Elio Vittorini e la Conversazione in USA

Elio Vittorini never went to America. Nonetheless, he fostered and signed translations; he prepared the anthology Americana; he contributed to the fortune of US writers in Italy; he maintained a correspondence with authors such as Ernest Hemingway and publishers such as James Laughlin. In June 1948 he wrote to Renato Mieli, editor-in-chief of l’Unità in Milan, explaining his refusal to go overseas for a reportage. His motivations entailed his activity as writer: “I could author a sort of Conversazione in Sicilia focused on the US: a Conversazione in USA”. His memory journey to his home soil moulds every other tale of travel, geographical contours tend to overlap, and he even turns down actual travel. Essentially, it is a literary dialogue: every different geographical place becomes a tool to rethink one’s own identity, especially on a political basis. This is an obvious trait both of his work as translator during the twenty-year fascist rule and of his claim for autonomy with respect to the Communist orthodoxy. This autonomy is even more necessary after the Politecnico events, because, as Vittorini writes in his letter to Mieli, “I should be free to ‘understand’, rather than having to ‘prove’ my ‘already achieved’ understanding”.