by Rose Facchini

Anna Lanfranchi is a Teaching Fellow in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick. Her research intersects translation, Italian, and book history to focus on transnational publishing from the nineteenth century to the present. Rose Facchini spoke to Lanfranchi about her recent book, Translations and Copyright in the Italian Book Trade: Publishers, Agents, and the State (1900-1947) (Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2024).

Rose Facchini: What I find most compelling about your work is its inherently interdisciplinary nature. The convergence of diverse fields of study culminates in a remarkably multifaceted project. Would you say that your doctoral research served as the catalyst for looking into the relationship between translation, copyright, and the book trade during the first half of the twentieth century?

Anna Lanfranchi: For my PhD, I originally considered the translation industry during Italy’s fascist period, which is a field that has been quite vastly explored. Then, when I was doing my preliminary research to look at this phenomenon, I came across many archival sources that had been mostly neglected in historiography and had to do more with the daily activities behind the scenes. This included the work of literary agents, publishers, professional readers, and translators, but more in a negotiating and mediating role. I became fascinated by this preliminary stage, which allows the translation process to begin. Therefore, my doctoral research shifted focus to the copyright negotiation side, allowing me to explore this interconnected nature of the book trade, which is not typically associated with the fascist period of Italian history. I found it fascinating to discover the extent to which the Italian book trade was interconnected with Britain, Europe, and the United States. What I aim to bring out with this book is that international dimension, which perhaps precedes the period typically associated with the global history of publishing.

In terms of archival sources, my research started from Fondazione Mondadori, primarily around the collection of Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, and especially the dialogue between Mondadori and the Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale. This dialogue constituted the central part of my book; the starting point to then go on and explore other areas of Italy and other social agents that helped, alongside literary agents, to foster the translation rights trade.

RF: Could you elaborate further on the archival materials you engaged with? What other types of sources did you ultimately incorporate into your research? Which source would you consider the most instrumental to your book—the one that served as your primary foundation?

AL: The most important archive for my book was that of the Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale, the only surviving corporate archive of prewar literary agents in Italy, and which has also been the object of an in-depth study by Anna Ferrando. It provides a variety of insights on various topics that I then tried to explain in this book. You can find a lot of information on the specific work of this literary agency, as well as on many other social actors involved with copyright negotiation, from translators to foreign rights departments to authors’ societies. Toward the end of the war, the support provided by the Allies, particularly the United States and Britain, played a significant role in copyright negotiations, too. This leads to the final part of the book, which deals more specifically with politics and cultural diplomacy and how they fostered the recovery of the translation industry after the war.

When writing my book, I was aware of how scholarship on book history and translation in the first half of twentieth-century Italy has historically concentrated on Milan and the center-north of the peninsula. So, I tried my best to incorporate archives from other areas to map as much as possible what was going on at the national level. That is why I decided to broaden the scope to Bemporad in Florence—which was declining as a publishing center in interwar Italy—and to Laterza in Bari. This scope allowed me to explore the connections between the broader European book trade and other regions of Italy beyond the dominant Milanese publishing scene.

RF: In addition to the Laterza archives, did your research lead you to investigate archival collections in other regions of southern Italy? Were there any other archives that you wanted to access but could not?

AL: Unfortunately, as with most pre-World War II archives, it is really difficult to find Italian publishing archives that are well-preserved and that a researcher can access with relative ease. The biggest problem is often locating the materials. In some cases, archives simply do not exist. This was true for a literary agency I refer to as the “first” Helicon, for which we do not have an archive. It is possible to reconstruct some of the agency’s activities through the archives of the Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale, Mondadori, and other publishers that corresponded with the agency. Without a central archive or filing system, we can only infer so much about the nature of their work.

Sonzogno’s case is similar in this sense. It was a very important publishing house in nineteenth-century Italy, and Silvia Valisa has done quite a lot of work on it from both a historical and a digital humanities perspective. However, no archive or a complete catalog of its activities exists. During my research, I was fortunate to discover relatively well-preserved contracts from the interwar period in the Fondazione Corriere della Sera archives, providing me with a representative sample of contracts to work on. This discovery allowed me to identify the specific role of translators as negotiators of translation rights in Sonzogno’s activities. There was so much more happening at the time, but unfortunately, we do not have many of those traces anymore.

For the center-south of Italy, I worked with Laterza’s archives and the state archives in Bari. These are incredible resources, and I think more work will—and should—be done there. During my limited time there, I focused specifically on the first fourteen years of Laterza’s activities, particularly on the negotiating work that philosopher Benedetto Croce did for the publishing house, in addition to the many roles he held in his relationship with Giovanni Laterza. In a sense, that archive shed light on the early phases of the trends I am studying, which is the work of intellectuals and literary critics with international networks. While not strictly a partnership network, these individuals were connected to publishing houses, periodicals, and presses across Europe and the Atlantic. This was a crucial piece of the puzzle in explaining the negotiation of copyright and copyright in translation in Italy, particularly regarding the central-southern part of the country.

RF: Can you tell us more about the personal and family archives you used during your research?

AL: In my book, I extensively used personal papers of poet and literary critic Lorenzo Montano, available at the Biblioteca Civica in Verona. Although not much of his personal work has been preserved, the remaining materials still required a lot of work to go through, as they lack the systematic organization typical of institutional archives. Personal papers can help fill gaps created by the loss of corporate archives, but they also have limitations of their own; primarily due to the fact that they are the archive of just one person who probably did not expect other people to look through their materials. They were created organically with no filing system underpinning it, but are nevertheless precious testimonies.

RF: Did your archival research yield any unexpected discoveries? Were there any findings that you found particularly exciting or frustrating?

AL: For Lorenzo Montano, it was exciting to find confirmation in his own personal papers that he worked for the British Ministry of Information and the Central Office of Information, and yet carried out intercultural mediation activities during and after the war. There were traces of that type of activity both in the Mondadori archive and the British National Archives in Kew. On the flip side, I wanted to learn more about what his activities actually entailed. For instance, we know that he was the director of Il mese, an international press review published in Britain for Italian readers at the end and immediately after the war. This review also served as an example for publications on postwar Italy in the United States. However, we know very little about the publishing activities behind that review. There are still many unknowns, and it is frustrating to accept that not all gaps can be filled.

RF: When we last spoke, you mentioned the possibility of exploring the U.S. dimension of this topic. Do you have any plans to study other archival materials related to this story?

AL: Continuing the research I started with this book, I would like to explore the relationship between politics and the publishing industry, focusing especially on American sources and cultural diplomacy during and after World War II. I wish to examine the interaction between, from the one side, information agencies in the United States and Britain and, on the other, the book trade in Italy, particularly the efforts of these agencies to distribute materials among Italian readers. A separate project would focus on translations of English-language authors, specifically considering the copyright protections of translators in their work, which were also recognized internationally. It will be a different project with different sources, more personal in nature, and I hope to conduct it as a complement to the research presented in this book.

RF: I am excited to see the outcome of that research! The historical period you are investigating is exceptionally dynamic; as you mentioned, it presents so many challenges within the scope of your research. One aspect I find particularly intriguing is the influence of copyright law and how it shaped the selection of books chosen for translation. Could you elaborate on this?

AL: I chose the unification of Italy in 1861 as the starting point for a comparative analysis of the status of translation rights on a legal level. It was interesting to see how Italy, starting in 1865, gradually opened up to the publishing world, first with the rest of the continent and later with the United States, in agreeing to protect translation rights mutually. This process involved signing bilateral treaties and then joining the Berne Convention, which ensured the copyright protection of Italian authors if they chose to translate their work into other languages. Vice versa, Italy adhered to these new international standards for copyright protection, meaning that publishers would need permission from authors before publishing their works in translation. This process had very real implications for the publishers who, to an extent, were learning as these new laws developed. I generally describe the period between 1861 and 1941 as the transformative phase in legal terms for the Italian book trade. During this time, Italy moved from the national unification of 1861 to the law of 1941, which remains in force to this day. Of course, it has been amended over the years, but it still remains the core of copyright law in Italy. So, over those eighty years, publishers have had to adapt their working practices constantly.

When selecting works for translation, there is a massive difference between publishers who can invest in contemporary works protected by copyright and those who cannot. The former have international networks to negotiate copyrights with authors, publishers, and literary agents abroad, along with the financial resources to pay for those rights. This distinction is also evident in the catalogs of the publishing houses and the new works they choose to invest in. Vice versa, works that were out of copyright in Italy were much cheaper to import because no translation rights needed to be paid. Depending on the networks a publisher had and the financial resources available for translation, they may not have been able to publish new works still under copyright. Instead, they may have chosen works that were technically out of copyright for translation in Italy. These works tended to be more popular, often published in periodicals, and sometimes included crime novels, though not always. For newer voices, modernist writers, and what we typically call—with a definition that I do not like very much—highbrow or middlebrow literature, there was more interest in negotiating translation rights, often through licensing agreements for translation into Italian. Sometimes, the fact that an important work was due to fall soon in the public domain could also be exploited by publishers in copyright negotiations with a writer. For instance, a publisher could offer to pay for translation rights of works technically out of copyright for Italy on the condition that an exclusivity on the author’s future output would be granted to them. This differentiation remained at least until the World War II, as the time when publishers could translate relatively recent works for free was quickly coming to an end.

Another fascinating thing I found was how publishers were quick to inform themselves about new laws and ask for legal counsel. They turned to lawyers, and sometimes to translators, asking questions such as, “what do you think? Is this still in copyright? Could you do this research for me?” This represented a kind of knowledge-making in the book industry about changes that often occurred very rapidly.

RF: This raises the question of readership. How were these works received by their audience?

AL: I have not done that research myself, but it has been investigated by Valerio Ferme, Francesca Billiani, and Christopher Rundle, among others, who have specifically examined the role of translation within the Italian literary field before World War II. Their research shows that Italy was heavily reliant on translated works and that they were in demand across all types of readerships, either in specialized periodicals for young readers or female readerships, as well as paperback or hardbound collections featuring modernist voices. There was a clear interest in knowing what was written outside of Italy and comparing the modernity presented in these works with domestic production.

This tension is particularly interesting given the political landscape of early twentieth-century Italy. Many scholars have demonstrated the complex relationship between fascism and translation. On the one hand, Mussolini’s regime was concerned that translation could potentially challenge some of its ideological foundations. On the other hand, translations were a necessary requirement for the book trade to become a thriving, modern industry. This was a very complex dynamic both in terms of the publishers’ room for maneuvering and the degree of self-censorship they imposed on themselves, especially as censorship of translations tightened in the late 1930s and early 1940s. What I found fascinating was the extent to which translated literature and non-fiction circulated in fascist Italy, contrary to what one might think.

RF: The problem of censorship is especially compelling. Could you tell us about archival materials that directly related to it?

AL: The archival material that engages with censorship deals the most with context-specific practices of literary agents and the contract system with foreign authors. Literary agents in interwar Italy used two primary practices. The first is what I call the “system of double contracts.” In this system, agents would “purchase”—meaning acquire the license for translation rights—and then create a separate contract with the Italian publisher. This allowed them to act like a “filter” between the publishing houses and the foreign book trade on a symbolic level because agents would ask for permission to export currency, another very sensitive issue for the regime, and had the flexibility to negotiate translation rights with multiple publishers should one of them refuse to publish an edition. The other practice where censorship played a role in negotiating translation rights was what agents used to call the “censorship clause.” Sometimes, in the 1930s, contracts for translation rights would become void if a censor banned a book or decided that it was unsuitable for publication in Italy. Today, in such a case, authors would still receive their advance, or some sort of payment. However, at the time, when a publication was banned, the advance was not paid to the author if the contract included a “censorship clause.” Agents developed these strategies to ensure they could continue their work in Fascist Italy, where negotiating and obtaining permission to export currency, which was necessary to pay for contracts, was extremely difficult. At the same time, agents aimed to ensure that, even if not all the intended works could get through, at least some of them would still reach Italian readers.

Thus, censorship played a crucial role in copyright negotiations, even before the stage of examining the text itself. There were also cases where authors abroad were aware of the severity of fascist censorship and agreed to make cuts to the translations. They would omit certain parts to ensure that, at least for the time being, their works—even if abridged—could reach Italy. The other thing I found surprising about censorship and the negotiation of translation rights is that literary agents and publishers in Italy were quite open in talking about censorship to colleagues abroad. Clearly, the international book trade was aware of what was going on in Italy, and they tried to be flexible, working with Italian colleagues to ensure that at least some of the international production could reach Italian readers.

RF: And certain topics were more subjected to censorship than others.

AL: Yes, the main themes typically censored were those considered sensitive on religious or moral grounds, though this was not unique to Fascist Italy. At the same time, censorship was particularly strict on content that could potentially damage the regime or Italy’s image abroad. If a book advocated pacifism or openly spoke against Mussolini, it would likely be banned. The regime also censored fictional works that portrayed Italians as villains. For instance, if the murderer in a story was Italian, he was often changed to someone from another country. In many of these cases, a text would not be immediately rejected if it could be presented in a way more favorable to the regime. Scholars have extensively studied the range of adaptations to which censorship subjected translated texts. Still, I believe that much more research needs to be done on censorship in Italy both before and after the Fascist regime.

Regarding the original language of translated texts, Rundle has demonstrated that, from 1933, English was the primary source language Italy translated from. I think it is interesting that this is still very much the case; in 2023, English made up about 62% of texts translated into Italian. However, during the Second World War, works by French, British, and later American writers could not be negotiated in Italy because those countries were considered enemies. Previously negotiated works could still be published if they did not alert the censor, but any new negotiation stopped. In those years, translations from Scandinavian languages and German increased significantly compared to French or English. So, the political situation also had a certain degree of influence on the languages from which Italian publishers chose to translate.

RF: Did you come across any instances of actual legal ramifications, either for the publisher, literary agent, or even the translator?

AL: One of the biggest negotiations that went sour was documented in the Sonzogno archive. The publisher had been preparing an edition of several works by James Oliver Curwood, for which they had purchased the translation rights from another publisher. However, they later discovered that the translators had not been fully compensated for their work. This brought the whole process to a halt, and a solution had to be found with the individual translators. Even though translation rights were still a relatively new field, translators were aware of their right to remuneration under the new law and were willing to take action if a publisher did not adhere to it. So, this story exemplifies why publishers began to pay so much attention to new regulations related to translation.

Another interesting legal issue occurred in the postwar period and concerned the validity of prewar contracts. Shortly after the war, there was a period of widespread uncertainty about whether contracts signed before the war were still valid for publication in Italy. This confusion was further exacerbated when literary agents, some of whom had worked in Italy before the war, returned and discovered the “flexibility” in translations that we discussed earlier—measures like the double contracts system. This prewar “flexibility” that had been a part of prewar negotiations often surprised new agents entering the market in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Overall, everyone seemed to be quite knowledgeable about the new regulations, both in Italy and abroad. On one hand, literary agents and translators were not afraid to remind their colleagues that there could be repercussions if the law was not observed. On the other hand, there was a notable preference for resolving disputes amicably rather than involving lawyers. From what I have studied, I have never found a situation that led to a trial. Most conflicts were resolved in a “gentlemanly” manner, though women were very much involved in these negotiations both as literary agents and translators.

RF: It seems that the environment was far more cooperative than one might initially assume. Regarding the late 1940s and early 1950s, in the aftermath of World War II, do you see any parallels between the copyright issues you studied and those in today’s publishing industry, either in Italy or globally?

AL: It was fascinating to study the starting point of what is now a common characteristic of the Italian book market, where translations continue to play an important role and with English remaining the dominant language from which publishers translate. It was also interesting to note how Italian writers have improved at negotiating foreign rights and securing translations of their works abroad. Over the past 20 years, there has been a sharp increase in the number of Italian works published in translation abroad, which contrasts with the challenges writers faced during the first half of the twentieth century in achieving the same goal. It is great to see this increase, but it is equally important to acknowledge the historical roots of English’s dominance as a source language for Italian publishers. While English and French were the two historically dominant languages, other languages are becoming increasingly important. Today, translations that were previously done through English or French are now being undertaken directly from the original languages, such as Chinese and Japanese. For this reason, in my future projects, I would like to collaborate with colleagues who work on other sources and target languages to carry out comparative, transnational research on copyright and translation flows in the twentieth century, both within Europe and globally.

Rose Facchini is a Lecturer in Italian at Tufts University and the Editor and Italian Translator Editor for the International Poetry Review. She explores the intersection between Italian Studies and Environmental Humanities with a focus on climate change and foodways, particularly through the lens of speculative fiction. Her translations have appeared in several journals, most notably Asymptote and West Branch, and her non-fiction work appears in Military Medicine.

Edited by Artur Banaszewski

Featured Image: Italian publisher Arnoldo Mondadori with author Gabriele D’Annunzio, before 1938, Archivi Mondadori, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.