ON THE TRANSLATION OF LITERARY TERMS: NEOREALISMO AND NEUE SACHLICHKEIT

This essay examines the cultural practices and prejudices that shaped the Italian reception of German Neue Sachlichkeit in the 1920s and explores their role in the development of Italian Neorealism in the 1940s. I argue that, precisely because Italian critics approached the German critical category - and indeed all critical categorisation - with scepticism, they facilitated the more indiscriminate use in Italian of the term "neorealismo", which originated, at least in part, as a calque for the German "Neue Sachlichkeit", but which came eventually to constitute a distinct - and distinctly Italian - critical category. Focusing in particular on Giovanni Necco's 1933 essay Neorealismo made in Germany, I argue that, in the Italian context, questions of classification and definition were deemed peripheral to the critic's task, meaning that references to "neorealismo", while customary, remained largely heuristic. As a result, Italian "neorealismo" was free gradually to shift and to expand towards its current definitions.