Newsreels and camera eyes : a mirror of America’s intellectual life in John dos Passos’s USA

Abstract EN

In the history of literary and cultural transfer, there are a number of interesting cases where translation accounts for the stature an artist achieved.

In American literature, a well- known example is John Dos Passos.

Misunderstood or neglected by his American contemporaries, he rose to international fame after he had been discovered and translated into several languages, mainly French.

It ought to be admitted that the role of the French in paving the way for American writers is equally evident in the Twentieth Century.

In the Thirties, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre and other French writers developed a predilection for some Twentieth Century American writers, mainly John Dos Passos .

Even if they relied on translations for their judgement rather than on the American source text, the impressions these authors made on Dos Passos’s novels – which they considered as a kind of “spiritual Baedekers”- were enormous.

They praised his deep concern for the preservation of America’s cultural and historical heritage and they were marvelled by his success in fictionalizing the political and social events that dominated America in the first decades of the Twentieth Century through the use of many modernist techniques, mainly in his Trilogy USA.