Giuseppe Antonio Borgese and the “Biblioteca romantica”

by Angela Albanese

Giuseppe Antonio Borgese was founder and director of the «Biblioteca Romantica», a prestigious series published by Mondadori in the 1930s, which offered translations of fifty representative masterpieces of world literature. Here we present an extract from Borgese’s Afterword to the first volume in the series, Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, translated into Italian by Ferdinando Martini in 1930, in which the editor discusses the principles that should underlie the practice of literary translation.