As I was nearing the completion of this project, Italy was in the process of electing a new government, with xenophobic parties gaining electoral sway. NeoFascist violence towards immigrants has been on the rise, and the government still denies birthright citizenship to Italians with foreign-born parents. In spite of this distressing reality, Italy has become a second home to me, and Italians have, on the whole, welcomed my efforts to explore their literature and experiment with their language with an outsider’s sensibility. In spite of those who aim to control borders, deny passage and to restrict Italy to ‘Italians first’ (‘Prima gli italiani’), Italy’s identity – including the very definition of ‘Italian’ as it applies to the current population – is radically changing, and its literature, always an open system, further enriched by these changes, continues to diversify.

Language is the substance of literature, but language also locks it up again, confining it to silence and obscurity. Translation, in the end, is the key. This volume, which honours so many writer-translators, is as much a tribute to the Italian short story as it is validation of the need – aesthetic, political, ethical – for translation itself. I am enormously grateful to the team that has worked to bring the works of these writers into English for the first time, or to retranslate stories with greater accuracy and intuition. In the process of editing their contributions I have deepened my own awareness and respect for what it means to transport literature from one language to another, and I have redoubled my commitment to doing so. Only works in translation can broaden the literary horizon, open doors, break down the wall.

I have ordered these stories in reverse alphabetical order, by author’s last name. It is an arbitrary sequence, but it is also serendipitous that Elio Vittorini appears first. In 1942, Vittorini published Americana, an anthology of thirty-three largely unknown American authors – among them, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and Willa Cather. But this was no mere gathering of authors; it was a massive, collective translation enterprise, featuring contributions by some of the most important Italian writers of the time, including Alberto Moravia, Cesare Pavese and the Nobel Laureate poet Eugenio Montale. The objective of Americana was to introduce iconic American voices to Italian readers. For America, too, was a fabulous projection in the minds of many Italians of that generation: a legendary place that stood for youth, rebellion, freedom and the future. But this projection, at least Vittorini’s version of it, was no escapist disconnect from reality, but rather, a form of both creative and political dissidence, a heroic, courageous connection, by means of literature, to a new world.

The first edition of Americana, to be published by Bompiani, was banned by Mussolini’s regime. It passed the censors only after Vittorini removed his critical commentaries on the individual authors, and Emilio Cecchi, a critic in good graces with the Fascist government, wrote an introduction. To leaf through the book today – it runs to over one thousand pages long – is to traverse a bridge that feels nothing short of revolutionary. Vittorini was my guiding light as I assembled this book. I followed his example in writing the brief author biographies – intended as partial sketches and not definitive renderings – that preface each story, and it is in homage to him and to that landmark work – to the spirit of saluting distant literary comrades, of looking beyond borders and of transforming the unknown into the familiar – that I offer the present contribution.