Paper short abstract:

Between the 1960s and the 80s 20 literary translations were published from the Portuguese-Writing Africa in German or in Italian. This communication's aim is to investigate this corpus to verify the hypothesis of a net of left-wing solidarity in countries not directly involved in the decolonization.

Paper long abstract:

Five translations of African authors (among which two anthologies) from the Portuguese were published in Italian in book form between 1961 and 1969. After this, in the next 20 years no translation from Portuguese-Writing Africa appeared: just in 1989 a new generation of translators will begin again the task of publishing literature in Italian translation from that part of the World Literary System.

Roughly in the same period, between 1962 and 1988, 15 translations appeared in book form in the German market. Among the 15 publications, 10 of them were published in the German Democratic Republic, a communist country at the time.

While both the English- and the French-Speaking literary system - more attuned to the post-colonial literary production - had developed publishing spaces dedicated to African literature (such as Heinemann African Series or Présence Africaine) and were developing a taste for this production, facilitating also translation and acceptance of foreign-language African literature, in Italy and Germany the circulation of this production seems to be more random.

A closer analysis of translations into German and Italian in this period can, however, show how the net of solidarity with the anticolonial fight and then with the new nations arisen from the fight - all of which aligned with the Eastern bloc - constituted an alternative way through which literature circulated abroad.

This proposal will focus on the Italian and German translations of this period, investigating the publishing and translating structure and agenda behind these publications, in order to validate our hypothesis.