HEMINGWAY IN ITALY
of this century, the author of
Tempo innamorato
(1928).
As
an
instance of Hemingway's style I quoted in my article a long passage
from "Cat in the Rain," and advised a study of "Big Two-Hearted
River."
My article in
La Stampa
was resented in certain quarters: it was
said, among other things, that long ago Italian literature had gone
through the phase represented by Hemingway's stories; one must not
forget that those were the years of the Fascist rule, and nationalism
was rampant, so much so that when, in 1936, I wrote about Heming–
way's
Green Hills of Africa,
the Fascist censorship must have been
caught napping when it allowed the article to appear at all: Hem–
ingway's name was taboo among us because of his attitude during
the Abyssinian campaign.
In the meantime, however, other critics had been speaking of
Hemingway with praise, chiefly on account of his novel about the
Italian front,
Farewell to Arms;
and what information the Italians
could not get from their own literary reviews, they gathered from
French magazines, always widespread in our country. By 1941,
Hemingway's work was not only so well known but so widely imi–
tated that one of our leading critics, Emilio Cecchi (who had helped
to acquaint the Italian public with Hemingway) wrote in the
Carriere
della sera:
"We keep stumbling everywhere against this type of dia–
logue, whether we read a short story or a reporter's correspondence."
Among the first to learn from Hemingway, as well as from
other American novelists, Elio Vittorini became known in the thirties
through his translations of D. H. Lawrence as well as original short
stories and impressions of places
(Piccola borghesia, N ei M orlacchi)
:
he was then a Fascist and had himself photographed with the front
page of the
Carriere della sera
under his eyes, with the "Discorso del
Duce" well in evidence: he was then very young. In 1941 he wrote
his best book,
Conversazione in Sicilia;
in the previous year he had
published a selection of short stories by William Saroyan (
Che ve
ne sembra dell'America?).
Hemingway and Saroyan are the evident
literary sponsors of the book which he published in 1945,
Uomini
e no:
from the very title, which sounds very quaint in Italian until
one realizes that the model has been supplied for it by Hemingway's
To Have and Have Not,
combined with Steinbeck's
Of Mice and Men
(
Uomini e topi
in the Italian translation) .
.
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