Bloomsbury Writers in Italy: a Comparison of the Italian Publications History of E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf

This article examines Italian publication history of three writers commonly associated to the Bloomsbury Group through an investigation of Italian publishers' and translators' archives. While the publication of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey roughly developed in the same period, E. M. Forster, whose work exhibits a strong cultural tie with Italy, had to wait almost 40 years to see his works translated and published in Italy. This article investigates the reasons for such asymmetry with a two-prongued approach : on one side, it takes into consideration the critical reception of the three writers; and on the other, it highlights the editorial polices driving the Italian translation and publication inferred through the archival documentation of the people involved in the pre-publication stage. Archival documents testify that Mondadori, which first translated and published Woolf and Strachey in Italy, also had an interest in Forster well before 1945, but never managed to obtain the translation rights.