Her Life with Benito Translated: Trivialization of Fascism and Reception in Brazil of the Memories of Rachele Mussolini

Abstract

On February 15th, 1949, the literary supplement Autores e Livros, of the newspaper A manhã from Rio de Janeiro, published a long review of the translation of Rachele Mussolini’s memoirs, entitled My life with Benito, published in 1948 by Instituto Progresso Editorial (IPÊ). ), integrating the Meridiano Collection, which proposed a selection of books for the formation of a library of historical documents. This collection also features works such as those by Carmine Senise, Mussolini’s chief of police; the memoirs of Dino Alfieri, Italian ambassador to Germany who organized the meeting between Hitler and Mussolini; among others. In this article we intend to discuss the relationship between this translation choice and its possible links between the Italian community in the State of São Paulo and fascism in Italy and Brazil. For this, we explain the revisions of the figure of Benito Mussolini and the trivializations of fascism in the lexicon and semantics of these texts from the first years after the Second World War, giving special attention to the construction of Benito as a “family man” and the attenuations of fascist crimes in Rachele Mussolini’s memories. The aim is bringing to light the possible objectives – marketing, ideological and personal – of the editors of IPÊ, mainly the dissidents of the fascist regime exiled in Brazil: Francesco Malgeri and Luigi Federzoni.