Before Ferrante - Becoming a cosmopolitan writer. Alba De Céspedes between Italy and France

Before Ferrante - Becoming a cosmopolitan writer. Alba De Céspedes between Italy and France
Part of the CCWW series: Before Ferrante. Mapping Italian Women Writers in Translation
18 April 2024
Speakers:
Guido Bonsaver (University of Oxford, UK)
Sabina Ciminari (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France)
Guido Bonsaver (Oxford University, United Kingdom), Negotiating Literary Success in Fascist Italy
Following the critical and commercial success of ‘Nessuno torna indietro’ (1938), Alba De Céspedes was forced to face the political and cultural implications of her novel, suffering different types of censorship when the text was reprinted and then turned into a script for a film adaptation. Her case will be discussed as exemplary of the regime’s post-1938 restrictions on artistic creativity and as typical of the pressures which women writers were subjected to.
Sabina Ciminari (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France), From “best-read, best-selling” author to “jeune auteur français”. Trajectories in France of Alba de Céspedes’ works
The intellectual biography of Alba de Céspedes, read through the most significant stages of her translations into French, allows us to trace the history of a reception that corresponds to the path taken from ‘Nul ne revient sur ses pas’ (the translation of ‘Nessuno torna indietro’, which appeared in 1949 at Albin Michel) to ‘La Bambolona’ (the last title translated into French, in 1968 at Editions du Seuil), and passes through the privileged relationships with her translators (Juliette Bertrand and Louis Bonalumi). A path that led de Céspedes to privilege her publishing and cultural life in France: her literary imagination underwent, therefore, a shift to the point that she changed her language of writing and became “un jeune auteur français” with the publication first of poems entitled ‘Chansons des filles de mai’, in 1968, then of the experimental novel ‘Sans autre lieu que la nuit’, in 1973.