Foreign Women Writers in Fascist Italy: The Case of Danish BIBI and her Double Censorship

Censorship and translation are, interestingly, two opposing forces driving communication towards two extreme ends: translation allows the circulation of communication worldwide, whereas censorship bans or blocks this circulation. The ability to disseminate foreign literature, and more specifically, foreign women’s literature, under Fascism is undoubtedly a fascinating area of research, given the regime’s nationalistic agenda and the role assigned to women during those years. Foreign novels written by women gained a great deal of success and managed to circulate around Fascist Italy for many years, as Fascist censorship at the beginning was not so strict about foreign literature. The case analysed in this paper is the translation of the first novel of a series of books whose main character is Bibi, written by Danish writer Karin Michaëlis. These books initially managed to escape censorship, despite displaying a non-conformist girl in sharp contrast with the model traditionally endorsed by the Fascist ideology. These books, however, were eventually banned because they were considered a threat to the regime. Between 1927 and 1939, the acclaimed Danish writer Karin Michaëlis (1872-1950) wrote six children’s books about the tomboy named Bibi. Emilia Villoresi who, because she lacked a knowledge of the Danish language, translated these works from their German versions into Italian. In 2005, the renowned translator Eva Kampmann retranslated the first volume of the series from Danish (the original source text) into Italian, thus highlighting interesting cases of additions and omissions in Villoresi’s version, which could help us to better assess the reasons why these books were initially acclaimed and later banned by the same regime. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, it addresses the issue of censorship and translation in more general terms, and, second, it will analyse the translation strategies employed in the different translations of Bibi and, more precisely, the comparison of the first official Italian translation carried out under Fascism and its later version issued in 2005 along with the first German translation. This comparative analysis will allow us to determine whether the translation strategies employed by Villoresi in the first Italian version can be attributed to either manipulation or reasons of censorship in line with the regime’s ideology.