Agons of World Literature: Dino Buzzati in Europe, 1940–1990

Abstract

abstract:World literature involves a “transvaluation,” a Nietzschean “Umwertung,” wherein “idols” are challenged, the dominant discourses that have been accepted as “truth” in an originary or receiving culture. The worlded text becomes a site of interpretive conflict, allowing it to maintain or unsettle hierarchies of linguistic-literary prestige, national as well as international. This approach to theorizing world literature is explored through the reception of Dino Buzzati’s 1940 novel Il deserto dei Tartari in the United States and Europe during the period 1940–1990. On the basis of materials in more than a dozen Western and Eastern European languages, starting with translations and their paratexts and including reviews, essays, and censorship reports, Buzzati’s text is shown to have been interpreted according to specific discourses—most significantly, existentialism and Marxist-Leninism—which struggled for international dominance in the period, subject to shifting permutations of meaning, value, and function. As Buzzati’s text was translated and discussed, traveling from West to East over several decades, it rippled with diverse meanings that served conflicting cultural political agendas.