Benjamin Fondane’s Baudelaire in Italy

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to analyse the enunciative, creative, social, and ideological dimensions of the act of translation as a discursive practice – particularly in relation to its function within cultural systems – by examining the role it played in the Italian reception of a major work by Benjamin Fondane: Baudelaire et l’expérience du gouffre (1947). A “testament-book” foreshadowing the tragic fate of the Romanian-born writer, it outlines the contours of a different aesthetic, “the aesthetic of Ulysses”, oscillating between “acquired craft” and “poetic risk”. Through the Italian rendering of a work that intricately interweaves literature and philosophy, we focus on the condition of translators as the hidden masters of our culture, long relegated to the margins of an activity traditionally viewed as ancillary to the source text and to the circulation of knowledge and cultures.