Cowboys and Indians Through The Lens of Children's Literature. Pacifico Fiori's "La storia del Far West" in English Translation

In the 1950s Italy was living a historical turn in society. The economic miracle led to improvements in people’s habits, with television, cinema, and radio that revolutionized free time. The need for general knowledge in a wide variety of subjects is reflected in the distribution of encyclopedias for both adults and children (Boero, De Luca 2012). Pacifico Fiori worked along these publishing lines to produce books that helped young readers discover new worlds beyond their own. La storia del Far West (1951) was published in the book series Ragazzi d’oggi, with stories to be read outside the spaces of formal education. According to the paratext, the series was meant to challenge the growing presence of movies and comics considered “bad literature” for younger generations. It seamlessly educated young readers' “brain” and “heart”, but still from the point of view of an Italian society that maintained the conquering ideology of the Fascist regime. Fiori’s book was translated into English as Far West in 1969 by Susan Cannata for Rylee, a small British publishing company, when a new wave of investments reached books for children. Far West cannot be considered a standard translation from source text to target text. Firstly, the book concept is different: if the source presented few black-and-white illustrations with a preponderance of textual material, the target is an oversize volume with s plendid colour illustrations telling a story on their own, surrounded by chunks of text. Secondly, the chapter division of the source was cut and reorganised in a chronological narration in the target that covered part of American history from Columbus to Buffalo Bill, eliminating large sections of Fiori’s text in favour of a different concept of entertainment through reading. Historical facts involving Indigenous peoples and the European colonizers show a different approach to the topics of gender (women ancillary to men’s enterprises vs. men as settlers, warriors, and conquerors), race (natives vs. settlers), power (Indian chiefs vs. notable European colonizers). Education is not part of the narrative, emphasizing the aim of source and target text to mix knowledge and pleasure avoiding didacticism. This approach seems to support Chartier’s vision of children’s literature as a primary source of entertainment in view of more complex readings. Nevertheless, the translation theory by Venuti on “domestication” provides the basis to read Fiori’s case study as an example of the colonization of language that – from an education point of view – manipulates the information to appease the target culture of British readers. Upon first reading, the source text is unbalanced towards the colonizers, and even when there is a vivid description of the Natives’ habits and traditions, the colonial view triumphs in the conclusion with the ‘natural’ inclusion of Natives in the new white people society. The target text, on the other hand, seems to maintain a descriptive character that reorganizes and even integrates the knowledge on the Natives presented in the source text, constraining the colonizing view of Fiori’s text towards a seemingly more objective approach to Otherness.