Vasilij Grossman’s Žizn’ i sud’ba and Its Two Italian Translations

In 1984, the Jaca Book publishing house released the first Italian translation, by Cristina Bongiorno, of the novel Žizn’ i sud’ba [Life and Fate] by the Jewish- Ukrainian writer Vasilij Grossman. In 1980, however, the text was incomplete, based on a typewritten, unfinished, microfilmed copy that was secretly sent to the West, thanks to the intervention of Andrej Sacharov and Vladimir Vojnovič. The novel, which Grossman finished in 1959, was censored because of the author’s anti- Soviet and anti- Stalinist positions. In 1960, he entrusted a typewritten copy of the novel to his friend Vjačeslav Loboda. In 1988, when Lobada’s widow heard of the novel’s publication in the Soviet Union, she gave the copy in her possession to the writer’s adopted son, Fёodor Gruber. The first definitive edition was published in the USSR in 1989, on which the new Italian translation by Claudia Zonghetti, published in 2008, is based. The aim of this chapter is to propose a reflection on the cultural implications of the relationship between retranslation and canon, both in the culture of the source text and in the culture of the translated text.