ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Frantz Fanon's translation into Italian in the 1960s as an example of 'activist' translation, used politically and instrumentally by a generation that wished to transform Italian society by looking to other models of revolutionary struggle in the so-called 'Third World'. The activist uses of Fanon's translation into Italian differ sharply from the later, more 'academic' translations of his work, linked to the importation of postcolonial theory into Italian academic discourse in the early twenty-first century. A discussion of Fanon's translation into Italian cannot be separated out from an overview of Giovanni Pirelli, the Italian writer, anti-fascist partisan and anti-colonial/Third-Worldist activist who was transformed by L'An V de lar revolution algerienne when he first read it. Pirelli and Fanon together devised plans for an anthology of Fanon's essays, both published and unpublished, with Fanon deciding on the structure for the Italian book.
