Het culturele netwerk van Cees Nooteboom in Italië

Just like in many other foreign countries, Cees Nooteboom is an acclaimed author in Italy as well. This raises some questions, for example on the image of Nooteboom given by the Italian reviewers of his books, or on the people that have contributed to his success in Italy. To shed light on these aspects, the present article will adopt a sociological approach to translation to study the role of the Italian mediators of Nooteboom – editors, translators, reviewers – in a network analysis as advocated by Grave (2017). In particular, and following Sapiro’s (2016) suggestion, the focus will be on the social circumstances that enabled the circulation of Nooteboom’s books in the Italian literary system: (i) the strong symbolic capital of two gifted and experienced translators; (ii) the consecration power of the publisher Iperborea, which has toiled for the diffusion of the Dutch literature in Italy and particularly of Nooteboom’s oeuvre; (iii) the book reviewers, journalists and writers who have praised his work by making it accessible to the target culture. Moreover, this article will show, by means of an imagological approach, which images and which typically Dutch features are attributed to Nooteboom by Italian literary critics. To this purpose, an intertextual analysis will be carried out of a corpus composed by paratextual sources.