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ABSTRACT
In this article I explore the way Italian crime fiction is presented to prospective Anglophone readers through paratextual bindings: titles, cover images and blurbs. I focus in particular on the way Italian settings are – variously – described, elucidated, emphasised and promoted, as publishers and their marketing teams seek to place a text within a space of familiarity or exoticism. Through the very act of circulation across cultures and languages, new forms of national allegory are attributed to these crime novels, on the basis of the perceived needs and prior associations of their new readership.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For a later rethinking of the concept of ‘national allegory’, as well as a helpful contextualisation and analysis of the Jameson–Ahmad debate, see Szeman (Citation2001).
2. Cecilia Alvstad, too, emphasises the importance of studying publishers’ paratexts in addition to authorial ones: much more than just marketing tools, they are part of the overall package constituting the complete text, and consequently influence reception (Citation2012, 78).
3. Even in the era of electronic books, when readers might not handle their reading matter in the form of physical artefacts, bindings remain important, especially at the point of purchase, when a colour image of a book’s cover, along with a blurb or summary of some kind, are always prominent. Some of the books discussed here include other paratextual material elucidating the text’s origins and context, such as translators’ notes, introductions and the like. However, an analysis of these is beyond the scope of this article, in which I focus only those paratextual elements that tend to constitute a reader’s initial point of contact with a text.
4. http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com.au/. Accessed 24 March 2016.
5. It is worth noting that, perhaps by virtue of being smallish publishers with a particular dedication to translated writing, all but one of these publishers (Abacus) credit the translator quite prominently on each book’s web page. This is a refreshing change from the position of invisibility to which translators’ work is often relegated.
6. From http://www.bitterlemonpress.com/pages/about-us. Accessed 24 March 2016.
7. Hersilia ceased trading in 2015 but has been included in this study as the only publisher specialising exclusively in Italian crime fiction.
8. From http://maclehosepress.com/about/. Accessed 24 March 2015.
9. Interestingly, Stewart King (Citation2016) notes a similar predilection for arches and doorways in the cover art of Robert Wilson’s crime novels set in Seville.
10. Yuko Tamaki (Citation2009) reports that in Japan titles are usually selected at an editors’ meeting late in the production stage, with little or no input from translators. Literal translations are commonly selected, though at times these will be replaced on the basis of input from the sales department. In the Italian publishing context, there are a number of different ways titles are translated, but effect and marketability would generally take priority over the choice of a close translation of the original title.
11. This makes one wonder what effects success in translation might have on an author’s subsequent production. Since the sheer size of the Anglophone readership can make it a desirable market for authors to attract, an interesting topic to investigate would be whether, to facilitate their reception in foreign markets, any Italian crime writers begin modifying their writing style or plots after the experience of being translated.
12. Abacus’s apparent association of Italian crime fiction with travel writing about Italy is further underscored by the fact that, at the time of writing, the web page for Death Under a Tuscan Sun also includes prominent links not only to other crime novels they publish, as one might expect, but also to the travel memoirs A Thousand Days in Tuscany by Marlena De Blasi and A House in Sicily by Daphne Phelps.
13. It is worth noting that the Abacus cover images of Cardetti’s and Villar’s novels also share the sunset wash used for the publisher’s Italian crime fiction list, though the places depicted on the covers – a church’s interior and cliff face respectively – are quite different from the cityscapes selected for Italian titles.
14. One further example of Maclehose bucking the Abacus trend is the omission of the toponym from Valerio Varesi’s Le ombre di Montelupo (lit. The Shadows of Montelupo), which becomes simply The Dark Valley in translation, a title suggested by the publisher and agreed upon by the translator (Joseph Farrell, email communication, March 2016).
15. Stephen Sartarelli’s translations of Andrea Camilleri’s ‘Montalbano’ novels (published by Picador), which all include several pages of translator’s notes at the end, are a rare exception.
16. Alvstad observes that within a given publishing house, ‘[t]itles on the same list tend to be marketed with similar strategies, which means that they are produced, represented and promoted as part of a larger whole’ (Citation2012, 78–79). She makes some well-founded criticisms of this kind of homogenising tendency among Swedish publishers of world literature from Asia, Africa and Latin America, observing that works of completely different literary styles and cultural origins are all Eurocentrically bundled together into a series presented as at once exotic and universal. In the case of Abacus’s crime fiction list, the strategy is arguably somewhat more justifiable, given the works’ shared generic features and similar cultural backgrounds. For many crime fiction enthusiasts, the recognisability and interrelatedness of authors and genres, often signalled by their packaging, can be important when seeking out new books to read.
17. Carol Reid, The Short Review, May 2008, issue 7, http://www.theshortreview.com/reviews/Crimini.htm. Accessed 24 March 2016.
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Notes on contributors
Brigid Maher
Brigid Maher is Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, and author of Recreation and Style: Translating Humorous Literature in Italian and English (John Benjamins, 2011). Her main areas of research are the theory and practice of literary translation, contemporary Italian literature, and the translation of crime fiction. Her translations of novels by Milena Agus and Nicola Lagioia have been published in Australia, the UK and Italy.