Tommaso Landolfi, (Co)Translator from Romanian

Abstract

The present article examines unpublished materials that document the early encounter of the Italian writer and translator Tommaso Landolfi—then a university student in Florence—with Romanian literature, mediated by his fellow student, the Romanian poet and translator Dragoș Vrânceanu. The corpus comprises Landolfi’s letters to Vrânceanu (1929-1930) and a 171-page manuscript preserving three redactions of their unfinished Italian translation of Adrian Maniu’s three-act verse play Mesterul (1922, The Foreman), all held in the Vrânceanu archive at the National Museum of Romanian Literature (Bucharest). Combining epistolary analysis with genetic criticism and philological comparison of the drafts, the study reconstructs the collaborators’ working practices and traces a revision trajectory from largely literal transfer toward stylistic condensation and linguistic modernization. Landolfi’s interventions mitigate calques, recalibrate syntax, and propose more idiomatic solutions. After Act I, however, revisions become sparser and more uneven, a shift that resonates with the cooling relationship suggested by the later letters and helps account for the translation’s eventual abandonment and non-publication. By foregrounding this unfinished cotranslation, the article refines Landolfi’s profile as a writer-translator engaged with foreign literatures beyond his well-known Russian, French, and German horizons, and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of interwar Italian-Romanian cultural transfer through translation.