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

Journal of Italian Translation
arguably much more subjective analytical space, particularly when
their trends, transformations and creative agents are transmitted –
and thus invariably, somehow, translated – to audiences beyond
Italy. This particularity, then, has been even more pronounced this
year as Italian unification marks its less-than-uniformly celebrated
sesquicentennial. To be sure, this sort of subjective analysis is often
politically inflected, and perhaps rightly if not ineluctably so;
politics and the arts are more or less intertwined the world over,
and Italian praxis has a long and storied tradition of leaning much
more heavily on the side of more. So this year, with the variable
meanings of Italian ‘unity’ and ‘unification’ looming large, a great
many discussions of the state of Italian fine arts – in print, at commemorative
events, in literary discourse and at art fairs – have been
characterized by an element of surprise, rhetorical or not, that such
cultural practices yet exist, yet endure, maybe thrive. Exemplary of
such discourse might be the tone of the following: Recognition at
home may be scant and resources significantly strained, but Italian
artists, writers, filmmakers and performers carry on with their
creative pursuits, somewhat incredibly, all the same.
Yet is this really, in fact, surprising? For better or worse, is not
adversity – social, political, economic and so forth – a time-proven
motor of expressive energy and creative output? Insufferable
though I generally find such arguments (my rather simple, if not
simplistic and naïve belief is that one creates things or one does
not, and those things might matter or they might not, and that is
fundamentally that), they are at times quite difficult to refute. The
genesis of ever-venerable Italian Neorealism is often discussed in
similar terms, of course, and there is indeed no shortage, in the
contemporary setting, of visual icons suggesting that variably
reactionary voices are expressing themselves at considerable volume:
photographs of recent student protests in Rome; Maurizio
Cattelan’s gargantuan L.O.V.E. sculpture in Piazza Affari, in Milan;
still-images from recent films such as Videocrazia and Gomorrah;
and così via. In other words, if observations of fine arts in today’s
Italy tend to encompass political foci, it is in part because invigorated
practitioners of the same tend to confront political realities
head-on. Among the many conferences, arts events and publications
that devoted resources and words to such issues, a recent
edition of Frieze, a primarily Anglophone magazine of art and
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