The First Edition of August Strindberg’s Chamber Plays in Italian (1944): Indirect Translation and Cultural Reconstruction after Fascism

The first Italian edition of August Strindberg’s chamber plays (1907) came out in 1944 thanks to the efforts of Rosa e Ballo, a publishing house operating in Milan while the city was affected by World War II. The translator was the Germanist Alessandro Pellegrini, whose source was Emil Schering’s standard edition of Strindberg’s Werke. Deutsche Gesamtausgabe. In addition, the introductions Pellegrini wrote in each of the five booklets (the four chamber plays and the play Easter) were remoulded to become the first Italian monograph on Strindberg: Il poeta del nichilismo (1944). This article highlights the importance of Strindberg and Schering’s collaboration with reference to Strindberg’s transnational agenda; when Strindberg became part of the German literary and dramatic canon at the beginning of the twentieth century, more of his works, especially his late experimental plays, succeeded in reaching Italy. This article focuses also on the Italian reception of Strindberg’s dramatic output through the German mediation, giving evidence that Pellegrini’s translation is based on Schering’s, and examining Pellegrini’s actualization as a critic in the paratext (eventually metatext), which took shape within the intellectual network created by Rosa e Ballo, and by means of which Strindberg’s radical bourgeois pessimism helps to explain the present condition of mankind