, 6). As a result of such a complicated publication process, we have a “condensed” translation, published in 1925, one year before the Italian original, which in turn was abridged one year later, in 1926, for concision needs.
As the analysis will point out, what has been claimed as necessary for the sake of stylistic concision includes different political speech quotations, different historical accounts of the Italian and European pre-war political situation, differences in the dictator’s attitude towards women and differences in the narration of the very same events of Mussolini’s life.
To have a clear idea and a complete account of the changes and differences, I did a manual analysis of the whole English and Italian texts, but due to length limit in this paper I will present the analysis of representative selected extracts.
Leaving aside the differences in the historical accounts of some events concerning Italy and Europe in general1, it is important to note the presence only in the Italian version of a quotation from one of Mussolini’s speeches explaining the necessity for Italian territorial expansion (ibid. 1926, 289–290) or the presence of a passage, in English only, where Sarfatti explains that “Mussolini gave himself to the task of showing up the Communist illusion” saving “England, Germany, France and even America from the dreaded infection” (1925, 262). Furthermore, there is a whole chapter, in Italian only, dedicated to the idealization of fascism and transformation of its violence into a sort of game. Fascism should reflect the military virtues of courage and discipline, but Sarfatti says it reflects also some “deficiencies” due to the “military education” (1926, 248), “faithful to the supreme leader, […] but quarrelsome2” (ibid.). Unfortunately, with the restoration of the←127 | 128→ “sect and faction, the revengeful, delightful and a little bit cruel Italian joke revived too.” and addressing the English readers in Italian, the ones who mostly criticized fascism for its violence, she asks them to reread “our and your classics” as “Shakespeare, for first, inherited this tradition (ibid., 249). The so-called fascist punitive expeditions were born from the Commedia dell’Arte tradition:
It was the playful episode, or the fictional adventure, staged nearly always open-face, generously, against local little despots, kidnapped and kept in easy, very brief imprisonment, as a joke; or obliged by force to gulp down a glass of castor oil. The ridiculous plaid down the arrogance. (ibid., 251)
References to Mussolini’s anti-feminism are not present in English. So in Italian Sarfatti says that during a party he abruptly interrupts two foreign ladies who were talking about politics saying that “these talkings are for other brains” (ibid., 303) and she goes on to tell that an English feminist, Lady M., said to him that with such ideas he would have no success in England and he answered “I don’t go to England and I don’t believe that in England all the women are quaker politicians” (ibid., 303).
It is also interesting to note the presence of many different passages concerning the alleged powerful fascination that the Italian dictator seems to exert on women of all ages and nationalities since he was a child, slightly exaggerated in the English version. So in the third Italian chapter young Mussolini frightens little girls, one of them in particular, while in the fourth English chapter the little girl “had to go with him meekly, a bit fascinated, no doubt, as well as dominated, […]. Seven years old, she was woman enough to enjoy being tyrannized over by this young man of five” (ibid., 29). In the 14th Italian chapter he has got one Russian girlfriend, but in the corresponding 15th English chapter he has got two Russian girlfriends.
Among the many differences it is also important to stress the references to the Matteotti case, “inflamed against us by a systematic Press campaign” (ibid. 1925, 159) in English. But in 1926 the Matteotti “incident” was over with the arrest of the presumed murderers. So, the Italian text can clearly claim the innocence of Mussolini even using that tragic event to boast about Mussolini’s great sense of justice. Consequently, the text informs the Italian reader that when the people asked for justice for the Matteotti murder, “a diabolic crime [that] makes him almost fall down” (ibid. 1926, 265) he commanded for justice to be done, “deaf to any call of fear, or interest, or affection” (ibid.).
But the differences do not consist only in cuts or additions in the English or Italian version, they include real manipulations performed during translation in order to make the original conform to the tastes and expectations of its new readership. A case in point could be the description of an episode in Mussolini’s←128 | 129→ childhood in the fifth English chapter. The young dictator, “had given the word of command for a raid upon a certain apple tree” (ibid. 1925, 38). In English, an angered farmer fired at one of the boys, who was wounded in the leg, and the boys fled “all but one. Benito, like the true leader he already was, went to the rescue of the wounded lad who was all but unconscious, his leg bleeding profusely […] having done so, his next concern was to punish his timorous companions” (ibid.).
The very same episode has been narrated in the fourth chapter in Italian but it is slightly different. Mussolini is described as a leader as usual, but the boys run away at the shouts of the farmer. The wounded boy is not shot in Italian, but he falls down from the tree, breaking his leg. The farmer has got a shotgun but he does not use it and Mussolini rescues his friend defying the farmer.
To conclude, the different chapters, the differences in the very narration, the different construction of that narration together with the differences in the pictures and in the presentation of the books testify to the different strategies used by the English and the Italian writers in order to adapt their text to the different social and political background of England and Italy.
Both versions have been written and published for propaganda, but the very same end seems to be achieved in a slightly different way, arguably due to the different audiences and assumed expectations.
References
Canali, M. (1997): Il delitto Matteotti, Affarismo e politica nel primo governo Mussolini. Bologna: Il Mulino.
De Grazia, V. (1992): How Fascism ruled women. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press.
Falasca Zamponi, S. (2003): Lo spettacolo del fascismo. Rubbettino Editore.
Festorazzi, R. (2010): Margherita Sarfatti, la donna che inventò Mussolini. Costabissara: Angelo Colla.
Sarfatti, M. (1925): The Life of Benito Mussolini. Translated by Frederic Whyte. London: Thornton Butterworth, LTD. and F. A. Stokes Company, New York.
Sarfatti, M. (1926): Dux. Milano: Mondadori.
Spirk, J. (2014): Censorship, Indirect Translation and Non-Translation. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Whyte, F. (1931): A Bachelor’s London, Memories of the Day before Yesterday 1889–1914. Grant Richards.←129 | 130→ ←130 | 131→
1 See Sarfatti 1925, 139–140,145–146.
2 All translations of the only Italian passages into English are mine.