Tales Told by a Machine/Novelle fatte a macchina

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from Novelle fatte a macchina”. The name of the translator does not appear on the front cover – which bears the names of Gianni Rodari and Fulvio Testa – but on the front jacket flap, where Sue Newson-Smith is placed between Rodari and Testa. The jacket blurb summarises the seven stories in English translation:

The following seven tales were selected from a series of stories inspired by the answers of hundreds of Italian school children to the question: “What would happen if…?”

If, for instance, millions of empty tins and bottles arose from the world’s dustbins and grew so big that park benches, bridges and whole cities were enclosed like ships in bottles…If people could turn into cats when their families got them down…If the canals in Venice rose so high that everyone had to become fish and to sell insurance, teach geography, get engaged, etc., in the water?

The most unexpected heroes feature. There’s a piano-playing cowboy who rides hard with his piano behind him, also mounted. There’s an opera singer who records himself playing and singing every single part in Aida, and a fisherman so obsessed by fishing that he leaves his mournful vigil on the Garibaldi Bridge neither day nor night, although he never catches a single fish.

These amazing and extremely funny stories, by their illogical juxtaposition of ideas, turn upside down accepted concepts of life. Gianni Rodari is a firm believer in the educational value of surreal humour and fantasy – and so it seems, are children.

One story is missing from the description, “One for Each Month”, which is a collection of twelve nonsense stories (one for each month of the year), the shortest of which is told in two lines. In the review the only reference to Rodari’s country of origin is in the first line with the “Italian school children” who were the starting point for the creation of the Tales. The rest is concentrated on the content of stories and on the style of Rodari, who is “a firm believer in the educational value of surreal humour and fantasy”, both

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characteristic elements of his writing from the English perspective already mentioned for Telephone Tales and Mr. Cat in Business.

The Hans Christian Andersen Award is not mentioned here, but it appears in the biography on the back jacket flap:

GIANNI RODARI was born in Omegna, Italy in 1920. A writer and journalist of many years’ standing, he has contributed to several newspapers and children’s magazines. He is the author of numerous children’s books, some of which have been translated into several languages giving him an international reputation. In 1960 he was awarded a top Italian book prize and in 1970 the Hans Christian Andersen Medal for children’s literature.

The image of Rodari changed in terms of details: here he was born in Omegna (as opposed to the more general Piedmont), he was a writer and journalist that contributed to newspapers and children’s magazines (a more vague description than the first one for The Befana’s Toyshop), whose books (only some) were translated all over the world. A vague reference to an Italian book prize is made here (the Premio Prato or Prato Prize mentioned in Rodari’s biography for The Befana’s Toyshop), followed by the renowned Hans Christian Andersen Prize. This short biography emphasised the experience of Rodari as a writer “of many years’ standing”, without further indication of other books by Rodari in English translation or even in the original Italian as happened for the biography that appeared in 1970 on The Befana’s Toyshop. The book was distributed in hardcover, and it presented a table of contents, with a series of illustrations by Fulvio Testa in black and white for each of the seven stories.

The epitextual material dedicated to Tales Told by a Machine covers advertisements and reviews from a variety of sources. Abelard-Schuman advertised Rodari’s book in The Junior Bookshelf in 1976 with this tagline: “Seven fantastic stories inspired by the answers of a hundred school children to the question ‘What would happen if…’” (1976: 238). Interestingly, the reference to “Italian” was deleted in

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the expression “a hundred school children”, thus eliminating the only reference to the country of origin of the text.

Reviews appeared in The Listener in November 1976, in the same year in Growing Point, and in 1977 The Junior Bookshelf. The first review by John Naughton lists Rodari’s books among others by various authors, Rodari being the only foreigner and accompanied in the description by the name of the translator. The review is a copy of the jacket blurb, without further reference to translation or foreign elements that characterise the text.

On the other hand, Margery Fisher in Growing Point dedicates a long review to Tales Told by a Machine, with a critical appraisal of each story and few remarks about the English-Italian clash of cultures in translation, emphasised in bold in the text:

Humour does not always travel well but one country’s jokes are more easily understood by another when satire is in question. The almost universal problem of hiding the detritus of civilization (so neatly aired in the Wombles books) is stated with freakish humour in “A Tinned World”, one of seven stories taken from “Novelle Fatte a Macchina” […] If I have any doubts about how far the tales will be appreciated by young English readers, they have been provoked by the last story […] because behind the verbal and situation humour there is an unusually strong affirmation of belief. I hope the deepening of the satirical voice will be heard as the author intended. (Growing Point, 1976: 3010-11)

Four elements characterise this review: the difficulty of communicating humour between different cultures, the reference to a local well-known book series, the comparison between English and Italian children, and the voice of the author in English translation. To the English-speaking reader, humour is a characteristic of Rodari’s writing as already mentioned in the paratextual material presented for his other books in translation. Fisher added another facet to Rodari’s writing, namely satire, which became a “satirical voice” speaking to the English reader hopefully in the same way as it did to

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Italian children. The reference to the Wombles¹⁵⁶ should help readers understand the social problem at the basis of the short story by Rodari “A Tinned World”, cited alongside the Italian name of the collection of stories it came from. At the end of the review, Fisher concentrated her comments on the potential target readership and how

“the deepening of the satirical voice” of Rodari would suit the tastes of the receiving public.

The reviewer of The Junior Bookshelf opens the review with a reference to the country of origin of Rodari:

Seven stories have been selected from a series written by this versatile Italian author. They try to answer the question “What would happen if?” […] Such propositions sound like a kind of science fiction, but as they increase in improbability, so the humour becomes semi-adult in style. All children may not appreciate this, but for those who do, the books will prove a feast of enjoyment.” (The Junior Bookshelf, 1977: 226)

Humour reappears here, but it seems to target mature readers as it “becomes semi-adult”. It seems that the voice of Rodari in reviews is growing older like his readers, aged between nine and eleven according to the Grasshopper series where Tales Told by a Machine was included.

On the Outside in World website there is a full page dedicated to Tales Told by a Machine¹⁵⁷. Each tale is described through a brief summary, but this time the reference to translation opens to a supposed typical tendency in translations into English:

There is a tendency in translations to change the names of characters and of places as well as to anglicise them for a UK audience. This translation, despite

156 These characters were created by Elisabeth Beresford in 1968 and became immediately famous throughout the UK. The Wombles are furry animals that live in the burrow of Wimbledon Common in London and their main ability is to make an effective use of ‘bad rubbish’ to fight pollution. The official website of the Wombles is available at: http://www.thewomblesbooks.com/ (last access 03/09/2015)

157 The book review can be found on the website of Outside in World at http://www.outsideinworld.org.uk (last access 3/07/2015)

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being done in 1976, has kept faithful to its original Italian version and all the names of characters and places are as they are in the original language.

The reviewer focussed the attention of readers on proper names, which in this translation remained as they were in Italian¹⁵⁸. The reviewers here also suggest that up to 1976 the tendency to “anglicise” names was well-known, and the translation by Newson Smith went against the current. The last paragraph in the review emphasises the “very Italian”

context where each story takes place, possibly to promote some sort of ‘Italian flavour’

that the English-speaking audience can enjoy:

This collection of stories by Rodari is very Italian in its context as there are strong connections in some of the tales with Italian cities such as Rome, Livorno and Venice. The particular surreal humour of Rodari and the non-sense is consistent throughout the book and children (and adults) will certainly enjoy these engaging stories.

Like in the review for The Junior Bookshelf, Rodari is recognisable for his humour, in this case surreal and the nonsensical in narration, which can entertain adults and children.

In brief, the image of Rodari that emerges from the paratextual material of Tales Told by a Machine is that of an Italian author well known at home, whose humour in narration seems to be the most striking aspect of his narrative style. Despite the limited advertising campaign for the book, Tales Told by a Machine collected a series of reviews that emphasised Rodari’s narrative development which also resulted in a change of readership from very young children (e.g. Telephone Tales) to eleven year olds and adults in Tales Told by a Machine.

158 But this is not the only case, as will be shown in the analysis in Chapter 4, which sheds light on the strategies used by different translators to deal with proper names as part of the voice of the narrator.

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