A “work […] done out of a real religious interest”: Monsignor Alberto Castelli and the First Authorised Italian Translation of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral

The first part of the article reconstructs the wartime genesis and difficult publication history of Monsignor Alberto Castelli’s Italian translation of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (1935), issued by Bompiani in 1947, on the basis of hitherto unexplored archival documents, including the correspondence between Castelli and Eliot, some of whose letters to the Italian scholar have recently been donated to the library of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. I then analyse Castelli’s translation, placing it in relation to his pioneering essay on Eliot’s drama in Scrittori inglesi contemporanei (1939) and comparing it with Cesare Vico Lodovici’s earlier unauthorised version.