Journal of Italian Translation - Brooklyn College - Academic Home ...

La «chitarra» dell’Imaginifico
by Gian Carlo Fusco
Translated by Gregory Conti
Gregory Conti was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pa, and
teaches English at the University of Perugia, where he has been living
since 1985. His literary translations include three books by
Rosetta Loy (First Words (Metropolitan Books, 2001, Hot Chocolate at
Hanselmann’s, University of Nebraska Press, 2003, and The Water
Door, Other Press, 2006), The Banality of Goodness: The Story of Giorgio
Perlasca, by Enrico Deaglio (University of Notre Dame Press, 1998)
as well as extracts and short stories by Mario Rigoni Stern, Gian
Carlo Fusco, and Vitaliano Brancati, published in Raritan, Beacon,
and the on-line journal Words Without Borders. Conti has also published
several essays and book reviews on translation as well as
introductory essays for three of his four books. He is now working
on a translation of Corpo by Tiziano Scarpa (Einaudi, 2004), extracts
of which will be published in the Winter and Spring issues of Raritan
in 2007.
Gian Carlo Fusco was born in La Spezia in 1915, and died in
1984. He was primarily known as a brilliant journalist and raconteur,
who wrote for some of Italy’s best known newspapers and
magazines (Il Giorno, Il Mondo, L’Europeo). His several books, nearly
all republished in the last five years, are captivating evocations of
the underside of Italian life from the late 1930s through the 60s.
Quando l’Italia tollerava (1955) is a “scientific” investigation of Italy’s
then-legal brothels. Duri a Marsiglia (1974) examines the underworld
of organized crime in Marseilles between the two world wars. Guerra
d’Albania (1961), and Le rose del ventennio (1958) offer behind-the-
scenes looks at war and bourgeois social life under the Duce. Only
one of Fusco’s works has been translated into English: a chapter
about the anarchist Ezio Taddei from his book, Gli indesiderablili,
translated by Gregory Conti, which appeared in Raritan, Vol. XXV,
Number 4, Spring 2006.
L’Italia al dente (1960), from which this story is taken, is a rather
typical Fusco production: a collection of eight stories, all off-beat
and very entertaining while at the same time full of interesting his-