Italy's Salman Rushdie: The renarration of “Roberto Saviano” in English for the post-9/11 cultural market

Abstract

This article considers the construction of the literary fame of Roberto Saviano, author of the 2006 Italian bestseller Gomorra, in the British book marketplace. In order to understand the political import of Saviano's translated author-brand, this analysis utilizes the tools of narrative theory to look at what narratives were created around the authorial personality and what other public narratives and meta-narratives are mobilized to introduce the author to his new reading public. The analysis centres on Saviano's reputation as “Italy's Salman Rushdie” and it demonstrates that the political import of the narratives that underpin the author-brand in translation is linked with a set of post-9/11 public narratives.

Keywords:

• Roberto Saviano
• narrative theory
• author-brand
• Gomorra

Note on contributor

Serena Bassi received her PhD in Italian studies at the University of Warwick, with a thesis entitled “Italy in the Mirror of Translation: Place, Culture and Difference in the Twenty-First Century Book Market”. Her research focuses on the sociology of translation and on translation and national images. Her current work is on cultural exchange between Italy and the anglophone world in the second half of the twentieth century, with particular reference to questions of gender and sexuality.

Notes

1. Summers (2012) tracked the translation of Christa Wolf's “author function” in an anglophone context. Even though the notion of author-function is also relevant to this case study, I have chosen to use the theoretical concept of author-brand instead, in order to stress the deliberate construction of narratives of who the author is to make the book appealing to the target audience.

2. This move seems to correspond to the creation of a specific kind of capital around the book, which Angela Kershaw (2010) has termed “testimonial capital”.

3. The title of the American edition is interesting from a narrative point of view. Like the Italian title and unlike the British one, it highlights the international dimension of the book's treatment of the Camorra. Moreover, the reference to a “personal journey” is in line with the Italian reception of the text as an authentic account of the Camorra based on first-hand experience.

4. Solzhenitsyn had been compared to Saviano once before, in The Guardian (Hooper 2008a).

5. As various observers have noticed, Rushdie's post-9/11 articulation of his defence of freedom of speech entailed a shift of perspective from his earlier position on the death sentence fatwa, which came from “a recognizable liberal-left position” (Sawhney and Sawhney 2001, 433) and from the representation of Islam in his novels, which features “the presence of not one but several Islams […], a polyphony of different Islams” (Almond 2007, 95).