Scandinavian Poetry as ‘World Poetry’: the Case of Massimo Spiritini’s Anthology Poeti del mondo (1939)

Scandinavian poetry was hardly translated into Italian in the 1870-1940 period: the first attempts were made by the numismatist Solone Ambrosoli with small collections of mainly Swedish poems (1879-1882), but for a long time very little was to be found in Italy. In contrast, with nearly thirty authors from Denmark, Sweden and Norway, the anthology edited by Massimo Spiritini (1879-1963) for Garzanti in 1939 was the most extensive collection of Scandinavian poems translated into Italian before 1958. Published right after Giacomo Prampolini’s contributions, it was one of the first books to present a number of authors from all three countries and the first one to place Scandinavian texts in a European context in a single volume. Spiritini’s experience of and interest in Scandinavian literature was most likely influenced by Dutch and French translations, but the presence of Scandinavian poems is quantitatively significant in relation to other cultural areas. The choice of the authors and of the texts reveals that Spiritini intended to broaden the knowledge of Scandinavian literature in Italy while conveying a traditional and quite romantic view of Nordic poetry. This latter aspect of his work becomes evident when his translations are compared with those of Prampolini.